ONE
Stephanie
The young blonde waitress, who happily took her order when she arrived – when most of the tables were empty because it was between the lunch and afternoon tea rush – now keeps throwing her looks. Stephanie is taking up precious table space.
The girl cannot be more than eighteen. Stephanie thought the whole world was her oyster at eighteen. At thirty-six, she’s more jaded than she would like to be.
The bastard still hasn’t sent me the child support for this month.
When was it due?
Yesterday and I had to ask him last night to send it. He always does this. He always makes me ask for it and it makes me feel like a pathetic beggar.
He’s such a complete arsehole.
Stephanie replies with a closed-eyes emoji rather than a proper message.
She would like to keep talking but Gail is a lawyer and is probably right in the middle of something at work.
She’s taken the time to answer Stephanie because she’s a good friend.
And Stephanie doesn’t want to ruin the friendship by interrupting her work day too many times.
She has been conscious, since she and Christopher first separated, of not turning into the needy divorced friend who’s always embroiled in a crisis.
When she was right in the middle of divorce mediation, and stressed beyond what she thought she could cope with, she forced herself to only contact Gail when she absolutely needed to.
Gail is her oldest friend and the person who she has been able to count on since she was thirteen years old.
Gail specialises in insurance law so she wasn’t much help with the legal tangles involved in a divorce but she did find a good divorce lawyer to help Stephanie and she has been there when Stephanie needed her the most.
Still, needing Gail all the time would stretch the friendship and Stephanie knows that. Everyone has their own lives to deal with and friendships, even old friendships, need to respect that boundary.
Stephanie picks up her cup of coffee but finds it empty. With a sigh she opens the banking app again, sees the amount in her bank account is still exactly the same. The app sends her notifications when money is deposited so checking is really a waste of time but she does it anyway.
To distract herself, she scrolls through the news.
Most of the articles are about the huge fire that destroyed over a million hectares in the Blue Mountains.
A downed power line sparked a grass fire but it quickly spread.
High winds made everything worse and the fire department struggled for days to contain the raging flames.
Pictures show miles and miles of burned vegetation and houses where only a few beams are left, charred and blackened, owners clutching pets, devastation on their faces.
You have a lot to be grateful for, she reminds herself. She has a home to go to when others do not. She cannot imagine what it would feel like to lose everything in a few hours.
‘Um, excuse me,’ she hears and she looks up to see the blonde waitress. ‘Are you going to order anything else? There’s quite a queue for tables.’
At the front of the café a group of mothers with babies in prams are blocking up the entrance, all of them looking over at Stephanie’s convenient table with the floor space around it.
Inside her, something pulls with longing for the time when her children were small and life was simply a matter of routine and desperation for sleep.
With a quick shake of her head, she stands and pushes past the waitress, and then out the door into the spring sunshine. It’s warm enough for a T-shirt today and she’s immediately hot in her sweatshirt and jeans. She’s still getting used to the weather change.
It’s school pick-up time and the streets are filled with mothers and children.
Stephanie’s own children attend a school twenty minutes away.
Fortunately, their house is around the corner from a bus stop and both sixteen-year-old Luke and twelve-year-old Avery catch the bus every day.
It has meant that it’s easy enough for Stephanie to get to her university classes and keep on top of all her course work for her degree in education so that she can finish qualifying as a history teacher, a process that was abruptly halted years ago when she got pregnant with Luke at university and dropped out to marry Christopher.
In her car, she opens her banking app again. No money has been added to the total so she fires off a furious text message to her ex-husband.
Once again, I have still not gotten my child support for this month.
I haven’t paid for Avery’s gymnastic class yet because I can’t afford to and Luke needs new sneakers.
I am so sick of having to ask you for this every single time.
If you can’t stick to the agreed schedule, I’m happy to take this to court.
Glancing at the time, Stephanie starts the car and pulls off so that she can be home when the kids get home.
She likes to make them snacks and talk about their day if she’s there.
It’s exam week at university and she should be spending her time doing essays and studying for her exams but she has wasted most of today because she’s so irritated with Christopher.
Once a month she finds herself in this situation of chasing child support.
And when she does, her brain can’t focus on anything else except for composing angry eloquent text messages, designed to somehow make Christopher not only send the money but also apologise for being such a shit.
She stops at a traffic light, irritation streaking through her. She’s left too late and the kids will already be home, probably eating junk food. ‘Bloody Christopher,’ she mutters.
After everything I did for you, you have no right to treat me and our children like this. One day you will regret it when they understand exactly how hard you made it for their mother. You should be ashamed of yourself. A real man wouldn’t behave like this.
That’s what she should have sent him. A car behind her hoots and she pulls off, immediately forgetting her perfect enraged words.
As she’s driving, Stephanie hears a notification from her banking app.
Money has been deposited. It must be from Christopher.
If she threatens court, he sends the money – but she’s so sick of having to do that.
They’ve been divorced for nearly six months now and she has to do this every single month without fail.
And how many more times can she threaten court until that loses its effect, especially since he knows that getting a lawyer to take him to court would cost her money she doesn’t have.
‘Screw you, Christropher,’ she shouts, slapping her hand against her steering wheel.
Parking in her garage, she grabs her phone and checks and the money is there. Taking a deep cleansing breath, she lets her anger go. She’s set for the next month.
Once she’s had a chat with the kids, she’ll sit down and pay everything that needs to be sorted out, hoping that enough is left for her to treat the kids to dinner and a movie. Something fun.
Her current part-time job in a childcare centre is for two days a week only and is not enough for anything except keeping her head above water. She dreads the bills that come in over email, each one more than she can believe.
Her life is now worlds apart from what it was when she discovered Christopher was sleeping with his practice manager. A woman who is still working for him and still warming his bed.
The whole thing was such a ridiculous cliché that Gail had actually laughed when Stephanie told her about it, assuming it must be a joke.
Christopher, who had once adored Stephanie’s body and Stephanie’s mind and Stephanie’s everything, had cheated with Vanessa who was thirty-three, nearly as tall as he was and had a chest that a person couldn’t help staring at.
She also had white-blonde hair and blue eyes.
She was so completely opposite to Stephanie that it made her question if her husband had ever actually found her attractive, if they would have even gotten married if she hadn’t fallen pregnant.
She throws her phone into her bag and leans her head back, closing her eyes. Let it go, just let it go.
She knows why Christopher drags out the sending of child support.
He is furious that, in an attempt to keep his practice earnings as a doctor for himself, he somehow ended up agreeing that Stephanie could keep living in the house until both children move away from home.
Only then will it have to be sold and the money divided.
With the cost of living being the way it is, Stephanie can’t see the house being empty of children for at least another ten years, maybe more. Perhaps they will go away to university but perhaps they’ll need to come back.
Both she and Christopher love the house.
They bought it when the suburb was just beginning to gentrify and it was a large dilapidated art deco style house on an even larger piece of land.
Stephanie’s lawyer, a spitfire of a woman called Miri with flaming red hair, got Stephanie the deal.
The house until the kids moved out, child support, and nothing else.
Miri told her it would be near impossible to go after Christopher’s GP practice earnings.
‘The bastard could just close it down and open up in another area, and boom, you’re out of money,’ Miri told Stephanie.
One of her favourite things about her lawyer was her refusal to use Christopher’s name, only ever referring to him as ‘the bastard’.
Stephanie accepted the deal, knowing that the house would grow in value, something that she holds onto as she has begun to realise how much it costs to maintain.
It’s in an old suburb surrounded by maple trees whose leaves turn a beautiful rich red every autumn and then turn brown and drop everywhere, clogging up gutters and drains.
The house is old but it has been mostly transformed by Stephanie’s hard work and Christopher’s money. And there is still more to do.
But for now, she’s okay.
‘It’s all under control,’ she whispers.
She just needs to get through the next few exams and life will be easy. Well, manageable.
That’s all she’s hoping for in the run-up to the end of the year. That and a new job so she finally has enough money.
Some people will do anything to make more and more money, but she just wants enough. Having just enough money will change everything, she’s sure.