Page 17 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
The kid left and Hannah looked at her brother. ‘Was that what I think it was?’
‘The unrequited love of a fourteen-year-old country boy for an older woman who’s gone back to Sydney and embroiled herself in big city life where she might meet boys who spurn ownership of guinea pigs?’
‘You’re referring to your sixteen-year-old daughter as an “older woman” now?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t tell her that.’
‘I’m not sure if a 911 call was warranted. Although, I did like that part where you finally acknowledged I’m the experienced senior partner in this veterinary practice.’
‘That was bribery. Totally meaningless. I’ll retract it formally in an email to the human resources division.’
‘Idiot,’ she said fondly. ‘But seriously, he only wanted to hear what you had to say.’
Josh shrugged, the exact same movement the kid had given earlier. ‘It was a bit awkward. He clearly wanted to ask if there was some reason why Poppy hadn’t been in touch with him, but he didn’t know how to go about it.’
‘Offloading his personal problems onto his guinea pig was certainly original. What did you tell him before I came in?’
‘Nothing. What could I say? Poppy would have my guts if she thought I was getting involved in her personal life.’
Hearing Josh’s confidence that he knew exactly what Poppy would or wouldn’t want him to do or say struck Hannah as being very germane to her own thoughts of late. Her brother had had parenthood thrust upon him at an early age and he’d been single for the most part, after a few shaky months living with Poppy’s mother. He’d coped.
He’d more than coped; he’d thrived.
‘What was it like, looking after Poppy on your own when she was little?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Tough. Awesome. The best years of my life, maybe, and definitely the hardest.’
‘But you were a teenager. You missed out on your uni scholarship. You sacrificed a lot when you became a parent. If you had your time over, would you do things differently?’
‘What’s brought this on?’ He frowned. ‘You’re not worriedPoppy’sgetting up to …’
‘What? No! Bloody hell. I was just—’ She paused. It was way too soon to start blabbing to Josh that she needed to know what being a single parent felt like. He’d said it was awesome. That was all she needed to hear.
Josh was in full defensive mode, like a daddy emperor penguin defending the egg on its webbed feet. ‘Poppy only likes boys as friends.EspeciallyBraydon. She’s two years older than he is, which at that age is like being two decades older. He’s just got a crush, that’s all. I’ll call her later and subtly suggest she might want to tag him in a funny social media post or something. You know, a friendly wave so he knows he’s not being “ghosted”.’
She smiled at him. ‘Rightio, Dad. I wasn’t trying to suggest anything, really. You okay to finish up here? I’m going out this arvo and I need to go wash up.’
She headed upstairs to shower and switch out her scrubs for riding boots and ancient jeans. She zipped a woolly brown vest over her flannel shirt, and braided her hair away from her face so the tail of her plait hung over her shoulder, just in reach of her nervous fingers. Better than worry beads, right?
Kev and his mate Lionel collected her bang on time. They headed south on the highway and, really, it was fun.
She’d been worrying for nothing.
She’d been so freaking busy of late that sitting in the filthy back seat of an ancient LandCruiser while Slim Dusty and hay motes filled the air around her felt like a holiday.
When the sign for Dalgety flashed by the window fifty kilometres later, Hannah uncapped the water bottle she held and took a long drink. Still totally fine: leaving the Hanrahan town border didn’t faze her at all! Woo! Go her!
Those paddocks looked harmless. Pasture was browning off now the summer rains had moved north, and the wildflowers clustered beneath crooked fenceposts looked brittle and dry and okay, damn it, maybe shewasfeeling a little worked up now.
Crowds. People. Strangers. But she was going to deal with it, because that’s what small-town vets who wanted to have a baby did, right?
Lionel dropped a gear and the heavy horse float behind them clunked and rattled. Out the window, poplars marched like soldiers along high banks that must once have marked the waterline of the Snowy River a century ago, before the dam tamed it. Progress, she supposed. A shame, too, for the floodplains to miss out on their annual dousing with snowmelt. All that river flood which once provided water for families and irrigated the bush food and carried alluvial gold into the pans of colonial gold diggers, lost to history.
The gold had petered out a hundred and fifty years ago and the town still clinging to the river’s banks was little more than a crossroads now. Population of Dalgety? She couldn’t remember, but a couple of hundred at most, and besides a café that doubled as a plant nursery, all she could see were highway signs to someplace else. A handful of old timber cottages, smoke plumes rising from their chimneys, dotted the landscape. It was charming, rural and peaceful; nothing at all for her to be uptight about.
‘You’re overthinking, girl. I can feel it from here,’ said Kev, twisting in his seat to look at her from under the peak of his corduroy cap. ‘There’ll be plenty of beginners today, don’t you worry about that.’
Yeah, she was overthinking, just not about campdrafting.
