Jade texted Corey, desperate to share the momentous news of Milo’s first words: Milo just said Mama
She didn’t expect a reply—Corey had told her he was working fifty kays out of Jerilderie—so she was surprised and thrilled to see three wriggling dots appear.
Tell me when he says dad
Her excitement balloon lost some air. She wanted to smile—after all, what father didn’t want to hear their kid say ‘Daddy’? But if ‘dada’ had been Milo’s first word, she would have been just as excited. Why wasn’t Corey?
She quickly blamed the communication method—there was no nuance in texts. Of course he was excited, but he was probably also disappointed that he’d missed out on hearing Milo. Well, she could fix that.
Holding up her phone again, she pressed the recording button. ‘Milo, say Dada. Da. Da.’
Milo turned towards her, lost his balance and sat down abruptly, bouncing on his nappy-clad bottom. His blue eyes rounded in shocked surprise and then his face crumpled. He let out a howl.
‘Oh, baby.’ Jade picked him up and he rubbed his eyes. ‘You ready for a nap?’
She walked into his room and was about to lay him down in his cot when she remembered that woman’s suggestion about coming to the garden. Jade still couldn’t work out if Helen was legit with her offer or planning to rip her off. She didn’t have anyone to talk to about it either. Mind you, her mother would have said, ‘If it seems too good to be true then it is,’ but Charlene Innes didn’t trust anyone, not even her daughter.
Not that Jade was quick to trust either, and she was especially wary with the staff at Centrelink and Human Services. The maternal and child health nurse was okay, even if she was as old as. Actually, Helen looked pretty old too. But unlike the other women her age in town who wore their white hair cut into neat and identical bobs, Helen’s hair was salt and pepper and cut in a pixie style with magenta tips. The bright colour intrigued Jade. She’d only seen coloured tips on younger women.
She’d love some colour in her own hair, but she couldn’t afford it. Once she’d bought colour from the supermarket, but it turned her hair green instead of the royal blue she’d hoped for. Did the colour make Helen cool or a try-hard?
Old women were hard to trust—they could look kind, caring and understanding, but sear her with a judging look that burned like a brand. A look that sneered and said teenage mother, white trash, lazy and useless, a drain on taxes.
Yeah, right. Jade had so got pregnant to get five hundred and sixty dollars from the government. As if! She’d got pregnant because she didn’t know taking antibiotics nuked the pill and neither the doctor nor the pharmacist had bothered to tell her. By the time she’d realised she was pregnant, it had been too late to have an abortion. Now she had Milo, she was glad she’d been denied that difficult choice, but it didn’t mean being a mum was easy. Most of the time she was doing it on her own.
Like today. She hadn’t spoken to anyone other than Milo. Cleaning kept her busy but it also kept her inside. Some days she stayed in hoping Corey would turn up, but there was no chance of that today.
She settled Milo into the pram. ‘Hey, little man. Wanna go see the picture of the big flowers and the butterflies?’
Milo fell asleep somewhere between crossing the railway line and Riverfarm Road, the rough pavement rocking him to sleep. Jade often walked this route as it took her past some of Boolanga’s oldest houses and gardens. She’d always loved flowers and her earliest memories of school were sitting cross-legged on the oval making daisy chains. Back then, she’d had no idea the flowers were capeweed, she’d just loved the bright yellow petals.
Spring was still her favourite season, when blossom frothed and spring bulbs pushed up flowers that covered the colour spectrum. Since leaving Finley, she’d been teaching herself the names of flowers. When she found one she didn’t know, she took a photo and asked Fran at the library. The old chook might be too eager to push her into a mothers’ group but she was a walking flower encyclopedia. Jade respected her for that.
She snapped a photo of a cluster of white flowers with black centres that grew from a tall central stalk, then kept walking until she arrived at the gates of the community garden. Jade loved these gates. Hammered metal sunflowers were welded to the wire and spray-painted silver and gold. Sculptured bees on wires looked like they were buzzing about the flowers and they bounced in the breeze. At the top of the gate, the words Boolanga Community Garden filled an arch.
Jade hesitated, unsure if she should walk straight in. She craned her neck but couldn’t see anyone working on the many garden beds, which apart from some random cheery red ranunculi and some decorative White Lion double daffodils, were sadly lacking in flowers. Scanning the area, she saw three white bee-boxes and at the very end there was a rope ladder hanging from an oak tree. Was that the tree Helen had suggested Milo could sleep under?
Halfway down the block there was an old shipping container with its doors flung open. Pushing Milo between the mostly neat beds, Jade walked to the container and looked inside. A couple of spades and forks hung off three long posts and a board was attached to the back wall. The names of the tools were written in texta, but without a shadow outline,
