Chapter 21
Twenty-One
On Thursday, Sweeney got drafted into helping her mother at the charity shop.
Someone had called in sick and her mother hadn’t been able to find a replacement at such short notice.
She didn’t mind. Fin was taking his mother into Melbourne to drop off her latest batch of beanies to the Royal Children’s Hospital, and frankly it was nice to do something around town that didn’t involve her and Fin doing it together.
And to catch up with her mother.
Given she was living over the road in Ronnie’s house, they hadn’t really had any solo mum–daughter time, and although Sweeney had mostly felt like strangling her mother since she and Rhonda had thrown them in the middle of their lie, she knew soon enough she’d be gone again and she’d have wasted another opportunity to connect.
Being forced to hang around Ballyshannon longer than she normally would, seeing familiar people and familiar sights, had softened the hard crust of her memories, and the hollow ache that it covered had been soothed by a deluge of nostalgia.
‘You can do the money,’ Connie announced as she unlocked the rear door to the shop.
She was casually dressed in jeans and a light sweater, her spiky salt and pepper pixie cut stylishly zhuzhed with some gel.
She walked through the back area, flicking on lights as she went, and they passed bags bulging with donated clothes and other sundry items of household goods and bric-a-brac.
‘It’s a simple system to learn. Mostly we get tap transactions. But people can also pay with cash. Come on, I’ll show you.’
They passed through a lurid, seventies beaded curtain that formed a partition between the back room and the shop.
Her mother went through the cash register system, which seemed easy enough.
‘It’ll be busy for the first few hours,’ Connie said, ‘then it’ll settle.
That’s when we go out the back and start sorting through the endless piles of donations.
The shop only opens Mondays and Thursdays since Covid, so there’s always a backlog. ’
Her mother hadn’t been kidding about busy.
She opened the door at nine on the dot to admit a dozen people who were already standing outside, and the clock was ticking closer to midday the next time she looked.
Surprisingly, though, Sweeney enjoyed it.
She knew about eighty per cent of the people who came through and they were all up for a chat.
But it was her mother that was the revelation.
She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of what and where everything was in the shop and she whizzed around like a whirling dervish helping people locate what they wanted, heading out the back to check on a requested item that wasn’t on shelf but might be in the non-sorted items. She chatted and recommended and sometimes even cajoled customers into buying something they might have otherwise left on the shelf had Connie not provided an entertaining discourse on the provenance of said item.
Sweeney couldn’t help but think she was wasted here. She should be at Doherty Motors selling dodgy second-hand cars.
The charity shop was run through their church, though, and Sweeney knew her mother took that very seriously.
Connie firmly believed that people/organisations/governments were judged by how they treat their less fortunate and felt passionately about how the money raised supported myriad community programmes for the disadvantaged.
Most notably, though, Sweeney could hear her mother’s laughter all over the store.
As a kid, she used to love lying in bed of a night-time, listening to the low murmur of her parents chatting in the room next door, the occasional burst of her mother’s laughter making her smile as she drifted off to sleep.
It had been so happy and comforting, and Sweeney had felt safe and sound in the knowledge that all was right in her world.
Then the laugh disappeared for three long years, the house oppressively silent, and Sweeney had feared she’d never hear it again.
Hearing it now helped soothe those teenage anxieties that still lurked somewhere deep inside and had been the reason why she’d only ever made brief, infrequent visits home.
‘Sweeney Bailey, it’s so good to see you in town.’
Coming out of her reverie, Sweeney focused on the birdlike woman in front of her. Elderly, a little hunched, wrinkles like ravines, but a wicked sparkle in that shrewd old gaze that had kept a keen eye on the goings-on at the primary school for decades as the volunteer lollipop lady.
‘Hello, Mrs Hitchin. Lovely to see you again.’
A papery-skinned hand slid over the top of Sweeney’s.
‘Always knew you and young Fin were destined for each other.’ A big smile showed off teeth still in remarkable shape—all her own, as she would be quick to point out.
‘Right from the moment you both walked across my crossing holding hands on your first day at school, I said to myself, those two are going to get married one day.’ She patted Sweeney’s hand. ‘I felt it in my water.’
Sweeney gave a nervous half laugh. Betty Hitchin’s water was famous around Ballyshannon. Or maybe infamous was a better word. It had predicted births, deaths, marriages, floods, fire, a pandemic, election results and a string of Melbourne Cup winners far more accurately than most pundits.
Few people messed with Betty’s water.
Except this time it was way off. Not that Sweeney was stupid enough to mention that.
She just smiled and said, ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ Her mother was busy with another customer but Sweeney wasn’t going to wait around for her to be free.
God alone knew what else Betty might predict if she wasn’t distracted.
‘Yes, dear.’ She lifted a ceramic bowl of some description onto the counter.
It was a plain, mint-green colour, the porcelain a little crazed, a handle protruding from one side.
It looked like a giant teacup but was, Sweeney suddenly realised, an old chamber pot.
‘Do you have one of these in canary yellow?’
Sweeney blinked. ‘Um, no, I don’t think so.’
Okay, she didn’t know every single item they had in the shop, but considering nobody had used a contraption like that in a hundred years, she was prepared to put money on the fact that Betty Hitchin was holding Ballyshannon’s only chamber pot.
And wasn’t the more important question, why on earth did Mrs Hitchin want a canary yellow chamber pot? Surely whatever the colour, they all did the same thing?
Betty pursed her lips as though the answer displeased her and maybe she was going to push the point, but instead she just sighed, looking wistfully at the ugly, antiquated port-apotty. ‘Oh well … I guess I’ll keep looking.’
She handed the pot to Sweeney and, with a cheery goodbye, departed the store.
*
It was one in the afternoon before the lull hit and Sweeney was able to go to the bakery, buy two sausage rolls and two peach blossoms and take them out the back, where her mother was already sorting through the mountain of donations.
Two dainty, mismatched china cups of steaming tea were sitting nearby on a desk that was covered by white plastic bags, each filled to the brim, puffy as marshmallows, their contents threatening to spew out.
‘This is a lot of stuff,’ Sweeney said as she glanced around at everything that needed to be sorted.
‘We’re the only charity shop in the district so we get all the donations from the other centres nearby.’ Connie sat on a rickety old chair and bit into the warm, flaky sausage roll. She sighed as she chewed. ‘Mmm, these are my favourite bakery item.’
Her mother said that every time she ate a sausage roll. Sweeney, on the other hand, had always had a sweet tooth, like her father.
She claimed another rickety chair and, in what was a familiar routine, she bit into the peach blossom first. A family bakery trip had always involved sausage rolls and peach blossoms, but whereas her mother had gone with the savoury option to start, Sweeney and her dad had always gone for the pink fluffy goodness, their fingers smothered in cream, their mouths covered in pink coconut.
Her mother laughed as cream oozed out of the sponge and coconut stuck to Sweeney’s nose, and then they were both laughing.
And she knew in that moment her mum was thinking about those long-ago bakery visits, too.
Surprisingly, the memory no longer hurt—it just glowed warm between them, a candlelit snow globe-esque bubble from their past so alive with scenes of family and laughter Sweeney felt as though she could reach out and touch it.
‘You’re doing really well,’ Sweeney said after she’d devoured the peach blossom and washed the sweetness and coconut down with a couple of sips of tea.
Her mother glanced over the rim of her cup, taking a slow sip before placing it back on its mismatched saucer. Connie gave her a soft smile. ‘I’ve been doing really well for a long time now.’
A sudden lump rose in Sweeney’s throat, threatening to choke her, and she swallowed it down with another sip of tea. ‘Yeah, I guess you have,’ she murmured eventually, returning her mother’s soft smile.
‘I should never have leaned on you like I did back then.’ Connie shook her head, her eyes clouding over, her forehead crinkling. ‘It was unfair of me.’
It wasn’t the first time her mother had apologised.
Most recently she’d done it the night of the surprise party—although that was slightly dubious given it had been a brief segue on the road to emotional blackmail—and she’d expressed how sorry she was multiple times to her teenage daughter after she’d come out of her funk.
Sweeney had been in her last two years of high school and so damn relieved her mum was back that she’d accepted the apologies readily, eager to move on, to get back to normal. But the truth was, she’d never quite forgiven her mother.