“Don’t look at me like that, you cheeky bugger. Come and have a feed.”
He stepped out, set down the bowl, and lit the cigarette while she tucked in. Prime beef steak and fried potatoes, she had a good right to be keen. Tommy sipped his coffee. Looking out over the backyard with its fowl house and veggie patch, its dunny and wash station, into the paddocks beyond. Some cattle were near the fence line, grazing peacefully on feed as green and rich as the day he’d first come—somehow he still didn’t trust it, assumed it couldn’t last. He drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled through his nose, blue eyes narrowed in their customary squint. His face was lightly stubbled, gray and gold, red in places, he didn’t ever grow a full beard. Broad in the chest and shoulders, work-thick sunburned arms, his torso dusted in freckles and wispy fair hair. He scratched his chest and yawned heavily, tossed the coffee dregs. With the cigarette between his lips he unbuckled his trousers to piss off the steps, then reconsidered after a glance at the house. She was probably still sleeping, but what if she saw him? He dropped his cigarette in the bucket, then, holding up his trousers, waddled awkwardly down the steps and barefoot across the yard to the dunny instead.
Tess glanced up curiously, wondering at this change in routine.
Sure enough, he left the outhouse to find Emily waiting on the back porch, wrapped in a bedsheet, her hair loosely tied, blondstrands falling about her face. Tommy stalled at the sight of her, draped all in white and framed by the house in the palemorning light. How had he got so lucky? How hadn’t that luck run out yet? Once, she’d been married to the fat baker in town;the day his heart gave out was the day Tommy’s fortunes really changed. And Emily’s—they should never have been together inthe first place. Tommy was almost waiting for her to realize the same thing about him. Good job she’d not caught him earlier,pissing off the steps.
“Morning,” Emily said, smiling. Tommy began walking again.
“Morning.”
“You should have woke me.”
“You were sleeping.” He came up the steps and kissed her. Soft lips, her breath sleep-warm, the tanned and freckled skin ofher bare shoulders. “I made coffee if you want one. Or tea, however you like.”
“I have to be getting back, Bobby. I’ve the shop to open. I’m already late.”
He looked down shyly. “You know you don’t have to.”
“It’s not about having to. I want to. The bakery’s my life, my living.”
“What I meant was it doesn’t have to be, I—”
She touched his face tenderly. He didn’t go on. There were things he wanted to tell her, ask her, there had been for a longtime now. He was worried he might spoil something between them. That she might not feel the same.
“I know what you meant. Maybe one day. But that shop means a lot to me too, and I’m good at it, or I would be if you weren’talways making me late.”
“I’ll take you down then.”
“I can walk.”
“Be quicker if we rode.”
“All right, but we’d best hurry up about it.”
“Before anyone’s awake to see us, you mean.”
“Well, you aren’t exactly respectable. And me a widow and everything . . .”
They smiled at each other, at her teasing. Tommy never knew when she was being serious, when he should worry, or take offense,and that playfulness she had about her, that unpredictability, set off butterflies. The simplest word could send him spinning.He’d never experienced anything like it in his life.
Inside, Emily gathered up her scattered clothes and took them into the bedroom to get dressed. Tommy found a shirt and a pairof socks, sniffed both, figured they would do, pulled them on. He tidied up a little, collecting their wineglasses, emptyingthe ashtray. He was always tidying when she visited. Before Emily, he’d lived like any other bloke. Now all his books werelined up neatly on the sideboard, his old Queenslander journals were in a tall pile by the fire. For years those journals had been like a millstone, Tommy scouring the pages fornews from home. Now he was working his way through them a little differently: a couple of pages a night got his fire goingjust fine.
He sat down in the armchair and waited. Furtive glances at the bedroom door. Through the gap he could see her moving, her shadow playing over the wall. He could already feel her leaving, the absence of her in the house. There’d been one other brief relationship before this—Anne, they’d not been right from the start—and since then he’d made his peace with being alone. He’d never figured he deserved true happiness, not in that way, content to count the other blessings in his life. But now, with Emily, it was like he could touch it: a life together, the two of them, maybe children, a proper family—Christ, he didn’t dare.
He never woke up screaming, those mornings she was here.
* * *
After dropping Emily in town, Tommy ate a quick breakfast then with Tess by his side rode out on Lady, to Arthur’s place,north across the undulating fields, the three of them loping along together, comfortable in their routine. Lady was good forhim that way. Her easy, unhurried gait. She was a hazel-colored mare and only the second
