Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,157
band. But I always knew you could never fly so far away that you would never spring back.’
‘Please! You have nothing on me.’
‘Of course I do. I am your family. As is my wife, who adores you. As are the twins, and I can see how your face turns all soft whenever they call you ‘Enna. And, as to little Rosie—she looks so like you did as a baby it brings tears to my eyes.’
‘Hang on a minute—’
‘Siena, do you really think you can pull anything over on me any more?’
She had tried, so many times, to break the pull and tug of authority and self-reliance that had framed her childhood, and in leaving she had always thought she’d won the tug-of-war for good. But now she was back she knew the war had never been over, it had just been an intermission.
A knock came at the door. It was one of Rick’s employees. ‘Um, yeah, hi. There’s a guy here in a blue suit and a funny hat who says he’s here for your sister.’
Siena stood and placed the football carefully on his desk to show Rick exactly how much more mature than him she was. ‘That will be Rufus. My driver. Thanks.’
The guy blushed beneath the grease streaks on his cheeks and left.
She waited for Rick to make some smart comment—wondering why she hadn’t used her driver the day before rather than crashing his car—but he instead let go of a long high whistle.
‘Well, you’d better fly. As always.’
‘Afternoon, Rufus,’ she said as he opened the back door of the thankfully air-conditioned limo for her.
‘Ms Capuletti. You really should have called me to drive you to your old neighbourhood yesterday,’ Rufus said as she slid into the back seat. ‘You could have been hurt.’
She thought she heard the words ‘women drivers’ muttered under his breath as he shut the door but she was too shocked to care.
‘You heard about that?’ she asked when he got behind the wheel. She shuffled forward to lean on the open partition between them.
‘I know a guy who knows a guy,’ he said, watching her in the rear-view mirror, his beady blue eyes actually almost smiling, but Siena was pretty sure she didn’t want to know about the marginal kinds of guys Rufus knew.
She sat back with a groan. Really this place was just so small town it made her sick.
‘Oh, just shut up and drive, Rufus,’ she said.
He laughed before gunning the engine. ‘Yes, Ms Capuletti.’
The drive up to the beaches of Far North Queensland was glorious. They passed the Skyrail with its tiny round pods taking tourists by the hundreds slowly up the almost vertical cliffs covered in lush green vegetation towering forbiddingly to her left. For that lovely trip alone she knew she would now never regret having come back to Cairns.
With a deep breath she tuned that out and looked deliberately to her right where perfect white sandy beaches blinked between black rocky outcrops and intermittent tracts of sugar cane farms and banana plantations slowly growing anew after the devastation of a tropical cyclone.
They passed Palm Cove, a haven of resorts, lavish gardens and beachside bliss. In an alternate past she would have not called Rick and would have stayed there instead, working on her tan, spending the day at a resort spa or taking a boat out to Green Island for a glorious day snorkelling.
She couldn’t help sitting higher in her leather seat to get a glimpse of the ocean, laid out blue and green and magnificent all the way out to the far horizon. She had to admit that of all the beaches in all the world this area was as beautiful as any she had ever known, and she had known a few. And most people would think themselves blessed to be surrounded by palm trees and year-round sunshine.
A half hour later the car slowed as they reached Port Douglas.
They passed the pristine manicured lawns of the world class golf course, hooked a right towards the beach, then a left through a set of large guarded gates. At the end of a straight white gravel driveway sat the palatial Palazzo Maximillian. It was a grand, symmetrical, three-storeyed, white and gold monstrosity surrounded by ubiquitous Queensland palm trees.
Maximillian, bald and tanned from head to toe, met her at the car door in a smoking jacket and white satin trousers and carrying a martini. Siena wondered if he was in fact waiting for a camera crew rather than