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‘I’m sorry, Franco,’ she said, suddenly tired of the fighting, and the tension this man added to the room by his mere presence and just wanting him gone, ‘but there’s no point discussing this any longer. I’m not going to change my mind. You’re simply not the kind of person I want to do business with. End of story.’
It might have been too, if Gus hadn’t wheeled himself back into the room a moment later, oblivious to the tension between the two warring parties, an old cardboard box perched on his lap. ‘That was Tom on the phone.’
He was frowning, Holly noticed, the worry lines on his face noticeably deeper, and for a moment she forgot about Franco. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Tom can’t make it.’
‘What? But he promised he’d be here tomorrow.’ A team of workers had been engaged to start in a couple of weeks when the younger vines would need work, but Tom was an expert who’d agreed to help her with their most precious low-yielding vines that she wouldn’t trust to anyone but family.
Gus shook his head. ‘Susie’s ill. Breast cancer. She starts chemo in Adelaide Monday. He’s sorry, but …’ He shook his head.
‘Oh, Pop.’ She crossed the room and knelt down beside him and enclosed one of his hands in hers. Gus had lost Esme to cancer twenty years ago when Holly was just a kid in primary school and Tom and Susie had been there, supporting him, at her funeral.
Losing Esme had almost killed him. He’d once told her that if he hadn’t had Holly to look after, it probably would have. And now, for it to happen to a friend … ‘That’s horrible news.’
‘I told him things have improved. That Susie’s chances were better now than they would have been twenty years ago.’
She blinked away tears. She wanted to hug her grandfather and squeeze him tight and she would have, if they didn’t have this wretched visitor, and so she simply said, ‘That’ll help, Pop. I know it will help.’
He nodded on a long sigh, rubbing his bristly jaw with one hand. ‘Yeah, but it’s gonna mess with our plans too, Holly. Where are we going to find someone else to help you prune at such short notice?’
‘Let’s talk about it later,’ she said, wanting to close down the conversation as she stole a glance at Franco, wishing that this stranger didn’t have to bear witness to everything that was going on in their lives right now. ‘Tom’s not the only one around here who can prune.’ Even though he would be nigh on impossible to replace at this time of year. ‘What’s in the box?’
‘Oh,’ he said, as if he’d forgotten it was sitting there in his lap. ‘I found it. Devil’s own thing to find. Come and see. Franco, I think you’ll find this interesting too.’
Holly followed her grandfather warily to the table, curiosity warring with frustration. She didn’t expect whatever was in that box to make any difference to anything, but she was curious what he’d found.
Gus peeled back the flaps of the box. ‘Photographs?’ What on earth was Gus thinking? For the box was full to the brim of old photos, sepia mixed in with black-and-white and some, more recent, in colour. He started spreading them out on the table, family photos going back decades and pictures taken at harvest or in the winery. Gus worked furiously, clearly searching for something.
But why did he think Franco might find it interesting?
‘It took me forever to find them,’ Gus continued. ‘I figured they were somewhere in the storeroom but I had no idea where. Your grandmother always planned to organise them into albums, but there was always something else to do. There never seemed to be enough time. Oh, look,’ he said, passing her one. ‘Here you are at the beach. You must have been all of three years old in that one.’
She blinked down at the photo in her hands. The photographic paper was thick and curled on the corners with age but there she was, sitting on her mother’s lap in the sand, the Holly of three chubby in her floral one-piece, grinning up at the camera with a spade in one hand, bucket in the other.
Her eye was drawn instinctively to the woman who was her mother.
Holly looked at her smiling face, touched a fingertip to a face she wished she could remember other than from seeing it in photographs.
‘Ah,’ announced Gus, delighted. ‘Here it is!’ Followed almost immediately by his handing it to her with a growl. ‘No, that’s not the one I’m looking for,’ and more fervent digging.
Holly took it anyway. It was a smaller version of one she knew well, a photo of her parents holding her as a newborn, one they’d had blown up and had sat framed on the mantelpiece until Holly at ten had decided it belonged on the dressing table in her bedroom and spirited it away one day.
