Page 62 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘When do you feel low?’ Dorothy asks. Patricia always seems so calm and in control of her life. She can’t imagine her not being able to cope with anything.
‘Only sometimes,’ Patricia says airily. ‘When I’m worrying about my parents getting frailer, or when my sister has said something mean. Nothing major. Nothing like you’ve experienced. But I think yoga can help in proportional ways, if you know what I mean.’
Dorothy nods. ‘Yes. But sometimes it feels like it’s ripping me apart.’
‘Me too. Sandrine says that’s normal. You can feel a bit pushed and pulled but there’s no other method for really finding out what you’re made of.’ She stares at Dorothy for a few seconds. ‘I know that you are made of strong stuff. You may not even realise that yourself.’
‘I think …’ Dorothy’s breath catches in her chest. ‘I feel like I’m made of mess at the moment.’
‘Of course. I understand.’
And Dorothy can tell she does. Sometimes she thinks Patricia has worked out exactly who Dorothy is but she still wants to talk to her. To be her friend. It’s a rare gift of acceptance, and Dorothy can only hope she offers it in return.
Patricia bends to kiss her on the cheek. ‘I hope to see you in class on Thursday. But I’ll be thinking of you in between.’
She turns and walks down the footpath, away from the water, and Dorothy realises her car is probably parked there.
The café door opens and Frederick sticks his head out, looking at her inquisitively.
‘Coming,’ Dorothy says, plucking her order pad and a pen out of her apron. She glances in Patricia’s direction and sees her friend raise her hand to pull at her ponytail. How lucky, Dorothy thinks, that she knows someone who cares about her enough to come to check on her. To support her. That day Dorothy first wandered away from this café and towards that yoga class, she could not have known what Orange Blossom House would bring her. Now she does, and it gives her the strength to walk back inside, sniff back her tears and get on with her day.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
‘Thank you for driving me,’ Grace Maud says as the car approaches the turn-off to the road she knows so well. The one that used to lead home and now leads to a sight she doesn’t want to see, but has to.
‘I’m glad I could come with you,’ Cecilia says, putting on the blinker.
In silence, they pass fields that not so long ago were abundant with cane. Now they’re the mangled landscape of a broken heritage: burnt plants, twisted out of shape; all the years of toil by the men in her family, and the men who worked with them, gone. All the care that Grace Maud put into sustaining the business to ensure it would be hers and Tom’s, and no one else’s, is sunk into that soil. Who knows how long it will take to remake what they’ve lost.
After Tom’s phone call, Grace Maud had thought she wanted to head out immediately to see the damage. But then she considered what she would see when she got there, and realised that she wasn’t ready to have her memories irrevocably altered. She wanted to remember the farm the way it was just a little bit longer.
It’s the same reason she didn’t want to see either of her parents dead. She wanted to remember them alive, and seeing them dead would mean she might only think of them dead. Ellie Maud had been different: she’d gone to the funeral home after their mother died, viewed the body, said her goodbyes. She wasn’t here, though, when their mother died. So maybe she needed to check for herself.
Grace Maud didn’t need to see for herself that the farm had been destroyed – she heard it in Tom’s voice. So she went to see him at the neighbours’ place instead, and held onto her memories for a few more days. Cecilia had brought her breakfast, lunch and dinner, and even stayed up late a couple of nights, too worried to go to sleep, but Grace Maud was too deep inside her grief to really know what was going on.
Then the time came – she felt it – when she needed to make the drive so familiar to her that she recognises each groove in the road. She needs to see her son again. Tom hasn’t come to visit her, whether from shame or heartache or an acknowledgement that technically there’s still a breach between them, Grace Maud doesn’t know. She isn’t angry at him – how can she be? The fire wasn’t his fault. Or she doesn’t think it was. He won’t say exactly what happened. Won’t tell her who was meant to be watching.
They burn that cane several times a year and the rules and the pattern are always the same; and they’ve had the same workers the past few harvests, so it wasn’t as if someone didn’t know what to do. Maybe they were complacent. Maybe it was Luca. Grace Maud doesn’t want to think about that possibility. Not because she wouldn’t forgive him – she would, because he’s Ellie Maud’s grandson – but because she wouldn’t want him to carry the guilt. He’s a sensitive boy, still figuring out his place in the world. Everyone makes mistakes. If this is his, despite the devastation it has wrought, they can work their way through it. Although she may never know.
When the car approaches the husk that used to be the house, Grace Maud hears Cecilia gasp. The girl has never been here before, but she doesn’t need to know what was there to appreciate what has been lost.
Grace Maud keeps her gaze straight ahead, not daring to look at the fields closest to the house. At what’s left of the scores of years of her father’s work and her own after it. Those home paddocks were as familiar to her as her own body, because she used to gaze out at them each morning. Now they’re empty.
She goes to open the car door but it’s wrenched open before she gets the chance.
‘Mum.’ Tom puts out his hand to help her alight.
She thinks he might cry again and isn’t sure she can endorse that kind of behaviour on a regular basis. Her father didn’t cry when his sons died; nor did her mother. That means Grace Maud doesn’t cry either. Tom has had his cry on the phone, and that was understandable, but they need to buck up now.
She feels something like satisfaction when she sees that he looks tired and a decade older, but he’s not crying. ‘Tom,’ she says, accepting his kiss on her cheek. She’d considered being stern with him – perhaps even trying to talk about the matter that has come between them – but she can see that sternness wouldn’t be appropriate. He’s grieving too.
They walk together to stand next to the stilts that are all that’s left of their old Queenslander. Grace Maud can smell smoke and wonders if this is how funeral pyres smell. Ellie Maud and Bela went to India once, to Varanasi, to stand beside the Ganges and watch as the burning pyres were put into the water. Ellie Maud had told her sister about the smell, how it was almost reassuring. The rituals of death and life, she’d said, were comforting. This doesn’t smell like a ritual, though – it just smells like death. Death of history, of effort, of dreams, of money. Of family. Her family.
Then Grace Maud remembers about a very important part of the property.
‘What happened to the graves?’ she says, and Tom’s face contorts.
‘The stones got damaged.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m so sorry, Mum.’
