‘Marri,’ Jake told her. ‘Dad got it from the mill at Manjimup years ago and us boys helped him make it. It was secret men’s business up in his shed. He surprised Mum with it on their thirtieth wedding anniversary.’
Next item of interest was a huge white bucket of … ‘What is that exactly?’ Ella asked, pointing at the bucket sitting on the kitchen table.
‘Honey,’ Jake said. ‘I have hives up in one of the back paddocks near the bush.’
‘You keep bees?’ Ella said, and shivered. Bees weren’t on her list of favourite things.
‘Love having bees,’ Jake said. ‘I’ll give you a jar to take home and you’ll be converted. You’ll never want shop-bought honey again.’
Unlike the open-plan trend that took over in the nineties and had never gone away, Jake’s family home was from the era where separate rooms were built for purpose. The kitchen was at the hub of it. A wide opening joined the kitchen to the dining area, and off to the rear of the kitchen where a closed door led, presumably, to the rest of the house.
Ella’s gaze stopped at that door.
‘Shall I give you the grand tour?’ Jake said, teasing lightly.
Ella gave up trying to hide her curiosity. ‘Yes please! Back you go, mate.’ She shuffled Percy into his cage, and then turned to follow Jake.
‘This way, ma’am.’
She had one moment of hesitation. ‘Will the kids be okay?’
‘They’ll be fine, Ella. Ollie knows my rules. Helmets. No speeding. Four wheels on the road at all times. Stay on the tracks.’
She tried to relax. It was awesome that, in dark-haired, olive-skinned Ollie with his cheeky grin, Sam might finally have found a friend, but it was hard to let go too. Sam was a city kid, very lately a townie. Farms were a totally new experience for him. Snakes lived on farms. Farms meant quad bikes, electric fences, rams and bulls; an entire domestic zoo of animals with horns that might charge. And that big, deeplooking dam.
‘Relax, Ella,’ Jake said again. ‘They’re two boys out having fun. What could go wrong?’
Yes. What exactly. ‘Sorry. I know I’m being paranoid.’
She followed Jake, stealing more than an occasional eyefull of his back and butt along with a good sticky-beak at his house. It was t-shirt and shorts weather, for sure, and Jake suited both well.
‘This was my room. That was Brix’s room. This was where Abe drew on the wall with permanent marker and Mum had a fit,’ he said, showing her the faint squiggle of black pen through paint.
The rooms still had all the boys’ junk: boxes of BMX, basketball and football trophies; school reports; photos; and the paintings they’d all done in kindergarten that his mum had never thrown out. ‘She kept every little thing we ever made for Mother’s Day at school and Father’s Day,’ Jake said.
The beds were all made up. Posters on the wall. Nirvana. Metallica.
‘Who’s that?’ Ella said, indicating a gothic-style poster in Abel’s room.
‘Marilyn Manson. Abe went nuts about him.’
This place was too big for Jake. The boys’ old bedrooms were neat and tidy, but they had a closed-up feel, like they’d lost the love.
This house needed a family to fill it with running feet, yelling voices and sticky fingerprints on the walls.
It could be her family, too.
The thought gripped her before she could stop it, and Ella bumped her shoulder on a doorframe because she wasn’t paying attention to following Jake’s shoulders around yet another corner. Her heart had just done one great big bellyflop of want, and the shockwaves of it hammered her insides.
‘And this is the master suite,’ he said, standing back to let her pass. ‘My room.’
Ella waded up the carpeted corridor, still in bellyflop mode. To hide it, she made a show of studying a picture on the nearest wall, and then suddenly it wasn’t a show at all. The drawing was completely different to all the other art she’d seen and she reached out her hand to touch, then stopped with her fingertips suspended short of the surface.
‘Who is this? Did one of the family draw it?’
‘Nah. Honeychurches paint about as well as they sing,’ Jake said. ‘I could give you a singing demo if you don’t believe me.’
She knew him well enough now to know he was hiding something. His voice had changed despite the joke in the words.
Ella studied the picture. It was a portrait of a woman, or a girl more like it. Was it pencil? Charcoal? ‘Who is she?’
‘That’s Cassidy,’ Jake said. ‘A guy on a street in Kathmandu drew this, and we didn’t want to carry it all around Nepal and then Europe so we sent it home. Come on.’
This was the girl who’d broken Jake’s heart.
The girl in the portrait was beautiful in an elusive, restless way. If a picture could look windswept, that’s how Cassidy appeared, like one good puff would blow her away.
Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe, for Jake, she would always be the girl who got away.
‘Why do you keep her picture, if it hurts to look at it?’
He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t hurt me anymore. I hadn’t thought about it. It’s just there.’
‘But, you told me about the baby, Jake. If that’s what you think about when you see it …’ Ella shivered. That would be awful, being reminded of a child that would never be, every day.
‘That’s the decisions some people make, isn’t it?’ Jake said, digging his hands into the pockets of his shorts, waiting near the door to his room. ‘Who can say why people do what they do? Cassidy made her decision not to have the baby. You made your decision to keep Sam. I guess there was a lot of pressure on you to make a different decision too, for different reasons. What’s done is done. It affects me—of course it does—but I can’t change it, so I move on.’
‘But it’s not moving on, is it? The picture’s still here. You
