No one in the stands acted surprised. Reg clapped, but he didn’t jump up and down or throw his hat on the ground the way she expected he would if he was as shocked as she was. Why had no one told her how fast Rainbow was? Or that she was the star player on her team?
“Dad! Rainbow’s a ringer!”
Rainbow’s footwork was clean—she controlled the ball whenever her boot made contact with it. “How’d she get that good? Her coach is terrible.”
Reg squeezed her shoulder, grinning. “All those lessons you gave her. It’s a Madonna thing. You were like that at her age.”
She didn’t know how to feel about this revelation. Her daughter was a whole other person on the pitch: confident and bossy, ordering her teammates to get open, pointing them to where they needed to go in order for her to pass to them. Rainbow looked like her tiny clone, except for the fact that Rainbow’s ponytail was high and had a bow in it.
Sun shining, freshly-cut Bermuda grass, happy crowd, happy daughter.This feeling, bloody hell...Better than anything she could have imagined when she was fifteen.
What a perfect day…
As that thought crossed her mind, she noticed Brad Collins in the stands on the other side, cheering for the Lionheart girls with his wife and twelve-year-old son. His nine-year-old daughter, Lacey, was on the field playing for Lionheart.
He flashed her a double thumbs up.
She ignored him.
Beside him in the stands, his aunt Debbie and grandmother Peggy clapped. They were cheering for Rainbow.
Ignore him…
Inside the pocket of her hoodie her phone vibrated—incoming call from Maude. She hesitated for a moment, looking down at the screen, before she answered. “How ya goin’?”
“Where are you?”
She squinted against the sun. “At Rainbow’s game. What’s up?”
“I heard from your lawyer.”
Ronnie swallowed. She shifted on the hard bench, suddenly uncomfortable.
“You’re doing that thing you do. You’re avoiding talking about this,” Maude accused in a light voice.
Next to her, her dad ate peanuts and dropped the shells.
She cupped her hand around the phone. “I’m listening.”
“We need to have a sit-down with her. Who’s paying her bill? It better not be me.”
“I am.”
“On your salary?”
Ronnie snorted.As if tattooing paid better…“Did you talk to her? What did she say?”
“I met with her at her office. She seems nice. She walked me through everything I have to do and what would change.”
When will the other shoe drop…
On the other end of the line Maude’s high voice sounded relaxed. When she was in a good mood, her rural Queensland accent all but disappeared and she sounded urban, like a woman from Sydney. “Can you handle this right now? Are you emotionally mature enough and financially stable enough to take care of a human being? You can’t even take care of yourself. You’re a mess.”
Ronnie swore inwardly.
Maude continued. “But Rainbow adores you, and she trusts you. She thinks you’re god. You’ve always been so good with her. I keep expecting you to stuff it up, but you haven’t. Not with her, anyway. Having two supportive, loving parents would be better for her in the long term.”
“Thank you? I think so.” Maybe this bullet was going wide. She got up and walked down the grandstands.
