Sweet as Honey (The Seven Sisters) - By Caitlyn Robertson Page 0,75
the old Stone Store. He’d heard that the bridge across the inlet had become choked with debris and burst its banks during heavy rain, so they must have removed the bridge and diverted traffic away. Shame—he’d liked the old road past the historic buildings. They’d all had some good times in the river. He remembered the day Sean had pushed Megan in, and how outraged she’d been. She’d stood there with her hands on her hips and yelled at her brother, beautiful in spite of looking like a drowned rat.
“No point in waiting,” Sean said. “It’s good to have kids while you’ve still got the energy. I find it exhausting, even though Gaby does most of it.”
“I guess.” Dion knew nothing about having children. One of his half-brothers in the UK had a couple, but he’d never got involved with them. He tended to hold babies in front of him like a rugby ball, and when people saw how uncomfortable it made him, they stopped giving them to him. He wasn’t one of those jolly uncles who took the kids to the zoo and bought them sweets. The children steered clear of him now when his brother came to visit, and he was quite happy with that. “Are the kids at home with Gaby?”
“Nah, one of Gaby’s friends has them for a few hours,” Sean said. “They take turns to give each other a break.”
That didn’t surprise Dion. New Zealanders had always had the ‘number eight wire’ approach to life. When the first European immigrants arrived, thirteen thousand miles away from their homeland, they quickly learned to invent things they couldn’t easily obtain, and the number eight gauge of fencing wire was soon adapted for countless other uses in New Zealand farms, factories and homes. The phrase came to represent a Kiwi who could turn their hand to anything, and they were a people who reacted to problems by pulling together to help each other out.
The houses thinned, and as Sean took the road leading to Opito Bay, the countryside spread away from them, rising and falling in a series of emerald hills until it met the glittering sea on either side. The finger of land formed part of the sub-tropical paradise of the Bay of Islands.
Dion blew out a breath. “That’s quite a view.”
Sean smiled. “Yeah. I can think of worse scenery to look at on the way to work.”
Dion thought of the narrow, dirty streets of London, the crowded Underground, the smell and taste of the city, metallic and dusty. Like an old but revered actress, London was beautiful in its own way, and of course its history knocked New Zealand’s into a cocked hat, as the Cockneys would have said. But he’d forgotten the beauty of Aotearoa. How vast and high and blue the sky seemed.
“How’s the business going?” he asked. He knew Sean had joined his father’s building trade.
Sean gave him a strange look, but said, “Yeah, good. Things are picking up a bit after the recession. Lots of new houses being built.”
“Cool.” He tipped his head back on the headrest as a wave of tiredness hit him. Jet lag, no doubt. It couldn’t be the pace of life in the Northland. Even the staff at the tiny airport had been laid back, shrugging off the plane’s late arrival with typical Kiwi indifference. And Sean hardly seemed stressed, driving along happily at fifty in a hundred kph zone. What was that—about thirty miles an hour? Jeez. And there weren’t even any speed cameras to worry about.
What would it be like to get up every morning and know your day involved driving to a field somewhere and hammering nails into planks of wood until home time? No airports, taxis, extended lunches, long business meetings in boardrooms, laptops, iPhones, annual reports. No air conditioning, stewed coffee, dry sandwiches, or the cloying smell of beeswax from the polished oak tables. No talking, talking, talking all day until he thought he’d used every word in his vocabulary and would never be able to utter anything ever again.
Actually, it sounded quite attractive now he thought about it.
Then he sighed. You’d soon get bored, he scolded himself. He was disillusioned and tired, stressed after the events of the past few months, maybe a bit burned out, and he needed a break. But he wasn’t due a mid-life crisis yet.
Sean glanced at him again.
Dion raised an eyebrow, sensing a question hovering in the wings. “What?”
Sean’s brow furrowed. “Are you really not going to