CHAPTER TWO #3
"Still doing the twelve months." It wasn't quite a question, and there was something in his voice she hadn't heard directed at her in a long time, something that might have been mild concern, or might have been the particular recognition of a man watching his daughter repeat a pattern he suspected, deep down, he'd handed her without meaning to.
"You always did move around more than I liked, growing up.
Never thought that was fair on you, if I'm honest, all those schools.
Your mother and I used to argue about it.
She reckoned it built character. I reckoned it just built a kid who never learned how to unpack a box. "
"You did what the job needed, Dad. I never blamed you for it."
"Maybe not. Doesn't mean it didn't cost you something.
" Another pause, the television murmuring on in the background, and then, quieter, in the closest thing to an observation her father had ever offered her across three decades of a relationship built more on logistics than feeling, "Nine years in that town now, though, isn't it.
Maybe it's alright to unpack a box or two, love. Just a thought. Not having a go."
"How's Mum?" Pip asked, mostly to shift the conversation somewhere less exposed, though the question carried its own particular weight.
"Same as ever. Bought a new set of curtains for the place in Dubbo last month, told me she liked the pattern too much to ever move again.
" Her father's voice carried something wry in it, the specific fondness of thirty years married to a woman who'd only settled, properly, once the moving had stopped being required of her.
"Funny, watching her finally put roots down now that there's no job forcing us anywhere.
Took her a good while to trust that the roots would actually hold. "
"Maybe that runs in the family too, then. Not just the leaving."
"Maybe it does," her father said, something almost hopeful in it. "Be good to see you do the same, love, whenever you're ready for it. No rush from me. Just glad to hear you're thinking about it at all."
The call ended a few minutes later on its usual practical notes — was her car running alright, did she need anything sent up, he'd ring again soon — and Pip stood there in the thinning morning light with the phone warm against her ear, the chair she'd just set down empty in front of her, front row, facing the fire, and thought about the strange mirrored shape of her own life and Renz's, two people raised in completely different households who'd somehow arrived at the same careful, defended place from opposite directions — him taught that he was only as good as what he did for people, her taught that nowhere was worth unpacking for, and both of them, without ever discussing it, spending years circling the same unclaimed chair because neither one quite believed they were allowed to simply sit down in a life and stay.
She put the phone away. Down the slope, more cars were arriving, and Renz was already moving toward them with a tray of coffee balanced in one hand, and she went to help him, because that, at least, she'd always known how to do.
? ? ?
She remembered, watching him now, the first time she'd ever seen him — four years back, her first gathering, dragged along by Dom as an afterthought plus-one to a work crew she'd barely known, standing at the edge of the car park working up the nerve to walk into a crowd of forty strangers who all seemed to know each other's whole histories.
She'd been calculating, in the particular anxious arithmetic she always ran at unfamiliar gatherings, exactly how long she'd need to stay before leaving wouldn't look rude, when a bloke she didn't know had simply appeared with a coffee, unprompted, made exactly the way she'd have made it herself if anyone had bothered asking, and handed it over with nothing more than "You looked like you could use one," and gone back to whatever he'd been doing before she could even properly thank him.
She'd asked Dom about him later. That's Renz, Dom had said, in the tone you use for a fact so obvious it barely needed explaining.
He does that. Notices things. You'll get used to it.
She hadn't gotten used to it, not exactly — had instead spent three subsequent gatherings quietly cataloguing every small unasked-for kindness he handed out to virtually everyone on the headland, and had felt, somewhere in the second year, the specific unwelcome recognition of wanting one of those kindnesses to mean something more than it apparently meant to everyone else who received one.
She hadn't said anything, of course. Saying things had never been her strong suit, not when the thing in question involved staying rather than leaving, wanting rather than departing cleanly before the wanting could cost her anything.
She'd simply kept coming back, year after year, telling herself it was for the crew, for Dom, for the general easy pleasure of a gathering that asked nothing of her except her presence, and had let four years accumulate around a truth she'd never once said out loud where either of them could hear the whole shape of it.