Chapter 7
Mom shows up at the house as the sun is going down. We hear the buzzy whine of a fissioncar on the dirt track that passes for the road to our farm.
“She took her time,” Max says at my elbow in the chook yard, and I give him a little punch on the arm. “Ow,” he says, but I didn’t hit him that hard.
What he means is that if Pop called her when Max told him what happened, she might–and only might–have gotten here maybe half an hour ago. But there’s probably plenty of reasons why she’s just getting here now. She stays in the city a lot to do her work. She’s on the City Council, after all.
The sheep lift their heads at the sound of the fissioncar, too. Sheep, their Noise says. Sheep.
Sheep are sweet little animals, but man, they’re dumb.
We watch Mom drive round the large front paddock, and she’s out of the fissioncar almost before it comes to a stop. “Ben!” she shouts, and runs over to me, clamping me in a hug. “Are you okay?”
“He broke his arm,” Max says.
“I know,” Mom says, turning and hugging Max, too. “Tell me what happened. Your father’s version didn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Neither does ours,” Max says, and tells her our version, not even embellishing all that much. Mom takes it all in, and I can see her thinking. She’s a scientist, our mom, the smartest one we’ve got, if you want my opinion. I take after her, if you want another.
“Okay,” she says when he’s done, looking to me for confirmation, which I give her. “And it grabbed for you?”
It missed, though, I sign.
She closes her eyes like this is something she doesn’t even want to think about. Then she hugs us each again. “We’ll talk about this some more,” she says, “but first I want to see your father.”
“He went over to the Smith farm to see if they saw anything,” Max says. “Then he said he was going to move the rest of the sheep down from high pasture.”
“All these years and still no sheepdog,” Mom says, almost to herself, but fondly. She knows as well as we do why Pop doesn’t have dogs on the farm, as much as me and Max might want one.
The heartbreak when they go is too much.
Mom heads into the house and pretty much right out the back again to find Pop. I hear her talking to Angharrad–who’s excited to see her–in the backyard on the river side of the house, and then they ride off into the distance.
“Sorry,” Max says. “I know you’d have rather told her about the god and all.”
He’s not wrong. Even though I sign really fast, it’s not as immediate as when people talk, so other people, even my idiot brother, get to tell all the stories.