Chapter Ten
While Will was scrubbing paint off his fingers with the aid of turps and a clump of old steel wool, he made his decision: next time he saw Jodie, he was going to ask her out.
In many ways, she was the perfect candidate for him to test drive his emotional state with.
For starters, they liked each other. Also, he’d known from the moment she’d tripped over and his and her limbs had tangled like spaghetti that the two of them had chemistry.
And—and this was maybe the most important part—she wasn’t planning on sticking around in Clarence.
If it ended badly (he closed his eyes and willed himself not to remember Tweed Valley Hospital) then he wouldn’t have to up stumps and find somewhere else to live. He loved being the Clarence publican. He never wanted to leave.
And, as fate would have it, Jodie had taken to dropping in to the pub each morning and then hanging around to chat.
At first, sure, she was visiting to make him do hideous stuff like stand face to face with a wall and lever his leg backwards with a rubber band, or practise balancing on one leg, but lately her reasons for dropping in had been little ‘chores’ Carol had dreamed up for the two of them to do to get the place ready for the Twilight Markets. The pub had never been so ready.
But she’d already been by today and helped zhoozh up some signage, so he wasn’t expecting to see her again until tomorrow.
He could suggest a ramble along the riverbank, maybe.
Accompany him to the vet clinic to help him pick out a collar and worming medicine for the ginger cat. Worming medicine was romantic, right?
He was smiling to himself as he walked out of the men’s bathroom back into the beer garden, but stopped as he saw the very woman he’d just been thinking about sitting on a chair in the shade of the party tree. ‘Oh! Hello again,’ he said.
‘What’s got you looking so pleased with yourself?’ she said, smiling at him.
‘You’re just the person I wanted to see,’ he said.
‘You just saw me a little while ago. Don’t tell me you’ve twanged that hammy again?’
‘There’s more to me than a strained hamstring and a pythonriddled shed full of trestle tables, you know.
’ He was joking when he said it. But he also wasn’t.
He was also aware that for a very long time, he had only wanted to be …
not a trestle table guardian, precisely, but someone who was thought of as publican first, person second, single bloke a very distant third.
He’d wanted distance—from others, but especially from himself, because guess what?
Being close to a person came with vulnerabilities attached, and he hadn’t handled his own vulnerability very well.
Or at all, if he was being honest. He’d ignored it well …
but he hadn’t handled it. Losing a patient who had put his trust in Will had left him so raw and abraded he’d never wanted to expose himself to being a repository of someone’s trust ever again.
Now? Now, he wasn’t sure what he wanted, just that he wanted more … and now was his chance.
‘I wanted to ask you something,’ Jodie said.
‘Sure, but what say we ditch the pub and the endless demands of the Twilight Markets committee divas this arvo and do something. You and me.’
Her eyebrows raised ever so slightly. Her bottom lip disappeared for a second as she considered his words. ‘You and me,’ she echoed.
‘Yeah. We could go for a walk by the river, maybe. See if Hoges at the servo has any Golden Gaytimes in his freezer. Talk about whatever you want to talk about.’
Was he imagining an extra touch of pink in her cheeks? It was a mid-December day and the thermometer had to be pushing thirty, so maybe she was just hot and annoyed. It’d been a long time since he’d asked someone out, so his ability to judge such things was rusty.
‘You don’t know anywhere around Clarence where we could go for a swim?’ she said finally. There was a glow in her face, definitely. And he was pretty sure it wasn’t the weather. ‘A creek. A rock pool. A waterfall …’
He blinked. ‘Uh, sure. There’s a great place up past Dunoon that the locals go to.
I haven’t been there in years, but we could go check it out.
’ He dropped his eyes to her footwear. Strappy sandals with little beads and leather flowers, they looked like a torn hamstring waiting to happen on a trek through the scrub. ‘You might want sturdier footwear.’
‘How about I run back to Carol’s to change, and I can come back in my car. See you in the car park in ten minutes?’
‘It’s a d—’
‘Oh. And I really did need to talk to you about something. I’ll tell you on the drive.’
‘Sure,’ he said, watching those tanned legs whisk their way out of the pub’s garden. That unsaid word, date , hung in the air, and he wondered if he was the only one who could feel it.
From Clarence, the road to Dunoon traversed a bridge, passed the gate to his brother’s macadamia farm and farm-stay business, and wound its way up over rounded hills so the views were of plantations and grassy paddocks, and down through narrow roads in secretive valleys where the trees to either side formed a forest canopy overhead.
Jodie drove like a nervous L plater. A stop sign felt more like a wait-until-a-week-has-passed sign, and he wasn’t sure if they were ever going to make the right-hand turn necessary to leave town. Her hands had a grip on the steering wheel like it was a life buoy.
‘What?’ she said, reading his mind.
‘I was wondering if I should have offered to drive. Country roads are a little less orderly than in the city.’ Which was his tactful way of saying, Why the hell are we driving so slowly?
‘Sorry. I thought I was back to driving like a normal person.’
He frowned. That made no sense.
‘Back to?’
She cleared her throat, took her eyes off the road for a nanosecond to look at him, then said, ‘A year ago my business partner died in a car crash. You know I’m from the Blue Mountains, right?
Well, there’s this known blackspot there, he was speeding a little, oncoming traffic, rain, et cetera, his car went through the guardrail and—’
‘I’m sorry.’
She nodded. ‘He was alive when they cut him out of the wreckage, but he didn’t make it to the hospital.’
Will winced. That word. And he had no trouble at all imagining the ambulance worker, the lights and sirens, the desperation to see a rise and fall in the line on the electrocardiographic heart monitor.
‘It messed me up for a while there. I may still be messed up, in fact.’
‘I know a bit about that.’
‘Wait—Carol told you? But I’ve barely told her.’
‘No. I mean—I know a little bit about being messed up. On a personal level. Me, I mean, not you.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and he noted the speedometer in the car had dropped to about 58 despite the fact they were in an 80 zone. Luckily there was no one behind them. Speeding was dangerous, but going too slow could also be dangerous.
‘We were more than business partners,’ she added. ‘We weren’t together or anything, but it felt like we could have been. If we both wanted it. If either of us had said it in so many words.’
Will felt perilously on the brink of psychology.
He felt like he was standing at the edge of a crack in the earth, where the bottom was so deep, so dark, so shrouded in murk, he couldn’t see what lay there.
What would a friend say in this situation?
One whose brain hadn’t started throwing up phrases like grief is universal and there are stages to go through and there’s no benefit to hurrying them and one of those stages can be guilt .
A friend would concentrate on what Jodie was saying. Answer accordingly.
‘Did you want there to be something more between you?’
They passed the roadside sign announcing they’d reached the small cluster of houses that made up the speck on the map known as Dunoon.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that terrible?
Rod is dead, and I don’t know if I’m grieving his loss because it threw my life under the bus, or because I loved him and never got around to saying it. Feeling it, even.’
Her voice was a little thick. As averse as he was to getting emotionally involved in someone else’s trauma, he reached out and put his hand on her knee. Patted gently. ‘I’m sorry.’
The indicator started tick-tick-ticking well in advance of a left-hand turn they needed to make, but they’d driven the three hundred metres and turned left before he realised he was supposed to be giving the directions.
‘Do you know the way to the rock pool already?’ he said.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said. And then let out a self-deprecatory laugh.
‘You do know the way.’
She shrugged. ‘I may have done a search online for rock pools around Clarence.’
‘But then … why ask me if I knew of one? We could have just come straight here.’
She winced. ‘I know. I was … well. To be honest, I have an ulterior motive. I wanted to see if you recognised me.’
He frowned. ‘Jodie. Pretty sure I’ve been “recognising” you every day for a couple of weeks now.’
She pulled into the unmarked clearing where the road did a switchback and the wood and wire boundary fence of a local farm got lost in a cluster of long weed and lantana. Exactly the place he would have told her to pull over to access the rock pool. Exactly .
‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘It’ll be less embarrassing if I show you.’
Jodie was fit. She loped along the rough foot track like a dingo who’d sniffed out steak cooking on a campfire after a long lean patch surviving off witchetty grubs. For a woman who’d confessed to spending almost a year moping on a sofa, she had some pace.
‘Have you forgotten I’m wounded?’ he called after her. ‘Saving your arse, as I recall.’