‘Bike’s fixed,’ Sam says as he heads back into the garage. ‘I’ll see her soon enough.’
Wince shrugs and tosses the empty oilcan into a rusty rubbish bin. The motorcycle engine roars to life inside the garage and Sam rides out on the gleaming black and red Kawasaki. Pausing at the road as he checks for traffic, he waves at Wince before turning right towards Tippy’s Tickle.
A crunch on the gravel. Wince looks over to see Sophie pulling a wallet out of her shoulder bag as she approaches. ‘All done? How much do I owe you?’
‘It’s twenty-two, but if you gives me a twenty, and we’ll call it square.’
***
A car door slams and Ellie glances up from the watercolour she’s working on and out of the shop’s bay window. She drops her paintbrush into a jar of water and wipes her hands on her apron.
‘She’s here!’
Florie emerges from the back room wearing a red T-shirt, jeans and a checked lumberjack shirt with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows. She balances a mixing bowl full of icing sugar and butter against her left hip and clutches a wooden spoon in her right hand. She joins Ellie at the window.
‘Took her long enough.’
Ellie glances at her wristwatch. ‘What do you mean? She rang only two hours ago from Gander.’
Florie grunts. ‘Ten years, Ellie. Not two hours.’
Ellie looks at Florie over the top of her horn-rimmed bifocals. ‘Don’t be like that, Florie. She’s a busy woman. She’s practically running that architecture firm in New York.’
‘A phone call more than a couple of times a year would’a been nice, even if she couldn’t haul her arse up here. We didn’t even gets a Christmas card last year.’
‘Yes, well. People don’t always act the way you expect. If there’s anything I’ve learned in all my eighty-odd years, it’s a waste of time to feel disappointed about things like that. I’m just delighted she’s here now. That’s the important thing. She’s come for my birthday, and I think that’s lovely.’
Florie shrugs. ‘Just seems funny after all this time, her comin’ up here like this at the last minute. You’d think she’d be plannin’ her life a year ahead if she’s so busy. Don’t people like her have diaries and PAs and all that?’
‘Florie. Be nice. She’s my only niece.’
‘Well, you could’a knocked me over with a feather when she said she was comin’, that’s for sure.’ She frowns at the icing bowl. ‘Where do you suppose Sam is with that cream cheese? Carrot cake’s just not the same without it.’
***
The screen door squeaks open and Sophie looks up to see Ellie step out onto the landing at the top of the steps to the general store. She wears a purple embroidered smock top and jeans rolled up over red plimsolls, and her dark green apron is spattered with colourful blotches of paint. A pair of horn-rimmed bifocals sits on the tip of her nose. Her aunt holds out her arms, which shake with a slight tremor.
‘Sophie! There you are! What a treat this is! My favourite niece here for my birthday.’
Sophie smiles up at her aunt and waves. She’s so tiny. So much smaller than I remember. A flutter of nerves travels up Sophie’s body. I should have kept in touch. Why did I stop writing, for heaven’s sake? Why didn’t I just pick up the phone? She’s family. My family. And she’s so frail. What was so bloody important that I didn’t even call until I needed something? Until I needed Kittiwake?
Sophie runs up the steps and embraces her aunt. ‘Your only niece, Auntie Ellie, unless there’s something you haven’t told me.’
Ellie squeezes Sophie tight and kisses her on the cheek. ‘Come inside. Florie’s making a carrot cake in the shop kitchen. If Sam gets back in time with the cream cheese, we’ll have cream-cheese icing. Becca insisted that ordinary icing just wouldn’t do.’
Inside, the store looks exactly the same as the day Sophie left Tippy’s Tickle back in 2001 – the walls and shelving the same sage green, the wooden floor polished to a bright shine, the two long wooden counters either side of the narrow room still painted white, with the wooden tops laden with boxes of Ellie’s art cards, jars of partridgeberry and bakeapple jam, and red paper bags of Purity hard tack bread for the stewed brewis everyone up here liked to eat with cod and fried pork-fat scrunchions, and for which she had yet to develop a taste.
A huge black Newfoundland dog with a red kerchief tied around its neck bounds towards them from the back room and rushes past Sophie out the screen door.
‘That can’t be Rupert.’
Ellie shakes her head. ‘No, no. Rupert passed away some years ago. He’s buried under the old tree up past the house. That’s Rupert’s son, Rupert Bear II. We call him Bear.’
Florie walks away from the bay window, carrying a large yellow bowl with a wooden spoon sticking out of what looks like vanilla icing. ‘Well, would you look what the cat dragged in? You gots fed up with New York finally? Decided to make your way back to Paradise?’
Sophie kisses Florie on her cheek. ‘Lovely to see you, Florie. How are the dachshunds?’
‘Best kind, duck. I’ve got people comin’ all the way from Halifax for my dogs now. Even had a fella email me the other day from Toronto, can you imagine that? Comin’ all the way from Toronto to Tippy’s Tickle for a dog?’ She looks over her shoulder at Ellie. ‘You’ll have to be printin’ up some more of your art cards, Ellie, for all these CFAs coming into town. Getting lots of publicity since Hildegarde won Best of Breed for dachshunds last year.’
Sophie raises her eyebrows in a question. ‘CFAs? I’ve forgotten what that stands for.’
‘Come From Aways.’ A man’s voice from the doorway.
Sophie spins around. Bear thunders back into
