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“You wanted to get back with her,” said Dillon.
“I did. But she was busy at work. Your mother was struggling with her health, Mace, and I guess I hadn’t proven very reliable. She didn’t have time for me. She said she still loved me,” he dropped his chin and swung his face towards the grave, “that I was the love of her life, but she had her own responsibilities and she didn’t see how we could fit together.”
“Jesus.” Dillon turned in a small circle and Don’s gaze re-centred on them.
“I think it was the saddest day of my life, until now, knowing she’s not still around, and happy with her choices.”
Mace put his hand over his mouth. The sun, no food, too many people to talk to, he felt dizzy. The one thing he and Buster had fought about was drinking. Buster thought it was evil and he’d thought she was crazy, old-fashioned, overreacting, and the few occasions he’d rocked home drunk, she’d been furious enough with him to scare him sober.
She barely stood as high as his chest but she’d laid into him one time with a leather belt and another time threw his car keys over the neighbour’s back fence. He’d moderated his drinking until getting shitfaced every weekend wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore, and that was partly him and a lot about her. And now he knew why it’d triggered her rage, and he ached for the sting of those red welts she’d put on his chest and arms anew.
“You should know hardly a day went past these last forty years I haven’t thought about her.”
He turned his back on Don, fearful of being sick. He heard Dillon dealing with it and he tried to get the rolling in his gut under control, but his chest was so tight, the new suit coat two sizes too small, and the sun was so hot. He had to sit down, but there was nowhere. He stumbled over to a big Moreton Bay fig tree and leaned his shoulder against it.
Buster had been loved and loved greatly and she’d given it up for his mother and for him. She chosen crappy paperback romances over the real thing. He couldn’t stand it; he had to get out of here.
He reeled around and was blinded by the sun, making his eyes water, he blinked to clear his vision and staggered over a tree root. A hand to his arm, steadying him, then to the back of his neck, holding tight. The bump of Dillon’s forehead against his that made his eyes shut tight. His own hand to Dillon’s neck, both of them breathing heavily.
“It’s okay, dude. It’s okay.”
He tried to pull away, but Dillon wasn’t an asthmatic weakling anymore, those fingers at his neck dug in. “Let it go, Mace.”
“Fuck off.”
“Not happening. You and me. There’s always been you and me, and I miss her too. She was the best. Now we have to go do what we said we’d do. All those times she heard us talk, big talk, trash talk, then we got smarter and started making sense. She believed in us. She never stopped thinking we were going to run the world. You and me, Mace. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have the money, we’ll get it. We’ll get through this. That’s what we do now.”
He stopped struggling, all the fight gone out of him. He let the tears come, let them wash down his face and bring the pain with them, and Dillon stopped him from falling over.
18: Perspective
He was untucked and once he took the ca
p off, in need of a haircut, but Bryan looked happy. He wasn’t Mace, but Jacinta was pleased to see him all the same.
The fact she thought for a nanosecond Bryan was Mace spoke to the particular madness she was feeling. There was no reason for Mace to show up here. She couldn’t have been clearer he’d be unwelcome, and she’d given him no cause to think she’d softened on that; no call, no email, no catching him in the foyer, not even a simple private text message.
Bryan threw his cap on a chair and stalked inside. “I’ve been waiting for hours. You didn’t answer your phone.”
“Left it in the office.”
“That explains that then.”
He studied her, a wry grin on his face. “We never were a hugging family, but you look like you could do with one.”
“I’ll cope.” She walked towards the kitchen and he followed. “Can I make you coffee? Get you a cold drink?”
“Jac.”
He’d sat at the counter. He was suntanned and tousled and slightly overweight and the only person in the world who’d understand how she felt. If she could trust him. “Why are you here?”
“Tom told me.”
“I didn’t know you talked to Tom.”
“Yeah, I talk to Tom. He’s hard to avoid. I only have a voodoo doll of Dad, into which I hammer great whopping rusty nails—regularly.”
“It’s not working.”
