Nev ran her hand through short, wet hair. “I don’t lose sleep over it. It’s not one of the top ten things I lose sleep over. There’s nothing I can do about it.” Ronnie knew about white noise, how it faded into the background. You get used to not knowing.
“It’s not the death sentence it used to be.” A white T-shirt was a good look for Nev.
“I wish you didn’t have to deal with this.”
“Everyone has something.”
“Carpe Diem, right?”
“I happen to like living alone.”
“You get what I’m saying though? You’re a catch. Seriously.”
Nev’s ears turned pink. “Enough.”
“You should go on dates. If not with me, with someone else. Put yourself out there.”
“I’d rather not.”
“You want to end up like Kazi?”
“Best-case scenario.”
“You’re not an old man.”
“Not yet.”
“I want to be an upstanding member of the community, like my dad. I want to stand for something. I want people to know who I am, and faces to light up when I walk into a business downtown. I want to be the one people call when shit hits the fan. I want to get married and have more kids.” Ronnie hadn’t meant to say that, but realized it was true. “I want a home like my dad and Blaise’s place, with open doors and relatives coming and going, but with fewer wallabies.” She wanted to be a leader. An all-around decent, regular bloke. Unpretentious. Aggressively middle class, with thick skin and good humor for armor.
Nev parked in front of Stone House. “Sounds like a plan for you.” She patted the front pocket of her shirt where Ronnie knew she used to keep an emergency cigarette, but apparently there was none.
Ronnie rested her hand on the knee of Nev’s sweatpants. “What about you? What do you want?”
Nev hesitated. “I don’t know, Dain’y. I guess I’d like to be the person you think I am.” She parked in front of Stone House, got out and shut the door.
44
SINGLE PEOPLE
The morning before Peggy’s wedding, Ronnie woke damp with dew, serenaded by cockatoos, riflebirds, bowerbirds, chowchilla, and scrubwren.
Before she opened her eyes, she knew where she was from the sound of running water shushing in rills over rocks, and from the smell. Moldy wet leaf detritus, rotting logs, tree perspiration, fresh wood shavings. If her mother was here, she would be able to identify each tree species Ronnie had milled into boards from the scent.
She opened her eyes and sat up in her tent. Outside, a clearing lay shaded and hidden between silent ferns and mossy stones.
Behind the horse barn at Upsend Downs, the blue quandong sapling had grown since they planted it six months ago. Someone had hammered metal t-posts around it and strung chicken wire to save it from the slasher. No one but Nev would have thought of that. No one else knew it was there.
Tracey Chapman on the radio. Honeybees in the clover, grass gone to seed glowing backlit in the distance. Golden lawn, dustyhaze, blue mountains, cerulean sky. Barney must see it when he mowed the nursery. What did he think when he saw it—a lone sapling on an otherwise barren hillside that rolled down into a wet ditch? The boss was not prone to whimsy or sentimentalism on the public side of the farm.
The quandong was now as tall as her chest. She pinched it gently near the top where it was no more than a leggy twig, careful not to damage it, unlike the other thing, the thing that came before. She was irrationally fond of it, was glad they had planted it here where no one else would see. Someday it would be a shade tree. It would look like it had always been there.
If anyone saw Ronnie she would blush like a kid caught misbehaving. It was always a mistake to become irrationally attached to things.
Nev seemed committed to protecting the quandong if the fence was any indication. Would she plant a new one if this one shriveled and turned brown? Ronnie suspected the older woman would replace it without telling her, like a parent replacing a beloved goldfish or budgie. Did that make it immortal? Would there always be an iteration of it here as long as Nev was alive?
Ronnie wanted to be that type of person—tending a perpetual flame for no reason other than that it seemed like the right thing to do.
The ectopic might have been her child but the tree was Nev’s.
