CHAPTER TWO
The Duffel
Pip
Pip Sorensen had never once, in her adult life, unpacked a bag on the first night anywhere, and she saw no reason today should be the exception, even though today was only a two-hour drive up the coast road and the bag in question held nothing but a sundress, a decent pair of boots, a phone charger, and the paperback she wasn't going to read, the same paperback that had made the trip with her, unread, to the last four gatherings running, its spine still uncreased, a small stubborn monument to intentions she never quite followed through on.
She'd learned it as a kid, the packing — learned it the way you learn a language before you're old enough to know you're learning one, from a childhood spent in a house where the removalist's number lived on the fridge next to the pizza place, where you didn't hang a picture until you'd worked out how long you'd be looking at the wall it hung on, because the answer was usually not long.
Her father sold agricultural equipment for a company that kept moving its regional territories around, and every eighteen months or so, sometimes less, a new territory meant a new town, and a new town meant new schools, new bedrooms, new best friends who stopped being best friends the moment the removalist's truck pulled away.
Six schools by the time she was fourteen.
Four different states. She couldn't have told you the plot of a single school formal, because she'd never been at one school long enough to accumulate the social capital required to have a date to one, but she could tell you, with her eyes closed, the precise economy of packing a life into two duffels and a milk crate in under forty minutes, because that was the skill the house had actually taught her, underneath all the ones on the report cards — how to leave, cleanly, without leaving anything behind that would hurt to lose.
Her mother had called it resilience. Her mother had called a lot of things resilience, in the particular brittle way of a woman who needed the word to mean something other than what it actually described, and Pip had absorbed the framing along with everything else, had spent a long stretch of her twenties genuinely believing that her talent for cutting loose from places and people cleanly was a strength rather than a scar with very good camouflage.
So she drove up the coast road with her duffel on the back seat, half-zipped, the way it always was, the way it had been in every flat she'd lived in for the last nine years — nine years in this one town, which should have told her something and never quite had, because nine years in one town with four different addresses inside it wasn't really staying, not in the way that counted, not in the way Renz had stayed his entire adult life in the same weatherboard house his grandmother had left him — and did not think about the fact that a person who'd lived in the same town for nine years probably didn't need a bag she could be out the door with in five minutes.
She just liked knowing she could. It cost nothing to know it.
That was the story she told herself, and she'd told it so many times by now that it came out smooth and automatic, no seam in it at all, the same way Renz's usefulness had no seam in it, though neither of them would have recognised themselves in the comparison if you'd handed it to them side by side.
The headland came up out of the dune scrub the way it always did, green and sudden after the long dry run of the coast road, and she felt the thing she felt every year on this particular bend — a lift, low in the chest, sudden and involuntary, that she'd never once let herself call by its actual name, because the actual name was homesick, and you couldn't be homesick for a place you'd deliberately never let yourself belong to.
She'd tried, once, a few years back, to explain the feeling to a therapist she'd seen for exactly six sessions before finding a reason the seventh didn't suit her schedule, and the therapist had used a phrase that had stuck with her longer than anything else from those six sessions — anticipatory grief, the woman had called it, the particular ache of loving something while already, pre-emptively, mourning the version of yourself that would eventually have to leave it.
Pip had nodded along at the time and privately filed the whole thing under things therapists say, and had thought about the phrase, if she was honest, at least once a week ever since.
The car park was already filling by the time she pulled in.
She recognised half the vehicles before she'd even switched off the engine — Dom's ute with the baby seat visible through the back window now, which still did something strange and unexpected to her chest every time she saw it, a lurch that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite envy but lived somewhere in the overlap between the two; Cole and Maya's wagon with the Queensland plates, mud-splashed from whatever back road they'd taken down; a hire car she didn't recognise that had to be Cal and Josie's, fresh off whatever flight had got them down from the Territory, still wearing the faint dust of somewhere much drier and much further north.
And there, at the top of the slope, exactly where he always was, exactly where he'd been every single gathering for as long as she'd been coming to them: Renz, in an apron that had definitely started the morning clean and now bore the honest evidence of cray pots and coffee grounds, moving between two trestle tables with the particular unhurried competence of a man who had never once in his life stood still long enough to be properly looked at.
She sat in the car a moment longer than she needed to, watching him fuss a tablecloth straight for what was probably the third time, and did the thing she always did when she looked at Renz Kowalski for longer than a few seconds, which was catch herself doing it and stop, deliberately, the way you'd catch your own hand reaching toward a hot stove out of habit rather than actual intention.
It wasn't that she didn't know. She knew.
She'd known for at least two gatherings now, maybe three, the slow specific gravity of it, the way her eyes went to him first in any room without her sending them there, the way she'd started, without deciding to, keeping a small mental ledger of things about him — that he took his tea black but always made everyone else's exactly the way they liked it without being told twice; that he had a laugh that came out in two distinct registers, a polite social one for the group and a lower, realer one for when something had actually got past his guard; that he'd once driven forty minutes each way to bring her a specific brand of paracetamol when she'd had a migraine, because the servo near her flat didn't stock it and he'd remembered, from some offhand comment she'd made months earlier, that it was the only brand that ever actually worked for her.
What she didn't know — what she genuinely, honestly did not know, in the unexamined animal part of herself that ran the packing and the empty walls and the never-quite-signed leases — was what a person like her was supposed to do with a fact like that.
Renz Kowalski was the most stayed-put human being she had ever met.
He had lived in the same house his whole adult life, a house his grandmother had left him outright, no mortgage, no landlord, nothing that could ever be taken away from him by a lease renewal or a rent hike or a phone call from an agent.
He knew everyone's coffee order and everyone's kid's exam schedule.
He set up tables at six in the morning for a party he wasn't required to run, because staying and serving and being needed was simply the only shape he knew how to be, and it fit him the way a well-worn boot fits a foot that's walked in nothing else.
And Pip Sorensen had a duffel on the back seat, half-zipped, because some nine-year-old part of her still believed, all evidence to the contrary, that the truck might come back for her at any moment, and you had better be ready when it did.
You didn't hand a man like that a woman like her.
It felt, some days, like the least fair thing in the world — to let herself want the one person built entirely out of staying, when staying was the exact thing she had never once, in her whole life, proven herself capable of.
She'd watched, over the years, plenty of the crew fall into exactly the kind of love that seemed to arrive whole and certain, Cal and Josie the most recent and most obvious example, two people who'd found each other in the middle of a genuine catastrophe and simply decided, apparently without all the elaborate hand-wringing Pip did over everything, that this was worth staying for.
She envied that. She envied it in the specific quiet way you envy a thing you've come to believe isn't built into your own wiring, the way a person born tone-deaf might envy someone who sang without thinking about it.
She got out of the car. She left the duffel on the back seat, zipped, ready, the way it always was, and walked up the slope toward the tables and the sea and the whole gathered noise of the Brotherhood coming home, and told herself, the way she told herself every year, that this was just a weekend, the same as any other weekend, and that she was not, in fact, walking toward the one gap in the front row of chairs that a man with his back to her had left there without deciding to, facing the fire, facing the sea, exactly her size.
"You're early," Renz said, without turning around, because he'd have known her step in a crowd of four hundred, let alone forty — the particular rhythm of it, quick and a little uneven on the left side from an old ankle break that had never quite set right, a rhythm he'd have recognised blind, the way you recognise a familiar song from just the first two notes.
"You're earlier."