Page 11 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
Kylie had the bonnet up and was shaking her head at the horrors apparently on display. ‘Yeah, right. And don’t give me that face, Hannah.’
‘You’re not even looking at me.’
‘I don’t need to be looking at you—my bullshit radar is finely tuned. Come on, I thought this was the year for the new you. Take up hobbies; have an adventure; buy gorgeous clothes; campdrafting. Why not whack a new car on the list, too?’
Now was the moment to confide about the change Hannah really wanted in her life, but her feelings … her intentions … were all sonew.So unexpected.
She slipped into banter because it was easier than laying bare her heart, when what was in there was still so muddled. ‘I knew it was a mistake telling you my New Year’s resolutions. And no way I said anything about new clothes.’
Her friend grinned. ‘That was me trying to give you a little hint. But seriously, Han, you told everyone on the lakefront your resolutions. Me. Your brother. The paella bloke, the kids on the beach, even the grumpy old fart who’s restoring the paddle steamer.’
‘True, but you know prosecco makes me chatty and prone to oversharing.’
She had allowed herself to get carried away as the fireworks crackled overhead and she’d sat, shoulder to shoulder with friends on old driftwood. Epiphanies could do that to a person.
And despite having agreed to Kev’s campdrafting suggestion as the lesser evil than being roped into Marigold’s craft club, training with him and her horse Skipjack had turned out to be fun.
‘Oh, heck,’ she said. ‘It’s Thursday, isn’t it?’
Kylie had hauled a dirty (yet vital-looking) piece of metal pipe from the engine and was now wiping it down with an even dirtier rag. ‘Yep.’
‘How soon do you think my car will be back on the road? I’ve got an event Saturday arvo.’
‘What sort of event?’ Kylie’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are there single men involved?’
Hannah smirked. ‘Relax. I haven’t been invited to some party you don’t know about. It’s the campdraft tournament down at Dalgety. There’s a maiden event and Kev reckons me and Skipjack have learned enough in his back paddock to not completely disgrace ourselves.’
‘In Dalgety. You cool about that?’
Good question.
It was such a good question, Hannah had probably made the right call not confiding in Kylie of her real goal for the year ahead. She wasn’t ready to listen to good questions that might expose the weaknesses in her plan. Not yet.
As for whether she was ready for an out-of-town visit?
Of course she was. She’d driven to vet calls down the mountain, further than Dalgety to the south, past Adaminaby in the north that time the Cooma vet had been in quarantine. True, they’d been emergency trips to farm sheds or freezing paddocks, where the social interaction consisted of her, a tired farmer and a crook animal, but she’d been totally fine. No problems there, so why should a visit to the Dalgety Showgrounds be any different?
The skin on her neck itched just thinking about it.
‘I’ll need your car until Monday arvo, at least. You want to borrow my ute?’
‘I guess I could go with Kev. One of his mates from the community hall has a horse float and loves an opportunity to get out from his missus’s feet, apparently, so he’s offered to take Skipjack down. They’ll have room for me with them.’ It would mean she’d be stuck at the showgrounds until the old blokes were ready to leave, but it wasn’t as though she had any evening plans.
She sucked in a breath and let it out like she was one of the punctured tyres in Kylie’s workshop. She’d be in Dalgety, away from home, for hours. It would be the first of the many tests she needed to pass.
Not the horse event. Kylie and Kev and everyone else who’d shown an interest in her new hobby might think a successful draft was her only goal for the day, but she knew better.
Saturday was when the last four weeks of soul-searching about fixing the hole in her heart would either pay off or implode. If she was really truly serious about having a baby, then she had to address her aversion to leaving the shadow of the mountains. Driving to competitions in the neighbouring towns would be a gentle way to do that.
Her friends and family might have guessed she was using campdraft as a way to ease herself back into the rest of the world, but they were too worried about her losing the plot to push her into talking about it. Well, that wasn’t totally true: Kylie was happy to push, but she generally softened her interventions with booze and those little chocolate ice-cream sandwich thingys. Also, Kylie was easy to distract with a change of subject.
Let the Hanrahan locals think she was ready for some adventure; it gave their fussing a focus. What she really wanted before the year was out was something else entirely, and there was only so much research and planning a girl could do from within the confines of a small country town hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest fertility clinic.
She needed to get cracking. Time was passing and ovaries were shrivelling into prunes.
CHAPTER
4
