Page 84 of Kiwi Sin
I said, “I thought she wasn’t capable of making a right choice.”
My dad shoved himself back from the table so abruptly, I nearly flinched. He was a deliberate man. That’s where I’d learnt it. Not now, though. He stood, leaned forward with his hands on the tabletop, and said, “You forget yourself.”
Somehow, I’d stood, too. The table between us, and more than the table. A gulf. “No,” I said. “I know myself, and so does Oriana. She knows herself, and she knows me.”
“She’s seventeen,” Dad said. “And you say you’re worried about Patience’s age, that she doesn’t know what she wants? What’s the difference, other than lust?”
“Love,” I said. “From both of us. That’s the difference.” I was sweating. Sweating more, because I’d already sweated heaps today, laying stone in the summer heat. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted to go home, take a shower, and go see Oriana.
You need to do this first.
“There’s another difference, too,” I said. “Oriana knows what she wants. She’s not just … not just dreaming and hoping. She’s not looking for somebody to tell her what to do, either. She’s been working since she got out. She’s got ideas, and she’s got plans, and she’s got …” I tried to sort out what it was. “Potential,” I finally said. “A whole future for herself, not just the one she wants with me. It’s exciting.”
“That’s not the way life works,” Dad said. “Two people who want different things, have different goals? What is that but guaranteed conflict in the home, and raising a woman to a place she doesn’t belong? Marriage wasn’t created to be a battle. Husband and wife are meant to be one flesh. The husband loves his wife as if she were his own body, protecting and providing for her, and a wife offers her ideas to him in a spirit of giving, and submits to his authority out of the respect she holds for him. That’s God’s way, because that way leads to contentment and peace in the home. Have you forgotten your Bible so quickly, then?” He quoted, ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.’”
I would have spoken, but he held up his hand and went on. “‘Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.’ That’s not tyranny. It’s leadership.”
I said, “It sounds right, because I’ve heard it all my life, and I know it’s what you and Mum believe. But it’s not what I believe. Oriana’snotmyself. She’sherself.”I doubt it’s what Uriel believes, either,I didn’t say.And I can guess what he and Glory will think of this plan when they hear.
“It’s not a matter of thinking,” Dad said, “out of your limited knowledge. Yourworldlyknowledge. God’s word is perfect, given to us as a path to follow.”
“And where does it say,” I asked, “that a father chooses his son’s bride? Where does it say that a leader chooses a woman’s husband? A woman who isn’t even his child? Or call Patience what she is. A girl.”
A silence so loud, it pressed on my ears. My dad’s face across the table. My mum sitting rigid. Horrified.
“Get out,” Dad said.
I’m not sure how I walked to the door. My legs felt stiff, and when I got to the ute, climbed in, and shut the door, I started to shake.Adrenaline,I thought dimly.It’s just adrenaline.
It was more than that. It was setting fire to my family, to the life I’d known for twenty-five years. I’d walked out of Mount Zion’s gates, and somehow, I’d ended up on this road.
I’d thought I was walking the right path, but I’d tossed a torch behind me, and now, I was burning everything down.
How could this be right?
How could it not be?
35
NOT DANCING WITH A LAWYER
Oriana
Unfortunately, when Gabriel rang the doorbell that afternoon, we didn’t get a chance to be alone and talk things over the way I’d planned. Priya was sitting at the kitchen bench with an exercise book, working on the maths problems Frankie had sent her, the exact same way Frankie was always doing, and Daisy and Gray were in the shower after their extra-long Saturday run on the beach, because to Daisy and Gray, if you didn’t hurt afterward, the exercise hadn’t been hard enough. They took the longest showers in the world when they took them together, and I was starting to suspect that youcouldhave sex in the bath.
How, though, if there was no way to lie down? Gray was big, and Daisy wasn’t, so … did he hold her up? Against the shower wall, maybe? That was the only way I could imagine it working, but it was so much more exciting than thinking about being in bed, under the duvet. If you were both naked, and wet, and kissing each other …
Stop it.How did I justlookat Gabriel, and start thinking all these things?
Priya said, “Hi, Gabriel. You’re here again, eh,” and looked at me in a meaningful sort of way. “I hope you really are going to have the house done by the end of the holidays,” she decided to add, “because Frankie’s coming home in two weeks, and she isnotgoing to want to live in the caravan with Oriana and me. She says she isn’t sharing a room again, and someday, she’s getting her own flat. I can’t imagine living all by myself, can you? It sounds so lonely.”
“Yeh,” Gabriel said. “To me, too.” And smiled at me.
I’d been chopping up cabbage for coleslaw. Now, my knife faltered. I heard the bathroom door open and Gray say, “So much for my self-control.” Daisy said, “I like you without self-control,” and he laughed. Then there was the sound of the door shutting, which meant they were in their bedroom and getting dressed.
I could tell Gabriel had heard. He raised his eyebrows at me, and I thought,How do people wait to do this? How?I said, knowing my voice wasn’t the steadiest ever, “I brined these chicken thighs to make them tender and juicy, but I’ve never made this recipe before, so who knows. Will you cook them on the barbecue for me? Seven or eight minutes on each side, and after that, I have watermelon to do as well. Just a minute on each side for that, at the very end. It sounded like a good dinner for today, because it was hot, and you’ve been working so hard.”
“Watermelon on the barbecue,” he said. “Sounds different. But good.”
