I thought for a millisecond. ‘I didn’t talk to him that much.’
‘Oh, come on, Sunny.’
‘Really.’
‘Right. So, do you like him?’
I screwed up my face. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We just met. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.’ Zara had picked up the scent of some gossip and I wanted to divert her from the trail.
Thankfully, her mum came out of the shop and gave us a wave. ‘There’s Mum,’ she said. ‘We’ll continue this conversation later.’
‘Nothing to converse about,’ I said. ‘So we probably won’t.’ I raised my eyebrows at her.
She opened the door. ‘Anyway, if you’d read my text you’d know that my friend Kayla, from school, is coming to visit. You know Kayla, right?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, sort of.’
‘We might go up to the waterhole later in the week, if you want to come.’
‘The waterhole?’ I shiver ran through me.
‘Yeah, you know, for a swim. People do that.’ She laughed and jumped down from the car. ‘You got something better to do in this dump?’
‘I guess not.’
She walked off toward her mother and I couldn’t help feeling gutted about Matt. I didn’t have room in my life for someone with problems. There’d been enough drama around me to last two lifetimes already.
I watched Zara and her mum get in their car, chatting happily. I won’t lie; the feeling came back. It made me sick to my stomach seeing them like that. Just casually being together, being happy. Taking it all for granted.
I waited a total of half an hour with the packet resting on my knees, losing its warmth, before Kevin finally returned, shouldering a carton of beer. I watched him, from the rear-vision mirror, dump it onto the tray of the ute.
He got in and reached for the key. ‘You ready to go?’
‘Yep.’ I stared straight ahead. I secretly hoped policewoman Shelley would pull him over for a breath test.
Kevin rubbed his hands down his thighs and turned to look at me. ‘What’s wrong, Sunny?’ He spoke as if reluctant to hear the answer.
Anger crawled over my body like a grassfire. It was always there; the pilot light of my resentment never went out, even when I wasn’t thinking about the accident. I knew it couldn’t be healthy, but I could not get over the fact that Kevin had taken my mother away from me. And he was the worst possible substitute for a parent I could think of.
Rage surged up from my insides and welled in my face like poison. I wanted to spit words at him. ‘Nothing.’
‘You’re not making this very easy.’ Kevin lifted his hands to the steering wheel.
‘Can we go now?’ I knew that if I said any more I would have no control of what came out.
‘I’m trying here, Sunny. And it would be nice if you could try too.’
I took a deep breath. My unspoken words hung in the air.
I don’t want to try.
Kevin shook his head and leant forward to turn the key. ‘Jesus, what’s wrong with you?’ he whispered.
Kevin, true to his word, gave me a job to do the next day. And the worst thing was he wasn’t going to work and was there to supervise me. Because of my head, he gave me an ‘easy’ job: sorting through boxes in the spare bedroom, where Grandma had hoarded decades’ worth of old junk.
The spare room, between the kitchen and the main bedroom, was the smallest bedroom in the house. It was always dark because the shrub growing outside the window blocked much of the light from outside. I walked in to find wall-to-ceiling stuff. Grandma was indeed a hoarder; the piles of clothes and boxes and books looked dangerously unstable.
‘Wow,’ I said.
Kevin nodded. ‘A lot of this can be thrown out.’
He was right. Grandma had kept weird stuff like newspapers, mouldy novels and what looked like hundreds of empty jars. Kevin took out boxes and boxes full of rubbish until we’d cleared nearly half the room.
In one box, I found some old albums. The photographs were behind plastic that had yellowed and cracked with age. Some were pictures of my grandmother and grandfather and there were early ones of Kingfisher Farm and my mum as a child. The colour had faded but the house looked freshly painted and the garden neatly kept. It was a younger, neater twin of the farm as it was now. In the next album Mum was older, and there were school photos of her with ponytails and missing teeth.
Kevin stuck his head into the room. ‘What have you got there?’
‘Photos,’ I said, not looking up.
‘The ute’s pretty full already. I’m going to the dump. Are you nearly done?’
I looked up. ‘Yep. That’s the last lot of newspapers over there.’ I pointed to a pile near the door.
He grabbed them and went out as I continued to turn the pages, fascinated by this old record of Mum’s life. Toward the back of the last album I found a picture of myself on Rocket. I looked like a miniature jockey, perched high on his bony back, no saddle. Beside me was a man. It was him: the same man who held the fish in the only photo I’d ever seen of him.
This was my real father. The live flesh-and-blood one. His name was David Moore. Dave. That was about all I knew.
Mum had always said, ‘If you want to know about your biological father, you just have to ask.’
I’d asked her only two things:
1. ‘Did you love him?’
‘Well, maybe once, but no, not in the end.’
2. ‘What happened?’
‘He wasn’t a good man for me.’
Distant feelings hung like mist in the atmosphere around his name, but back then Mum’s ‘no’ had been enough for me. She didn’t love him and I didn’t need him. Things had changed, though, and a situation had arisen where a spare parent could be quite handy. And maybe the ‘not a good man’ part wasn’t true anymore. Perhaps he was a great bloke now.
