Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,123
at her from between patchy white cloud cover. Tropical Cairns. Paradise. Home.
Siena peeled her clamped fingers from the armrests and shook life back into them.
Okay, you have a few minutes, now deep breathe and focus on happy thoughts.
As the overhead lights called for everyone to do up their seat belts, Siena toed her fake red Kelly handbag further under her seat. Shopping in Hong Kong was a happy place. Why hadn’t she conjured that thought? Next time. And she had a feeling she would be needing many of those next times over the coming weekend.
Out of the corner of her eye, Siena noticed that young Freddy was sitting staring at his open seat belt with one half in each of his hands as his cola balanced precariously between his knobbly knees. He had a cola moustache on his upper lip and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. But her friendly neighbourhood flight attendant was nowhere to be seen.
What sort of parents deemed him independent enough to look out for himself at the age of five? She’d seen it time and again in her job and had never been able to understand such thought processes. She of all people knew just how such an assumption of early independence could turn the poor kid—hostile, erratic, doing anything and everything to get attention. To get discipline. To get a parent to tell him no.
She found herself experiencing an unexpected moment of empathy. Well, the kid hadn’t spilt anything on her in the last five minutes and she had to give him kudos for that.
‘Would you like me to help you with that?’ she found herself asking.
‘Yes, please,’ the boy said with a cherubic lisp.
Siena shuffled in her seat and took a hold of the two halves of the seat belt. The young boy lifted his thin arms and Siena had a whiff of something sweet like a mix of cola and biscuits.
When the belt clicked into place he gave a little sniff and Siena realised that two tracks of shiny tears were sliding down his cheeks. Oh, heck. A sniffly kid, and now tears? Was she being punished for something?
In the end empathy won out again. For the next fifteen minutes she talked the kid down from his cola high, and up from his lonely low, so that when the plane landed, and Jessica and her bouncing ponytail took him away, she was sure that he had been replaced by a completely different kid.
Siena waited until the plane was all but empty to grab her carry-on and suit bag containing her uniform for the working flight back to Melbourne on Saturday evening. She wasn’t in any hurry.
When she disembarked on to the tarmac the Far North Queensland heat hit her like a slap in the face. The air was thick, hot and wet. She could taste her own sweat on her lips. The tangy scent of the nearby sea hung heavy in the air. She could feel her dark curls frizzing by the second, her feet sweating in her designer shoes and the cola in her dress weighing her down as all evaporation ceased in the humid air.
Inside the thankfully air-conditioned terminal, a wiry silver-moustachioed man in a three-piece suit and hat in MaxAir’s incongruous powder-blue, completely unsuitable in the temperate climate, stood waiting with a sign reading ‘CAPULETTI'.
A driver? Max was pulling out the big guns. But, though it was a nice gesture, it only made Siena’s heart sink all the further.
‘I’m Siena Capuletti,’ she said, approaching slowly.
The man nodded. ‘Rufus,’ he said in a deep baritone. ‘Maximillian has asked that I be at your disposal for the weekend, Ms Capuletti.’
‘Right. Well. Excellent.’ Siena moved into the flow of the crowd, making her way through the backwater ‘international’ terminal, along tracts of unfashionable carpet long since in need of updating. She kept Rufus, who’d insisted on taking her baggage, in the corner of her vision. He had a look about him that made Siena think that if she pointed at another passenger and said, ‘Kill,’ he wouldn’t have any trouble obeying.
‘I have to make a quick call,’ she told him just before they left the air-conditioning. Rufus stopped where he stood like a dog who had been told to stay, though he had all the warmth of a German Shepherd police dog.
Siena found a quiet corner and made the call she had been dreading for days.