Page 118 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘Marilyn Monroe? Oh, no, she’s retired from all that nonsense.’
Hannah grinned. ‘You named a pet pig after a movie star?’
Eddie Gunther puffed out his chest and rocked a little on the balls of his feet. ‘She’s beautiful, ain’t she? And you look real close, her hair’s golder’n sunlight.’
She eyed the pig, whose eyes were slit like a demon’s and whose yellowed teeth were currently displayed in an impressive snarl. The beauty, she didn’t get. The decision to retire from the nonsense of hanky-panky? That, she got. Unfortunately.
Josh leant on his forearms over the rail from the safety of the shed’s aisle. ‘Complicated set of symptoms, Eddie. Now you see why I needed my expert sister here for a second opinion.’
Hannah eyed the malevolent expression of Marilyn the Devil Pig. ‘Yeah, you keep telling yourself that, you big coward.’ She eased as far away as the narrow confines of the pen allowed. ‘Unexplained mood change. Okay, I suggest we get a blood sample, see if there’s an indicator of disease. Look at her feet, see if there’s a cut or infection. Look in her mouth. At her age, a rotten tooth is a real possibility. That’d make anyone—any pig—a little tetchy.’
‘She’s a little old for an anaesthetic,’ said Josh.
‘Time to put those muscles of yours into action, handsome.’
‘You’ll be meaning me, I expect, Miss Hannah,’ said Eddie, rolling up his sleeves.
She grinned at Josh. Eddie was eighty if he was a day. ‘Absolutely. And we’ve got Josh here as backup just in case we need him.’
‘Gotcha.’
‘Okay. Blood sample, hoof check, teeth check, in that order. We ready, team?’ Hannah pulled a syringe from her kit and eyed the cranky pig. ‘Let the fun begin.’
One hour and a palette of bruises later, Hannah hauled her muddy self through the pen rails and headed out of the sty, leaving Eddie holding a blackened pig tooth as a souvenir in the palm of his hand. Josh was ahead of her, hosing the worst of the mud from his boots with one hand while he held his phone to his ear. Her brother couldn’t go an hour without ringing his new bride. Please, god, whatever Vera was cooking up for breakfast, let there be enough for her, too. She was beat. Dragging a huge pig around after the physical demand of a horse’s breech birth, plus a string of sleepless nights, was hard work. As strong as the lure of crawling into her apartment and collapsing onto the sofa was, there was no way she was missing out on one of Vera’s breakfasts.
Besides. She was due a comfort eat. Bacon, eggs, chocolate and ice-cream, all at once if need be, until she got Tom Krauss one hundred per cent out of her system.
‘Why the hell would you not have told me this earlier?’ she heard her brother explode into his phone.
What the heck? Whoever her brother was talking to, it wasn’t Vera.
‘Nope,’ said Josh, the hose water running, forgotten, over the cracked ground. ‘Of course … shit, man …’
Hannah bent over to lever off her mud-caked boots.
‘Which vertebrae? Uh-huh … you need me to—? Does Hannah know about this yet?’
‘Does Hannah know what?’ she asked across the wide, rusted tray of his work truck.
Josh spun around, the look on his face telling her he hadn’t known he had an audience. ‘Too late, Tom,’ he said into his phone. ‘Hannah’s right here.’
Tom? She opened her mouth to tell her brother she didn’t give a flying fruitbat what news Tom had to share, then paused. Were those …?
Holy hell, her strong, sensible, easy-going brother was crying.
She gripped the tray of the truck with both hands. ‘You’re scaring me, Josh Cody. What’s going on?’
Her brother held up his hand. ‘Tom,’ he said into his phone. ‘You need me, you just call, all right? … Okay, of course … Uh-huh. Yep, bye.’
She waited while her brother dropped his phone into the tray then looked up at her. ‘Is it Bruno? Buttercup? The foal?’ she said.
Josh came around to her side of the truck and stood next to her, his shoulder warm against hers. ‘No. They’re all fine.’
‘What, then?’
‘It’s Tom.’
Fear turned her innards to stone. ‘For god’s sake, Josh. Just tell me.’
