“Always.”
“Maude came in and signed the papers. She’s filing for the hearing to give you joint custody.”
Ronnie’s vision blurred. Her breath caught, pushing a little high-pitched sound out of her throat that she had never heard herself make before.
She started to cry into the back of her cast, unable to stop the horrible noises that sounded like an injured sheep.
“It’s all right, darling. It’s good news. Congratulations. We’re not there yet, but this is a good sign. Don’t get your hopes up too much yet. We’ve got a date. The bad news is, it’s in early October.” It was March now. October was seven months from now, in the spring.
Ronnie swore. “I can’t wait that long!”
“The magistrate’s office is swamped. They have a backlog. I hear they took damage during the storm.”
“Can we get on a waitlist or something?”
“That’s not how it works.” The delay wasn’t personal.
It felt personal.
Seven more months of walking on eggshells.
She ended the call and did a face-dive into the passenger’s seat, where she lay breathing hard, gasping.
17
MICHELANGELO OF MEAT
In late March, the autumn equinox marked the turning of the year for Nev. Yesterday, Ron had mustered the courage to ask the grouchy neighbor, Johnson, if he would sell her the open hectares of grazing land below Upsend Downs where he ran cattle, but he said no. This hadn’t surprised Nev, but Ron had been visibly disappointed.
Accepting defeat wasn’t in Ron’s nature. After moping around for a few hours, lifting weights and blasting heavy metal, she had cheered up. “He’ll change his mind.”
Last night Ron had brought her down to admire a row of gnarled pomegranate trees in the gully behind Johnson’s barbed wire. Ron had big plans for them. “You like getting attached to things that don’t belong to you, don’t you?” Nev had asked, rhetorically. Ron had smiled. What a dangerous way to live, with your heart on your sleeve.
Perhaps because she fell asleep happy, Nev dreamed of the time she watched the Tour de France from the Champs-Elysées in Paris.
The dream felt like a gift, a reprieve from the teenager with the machete and the cowering kids hidden under the floor.She hadn’t seen them herself, but other people’s memories had become her own.
She assumed they all died, but she hadn’t heard the end of the girl’s story, so she would never know. Women in the village had put the babies under the floor in an attempt to hide them, and the women had all been killed. What had happened to the babies under the floor? Did they meet the same fate as their mothers, the man with the machete? Or did they die of dehydration, later? She hoped someone had come back for them at night. Maybe someone had taken pity on them.
The pub looked half full: not bad for a Thursday night. In the corner a small stage held a drum set, guitar, fiddle and bass. She and Gunni drank a pint at the bar before the Wild Drovers played their weekly set list of classic covers.
Nev was lubricated and running her mouth. She saw Gunni turn with a bright grin and a “Hullo darling!” to welcome someone as a hand squeezed her shoulder.
Someone tall. A man. No, not a man, Ron. Ron bent to give their bass player a peck on the cheek, then squeezed Nev’s shoulder again. “Have you done sound check?”
She nodded. “Did you close the gate?”
“Which one? Just kidding.” Ron bent to give her a peck on the cheek like she had given Gunni. She was wearing one of Mattie’s black Alien Weaponry band T-shirts with the sleeves cut off. She was vain about her arms. Dopamine released by lifting heavy weights hours every day was a kind of drug.
Ron sat down at the drum set in the corner and started warming up.
Nev carried her second pint over to the stage and set it down between her fiddle and guitar, then pulled her fiddle ontoher lap. “How do you tell the difference between a fiddle and a violin?”
Ron was in a good mood. “I don’t know. How do you tell the difference between a fiddle and violin?”
“You don’t spill beer on a violin.”
Ron laughed.
