she was finally presented with the possibility of one, she didn’t want to inadvertently alienate her potential friends and neighbors.
The problem was, she was rusty and out of practice. It had been her and Bailey for such a long time now it was hard to remember how to interact with people on a social level.
‘I can go if you want me to?’ Kelley interrupted her thoughts, ‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.’
‘Finish your curry before it gets cold.’ Ava shook her head and set the cooking pan on a nearby pile of rocks to cool as she picked up the large wooden spoon she’d used to cook with and ate directly from the pan.
‘Don’t you have another bowl?’ Kelley frowned.
‘Nope,’ she spooned some more into her mouth. ‘Like I said, it’s usually just me and Bailey. I wasn’t expecting company.’
‘I feel bad now,’ he frowned, ‘I didn’t mean to impose.’
‘You’re not,’ Ava sighed, ‘I’m just a little prickly with people of the two-legged variety. I’m out of practice.’
‘Are you planning to stay on the island permanently?’ he asked curiously. ‘You’re one of the Wallaces aren’t you?’
‘So I’m told,’ she nodded as she continued to eat. ‘Apparently Harriet Wallace was my grandmother, but I never knew her. Serenity wasn’t real big on sharing personal details.’
‘Serenity?’
‘My mother,’ Ava replied matter of factly.
‘You call your mother Serenity?’
‘Called, she’s gone now, died just before I came here.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kelley murmured as he studied her.
Ava shrugged.
‘Her name was Caroline Wallace, but she was always known to everyone as Serenity. I don’t know why,’ Ava mused dryly. ‘The only time there was anything serene about her was after she’d smoked her way through an entire bag of purple haze.’
‘Where did you grow up?’ Kelley cracked his beer open and took a swig. ‘I don’t remember Hari ever having her granddaughter to stay.’
‘Hari?’ Ava repeated curiously, ‘you knew my grandmother?’
‘It’s a pretty small island, everyone knows everyone, but in this case, Hari was friends with my grandmother Alma. They played bridge together every Tuesday.’
‘What was she like, my grandmother?’
‘Hari?’ Kelley smiled, ‘she was a kind woman, tiny, with the sweetest smile. She baked the best cookies around, even better than my grams, although if you tell my grandmother that I’ll call you a dirty rotten liar.’
Ava smiled, damn it she didn’t want to be charmed but she was charmed. She didn’t want to like him either, but she did.
‘Communes,’ she offered randomly with a sigh.
‘Sorry?’
‘I grew up in communes,’ she explained self-deprecatingly, ‘sexy huh? Surrounded by a bunch of grubby half naked hippies who were stoned 99.999 percent of the time.’
‘Do they still even have communes?’ Kelley wondered, ‘I know they were big in the seventies, but I thought they’d pretty much died out by the eighties.’
‘Oh, they’re still around if you know where to look,’ Ava opened her own beer and took a slow thoughtful sip. ‘That’s where I learned to cook. By the time I was twelve I was cooking more often than not, for anything between twenty and sixty people at any given time.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah, I learned pretty early on that if I stayed in the kitchen no one really bothered me. Once I hit puberty, I started getting a lot of attention I didn’t want.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Kelley frowned. ‘What about your mom?’
‘Oh, she was around,’ Ava rose from her seat and moved across to a large tub of cold soapy water and began to scrub the pan. ‘Serenity wasn’t big on laying down rules and boundaries for me. She wanted to give me the freedom to explore my sexuality, but I had no intention of exploring it with those guys. I mean each commune is different, don’t get me wrong I’m not stereotyping anyone, but more often than not these communities are polyamorous or polygamous, which is basically a justification for a free for all.’
It was no wonder she was so guarded Kelley thought to himself as he handed her his empty bowl and spoon.
‘I can do that if you want?’
‘It’s okay,’ she took the bowl and dunked it in the water.
‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like growing up like that.’
‘It wasn’t all bad,’ Ava shook her head as she set the clean bowl and the pan against the rocks at the edge of the fire to dry. ‘Just different.’
‘It doesn’t sound like a very safe way to grow up.’
‘I was always safe,’ Ava sat back down in her original seat and picked up her beer as Bailey curled into