‘Way the grapevine works in this town they’ll have me selling lamb shanks in a minute,’ Ella muttered, making Jake’s easycrease smile morph into a head-thrown-back chuckle.
Another car pulled up across the road, looking in. Jake waved at the car’s occupants.
‘Do you know everyone in Chalk Hill?’ Ella asked, crossing her arms.
‘Pretty much.’
That was when the penny clicked, and Ella knew his problem. He was a proud man and this was his nanna’s iconic house. He thought he needed to be here to keep an eye on things. An eye on her. He thought she might stuff this up! The whipper-snipping was just an excuse for him to be here.
‘Jake, I understand that you might think you need to check up on me, okay? I know I’m new at this, but trust me, I’ve got it covered,’ she said.
‘I didn’t come to check up on you.’
So he was too nice to admit it. Whatever. She didn’t have time to worry about this right now. ‘Okay. I have to get back inside, Jake. I’ll call you when it’s over. I’ll give you any feedback. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
Ella leaned forward. ‘Just between us, I think we might be a bit high on the price.’
Jake’s face shut down.
‘But we won’t know that till someone makes an offer, I guess,’ Ella added.
* * *
At that first Home Open, the people that weren’t turned away by Jake’s whipper-snipping clucked about how expensive the house was while they dropped choc-chip cookie crumbs all over the jarrah floors, and Ella smiled till her face ached.
She held the second Home Open a week later on a Saturday and got the half of town that hadn’t come to the first one because Saturday suited them better. They clucked about how expensive it was while they dropped banana muffin crumbs all over the jarrah floors she’d swept to a sparkle.
Ella smiled till her face ached and inhaled the relaxing scent of cinnamon for an hour after she’d brought the Open Now signs in and everyone had gone home.
Then she sat herself in Irma Honeychurch’s kitchen and had a damn good cry.
CHAPTER
5
‘Erik, I’m going officially nuts out here. I don’t know what to do. It’s like my son is a stranger in my own house. He won’t talk to me. The school called me today. Sam pushed a kid at lunchtime over a game of handball. Handball! And that’s the second time since school started. He’s only been there three weeks! If he gets a third white slip, they can suspend him. He’s ten years old and he could get kicked out of school!’ All of that came out in such a rush that Ella felt dizzy.
‘Do you want that I come at the weekend? Talk to him?’
When Erik Brecker said those magic words, Ella remembered every reason why she loved him and why she’d married him. Erik had always been there for her. Unconditionally. Unreservedly. ‘Would you do that? Sam would love that. I would love that. I could use some adult company.’
‘I will work this out, Ella. I will change some session times. Okay?’
‘Thanks, Erik. Thanks so much. We’ll see you Saturday, okay? I’ll clear everything off the couch.’
She ended the call. It was four in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Sam should be home any minute and the house looked like it had been mugged. Breakfast dishes were stacked in the sink because Sam forgot to load the soap powder in the dishwasher last night and it hadn’t yet finished its cycle when she flew out of the house this morning. The kitchen counter had school consent forms she needed to sign and get back for an excursion next week (she hadn’t paid that $32 yet) and her handbag had spilled as she’d thrown it in her rush to get to the landline to catch Erik’s call, dumping business cards, her phone, half a dozen brochures of the Honeychurch house, her hairbrush and lipstick, and the two apples she hadn’t got around to eating for lunch.
This was her life.
This was supposed to be her new life as a successful real estate saleswoman bringing up her son in a small country town, but it looked exactly like the old life in Perth she’d tried to leave behind. Just without Erik.
Ella sat her butt on the bar stool, elbows to the countertop, and dropped her head to her hands.
That’s how Sam found her when he walked in the door a few minutes later and dumped his school bag on top of her apple.
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Hey. How you going?’
Sam opened the fridge door and shut it pretty much straight away. He moved on to the pantry. ‘There’s never any food to eat in this house.’
‘Have an apple, Sam. There’s plenty of fruit.’
‘I’m sick of fruit. All the other kids get a bakery order for lunch. Taking a cheese sandwich every day is crap.’
‘Don’t use that word. I hate that kind of language. We talked about this.’
Sam came out of the pantry with a box of sultanas in his hand. ‘Can I have these?’
Ella waved an impatient yes as she got off the stool.
‘Why can’t I ever have a bakery order?’ Sam pressed.
‘Maybe if you do the right thing at school all week you could have a lunch order on a Friday. If you strung one good week of behaviour together where I don’t have to—’ she was very close to screeching lose my shit.
Ella counted to five, praying for patience, and started again. ‘You tell me why I should pay for you to have a lunch order when you can’t even remember to run the dishwasher for me at night? I don’t know what to do with you, mate. I’m trying real hard to make this work—our move to Chalk Hill—but I don’t think you’re trying at all.’
Sam flared like a struck match. ‘I hate Chalk Hill. I wish we’d never left Perth. It’s dumb here. It’s so dumb, Mum. Why’d you
