Page 92 of Queenslander
Ronnie sighed in frustration. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. I still have valid thoughts when I’m hormonal. You’re on the same roller coaster I am.”
“I didn’t have major surgery on my reproductive system. You’re more hormonal that I am.”
“Stop talking about it, please.”
Nev looked like she hadn’t been sleeping well. Ronnie knew her friend had been staying up late drinking and waking earlier than usual, burning the candle at both ends.
“Lie down,” Ronnie said. The older woman’s shoulders and upper back were full of knots. Nev’s fingers were work-scabbed on the forefinger knuckles, rough from a quarter century of farming without work gloves.
Nev turned out the light. “I have to work in the morning.”
Ronnie closed her eyes, exhaled. She felt old, but not in a bad way. Had to protect Nev from Nev’s demons; working too hard and being too generous. It sounded like a beauty pageant answer.
“Old lady,” Ronnie muttered.
Nev’s breathing changed. Stopped. Resumed. Ronnie’s hand came to rest on Nev’s arm. After a while she touched the back of Nev’s head, scratched her scalp where columns of muscle from her neck met her skull. She fell asleep with her hand on the back of Nev’s head.
She woke up in the dark to the smell of sweat.
Nev sniffled, congested, an allergy sound. Nev didn’t have allergies.
Ronnie let her breath slow and deepen, let her chest expand with each inhale. Nev’s sadness would pass. Ronnie felt tenderness for her friend, the sort you feel for a past or future version of yourself.
When Rainbow cried, her pain was chaotic, urgent, coupled with fear and helplessness. Her daughter’s tears physically hurt some muscle in her chest. Child pain was sharper than adult pain. Adult pain was always secretly about something else, something that happened before, some secret hurt from ten,twenty, thirty years prior. Distance dulled it. Adult pain could be stopped and started. It came when one was alone. It stopped when someone else appeared, put back into the box.
The taxidermized barn owl observed from her perch in the corner.
Maybe Nev missed her parents. Had Nev been with them both at the end? Ronnie realized she didn’t know. What else had happened during the lost years, the two years they never talked about?
From now on Ronnie wouldn’t date anyone who didn’t want kids.
How would Nev fit into that? Would Ronnie tell her future partner that Nev was like a sister to her? That Nev needed her? That she needed the older woman more?
Would she still work for Nev a decade from now?
She was outgrowing the farm labor around Upsend, aging out of mucking the horse stalls and filling water buckets when there were teenagers for that. She could become a barn manager or a mechanic, make a higher hourly rate somewhere else. Nev had been trying to promote her, but accepting a raise was a commitment to stay.
She couldn’t stay here at Upsend Downs forever, much as she would like to.
Moving into Nev’s screen house down by the creek might have been a possibility before she fell off the roof, but had become dramatically less appealing.
“We’re okay.” She rubbed Nev’s warm back, hoping it was true.
28
PROCRASTINATION
The only downside of being a soccer family was that since Ronnie coached Atherton, she had never been able to attend Rainbow’s soccer matches for Gordonvale.
Where life closed a door, it opened a window. On Saturday morning, she tagged along with Reg to Rainbow’s match since she wasn’t supposed to drive herself yet. In early May, sugarcane flowered in the fields along the road to Gordonvale. She couldn’t wear anything with a waistband yet on account of the bloating, so she wore one of Mattie’s old Alien Weaponry hoodies and baggy gym shorts he had left behind in the dresser in his room.
She cheered when Rainbow scored a goal. Five minutes later the nine-year-old scored another, fist-pumped, then high-fived her teammates.
Ronnie cheered, hooting.
It happened again.
Unbelievable. Rainbow was a ringer.
