28. Complications Ensue
Roman
The next morning, Esther was sitting across the desk from me as usual, taking notes. “Tickets to Hawke’s Bay next Monday, then,” she said. “Hotel in Napier for two nights. Coming back to Dunedin, or on to Auckland?”
“Wellington,” I said. “I’ll want you up there, too. Both places. But I won’t be flying up from here.”
“No?” she asked when I paused.
“I need a ticket to Tauranga for Saturday instead,” I said. “Hire car, too. I’ll drive to Hawke’s Bay on Monday morning, but I’ll fly to Wellington from there, so I’ll want to turn in the car. I’ll also need two more tickets from Dunedin to Tauranga on the same flight as mine, but flying back to Dunedin on Monday morning. And two hotel rooms in Mount Maunganui for Saturday and Sunday nights. Two beds in one of them. Sea view. Best you can get.”
“An apartment may be better,” she said. “A condo. There’s not much up there other than motels. Assuming you want to impress these people.”
“Fine,” I said, not addressing the last bit. “Whatever seems best. Posh, is the idea. Ultra.”
“Names on the tickets?” she asked.
“Summer Adair. And Delilah … Wait. Hang on.” I picked up the phone, dialed the number, and got “Roman?” in that husky little voice that I heard not so much in my ears as in my groin. I didn’t shift in my chair, because Esther was watching me with her usual I-see-you-but-I’m-not-judging expression. I ignored my reaction as best I could and said, “Delilah’s surname. For the plane tickets. And both of your birthdates.”
“Fairbanks,” she said, then gave me the dates, and I told Esther. She made a note, and instead of ringing off, I asked Summer, “Have you left yet?”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re here. We cleaned again before we left, of course. And threw away anything too perishable, as you won’t be going back there for at least a couple of weeks.” None of which was a surprise, except that it wasn’t even noon.
“All right there, is it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s fine.” Still sounding guarded.
“Want to give me the address now?” I asked. “So I can collect you on Saturday morning?”
“Oh. OK.” She read it off, then asked, as if she didn’t want to say goodbye just yet either, “How are you doing? Still feeling good about this plan?”
“Yeh.” I had to clear my throat. “Yeh.”
“Can I do anything for you?” she asked. “Pick up a birthday present, maybe?”
“It’s not my birthday,” I said.
She sighed. “Roman. For your grandfather.”
“I know,” I said. “Teasing you. No idea. What do you give a man on his hundredth? Nothing that needs to age, anyway.”
Her soft laughter was my reward, and she said, “I’ll give it some thought.”
“I haven’t forgotten about the rest of it,” I said. “The weekend. I’m coming up with a plan now. I’ll ring you.” I wanted to say, Take some time there before you go job hunting, but I knew she wouldn’t, and that she’d also think it wasn’t my place to say, so I rang off and told Esther, “I also need some research from you.”
“Go,” she said.
“Best shops for dresses and women’s shoes in Dunedin. Best places for hair. Women’s hair. Manicures. Uh … other grooming things.”
“Salon,” she said. “Day spa. Do you want appointments?”
“No,” I said. “A list, though, and amounts. How much those things would cost. You know …” I hesitated.
“Yes?” she asked.
“A prepaid credit card,” I said. “With enough on it for two women to get all that. Assume they’re buying the best, add it up, and add a bit on in case. Seems more personal than just having money put into her account, and like it would feel better for a woman. What’s your opinion?”
She said, “I have no idea, but if that’s what you want, I’ll do it. Should I deliver it, or put it in the post?”
“Let me think about that,” I said.
“Do you want a greeting card?” she asked.
“A greeting card? Why?”
She didn’t sigh, because Esther never sighed. “If you’re trying to be more personal, a card would be good. Blank inside, I assume, so you can write your own message.”
“Oh,” I said. “Fine. Do that. Oh—and check into jobs for a software engineer. Call around the firms, see who may be hiring.”
“In what field?” she asked. “And here in Dunedin?”
“Yeh, Dunedin. And I don’t know. Does it matter? Isn’t it all programming?”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “It’ll be better if the person has experience in that industry. What level of software engineer?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out.”
It was only after she’d left that I realized she presumably now thought I was dating two women. This was a first for me, involving her in my dating life, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t chuffed about the change. Probably imagining the message I’d write in that card. “Best threesome I’ve ever had, but I’ll make sure the bed’s a king next time,” maybe, or possibly, “Can’t wait to see how the waxing turns out.”
Fortunately, Esther never shared, so I’d never know.
Summer
At five that afternoon, I was updating my C.V. on my phone, making lists of possible companies on a notepad, and trying not to feel discouraged at how few they were and how slim my chances might be, when I heard a knock at the caravan door. I opened it expecting to find Daisy, who’d greeted us when we’d arrived this morning, accepted my payment, showed us the caravan, and said, “Night shift this month, so I’ll go to bed and leave you to get settled in. Feel free to walk around the place, pick the fruit and so on. There are some groceries in the fridge and cabinet,” and left.
It wasn’t Daisy, but a slim, petite brunette about Delilah’s age, with a spiky short haircut and plenty of personality in her face. She said, “Hi. I’m Priya, come to invite you to dinner. It’s Frankie’s turn tonight, and she doesn’t like to cook, so don’t get too excited, but I thought I’d invite you to come up now, since it’s boring down here in the caravan. No TV. I stayed here for a few months with my sister Oriana, and I hated it. So tiny, and there’s nothing to do.”
Delilah rolled off the bed, where she’d been lying on her stomach and scrolling on her own phone, and Priya asked, “Are you disabled or something?” Which was direct.
“Ha,” Delilah said. “I feel disabled. I have a bruised tailbone. I have to sit on a donut.” She held up the inflatable plastic ring. “It’s for hemorrhoids, but I don’t have hemorrhoids. I’m making that clear. I just have a bruised tailbone.”
“Oh,” Priya said. “OK.”
I said, “It’s kind of you to invite us.”
“We always invite people the first night,” Priya said. “It’s an adjustment.”
“Oh,” I said, with no idea what she was talking about.
When we were walking up the track through trees and lawns and beds of flowers, Delilah proved she was equally blunt by asking, “Do you get lots of people staying in the caravan, then? Why, if you have a house? Don’t you like company?”
“Two houses,” Priya said. “But there’re heaps of them, yeh. Family coming out, or whatever. Daisy and Gray always let them stay, even though it can make Daisy cross. She’s studying to be a nurse practitioner besides doing her job, so she gets stressed. Which means she decided it would be down to Frankie and me to look after people. Cheers for that. Not like she asked me or anything first, right?”
“Totally,” Delilah said.
“To make it worse,” Priya said, “Frankie hates doing it, so it’s mostly me. My next older sister Oriana was the best at cooking and cleaning and being kind and all, but she got married and lives with her husband now, so there you are, it’s down to me. Did Daisy show you the yurt yet?”
“Uh … no,” I said. If Daisy didn’t like to have people staying, why had she invited us? This was awkward.
“I’ll show you, then,” Priya said, “as you’ll want to do your washing in it. It’s just Frankie and me in here. Dove’s in the house with Daisy and Gray. She’d like to be in the yurt, but it’s Frankie’s and my independent place, for grown people. We even have our own bedrooms. I’m seventeen, and Frankie’s twenty.”
Delilah asked, “How many sisters do you have? And wait—how old’s the one who got married?”
“Four sisters,” Priya said, “and five brothers, but only one of them’s out, and he doesn’t live with us. Oriana’s eighteen. She insisted on getting married before she was eighteen, which you can’t do without going to court. You can’t believe what a big deal it was. Daisy wasn’t best pleased. I think Gray had to talk her into letting her do it. Of course, Frankie and I don’t understand it either. Why would you want to get married when you’ve finally got your freedom?”
“Wait,” Delilah said. “Out? Out of where?”
“Mount Zion,” Priya said, as if it meant something, and Delilah and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Here’s the yurt.” We followed her up a ramp into a round building that I guessed was a yurt. A very large one, with wood ribbing supporting the roof like spokes in an umbrella, windows everywhere, and a view to die for.
“Laundry’s just back here,” Priya said, showing us a cupboard behind the extremely modern and sleek kitchen. I didn’t care how much cheaper Dunedin was, this place had to have cost a mint, with the sea at the bottom of the extensive gardens and two full homes on the enormous parcel.
“That’s about it,” Priya said, closing the cupboard door. “We only lock the door at night, because everything’s fenced and the gate’s alarmed. Knock first, but if we’re not here, come in and do your washing. Here, let’s go over to the house.”
Once again, Delilah said what I didn’t during the short walk over to a charming villa that looked like it had been built at least a century ago. “If Daisy’s a nurse,” she said, “how does she afford all this? New Zealand’s way expensive.”
“Oh, that’s Gray,” Priya said breezily. “Here we are.” Up the stairs to a covered porch and inside, and if the yurt had been immaculate, this was more so. Completely remodeled, but surely the polished wide-plank flooring was original, the walls finished with plaster and painted a soft cream, the furnishings simple but elegant. A smell of scorching ruined the atmosphere, though, and a cry of, “Shit. Shit. Shit,” proclaimed disaster.
Priya rushed through a door into a sleek, modern kitchen, where a thin girl with dark hair almost as short as Priya’s was looking into a Dutch oven and swearing, a huge hardback book and a spiral notebook open on the counter.
“What happened?” Priya asked.
“Buggered the sauce,” the other girl said. At that moment, smoke began to pour out of a wall oven, and the smoke alarm started to shriek.
I didn’t think. I ran over there, grabbed a tea towel, opened the oven door, and was greeted by a cloud of black smoke emanating from a lump of cinder. I pulled the tray out with a tea towel that was hanging on the door, closed the smoke away, dumped the tray in the sink, and started to flap the tea towel around the smoke alarm. Which was when Priya shrieked along with the alarm, and I looked over to see a huge pot boiling over on the stove in a mass of steam. I wielded my tea towel once more, wrapping it around my hand and arm to protect it from the boiling water, and managed to turn off the induction burner, then realized the other burner was on as well under the pot of scorched red sauce and turned that off, too. During all that, the smoke alarm continued to shriek, a dog was howling somewhere, and Delilah was laughing. Frankie, the thin girl, threw up her hands and shouted over the noise, “I’m rubbish. Daisy’s going to?—”
That was when Daisy came running into the room, tying the belt of a dressing gown. She was followed by a dark man who was as big as Roman and looked even tougher. He grinned, said, “Frankie cooking, eh,” and started opening windows, while a younger teenage girl trailed along behind, looked shyly at me, and blushed. And my phone rang.
Roman, I saw from the screen. Withdrawal might be tactful here anyway, so I stepped out of the kitchen, away from the shrieking, and swiped to answer. I was startled by the head of a chocolate Labrador sticking out of the wall as if it were mounted there, but realized when the dog withdrew its head that it was a dog door and this was the dog, who had wisely opted for avoidance of the smoke and shrieking. After which I finally shouted, “Hello?” into the phone.
“What the hell?” Roman said.
“Smoke alarm,” I said. At that moment, it stopped, which only left a whole lot of voices.
“You burning the place down?” he asked.
“Trying to avert disaster. What’s up?”
“I’m here,” he said. “At the gate. Got something for you. I could come down and give it to you, unless you’re not allowed visitors, in which case you could come up and I could hand it to you through the bars. Should’ve brought you a metal file baked in a cake. I didn’t realize it was going to be a fortified camp.”
“Uh …” I said. “Hang on. Or—wait. I’ll call you back in one minute.” I went back into the kitchen, followed by the dog, who had come through the dog door now that the smoke alarm wasn’t shrieking and was trotting in to join the action, her tail waving like this was all Big Fun. She paused along the way to give me a sniff and an extra wag, but when she got into the kitchen, she went straight over to the big man, sat as close beside him as she could get, and leaned her head against his thigh. He was clearly used to devotion, because his hand came down to fondle her ears.
“Of course I was studying while I cooked,” the thin girl—Frankie--was saying. “Otherwise it’s just a big waste of time!”
Priya said, “I’d have helped you if you’d asked.”
The younger girl said, “I’d have—” but was drowned out.
“I didn’t know I’d burn it, obviously,” Frankie said. “I was doing fine, but I couldn’t work out this differential equations problem, and then it happened in a second. I shouldn’t be on cooking at all, because I’m rubbish. We could?—”
Daisy said, “We’ve talked about this. We all need to pull our weight, and?—”
I said, feeling horribly in the way, “Sorry to butt in, but I have a suggestion and a question.”
“Oh, right,” Daisy said. “Summer and Delilah, my husband Gray. Oh, and Priya, Frankie, and Dove.”
“Hi,” Gray said, still fondling the dog’s ear and looking oddly relaxed under the circumstances.
“Hi,” the youngest girl said, raising a hand tentatively and letting it fall again.
“My suggestion,” I said, “is that I’d be happy to make this again, if you’ve got the ingredients. I can make spag bol in my sleep. My husband’s—” I stopped, because I’d been about to say, “My husband’s favorite dish.” Way too much information, except—wait. Daisy knew, which meant the man—Gray—probably knew, too. I kept forgetting that I wasn’t hiding anymore. “Anyway,” I went on in some confusion, “I’d be happy to make it. It’d be relaxing, honestly, and you all could go do—whatever you need to do, including the differential equations.”
“It’s just that it’s a bit hard,” Frankie said. “Differential equations. I need to focus. I know I can get it, I’m just not getting it. Not yet.”
“If you need help with it,” I said, “ask.”
Frankie seemed to take me in for the first time. I wasn’t sure her astonishment was much of a compliment. “You? I thought you were?—”
“A refugee?” I asked, knowing that my tone was dry. “A maid? A server? Or is it something else?”
“Well,” Frankie said, “yes. Because you’re here. In the caravan. And the way you look?—”
“If you’re trying to break free of gender stereotypes,” Daisy said, “that may have been a fail.”
“I have degrees in math and computer science,” I said, trying to keep it from sounding stiff. Trying to channel Roman, or possibly Daisy. You know. Confident people.
“She’s basically a genius,” Delilah said.
“You are?” Frankie asked. “Then why?—”
“I’m not a genius,” I said. “But I do know how to solve differential equations. And cook spaghetti Bolognese.”
“I think we have everything to make it again,” Priya said. “Daisy believes in a full pantry and freezer. Of course. Efficiency is all.”
“No more Turkish bread,” Frankie murmured, crunching a carrot and looking at her textbook, then at me. Dubiously.
“We don’t need bread,” I said. “I’ve got this.”
“She can’t help it,” Delilah informed Frankie and Priya. “Hyper competent. It’s like a disease, and there’s no cure.”
“We know all about that,” Frankie said. “So annoying.” Which was rich, if she wanted my help, but then—teenagers.
“Totally,” Delilah said. “I mean, shortcuts exist. That’s why some people buy frozen dinners.”
“Frozen dinners are awful,” I said. “Let me help. Please.” Because Daisy was looking distinctly harassed. “Oh,” I remembered. “Uh … Roman’s at the gate.”
“What, now?” Daisy asked.
“Who’s Roman?” Priya asked. “Don’t tell me there are more people coming.”
“Priya,” Daisy said, a snap in her voice.
“Daisy saving the world,” Frankie said, despite being bent over the counter with a mechanical pencil in one hand and the fingers of the other hand punching buttons on a graphing calculator. Worrying and worrying at that problem, unable to let it go. I knew the feeling.
“He said he has something to give me,” I said, wanting to laugh. And I’d thought our arrival at Roman’s had been dramatic.
“Roman d’Angelo, eh,” Gray said. “Well, spag bol stretches, and I’d like to meet him, ask him about wind power. I wonder if he does solar as well.”
“I, uh, don’t know,” I said. “And he won’t be thinking of staying for dinner. I’ll keep it brief.”
“He’s sitting up at the gate now?” Daisy asked. “I’ve got it. Wait, I don’t have my phone.”
“I do,” Gray said, and punched a few buttons.
“I’ll just go outside, then,” I said. “And let him in. And then come back and make dinner.”
“Excellent,” Priya said. “You can come over and watch TV with me, Delilah. Oh. You can come too, Dove, if you like, but it’s a cop show. Bullets and blood.”
“I could stay here and help cook,” Dove said. “If that’s OK?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “One minute. Let me go, uh, get Roman.”
Fortunately, I was used to chaos. I’d married a footballer.