A Roast on Sunday (16 page)

“I can’t believe how many lights there are, there must be hundreds,” Amy was saying.

“Thousands probably,” Jack answered.

“Surely it’s a fire hazard?” Amy frowned, her pretty little forehead crinkling.

“I’m sure they know what they’re doing, “Jack said, and then he leaned his head in closer to Amy’s as if they were co-conspirators. “Although after the fireworks fiasco, maybe I’m giving them too much credit,” he added.

There he goes
again, insulting our town, Maggie thought angrily. Amy obviously felt the same way he did from the way she threw back her head and tinkled with laughter. Stupid cow.

Maggie wondered h
ow she could have even thought for a minute he was a nice guy. She should have trusted her initial impression. Blinded by good sex, that’s what she’d been. Ok great
,
fantastic,
toe tingling sex
, but still. She stopped just behind them.

“
Did you enjoy our little town’s Christmas get together Amy?” she asked loudly, and they both turned to her.

“
Oh yes, it was just lovely thank you,” Amy answered, “very charming.”

“Charming?
That’s good. The fireworks were grand enough for you?”

“
Sure, they were nice.”

“
Nice? Well isn’t that just lovely. Of course I’m sure it was nothing compared to the kind of events they put on wherever it is you come from, but we do our best. Where was it you said you come from again?”

“She didn’t,” Jack cut in amused.
“Something wrong Maggie?”

“Wrong?
No, why?”

“You seem a little upset.”

“Do I have any reason to be upset Jack?”

“I don’t know Maggie, do you?”

Amy looked back and forth between Maggie and Jack. The two of them were staring at each other and the intensity of their gaze was such that she felt if she were to wave a hand between them it would most likely burst into flames. She coughed, choking on the atmosphere and tension that was thick in the air.

“Am I missing something?”
she asked, when she was able to breathe again.

Maggie
finally broke off from Jack’s gaze. She had to, if she didn’t she feared she would do something to make herself look foolish, like throw herself into his arms.

“No,” she said
, turning her head to Amy. “You’re missing nothing. You’re welcome to him.” Then she whirled on a heel and stalked off quickly towards where her mother, father and daughter were waiting under a lamp post, watching her curiously.

“You ok love?” Dot asked as she caught up to them.

“Just fine thank you. Come on, let’s get home.”

As they walked back to the car she was grateful it was dark enough
so that the others couldn’t see the tears that welled up in the corner of her eyes and finally, like a burst dam, made their way down her cheeks and nose. She wiped them quickly with one arm and sniffed.

Then she felt a small hand worm its way into hers, the fingers threading through her own. She squeezed her daughters hand and
was rewarded with a squeeze back.

Ah
bugger Jack; she had everything she needed to make her happy right here.

Chapter
sixteen

Maggie barely had time to spare Jack a thought over the next week. She was so busy in her shop with the lead up to Christmas. From the moment she opened the door at nine until the moment she shut it again at six, a steady stream of cars turned into the driveway with people wanting to buy her soaps for loved ones, friends and in some cases, employee Christmas gifts. There were two nights she had to stay up past 2am making more soaps as she had run out of some types.

One afternoon she
bribed her mother, with the promise of a cooked dinner and a glass of whiskey, to sit behind the counter and man the shop. Maggie picked Willow up from school an hour early and they spent the afternoon at the lake together. Even though the water still had an edge to it they had a blast swimming and taking turns diving to the bottom to fetch more lake weed.

One night
, using Ray as their getaway driver, she let Willow stay up late and they made a night time raid of the town’s only supply of mistletoe. It grew on a tree that was located on the sweeping lawns of the town’s museum/library. It was difficult to harvest and Maggie only bothered at Christmas time. She and Willow dressed head to foot in black, which probably wasn’t totally necessary but which made them feel like Ninjas. They made a game out of it, ducking behind hedges and trees and crawling army style along the grass, until Ray, fed up with being stuck in the car and missing out on the fun, tooted the horn loudly and yelled at them to “get a bloody move on!” Her mistletoe soap was popular at Christmas as it calmed hysteria, tension headaches, nervous attacks and anxiety, all common ailments of the holiday season.

On the Friday Willow finally finished school for the year and they went to Nick’s parent’s hou
se for a BBQ to celebrate. Other kids from school were there with their parents, and a couple of the single dads flirted with Maggie as they always did at parent evenings and galas and such. But even though she had made a promise to herself to be more receptive to that kind of thing and to not say no so easily, she just couldn’t summon any interest in any of them.

Saturday night the four of them, Maggie, Dot, Ray and Willow, spent the night decorating the house. Dot had already put some decorations up earlier in December. Others
stayed out all year round, like the sticker of a snowman in the front window that was faded from sun exposure and peeling back at one corner, and the small ornamental light in the corner that had a plastic candy cane inside. When you shook it upside down it glowed red, green and blue and glitter swirled up like a snowstorm and Willow had been utterly transfixed with it when she was a baby. Ray dug the boxes of decorations out from the cupboard under the stairs and they opened them up and spent time untangling fairy lights and tinsel and restringing cotton on the end of sparkly baubles. Ray had bought a tree off a guy on the corner somewhere, and he and Maggie dragged it inside, leaving a trail of pine needles in their wake. They wedged it into a bucket with bricks to help it stand and displayed it proudly in the corner of the lounge. They had to trim the tip of the top off as it was so tall it scraped the roof.

“It’s a beauty,” Dot declared.

“Smell that smell?” Ray breathed deep, “that’s the true smell of Christmas. That and sweet sherry of course,” he added draining the small glass Dot had poured him. Luckily they all preferred a mismatched style of decorating, and so they randomly took turns draping the lengths of silver, gold, red, green and blue tinsel around the branches, and hanging a collection of homemade and shop bought decorations on the tips.

“Oh I remember when you bought this home,” Maggie said, her eyes misting over as she clutched a cardboard Santa that Willow had painted
in her last year of Kindergarten.

“
Yikes, not very good at painting inside the lines, was I?”

“
I don’t care, it’s perfect to me. Oh and look at this one you made when I took you to baby art classes! It has your little hand print in paint on the glass.” She sniffed.

“Are you going to cry over every decoration mum? Cause if so this could take awhile.”

“Cheeky. Only the sentimental ones.”

When they had finished, a few hours and a few more sherry’s later, the house looked like Santa’s grotto. With the main lights off and only the lights on the tree and the candy cane light glowing the room was
warm and cosy and magical. Tinsel glittered and the soft sound of old carols played softly on the stereo.

It was a truly wonderful night.

But even though she was busy and
technically
didn’t have the time to spare Jack a thought, when she did finally tumble into her bed, she would lie awake, staring at the shadows on her ceiling, and she remembered how it had felt to be with him.

Chapter
seventeen

Meanwhile, across town, Amy was regretting her decision to leave her job as a beauty therapist for a career change as Receptionist/Office manager/Vet assistant at the Veterinary clinic. Admittedly, when she’d gone for the interview she had taken one look at him and decided then and there that if she was offered the job she would take it, no question. But working for him was like paradise gone wrong. He was moody and sullen at the best of times, and apart from gruffly asking her every now and then whether he’d had any messages he barely spoke to her. Her woman’s intuition told her it had something to do with Maggie, the lady who’d stormed off in a strop the night of the carols.

Jack, meanwhile, lay awake for much the same reasons as Maggie. Th
at damn woman, he fumed, was annoying, frustrating and bewildering with her mood swings and childish behaviour, but by god she intrigued him.

He yearned for her
about as much as he was determined to stay away from her.

Chapter
eighteen

In hindsight Maggie should have known that bad news would shortly be forthcoming.

C
ertainly she knew something was up. From the moment she got out of bed and tripped on the corner of the rug, banging her shin on the dresser and watching in dismay as a large yellow bruise surfaced, to the moment she limped out to the kitchen and saw that someone had left bacon frying and small flames were licking at the air from where the hot oil had caught, she knew that something wicked was in the air.

“Dammit,” she swore, flicking the switch at t
he wall to turn the oven off. She quickly grabbed a tea towel and ran it under the tap, then wringing most of the water out she threw it over the pan. Then she grabbed another tea towel and repeated the process. Once she was sure the flames were contained she wrapped some of the damp towel around the handle and carefully carried the whole thing out the back door, throwing it down onto the grass well away from the house.

She
went to unravel the hose and found it all twisted with knots upon knots, even though she knew for a fact that the previous evening after she had watered the vegetable beds she had wound it up tidily and in a neat coil.

H
er dad popped his head out the back door.

“Ah,” he said, “Oops.”

“Oops? That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself? You could have burnt the house down,” she fumed.

“
Nonsense. No harm done. I would have been back long before that happened.”

“It was only about
ten seconds away from happening. Where were you?”

“I had to make an unplanned
bathroom stop.”

“Christ dad, next time take the bloody pan off the heat. Seriously, this could have been really bad.” She
finally got the hose to behave and turned it on, aiming the water at the pan.

Ray
realised how upset she was. “Sorry love,” he said. “I promise it won’t happen again.”

“It better not
. I’m not having Willow exposed to any danger. You start pulling crap like this and we’ll either move out or put you in a home, you got it?”

“Got it.”
He saluted then disappeared back inside the house. Ten seconds later he re-emerged.

“
Er, sweetheart, let’s just keep this between us, aye?” he fidgeted his feet nervously. “No need to tell your mother.”

Dot was famously scared of
dying in a house fire. It was the one thing that terrified her, ever since she was a little girl and had been woken one night by screams as her neighbour’s house burnt to the ground. Luckily, the people had all escaped, but the family dog wasn’t so lucky. Dot had loved that little dog and she mourned him greatly. A fox terrier named Dash; he used to meet her at the gate when she got out from school and walk home with her. She considered him one of her best friends. Ever since his grisly and untimely death she had been extremely fire safety conscious. The wiring in the old house was checked every ten years and every room in the house had been fitted with a smoke alarm. Ray knew Dot would most likely kill him, or at the very worst seriously maim, if she found out what he had done.

Maggie
gave him her most serious glare. “We’ll see. Depends on whether you pull any more stupid stunts like this.” Then something occurred to her and she frowned. “I wonder why the smoke alarm didn’t go off. We checked them all last daylight savings and the batteries were fine.”

“A
h,” Ray winced, “About that…”

“
What have you done?”

“I
may
have pulled the batteries out last time your mother went bush and the boys came round for poker.”

“
Oh for god’s sakes dad, why would you do that?”

“You and Willow were asleep,” he protested, “
and some of the guys were smoking cigars. I didn’t want the alarm to go off and wake you.”

Maggie rubbed her temples warily and wondered if it were too late to crawl back under the covers and start this day again in another hour or so.

“Just fix them dad,” she said. “Replace all the batteries and make sure they work and I
might
not tell mum what you’ve been up to.”

“
Righto. Thanks love.” He disappeared back inside the house again. She peeled the tea towels off the pan and realised they were beyond saving. Reluctant to throw them away she decided they’d be just fine as rags for her father in his shed.

“Ahem.”

Her father was once more hovering at the back door.

“What now?”

“Any hopes some of that bacon could be saved?”

“
Oh for the love of
…” She took a deep breath and counted to ten. “No dad. It’s completely charcoaled.”

“
That’s a shame.” He vanished inside again.

Shaking
her head she took a deep breath. “Give me strength,” she muttered. She walked over to the fence and draped the towels over it to air dry.

It was then she noticed how still the air was.

Not still like you sometimes get on really hot days when even the breeze can’t be bothered dragging itself out from the shady spot it was dwelling in. It wasn’t that kind of still.

It was more like the ominous still you get just before a
really big storm hits, only today there wasn’t a cloud in sight. She licked a finger and held it out just to be sure, but as suspected there wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. It unnerved her, and she had a horrible feeling that she was being watched. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly cold.

Back inside her father was standing on a chair and slotting the smoke alarm back into place.

“All present and working again,” he said. Then he saw her face. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said,
because nothing was wrong exactly, at least nothing that she could pinpoint, but she just couldn’t shake the ill feeling that had stolen over her.

Opening her shop, she flitted from job to job, but nothing went right. She swept the floor,
making sure she got all of the dust out of the corners that had been dragged in over the previous few days. But just as she had it all gathered in one big pile at the front of her shop, the door flew open with a huge gust and all the dust went scuttling back to where it had come from. When she stepped outside though, the air was just as still as it had been earlier, not even a single leaf was rustling in a tree.

Despite being inundated with customers every other day that week, not a single car turned into their driveway that morning. She walked down to the end of the
road, thinking maybe the sign had been vandalised or stolen like it had once before but no, it was hanging where it always hung, not a mark on it.

The letterbox.

She frowned at the letterbox. Maybe there was something bad in the letterbox. She closed her eyes and opened it quickly, like she was ripping a band aid off, and slowly opened one eyelid to peer inside. A pile of envelopes greeted her but flicking through them there was nothing to warrant the ill feeling she had.

Willow.

She closed the shop, calling out to her father who was watching Baywatch in the lounge to tell anyone who came that she would be back in an hour, and she drove to Nick’s house. Willow, lying with Nick on the trampoline, was alarmed to see her mother jump out of the car, flushed and worried.

“What’s wrong mum?” she asked, jumping down from the trampoline. Her mother gathered
her into a tight hug and exhaled the breath she’d been holding the entire drive there.

“Nothing
’s wrong baby. I just wanted to see my girl.”

“I’m almost eleven
mum, not stupid. You promised no more secrets remember?”

Her mother smiled.
“Right. Sorry. But I’m not lying, nothing
is
wrong. I just really wanted to see you.”

Willow studied her mother’s face and
could see that she was being honest.

“Ok I believe you. It’s still
a bit weird though, you just turning up like this.”

“I know, and
I promise not to embarrass you like this too often. Do you want to come home with me for lunch?”

“Nah, Nick’s mum is making us a pizza. Can I stay for that?”

“Of course. That’s fine. Just stay safe ok, and if you can’t be bothered walking home call me and I’ll come and get you.”

“Are you sure everything’s ok? There’s nothing’s wrong with gran or granddad?”

Maggie bent down to Willow’s level and put her hands on her shoulders. She could tell that she’d freaked her daughter out and she wanted to reassure her. “No, they’re fine. Everything is fine, I promise.”

“Ok.” Willow kissed her mum quickly and then climbed back up on
to the trampoline. Maggie watched her go, wishing as she often did that she could wrap her daughter in bubble wrap and keep her always by her side. She’d been fighting that urge since her daughter emerged into the world, eyes open and curious right from the first moment.

“I love you,” she called to Willow.

“I love you too mum.”

Maggie drove home feeling
happier with the knowledge that her daughter was safe, but still with the nagging feeling that a storm was brewing.

Nick and Willow watched her drive away.

“Your mum is weird sometimes” Nick said.

Willow sighed. “Tell me about it.”

“Guess that’s where you get it from then huh?”

“Shut up!” Willow slapped his leg leaving a red hand print.

“Ow that hurt!”

“Serves you right.”

Things kind of returned to normal once she was back home, in that customers started to trickle in, her father managed not to start any more fires and enough of a breeze sprung up so that Dot was able to get some washing dry. She had returned from a catch up with friends to find her best frying pan in a blackened patch on the lawn but with no one confessing how it had got there. Both Ray and Maggie had clammed up and were claiming ignorance, but she knew the truth would come out eventually. It always did.

So Maggie had just started to relax and think that whatever had been bothering the world that morning had passed, when she looked out
of the door of the shop and saw Geoffrey the policeman standing there watching her, his hat in his hands.

Her heart stopped beating in her chest and a hand flew to her mouth.
Her first thought was for Willow, and thankfully Geoffrey could read that on her face because he opened the screen door and stepped inside quickly, his eyes anxious.

“It’s ok Maggie,” he said, “I’m not here about your daughter.”

“Oh thank god,” she whispered, her knees giving away so she slumped back against the counter.

“I’m sorry I frightened you like that,” he went on, “people always assume the worst when they see me. It’s
an occupational hazard.”

Maggie recovered her voice. “So you’re not here with bad news?”

“Well now I didn’t say that, or if I did I didn’t mean it like that, I get my words muddled sometimes sorry, it’s always –”

She cut him off. “Geoffrey
, why are you here?”

“Oh right. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“Something wrong with right here?”

“Somewhere you can sit down
I meant, might be better. Are your folks home?”

“Yes, they’re both here.”

“You might want them with you.”

“Geoffrey you’re scaring me.”

“I’m not meaning too, I’m sorry. Look,” he turned and closed the shop door behind him and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED. “Let’s just go inside the house.”

Maggie could hardly walk, her ankles kept turning in and her bones felt like they
had become disconnected from each other. She led the way into the lounge where Ray was snoring on the couch and poked him. He rolled over with a grunt but didn’t wake. Maggie poked him harder and this time he opened his eyes grumpily.

“What?” he comp
lained. “What does a man have to do to get some peace around here?” Then he saw Geoffrey and his expression soured even more. “What are you doing here?” he struggled to sit up. “I haven’t been on the bike again, and if anyone says otherwise they’re lying.”

“Relax,” Geoffrey said, “I’m not here about your bike.”

Dot had been upstairs changing the sheets on the beds when she heard voices and came down to investigate.

“What’s going on?” she asked, coming into the lounge.
“Oh hello Geoffrey.” She turned to Ray, “have you been out on that blasted bike again?”

“
No, I haven’t,” Ray protested under her glare.

“It’s ok Dot,” Geoffrey backed him up, “I’m not here about that
. Not this time anyway.”

“Then what?”
Dot looked at Maggie and saw that her daughter’s face had turned as pale as the faded curtains behind her. ‘Oh my god is Willow ok?”