37. The Hard Way
Roman
I watched them go, watched Daniel shamble off into the party again, and told Delilah, “Half an hour.”
“I’m not deaf,” she said. “Thank God Summer didn’t make me go have a lovely cup of tea with them. Extreme application of her tact-and-kindness superpowers happening right now, I’ll bet, when all I’d want to do is tell your mom to get over herself.”
I laughed. “Well, me too, if it helps.”
“Ha,” she said. “You can’t even escape. Do you really support her? Like, completely?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s my mum.”
“Man,” she said. “I’m revising my plans like crazy here. If I actually get rich, what’s to stop both of my worthless parents from crawling out of the woodwork with their hands out? Well, my dad probably doesn’t know who I am even if he remembers I exist, so there’s that, but my mom? Totally possible. Burglar alarms, I’m thinking. Call screening. Relentless coldness.”
A quiet huff of laughter that I realized had come from Hemi. Daniel had melted away, but Hemi and Hope were still here. He said, “I’ll tell you the secret of it. You don’t give them the money. You pay the bills directly.”
“Or you tell them to go fuck themselves,” Delilah said. “That’s my plan.”
“Also an option,” Hemi agreed, his face showing the most amusement I’d seen there all day. “And don’t worry about Daniel. I’ll manage him.”
“Better you than me,” Delilah said. “Ugh. Well, I’m off. Once I check and make sure they’re gone. The cool people are having a ping-pong tournament up at Tane and June’s.” Breezily, but I wasn’t sure she was feeling it. Possibly thinking she didn’t belong here either.
Hope said, “It’s fun up there with the cousins. Karen always loved it.” Hope had some tact superpowers of her own.
Karen came up before Delilah could leave, though, holding her kid, who was blinking sleepily against her shoulder. “What did I miss? People are whispering. Wouldn’t you know, the minute Logan wakes up from his nap, the excitement starts.”
“Nothing,” Hemi said.
Karen said, “Oh, come on. You can tell me.”
“Not our business,” Hemi said.
“Really, Karen,” Hope said. “It wasn’t?—”
“I’ll tell you,” Delilah said. “Let’s go sit in the front yard so we can gossip savagely. It had many facets. Much drama.”
“Oh, let’s,” Karen said happily, and off they went. Which left Hemi and Hope and me, looking at each other.
Hemi said, “Want a beer, cuz, before I round up my cousin Tane to help me get rid of Dad? This one’s going to be a team effort.”
I said, “Well, yeh. I do.”
“Let’s go, then,” he said, “because I want one, too. You good to drive?” he asked Hope.
“Of course,” she said.
When Hemi and I were sitting on that same section of wall, drinking beer from the bottle, I said, “That’s an idea. I could have Summer drive us to the Mount. Got a place there for the night.”
“If you need to drown your sorrows,” Hemi agreed. “She seems pretty competent.”
“She is. At everything. Quietly competent, I’d call it. Independent, too. Fiercely. And more determined than anyone I’ve ever known.” I stopped myself, because why the hell would I unburden myself about my non-love-life to Hemi Te Mana, famous hard man? “And I don’t need to drown anything,” I said instead. “I want this one, that’s all.”
“I don’t much care for getting legless myself,” he said. “For obvious reasons. My mum’s an alcoholic as well, since we seem to be sharing parenting stories, and I wouldn’t put too much money on Ana’s sobriety. Or, God knows, her partner’s.”
“But you escaped,” I said. “How?”
“Dunno. Anger, maybe. Blind resolve not to end up like Dad, too. But mostly anger. How did you?”
“Didn’t feel like a choice,” I said. “I wanted money, that’s the bottom line. I wanted choices. It should’ve been about family, maybe, but?—”
“Can’t miss what you haven’t had. So you went for the money instead.”
“And doing something interesting,” I said. “That first thing …”
“Bargains.co.nz,” he said. “Started it when you were twenty, in university.”
“Yeh,” I said. “Started small and built it up. I couldn’t think why somebody else hadn’t done it, because it was dead obvious. It was exciting, and university was pretty dull in comparison. Anyway, it worked, so I kept doing it. Since then, it’s been more of the same. Not that I knew exactly what I was doing. I made heaps of mistakes. Surprising it worked out, really.”
“It worked out,” Hemi said, “because you didn’t give up when you made a mistake. You learned from it and moved on. And you weren’t afraid to jump.”
I considered that. “You’re right. People are so bloody terrified of losing what they have, they don’t even look at what they could have. They hang onto that partner or that job with everything they’ve got, even if they’re not suited. No confidence they can get another one, maybe. I always thought …” I shrugged. “That if it didn’t work out, I’d do something else, a regular job, maybe try again later. Even if the thing cratered, it was experience, and I’d know better another time. And I liked the idea of my destiny being in my own hands. Nobody to blame if it went pear-shaped, but nobody to hold me back, either.”
“Mm.” Hemi drank his own beer in silence for a minute, then said, “Odd that we’re alike.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Not sure where the business thing comes from. Seems like it should come from somewhere.”
“Koro had a shop,” he said. “Mechanic. Maybe that’s where, because Koro’s no fool. He’s old now, so you won’t be able to tell, but he still sees enough. I lived with him for a while as a teenager.” He smiled grimly. “A pretty angry one. Mum in Aussie with Ana, Dad dead drunk and nasty with it. I was lucky to have Koro. Taught me to fish, to fix things that broke, to careabout things that broke. To be a good Kiwi bugger, not just another angry drunk Maori kid hooning around South Auckland, getting himself arrested, going nowhere.” He paused a minute, then added, “How to be Maori, too. Not that I learned any of those lessons easily. Resisted them with everything I had, usually.”
I said, “I didn’t have all that, the bad stuff. Single mum, yeh, but she was there, at least, and she’s not a big drinker. She worked, too. Don’t want you to think she didn’t. She had man friends, but she mostly kept them away from me, or me from them. Hard to convince a fella you’re twenty-five when you have a twelve-year-old son. She wasn’t that bad, though.” Now I was the one hesitating, but here I was, and when I had my chances, I took them. “You’ve done better than me on the family thing, too.”
He glanced at me sidelong, amusement on the tough face. “Know how old I was when I married Hope?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t followed you that closely.”
Another bark of laughter. “A fashion designer? Bet you haven’t. I was thirty-seven, and to say I stuffed up, that year before I married her … that’s understating it. I did everything wrong. Fortunately, Hope’s tougher than she looks. Forgiving, too. She was only twenty-five, but she knew more than I did about how it should be, though there was no reason she should. I needed humbling, and I got it.”
“I’m thirty-nine,” I said. “Married twice. Divorced both times. I’m not much chop at marriage.”
“Not good at being married,” Hemi said, “or not good at choosing?”
I considered that. “Dunno,” I finally said.
“You don’t drink too much,” he said, “so that’s not it. Do you cheat?”
“No. I wanted to be a man who—” I stopped.
“A man who sticks,” he said. “A man who doesn’t give up. And so far, you’re not.”
“Yeh.”
“I was married before, too,” Hemi said. “Unsuccessfully. It made a splash. Maybe you saw it.”
“Uh … yeh,” I said. “Hard to miss.”
“I was both,” he said. “Bad at choosing, and bad at being married. That anger thing I mentioned. Pride. Control. My marriage was chaos, was what it was. I thought it was excitement. That ring any bells?”
“Well, no,” I said. “Probably just didn’t know how.”
“How to let her in,” Hemi said.
“Maybe.” My legs were restless, because all I wanted to do was get off this wall.
“To be fair,” Hemi said, “Hope pretty much dragged me into being a better man. She wouldn’t settle for anything less, and I wanted her, so …” He smiled, a twist of his mouth. “I finally got over myself and started listening. To her, and to Koro. Koro was dead clear on the subject. When it got bad, Hope’s the one he took in, not me. Hope and Karen. Protected her from me, you could say.” I shot a startled look at him, and he said, “Not violent. Controlling, though, enough to make her run. So if it’s worth it, if you want it enough …” He shrugged a heavy shoulder. “You’ll find a way.”
I took another swallow of beer. Huh. Controlling. “I don’t know why I should keep trying,” I said. “She’s been married herself, and you could say she’s got walls.”
“But you see her,” he said, “and you’re pulled in again. You try to stay away, but you can’t. That about it?”
“Yeh,” I said. “That’s the way.”
“It’s the same thing as in business,” he said. “When you make a mistake, you recognize it, and you don’t do it again. Get your ego out of the way, let yourself learn, and don’t give up. I found that out the hard way.”