purple stitches for flowers and a yellow thatched pattern on the cottage roof.
‘No thanks. But you should keep it.’
‘Cool. I love it.’
‘Did you talk to your cousins?’
‘Yeah, they’re nice. Pretty upset. They kept talking about how their dog died only last year.’
‘No Rena?’
‘Apparently she’s staying a few days. I wouldn’t be surprised if the trip kills her. She’s absolutely crazy. She tried telling me he did it on purpose.’
‘Who?’
‘Your dad.’
Dorothy had a pleasing image of running Rena over in this car. Crunch. ‘What, he drove off the road on purpose, or had a heart attack on purpose? Or both?’
‘Exactly. I mean she’s nuts. When I left she was having a sleep on their bed.’
‘Frank and Lee’s bed?’
‘Yes.’ The children had never been sure what to call them; Dorothy knew this was her fault.
‘Did you have a nice talk to your aunt?’
‘She’s my aunt? I thought she was the real estate agent.’
‘Are you being funny?’ The car bunny hopped at the lights. She wasn’t used to a manual. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yes. But she did have that price-sticker vibe.’
‘Noting the value of things.’
‘Maybe it was just the pearls.’
‘I mean what things are worth. Not the value of things. That would be a different question.’ Dorothy turned on the radio. ‘How was it in there?’
Amy smiled. ‘Pretty nice house they ended up in.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ It would likely be sold now, she supposed. Ben had made sure to mention that there were complications with the will, which was fine with her; she’d rather that was all broached when they were safely home again through the sky, clouds reforming in the aeroplane’s wake, covering the trail. ‘They were privileged.’
‘Why didn’t they ever some to see us?’
‘Because they were cunts.’
‘Jesus, Mum.’ Amy leaned forward and turned off the radio.
‘Sorry.’
‘Oh, just let’s not talk about it.’ She put the radio on again.
‘Well, money sort of – bookended their lives. They came from money and they ended with it.’ Dorothy gestured around her. ‘Look at this neighbourhood. Do you see any graffiti, any homeless people, any social problems? No, it’s perfect, beautiful – see, people drinking cappuccino on the street, look at the little dogs, they don’t even shit, those dogs, they’re just little balls of fluff, it’s paradise.’ She leaned on the car horn. The people in the cafés and outside the boutiques looked over.
Amy yanked her mother’s arm away from the horn. ‘Stop it. Why did you even come? You’re so crazy.’
‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a nervous reaction.’ A small keening escaped from her, somewhere between a laugh and a cry.
‘Oh, whatever.’ Amy stared out the window as though she could melt it.
‘Amy. You know I’m one of four children too.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘That I love you. Thank you for coming with me. Now let’s just leave. Oh dear.’ Tears came properly now, slipping hot. She dropped a hand from the steering wheel to brush them away, and the car wobbled over the centre line and a passing horn blared.
‘OK crazy lady, pull in here. I’m going to drive.’
After a while cruising the balmy streets, taking in the high-end health-food shops and the bicycles and prams and pretty trees, the freeway loomed and Dorothy fell asleep, drifting off with her daughter at the wheel, clutching the framed tapestry in her hands.
With something like disbelief, Andrew and Dorothy looked back on their thirties as their financially comfortable years. Something had happened to money; not just theirs, other people’s too, even those like them without investments. There was less of it. Andrew was made redundant and the teachers’ union lost a pay dispute. The kids needed help with student loans. Petrol. Food. The cost of moving house. To take the pressure off they sold up the burn-scarred cedar place in Waterview and moved to a brick-and-tile rental in the hills thirty minutes from the city, a suburb with the outlier’s sense of itself, peopled by young hippies and retirees who liked their stories told. Donald and Hannah were in the thick of social lives, Amy was studying, subsisting in a fungal student flat in town, and Grace had become a series of South American postcards and video calls. This was the awful, dawning joke of parenting: that the early shock of children, their need and clamour and inescapable attachment, just as quickly became their blithe withdrawal. And they took everything. They took their friends, their jokes, their daily fresh discoveries, the gorgeous, ungraspable newness of the world. Look sharp, the tide’s gone out. There was room