Fair enough. “Being busy makes you happy.”
“What about you? What makes you happy?” Ron asked.
Nev considered.This.“Passive income.”
Ron laughed.
It was the first day of spring.
The first laugh.
That was how Nev knew she was in too deep. Love made everything new again.
“Did you hear?” Ron asked. “Queensland introduced a bill to Parliament to reinstate civil partnerships.”
Nev’s eyebrows rose. “Oh? When?” She only asked to be polite. The bill would probably fail. Conservative bloody pricks.
“Mid-September. They still have to debate it. They might vote on it by the end of the year.” She had been paying attention, which meant she cared about it. She only paid attention to things she cared about.
“Took them long enough, eh?” Nev knew the younger woman expected a more celebratory response. “Hopefully they pass it again and don’t take it away this time.”
Ron ignored her cynicism. “We’ll get gay marriage after that.”
“Likely in your lifetime.” Nev couldn’t allow herself to feel anticipation after the whiplash of gaining and losing the right to have civil partnerships in 2012.
Progress would always be an uphill slog.
“By the way,” Nev said. Ron looked up. Nev nodded. “Thanks for encouraging me to go to Taylor’s thing. It was a big deal.” It had been important to Taylor that she was in the pictures. Nev had been the only relative there representing their mother’s side. Taylor had been excited to show her where she went to school and introduce her to everyone.
Ron looked surprised. “I told you it was a big deal.”
“You were right.”
The defeated look in Ron’s eyes was still there, but softer.
By September thirtieth, the day Ron’s online course started, lambing season was trailing off. The year twelve equivalence program at TAFE was supposed to take twenty hours a week, but it would take Ron closer to forty.
Nev regretted encouraging her to do this. Ron still bottle-fed orphan lambs every three hours at night. Ron insisted she could do the coursework after work, but that seemed naïve.
Nev read the homework out loud to her at the coffee table in the family room with the television muted. Wordy and convoluted, the assignments used three paragraphs to explain a prompt that should have been summarized in a sentence. Nev couldn’t tell if Ron understood how to get a passing grade.
Together they researched what homework help was available at the TAFE student center in the school library an hour away.
On the website they found a tiny link toAccommodations and Accessibility. Ron didn’t click on it and Nev bit her tongue. Frowning, Ron shut the laptop.
Nev pointed to the words printed on Ron’s shirt:Success won’t be won inside the comfort zone. “In school, were you ever assessed for learning differences?”
Ron’s face went blank.
Nev watched her try to sip from an empty water bottle and wordlessly got up to refill it. She handed the full bottle back to Ron and returned to her chair at the head of the table.
“I learned other things.”
Like how to be the Michelangelo of meat.
“Did they say you were dyslexic?”
Ron shook her head. No telling what they had diagnosed her with or if it was accurate.
