‘This bookshelf weighs a tonne,’ Jake grumbled, because it was hot in the sun, his hands kept slipping and he was certain Abe had gifted him the heaviest end.
‘You got the heavy end, mate,’ Abe grunted, shuffling backwards into the shade. ‘Least you get to walk forwards.’
Then it was a king-size jarrah bed. The bedhead on its own must have weighed more than a small car, and Abe wouldn’t pull the thing apart to make it lighter because he’d lost some of the screws or the key he needed to get it all back together … and seriously, how much could two blokes and a sack-truck be expected to do?
‘Looks like you got the heavy end again, mate,’ Abe said.
‘Yeah, right. Either I’m fucking unlucky or you pick up the light end every bloody time.’
‘Least that makes one of us lucky.’
‘Fuck off, Abe.’
They spent another twenty minutes of hefting boxes and bits in the sun, dust kicked up in the shed, and Jess getting under their feet until Jake had to yell at her to get out of it and lie down.
‘Sooo,’ Abe said, with the tone of a bloke venturing a terrifying risk. ‘Have you heard from the lovely Ella of the lovely black item of underwear?’
‘Fuck off, Abel.’
‘Thought that might be the answer,’ Abe said.
* * *
So the month came and went.
Not seeing Ella was like a weight in Jake’s chest every bit as heavy as Abe’s jarrah bed, only this weight never lifted, and Jake never got to put it down.
He heard about her a lot though.
She was in the local paper what felt like every second week. The first time she was photographed with Harvey Begg, Shire President Calder and their local Member of Parliament. They’d taken the photo at the old town pool with Ella sitting on the top step and the three blokes huddled around the silver rails, all of them smiling. Rose between three thorns.
In fact, Jake was pretty sure he was the only man in Chalk Hill who didn’t smile when he saw that picture.
The second time, she was interviewed with Pickles; yet more newspaper columns with blurring print he didn’t care about. The story was all about community efforts to bring back the Chalk Hill swimming pool, and more about Pickles’ water ski park. That photo was taken out at Pickles’ farm where the blue of the water matched the sky and the rich brown earth, dug from the dam by the mountain-load, matched Ella’s hair.
Obviously, she was keeping herself every bit as busy as him. Fine.
Was it any wonder that photo found its way to the front page? She looked so beautiful and confident there, unless he really, really looked deep in her eyes. Did he imagine there was sadness there, staring back at him? Or was that just his own brand of wishful thinking?
How had he stuffed things up with her so monumentally?
Without Nanna Irma’s house to connect them, Jake drifted.
He could have called in to collect Maz’s mirror ball. But that would have felt like The End.
If he could have known that Percy would fly to visit Sam, he would have let the bird out of the cage, thrown him in the air and told him to fly.
* * *
The sale of Helen Nillson’s place to Henry Graham settled at the end of April, which meant Ella collected her first ‘proper’ pay since she’d started her new career. That was something worth celebrating, but she missed having people to celebrate with.
Erik was in Melbourne with his swimming squad.
Helen Nillson brought her a bunch of flowers to mark the occasion, and as she handed the flowers to Ella, she said Mick would like her to call him in six weeks’ time because now that she’d sold Chalk Hill, Mick could move to the city too.
Gina had gone and made her mother-in-law the happiest Italian mamma on the planet by getting herself pregnant.
Ella settled Helen’s flowers on the postage stamp-sized piece of desk in her space, and forked delicious mouthfuls of chocolate orange cake with cream cheese frosting, and wondered why she wasn’t feeling it?
She put the mirror ball up that night—Jake never did call by to collect it—and spun Bad Girls on her record player and the music was awesome as always, but bopping around the verandah with Sam didn’t feel the same.
Nothing felt the same.
After Sam went to bed, she spent an hour staring at the photograph on the front page of the newspaper, studying the picture of her with Dylan Fields (she didn’t know him well enough to call him Pickles) and listening to Boogie Wonderland and You Sexy Thing, trying to feel all the bountiful happy that smiled out of the page, wanting the music to take her away like it always did and always had. But didn’t.
That’s about when she gave up being so bloody stubborn and admitted it.
She was head over heels in love with that cockatiel-loving, infuriating, resourceful man who was good to her son, unveiled a mirror ball at eight o’clock at night and gifted her a flower called Moonlight. The man who kissed like kissing was an Olympic sport and he was the gold medal winner.
She hadn’t let Jake go. She’d told him to stay away.
Ella let out a sigh that could have picked her photo up off the front page of the newspaper and blown her clean away.
CHAPTER
29
Nanna Irma’s old house was busy as an ant hive.
Tradies crawled all over the roof. Carpenters banged away out the back.
They were building a new space for the commercial kitchen back there, and Nan’s old kitchen had been hauled out. Jake kept it, Nan’s kitchen. Couldn’t bring himself to give it up, or dump it, or sell it. That was something else he now had stored out at the farm: shells of cupboards and drawers, Nan’s sideboards, the old table.
Jake attached the crane cable to the stack of timber on the back of the Honeychurch Hardware delivery truck and was
