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The Christmas Cake War

STELLA QUINN

Chapter 1

The last time Jodie was in Clarence, she met a boy and fell in love. You know, the usual stuff. She had her heart broken, too, in case you’re wondering.

The whole process took about four minutes. A waterfall and rock pool had been involved, and a heroic rescue, and even though a decade and a half had passed since then, she’d never forgotten the breathless moment she was scooped—by a boy!—from deep, scary, ink-black water and brought back up to the sun.

Had she been fifteen? Sixteen, maybe? She was young, is the point, and she was naïve and wide-eyed and all those sweet, vulnerable things that shy teenage girls are when they’re suddenly clasped, bosom to chest, to a handsome boy with laughing brown eyes, no shirt and soaking wet boardies.

The heartbreak wasn’t his fault; she knew that now. He’d done nothing more than save her from drowning, set her on her feet and return to his friends. Hero Boy hadn’t even known her name, let alone understood she’d been daydreaming about having a summer holiday romance with a boy since forever, and he was the Clarence local she’d chosen for the role. The hurt and humiliation were all in her head.

But at the time, watching him walk away like he’d not even noticed she was a girl? Yeah. It feltfatal. She gave her shoulders a roll and stretched her fingers where they’d been clamped on the steering wheel. Driving back into the small country town after all these years had made her mind wander back to a time when she’d thrown words likefatalaround for the sheer drama of it. Teenager stuff.

She knew better now.

Jodie rubbed her chest and blinked rapidly and put a little pressure on her car brakes to pull over to the side of the short street that marked the centre of town. She was older now. She knew whatheartbreakreally felt like. Whatfatalreally felt like. She knew, but she wished she didn’t know, because knowing had been brutal.

She pulled away from the kerb, keeping her car at a snail’s pace as she began inspecting the passing houses of Lillypilly Street through the dusty windscreen. Not that there were many: a few brick, a few fibro, a few weatherboard. The trees and grass and shrubs of the front gardens were such a light green compared with the silvers and sages of the southern gardens back home. After all these years, would she even recognise the house where her great aunt lived?

Oh. Of course. There: a blue-painted weatherboard cottage showing its age. A rickety fence of rounded yellow palings marked the front, reminding Jodie a little of horse teeth. The shrubs lining the front path were pruned and tidyish, but dandelions growing up through the grass in front of the house and out on the verge near the road made the place look like mowing was a few days overdue. Three wide-planked steps leading up to the bullnose verandah looked like they’d recently been replaced. A sturdy chrome handrail, not at all in keeping with the country charm of the home, shone in the morning sun.

Old and new. She’d just been expecting old; she’d just beenwantingold, in fact. She’d spent the long drive north making wishful bets with herself:If Carol’s house looks exactly like it did when I was a kid, then maybe I’ll feel like a kid again while I’m here. Maybe I’ll remember what that little word ‘happy’ feels like.

But Carol’s house had some new amid the old, which was telling her that wishful bets had been false hope. No surprises there. Hope had flung itself over a guardrail on the Megalong Valley Road ten months ago.

Not that her family understood. Her mother, her father, her brother … they were totally over what they called her ‘wallowing in heartbreak’. She wasn’t sure whether they’d been holding family meetings without her and workshopping Ways To Perk Jodie Up, but somehow or other, it had been decided (by them) that it was her job (despite any objection she might raise) to drive 802 kilometres from Katoomba to Clarence and help Great Aunt Carol move into an aged care facility.

‘You’re the health professional in the family,’ her mum had said. ‘Carol will feel comfortable having you around. You know, in case her hip is playing up. Also, we’re all busy and you’re …’

Not busy? Untrue. Oh, sure, she wasn’t busy with anything meaningful, like earning a living or delivering meals on wheels, or even brushing her hair, but she was very busy with other stuff. Like ‘moping’, to use her mother’s pet phrase. She’d been busying the heck out of moping for months now.

Also, Jodie could not see why her mother thought a physio who’d had to sell her practice for a great thunking loss, and who was currently in a rut of deep unhappiness, was in any position to be playing caretaker to a woman who’d run her own life, happily and well, for over eighty years.

But, here she was, idling by the kerb outside Carol’s house.

All she’d brought with her was the laundry basket on the back seat filled with spare clothes, her own personal cloud of doom and little to no expectation of being any comfort at all to Carol.

Carol was, in her own way, as masterful as her mother. She—

Well. No need to spell it out.

‘Jodie? My darling girl, what a surprise to findyouon my doorstep,’ her great aunt said when she opened the front door a few minutes later.

Carol’s amazement mingled with Jodie’s guilt. It had been a very long time since she’d seen her. Jodie’s other thought was:Why is Carol surprised? Has Mum not told her I’ve been ordered to Clarence?

‘That basket of clothing must mean you’ve come to stay for a bit, pet. Your old room has some boxes of old committee meeting notes stacked up in it, but we can have it ready in a trice.’

‘Um. Thanks. Yes.’ Her old room. Three little, very ordinary, words, but they made her feel something that she hadn’t felt for a very long time: they made her feel warm. For a while there, in that January-February-March fog after the accident, she had tried to stop feeling anything at all. Call it cowardice, call it survival, call it what you like—its name didn’t matter, because it didn’t work. The truth was, her emotional state for the last year could only be described asraw.

‘You’re a long way from Katoomba. I hope you haven’t been driving through the night to arrive at this hour of the morning.’

She’d taken three days, actually, driving with her fingers gripped on the wheel so tight they ached, ten kilometres under the speed limit the whole time, pissing off every northbound truck driver on the Pacific Highway. But mentioning all of that would invite Carol to ask questions Jodie was in no state to answer, so she just smiled and said, ‘It’s good to see you, Auntie Carol.’

And, Jodie realised, there was another little nugget of warm right where her heart used to beat before heartbreak crushed it. When her great aunt wrapped her arms around her and pressed her papery cheek to hers, it felt so good. At least, it did until it started to remind Jodie of all the other hugs and cheek-presses she’d had to endure at the funeral.

She didn’t cry, but it was a close-run thing. She stepped back.