What can I say about Kevin? Mum first met him four years ago at the mechanic’s in Dawson, where we used to live before Grandma died and left her house in Kelly’s Crossing to Mum. Her big old FJ Holden, which I called a bomb and she called a vintage car, was always breaking down. I was usually with her when she took it in to be fixed, a twelve-year-old waiting impatiently in the front seat as the adults talked for way too long. I remember the day I realised there was more going on than just friendly banter.
‘What’s up with the old girl this time, Lily?’ Kevin said as Mum got out of the car.
At some point in the mechanics of things they’d reached first-name terms.
‘Pretty sure it’s the gearbox,’ she said, patting the domed bonnet.
‘Thought you’d have a go at that yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re getting pretty good at this sort of thing.’
‘I’m afraid changing the oil is about my limit.’ Mum smiled.
Kevin looked at me through the windscreen and winked. I folded my arms across my chest and glanced at the passing traffic.
‘Okay, let’s have a look at her.’ He lifted the bonnet so I could no longer see them.
There was definitely flirting going on – old-people flirting but flirting nonetheless. I may have only been a kid, but I was aware of when men tried to chat up my mum – she was a natural beauty after all.
Turns out they had a lot to talk about. They shared a love of old cars and they both wanted to live on the land. Mum thought he was great and fell in love with his blue, blue eyes. I’ve always thought blue eyes are completely overrated.
Pretty soon they were going out and a year or so after that Mum married him. I guess she was happy when he came along. Happier. Though I’d always thought we were fine on our own. Mum seemed to think it was some sort of wild coincidence that she, a car lover, and he, a mechanic, could actually get together.
‘A match made in heaven,’ she used to say. ‘Do you realise how lucky it is to find love like that, Sunny?’
I hadn’t liked hearing Mum talk about love, but since things were fresh and she was pretty much gone on him, she did it a lot. Their love story was one of the ‘joys’ of being in a blended family. Kids from normal families don’t have to endure that kind of intensity of lovey-doveyness between their parents because, by the time they’re born, the gloss has usually worn off.
Kevin was my guardian now, mainly because there wasn’t really anyone else. I had to live with him until I was legally old enough not to. I did have a real dad, of course. Everyone does. But mine was a stranger I didn’t even remember. We had a photo somewhere. It was just him standing on his own holding up a big fish he’d caught in some river a long time ago. He didn’t seem to have anything to do with me or Mum. She told people he was out of the picture, but I did wonder if anyone had bothered to tell the man who’d fathered me about her accident.
I don’t like thinking about it – the accident, that is – because it starts a fluttering in my stomach. Then the shredded bits of my insides flap around and tie themselves in knots, wringing and wringing in my guts. No matter how many times I go back to it I get the same pain – it hasn’t eased like people said it would. That’s one of those lies people tell.
You’ll get over it.
No, you won’t. Not like they mean.
Anyway, it was an accident and my theory is that accidents happen when a series of events line up: a set of freaky coincidences. In the airline industry, they call it the ‘Swiss Cheese Effect’, that is, for some reason all the random holes in the slices of the cheese line up, creating a way through for a set of events to occur that normally wouldn’t.
Here is what happened to my mother:
First hole – the Craigsville Show was on that weekend.
Second hole – she made a chocolate mud cake for the show’s cake competition and put it into the oven.
Third hole (here’s where things start to go wrong) – one of our two cows (Connie, a profoundly stupid – even by cow standards – bony little Jersey) got caught in a barbed-wire fence near the house and Mum had to run outside and help Kevin free her.
Fourth hole – the cake burnt.
I can just hear her. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ She used that particular expression a lot, which was strange for a woman who had become a Buddhist. I think she got it from Grandma.
Anyway, that night she had to stay up really late to make another cake and then she was totally zapped for the drive to the show the next day – fifth hole.
The following morning she’d got up early and nudged Kevin. ‘You coming, Kev? Cake’s got to be in to the show by 7.30.’ But Kevin had decided to stay home that trip; he had too much to do around the place, or so he must have said – hole number six.
Then came number seven. He’d said: ‘Take the Datsun so I can work on the FJ.’
It’s a long drive to Craigsville – an hour north from Kelly’s Crossing along narrow roads that meander through sugarcane country and then merge onto the main coastal highway. But Mum never made it that far.
I can only imagine what happened because no-one will ever really know: her eyes started to get heavy, her head lolled, and the Datsun swerved straight into the old gum tree at a hundred kilometres an hour. The car became a maelstrom of metal and plastic, the tree severing and twisting it like aluminium foil.
And Mum, well,
