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“Sad,” said Dad.
“Are you sure it’s not worth trying again?”
“Mum!”
“Okay, I get it. I’ll stop now, but—”
“No ‘but’!” Jesus Christ!
“All right, if you’re sure?”
“Mum!”
“Okay.”
“Don’t fuck up, Jay.”
“Dad!”
“Mick!”
Dad looked at Mum and laughed. Jake threw his hands up. He’d eaten too much, he felt sick; and indigestion, disgust, or fury burned in his chest.
“She wants you to know she’s sorry.”
“Yeah, she told me. It’s friggin’ easy to say isn’t it?” He stood. He had to get out of here. “Thanks for dinner, Mum. I reckon you should take your matchmaking shingle down now. I don’t need your help.”
“See you out,” said Dad, glancing briefly at Mum. He leaned on the table to pull himself upright and shuffled up the hall with Jake. At the front door, he tapped Jake’s heart with his strong left hand. “She here?”
Before the stroke Jake would have toughed that question out, fired back some slick retort. But now, looking at his father, knowing how close they’d come to losing him, and how hard he was working to recover, he couldn’t fudge it. He nodded. There was a hardness in his heart that pained from not having Rielle in his life.
Dad moved his hand to Jake’s face. “She here?”
Jake nodded again, closed his eyes. He saw one of a hundred images of Rielle that had free reign in his thoughts, heard the music of her laughter, felt the sensation of her touch. “It’s no good, Dad.”
Dad folded his last three fingers back and popped his thumb out, forming a pistol shape with his good hand. He fired it against Jake’s temple, mumbled “Fuckwit,” and pulled him in for a tender hug using both arms—one tight and strong, one loose and weak—before releasing Jake, swaying slightly from the sudden shift in balance.
Jake reached out to steady him. “You can’t just use swear words, Dad, you have to use whole sentences.”
“A new
me.” Dad laughed. “And you?”
“I guess I have to use whole sentences too.”
49. Real
At home with the rental beige paint and the semi-regular ant trail, Jake knew he wouldn’t sleep. He called Bodge, woke him up, and wasn’t sorry about it.
“Where is she?”
“Mate, I’m not sure I—”
“Where is she, Bodge?”
Bodge breathed a flubber of air down the phone. “Look, last time I got involved in this, things didn’t go so good.”
Jake stood at the sink and looked out the window, as if by looking into the night sky he could find Rielle himself. “You could say that. I want to know where she is.”
