Page 87 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘Hello, Patricia.’
‘I’ve been looking for you.’
Her mother’s head turns and she looks at Patricia with softness in her eyes. She’s been doing that lately, and it’s one of the ways Patricia knows she’s deteriorating. Softness is not in her mother’s repertoire.
‘I have a good handicap,’ her mother says.
‘I know, Mum. You’re a great golfer,’ Patricia says, taking her mother’s elbow. She always talks to her mother about the past in the present tense; her mother becomes confused otherwise.
‘Mum, we need to get home,’ she adds. ‘It will be dinnertime soon.’
There’s no point admonishing her for disappearing. She doesn’t know she’s done anything wrong.
By now Dennis is at her mother’s other side. ‘Mrs McKinley,’ he says, ‘I smelled something really good in your kitchen. Any chance I could stay for dinner?’
Patricia frowns at him. She has no idea what he’s on about.
But her mother looks at him and smiles. ‘Of course,’ she says, moving away from Patricia’s grip and taking Dennis’s offered arm.
Dennis raises his eyebrows at Patricia and nods towards the car.
‘How did you know that would work?’ she says quietly.
‘My nana used to go walkabout. Food was always the thing that would get her home.’
Suddenly she wants to know more about the Dennis who went looking for his lost nana, who can be so kind to her mother when he doesn’t know her, who offered to drive Patricia without her needing to say she herself was in no state to drive.
‘We’re having lamb chops,’ her mother says as Dennis helps her into the back seat and carefully does up the belt.
They aren’t having lamp chops, but they’re her mother’s favourite and Patricia is encouraged to hear that she wants to eat anything at all. Lately she’s been refusing to eat. Or maybe she can’t eat. Patricia isn’t sure which, because she doesn’t know if her mother has the capacity to decide not to do anything.
Last night Patricia fried chops and cooked vegetables – the sort of dinner her mother usually likes – and cut everything up into small pieces. Once the food’s cut up, her mother is able to use a fork with no problem – her motor skills are intact. Patricia had left her parents to it while she made another dinner for herself – if she had her choice, she’d never see another chop again – and got back to the table to discover that her mother hadn’t eaten anything. Patricia tried to feed her, like she was a toddler, but her mother wouldn’t open her mouth. Perhaps she’s finally forgotten how to eat. Or it’s a form of hunger strike: she wants to die and that’s her way of expressing it. If that is the case, Patricia can’t blame her. Being trapped inside an able body with a disabled mind is a nightmare with no prospect of an end.
If her mother won’t eat again tonight, Patricia will need to have yet another tough conversation with her father and try to make him talk to his sons.
For now, though, the immediate drama is over. Patricia feels her shoulders drop as she gets into the passenger seat, and listens as her mother tells Dennis about the day she almost won the golf club championship.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
When Grace Maud’s parents died, there was no discussion about where they would be buried. Each of them had declared it would be on the property, in the paddock one removed from the house, next to a stand of Burdekin plum trees that their mother had planted when the twins were children. When their mother went first, Grace Maud called Ellie Maud and asked if she still thought their mother should be buried on the property and not in a graveyard. Ellie Maud told her to talk to their father. He said they needed to stick to the plan. By the time their father died, Ellie Maud was ailing and Grace Maud didn’t call to ask her anything. Instead she was glad that neither of their parents was alive to see another child die.
It’s a strange thing, to be an orphan. Not just an orphan because your parents have died but because all your siblings have died too. And it’s a strange thing to orphan your only child by cutting him out of your life. Which is what Grace Maud has been doing to Tom. That’s why she asked him to meet her at the graves today; it’s also why she knew he would agree.
She believes him when he says he didn’t mean to hurt her, because he’s never intentionally hurt her; and she knows she let her indignation about what he did run away with her. Something an old lady could allow herself, perhaps, except when she causes her son far more harm than he has caused her.
‘I’m so sorry these were damaged by the fire,’ Tom says as he crouches to brush dirt off his grandfather’s headstone. ‘They were the first …’ He turns to look at her. ‘The first things I checked on. Once the house was gone. I had to know these were still here.’
‘And they are still here, even if they’re a bit beaten up. Your grandfather could give any fire a run for its money.’ Grace Maud smiles at the memory of the tall, reedy man who had command of this place for so long.
‘That’s what I figured.’ Tom stands up, and winces, putting a hand to his hip. ‘That’s getting harder. Not as young as I used to be.’
‘We never are.’
Grace Maud gazes around at the burnt fields and the new shoots of plant life. The birds are starting to come back now, with that peculiarly Australian cacophony that becomes background noise when you’re used to it but is stunningly absent when it’s gone. The return of the birds means returning seed and grubs too. The cycle of fire: ruin and renewal. Grace Maud just isn’t sure she has enough gumption for the renewal phase. She’s done it too many times with metaphorical fires in her life, and she doesn’t want to become so tired of it that she can’t start that forward motion each day. There’s a point past which all humans go, when the body starts its inexorable process towards death, and it can be fast or slow. She doesn’t want a slow death. She wants to be as alive as she can be until the very end.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she announces, ‘about this place.’
Tom turns to her with a curious look in his eyes. ‘So you’ve finally decided to grow avocados instead of cane,’ he says, his eyes crinkling as he smiles.
