Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,125
to know about, she knew that pleasing Max’s guests was now priority number one.
He raised one thick silver eyebrow, as though asking if she was going to be this stubborn all weekend. She grinned back at him.
For Siena stubborn was a promise.
An hour later Siena made plans for Rufus to pick her up the next day for her interview, took his business card in case she needed him for anything—car trips, tourist outings, dinner reservations, hits on annoying family members—and let herself into Rick’s home.
It was just as she had expected. Within the freshly painted walls of the brand new house lived ancient mismatched furniture from the old family home mixed with assorted Ikea decor. And there was an inherent scent of tomato pasta on the air.
Family pictures littered the top of their old piano, its keys yellowed by time. Memories crowded in on her as she remembered Rick forcing her to practice at that very piano every single night. While her friends had been at the mall or going to movies, from the day he’d become her legal guardian she had been chained to her weekly routine like a prisoner serving out a sentence for a heinous crime.
Siena lumbered up the stairs, dragging her small case into the obvious spare bedroom where she found a set of keys and a note reading: ‘The keys are for the green car. Dinner’s at seven.’
After changing into a thankfully cola-free filmy sleeveless black top and skinny dark designer jeans, she searched the Yellow Pages for the name of a dry cleaner. Grabbing her grimy suit and the keys for the green car—not wanting to bother poor Rufus for a quick trip to town, especially since she wasn’t entirely sure if she was partial to him or if she was slightly scared of him—she headed out.
The innocuous sounding green car turned out to be a great, hulking, Kermit-green, eight-cylinder Ute which looked so neat and sparkly clean it couldn’t have been used to haul anything more gritty and cumbersome than plants for Tina’s garden.
She started up the monster, took a few moments to familiarise herself with the feel of the pedals as it was the first right-hand-drive car she had driven in months, then backed out of the driveway.
She had to admit it was a beautiful day. Hot and sunny, like every day in Cairns—a huge tourist destination, poised on the edge of the magnificent Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. It really was paradise. For some. For others the hot air felt heavy, smothering, suffocating.
She switched on the air-conditioning, her breathing coming easier when the car smelt less like the past and more like the inside of a plane.
After about five minutes of driving Siena passed an intersection with an antique shop on one corner and an antiquated milk bar on the other and felt a massive wave of déjà vu.
Ignoring the map on the display of her PDA, she took a right turn down a familiar-feeling suburban street, shady with gigantic overhanging gum trees. The stillness of the place washed over her as she meandered deeper along the windy road past lovely large two-storey homes with gables and shutters and front porches and grassy front gardens. It was a picture postcard neighbourhood for a young family.
But familiarity soon morphed into prickly realisation.
This was her old street. The home she had lived in for the first eighteen years of her life. The home in which she had grown up as a late child with a bossy older brother and an absentee father.
She rumbled down the street in second gear. Piano music pealed from one house, making her feel giddy. She peered at numbers on letterboxes to draw her focus elsewhere.
And then she found it. Fourteen Apple Tree Drive. Even the street name was picture perfect. But she knew that the lives going on behind such façades weren’t anywhere near perfect.
A flash of movement loomed at the corner of her vision and she looked up from the letterbox to see a kid riding his bike out into the street.
Swearing loudly, she slammed on the brakes, the big car tugging and shuddering as she held on for all her might. But her unpractised arms couldn’t keep the car straight.
The wheels locked and skidded sideways and, with a crunching jolt, she mounted the kerb. The car slammed to a halt when it came face to face with a hundred-year-old tree in a mass of screeching tyres, grinding metal undercarriage