Page 94 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
Kylie looked like she was about to do a runner.
‘Your intervention is officially at an end. I’m no longer volunteering at the campdraft.’
‘Shoot. What happened?’
She frowned at Marigold. ‘You know everything around here, Marigold. Why don’t you tell Kylie what happened.’
‘Now, pet,’ said Marigold majestically. ‘All I know is that Tom called me to say we should delay the volunteer meeting scheduled for Thursday. He said you and he had some stuff to clear up first.’
‘Huh.’
‘But, of course, I saw Valerie LaBrooy at the IGA, and she told me she’d seen you coming out of Tom’s room before dawn this morni—’
‘What!’ breathed Kylie.
‘—ing, and she felt that the mood was, um, grim. Tom didn’t appear for breakfast.’
Bloody hell. Hannah had thought she’d got in and out undetected.
‘So, my love, when I saw you come into the café looking sad, I put two and two together and called Kylie into my office here so we could have a little confab.’
Hannah closed her eyes. ‘I am an adult. I can deal with my own shit.’
Silence.
She opened her eyes and they were both looking at her, Kylie with what seemed awfully like pity, and Marigold with understanding. Ha! As though Marigold had ever had her actions gossiped about and workshopped and confabbed!
‘Okay, fine, I do not have a wonderful track record of dealing with my own shit. But you know what? If you lot keep stepping in and saving me from myself, when am I going to learn?’
Marigold wrapped her in a leopard-print embrace. ‘When you put it like that, it makes a lot of sense, my lamb.’
‘It does?’ She pushed her way through the folds of caftan until she could see again. ‘And yes, so you can all stop wondering, I laid my heart bare to Tom and he turned me down. He’s not interested, so I told him to go screw himself and that is that.’
‘I’m so sorry, Han,’ said Kylie, coming in for a hug too, but Hannah took a step back. ‘What? Don’t you forgive us?’
Hannah looked in the mirror and adjusted her polka-dotted blue dress. Her hair looked awesome, reddish and neat and wavy like a freaking movie star’s. Her lipstick was only slightly smudged and she fixed that with a fingernail that was also awesome, and clean, and smelled nothing like animal innards. She hauled up her knickers so they didn’t sag, fiddled with her bra strap so her boobs were even, then smiled at herself in the mirror.
‘You two, I forgive. Josh and Vera and Kev, I forgive. I may forgive Graeme if he crawls over broken glass and sobs at my feet and ensures I never have to wait in a line of tourists for a latte ever again.’
‘And Tom?’ said Kylie, her eyebrows raised nearly to her hairline.
‘Tom is dead to me from this day forward.’ Actually he’d been dead to her since dawn, but she couldn’t work out how to get that into her sentence without it losing its punch.
And with a dramatic swish of her skirts (which was also awesome) she marched off.
CHAPTER
35
Tom let himself in through the side door of the pub, hoping for a quiet hour or two in the office. The café he was avoiding, but there were teabags in the pub kitchen and that would do.
He was looking forward to reading through the latest applications for pub manager; it would be a welcome respite from thinking about his dawn visitor. So would starting up a file for each of his dad’s properties and making a checklist of insurance policies and bank accounts.
Unexciting but totally safe, unemotional busywork. He’d just about had enough of emotions for one week.
The day was too chilly to open a window and there was no kindling on the premises yet so he couldn’t light a fire in either of the pub’s fireplaces, so he left his jacket on. The sky he could see through the office window had all the warmth and colour of mortician’s putty, which matched his mood precisely.
‘I think we need some distance,’ he’d said to Hannah after he told the biggest bloody lie of his life: that he had no interest in her suggestion that they become a couple. ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate. Dad, his business interests. The campdraft.’
