Page 86 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘You don’t need to,’ she said, although having someone else in the car might help to keep her calm.
‘Yeah, I think I do. I’ll drive. We can come back for your car later.’
She’d hesitated, feeling as though he’d seen straight through her older self to that two year old; as though he knew that she was too unsteady right now to be of use to anyone. It was a relief.
‘Okay,’ she said.
Now, Dennis is driving them to Yorkeys Knob.
‘Where would you like to go?’ he says as they near the beach.
‘Um …’ Her mind is blank. How do you start searching for someone who won’t be thinking about where they’re going? It’s not like her mother has a plan. She’s not a teenager absconding to a shopping centre.
‘I don’t know,’ she admits. ‘She could be in someone’s garden. She could be on the beach.’
She turns her head from one side to the other as Dennis drives slowly.
‘Is the beach likely?’ he asks.
‘She’s gone there before, so maybe. But she doesn’t like sand that much. So maybe not.’
‘She’s done this before?’
‘Yes. Um – let’s … let’s turn left here.’
Patricia tries to remember the houses her mother’s friends used to live in. She had three friends close by she would meet for afternoons of gin rummy. Her addled brain might spirit her away to what used to be familiar.
‘I think – yes, this street here, on the left.’
Dennis turns and slows to twenty kilometres an hour while Patricia keeps swivelling her head left to right. No sign of her mother.
‘What if she’s walked towards the main road?’ she says, her voice strangled.
‘She’s pretty old, right?’ Dennis says. ‘Do you really think she’d make it that far?’
He has a point, although that doesn’t stop her panicking.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anything.’
She’s no longer a two year old; she’s five, or eight, or ten. One of the ages when she was asked to make decisions for herself and became paralysed with the fear of saying the wrong thing, all the while knowing that for her mother there was no right thing. Whatever Patricia said was silly. She was a ‘silly girl’. She’s spent all the years since making herself into the opposite of a silly girl, but now the layers of her adult self are peeled back. Because whichever way they drive, it could be the wrong way. The only right way is the way that leads to her mother, and she won’t know what that is until they find her.
‘You know more than most people, Patricia,’ Dennis says seriously, and his hand takes hers.
She accepts it, regardless of what he may think that means, because she’s grateful for it. She takes a slow breath and her thoughts slow down with it.
‘Let’s go to the golf course,’ she says, remembering that until a few years ago her mother liked to play nine holes from time to time.
‘And that is … ?’ Dennis lets go of her hand so he can take the wheel properly.
‘Right up here.’
As they approach the entrance to the golf course, Patricia sees a small person who is, without doubt, her mother, standing on the side of the road, staring at a tree.
‘There she is,’ she says, more calmly than she thought she would.
Dennis stops the car a few metres away, and Patricia jumps out and almost jogs over.
‘Mum?’
