CHAPTER ONE #2
"They're all driving in from somewhere or worse.
Cal's coming off eighteen months in the Territory, flying two thousand k's to get here.
Arjun and Mia are flying the whole length of the country from a town that didn't exist as a town two years ago, not really, not the way it does now.
Dom and Pri have got the baby now, and anyone who's ever travelled anywhere with an infant knows that counts double.
" He said it the way he said most things, flat and reasonable and entirely closing the subject, because to him it was reasonable — you didn't hand a job to a tired man when there was a rested one standing right there with nothing better to do.
"I've got nothing else on this morning. Might as well be useful. "
"Might as well be useful," Layla repeated, quietly, almost to herself, the way you repeat a phrase back to someone to see if they hear how it sounds outside their own head.
He didn't seem to hear it that way. She let it go, because she never pushed it directly, not with him — that wasn't her way, and eleven years of watching him from the counter at Rivers had taught her that the only thing that ever worked on Renz Kowalski was time and proximity and letting him arrive somewhere on his own, the long way round, the way he did everything, tables included.
She picked up her tray instead and said, on her way back down the slope, not quite over her shoulder, in the deliberately offhand voice she used when she wanted a thing to land without seeming to be aimed, "Pip's driving up this morning too, I heard.
From the Bay side. Said she wanted to get here before the crowd, help you set up. "
Renz did not react to that, which was itself a kind of reaction, if you knew how to read him, and Layla — eleven years behind that counter, watching every one of them fall in slow motion into the thing they were all, eventually, going to fall into, Cal and Josie the most recent proof that the pattern always won out in the end — did know how to read him, and smiled the whole way back down to the café without turning around to let him see it.
He went back to the tables. He counted chairs — forty-one, then forty-two, because you always wanted one spare, you never knew who might turn up unannounced or who might need somewhere to sit that wasn't quite in the thick of things — and set them in their rows, and thought, not quite consciously, about a woman who never stayed anywhere long enough to need a chair of her own, and found that he'd left exactly one gap in the row nearest the fire, without deciding to, the way his hands sometimes did things a half-step ahead of the rest of him, the way they'd learned, over a decade of dishes done and birthdays remembered, to simply get on with a job before his mind had finished framing the reasons for it.
He didn't examine that. Examining things wasn't really in his skill set, not when it came to himself; he could read a fireground in four seconds flat — where the wind would carry it, which structure was defensible and which was already gone, which crew member was pushing past their limit before they knew it themselves — and he could read a room in less than that, could tell you which of forty people needed a coffee and which needed to be left entirely alone and which needed, more than anything, simply to be handed a job so their hands had somewhere to put their worry.
But turn the same attention on his own chest, and the instruments all seemed to go quiet, the needles flat, as though whatever equipment he used to read everyone else had simply never been calibrated for himself.
So he didn't examine it. He just left the chair there, one gap in a long straight row, facing the sea, and went to go and ring Baz about the cray pots.
Baz answered on the fourth ring, already halfway through an excuse before Renz had said more than his name, and Renz let him run through it — something about a pot that had come up light, a mate's boat that needed the trailer he'd been going to borrow — with the particular patient economy of a man who'd learned long ago that most excuses just needed room to finish themselves before you got to the useful part of the conversation.
"So what time, actually," Renz said, once Baz had run down.
"Eleven. Eleven-thirty at the outside."
"I told the crew ten."
"You always tell the crew an hour early, mate, everyone knows that, that's why it works out.
" There was real affection in it, the specific fondness a small coastal town reserves for its known quantities, and Renz felt it land the way it always landed, warm and slightly awkward, a thing he didn't quite know what to do with except say thanks and hang up and get on with the next item on the list.
By nine the first cars were coming up the track off the coast road, dust rising thin and gold in the strengthening light, and Renz Kowalski — first there, as always, tables done, ice sorted, coffee good, cray pots delayed but accounted for, a whole morning's worth of work already behind him before anyone else had climbed out of a car — stood at the top of the headland with a tea towel still over one shoulder from wiping down the urn, and watched the Skyfire Brotherhood come home, one dust trail at a time, and felt, the way he felt every year, entirely and quietly useful, and did not yet know that this was the year the tables were being set, without his knowledge or his permission, for him.
His phone buzzed in his back pocket while he was refolding a tablecloth that had blown half-loose in a gust off the water, and he saw his mother's name on the screen and answered it the way he answered every one of her calls, already half-listening for whatever practical thing she needed while the rest of him kept moving.
"You didn't ring for your sister's thing," she said, without preamble, the way she always opened, straight into whatever was on her mind with no room made for hello. "Jodie's birthday. She said you sent flowers but you didn't ring."
"I was at work, Mum. Twelve-hour shift. I did send flowers."
"Flowers are nice, love, but she wants to hear your voice.
You know how she gets." A pause, filled with the particular static of a woman doing something else while she talked, dishes maybe, or folding washing, multitasking the way she'd multitasked his whole childhood, never quite giving one thing her whole attention because there had never been enough of her attention to go round five kids and two jobs and a husband who worked nights.
"You're always so busy with that crew of yours.
More than you ever were with us, some days, if I'm honest."
"I ring when I can."
"I know you do, love. I'm not having a go.
" Which was, Renz had learned across three decades, precisely what she said in the exact middle of having a go, the family's peculiar dialect where the disclaimer and the accusation arrived in the same breath and you were meant to hear both without either party admitting to the second one.
"Just — you've always been the reliable one.
Don't want you thinking that means you can skip the actual ringing part. "