Page 43 of The Side Road
Connor wasn’t causing any trouble. Leaning and listening to music was not belligerent behaviour. It was a perfectly good place to lean and listen. But didn’t he have something better to do?
‘Fine,’ Mia said. ‘Tell him he can sit at the table. There’s tea and coffee in the lunchroom.’
The basket of knitted ‘Women Who Changed the World’ sat on the counter. Laminated cards with facts about the famous women were beside the basket, and on the bottom was a link for the pattern.
Saige picked up a doll and studied the orange-haired woman wearing a crown and a high-collared dress. ‘Rihanna, right?’
‘Rihanna? No, she’s a queen. Queen Elizabeth the First,’ Mia said.
‘Rihanna’s more fun.’ Saige put down the doll and pickedup another. ‘This one’s a zookeeper?’ The doll had a monkey on her hip.
‘That’s Jane Goodall. The famous?—’
Saige picked up another doll. ‘This one rides a motorbike.’
‘She’s a pilot. It’s Amelia Earhart.’
‘But she’s wearing a bike helmet and goggles,’ Saige protested.
‘They’re her aviator glasses. She was the first woman to cross the Atlantic. She disappeared trying to fly around the world.’
‘She didn’t make it?’
Mia shook her head.
‘Traumatised. Literally. A trigger warning should come before that story.’ Saige collected a bag of winter decorations, including pinecones, fake snow, wreaths, and candles, and wandered off to decorate the front window.
Mia considered Amelia Earhart. Adding a scarf might make her identity even more confusing, but perhaps a belt would help, or she could change the colour of the doll’s jacket. She placed Amelia back into the basket. Still no sign of Joan’s flag. If it didn’t turn up soon, Mia would make another.
Logging into her online shop account, Mia checked the sales orders. Her Quinn the Quirky Chicken reel had been running for twenty-four hours on social media. Discounted, she expected the kits would sell. As she scrolled to the bottom of the page, her mouth dropped open.
There were ten thousand orders.
‘Shit!’ Mia yelled. She turned to April. ‘We have ten thousand orders.’
‘Wow,’ April said.
‘Slay,’ Saige agreed.
Mia took down the post.
When Oliver openedthe front door at Hook & Knot, the women gathered around the table paused and looked up.
Having just dropped Tash at Mary’s house – the girls were working on an art project together – he had stopped in town to get petrol and buy groceries when he noticed the store was still open. Tash needed a four-millimetre circular needle.
‘What are you doing here?’ Mia asked. ‘We’re closed.’
Something ridiculously cute was happening to her hair.
‘I believe you sell wool,’ he said.
April giggled.
Mia gave her a stern look. April continued stuffing things into a post pack, but her giggling continued.
‘Was that a dad joke?’ Saige asked.
Oliver looked her over – a checked shirt over a white T-shirt, multiple earrings, fine plaits through her hair – and the same weary, bored expression that Tash sometimes gave him. He had a vision of his daughter four years older.
