Page 87 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
Although … everything would be a whole lot easier if Tom would get off his high horse and rethink his stance. Cody-Krauss would make a heck of a surname to fill out on school excursion forms. If they had a girl, they could name her Annabel, or Laura, or Sarah. If it was a boy … She looked up from Vera’s smiling face and found Tom was staring straight at her.
Yowza. She felt her cheeks get warm, and … she wasn’t imagining the blistering heat in that look, was she? Had he read her thoughts?
She could have looked away, but didn’t. She wanted a baby. But she also wanted Tom. Only, he didn’t seem totally on board—or at all on board—with any of her wants, despite the looks and the hot hands.
Josh was still talking and Tom had turned his attention back to his friend.
Her brother. Whose night it actually was, so she should stop thinking all about herself and start celebrating a wonderful, happy moment.
‘To a new Cody,’ Josh said and held his drink up for a toast.
‘A new Cody,’ everybody chorused. Hannah held an imaginary drink up in the air because that swan-topped latte she’d been promised had not yet materialised.
‘Now, don’t chug all your champers down at once,’ said Josh. ‘Because that’s not the only reason we’re here. Poppy? Cue the music.’
An orchestral recording of the wedding march rang out from the café’s speakers and Hannah gasped along with pretty much everyone in the room.
No way. No freaking way!
But yes way, because there was Poppy, in her humungous boots and her fifties-style dress going up to stand beside Vera with a bouquet of wildflowers in her hands and there was Marigold, puffed up like a giant, self-important mushroom in a silvery-grey caftan, looking officious and regal, joining them.
‘We didn’t want any fuss,’ said Josh. ‘We just wanted everyone we love to be here. And that’s you guys. We hope you’ll all stay to witness us taking our vows.’
Bloody hell, now Hannah really was crying, and so was her mother.
‘Did you have any idea this was going to happen?’ she whispered to her parents.
‘Your mother suspected. That’s why she had her hair done and spent two hundred dollars on a new top,’ Bert said.
Her mother shushed him. ‘I didn’t want to look a fright in case there were photographs,’ she said.
Of course people would take photographs. In fact—Hannah looked about the room—there were phones in everyone’s hands. But she could be cool about it. She had to be cool about it. Despite the fact no-one had given her even a teensy hint to wear a scarf, or a low-slung beret, or a balaclava.
This was not about her.
‘We are gathered here today,’ began Marigold, ‘to celebrate a marriage between two of our favourite people: Josh Cody, who I have known since he was a young menace who loved to ride his BMX down Dandaloo Street and do wheelies to show off in front of the tourists, and Vera De Rossi, who has become a dear friend to me and Kev, and to all of us here this evening.’
Hannah let the words wash over her. Josh was getting married. Right this very minute.
His world was bounding forward just the way he wanted it to.
So why couldn’t it be her turn next?
CHAPTER
31
What came after weddings?
Dancing, that’s what, and the dance she’d been enjoying at the Shaw Winery had been cut rudely short by that idiot ex-boyfriend who had gone on to wreck her evening. Well—he wasn’t here in The Billy Button Café, and if he turned up, she was pretty sure Graeme was buff enough to chuck him out.
Luckily, she knew the DJ and could put in requests, and even luckier, she knew what Tom liked to dance to.
‘Poppy. We need a slowish song so people don’t get exhausted too soon.’
‘No way! I have a whole playlist of sick beats, Auntie Hannah.’
‘That’s fine for you sixteen-year-old rebels, but we’re—’ what was the phrase Poppy had used? ‘—geriatric dinosaurs. We need a slow one from time to time. Give us some Michael Bublé.’
