The Goodbye Ride (9 page)

His cousin grinned.

“Jesus you two,” Owen said, shaking his
head, but smiling anyway.

“Sorry, love. We’re just interested, aren’t
we, Mark?” Aunt Margaret had a big voice for a woman whose feet didn’t touch
the floor.

Mark held his palm up and called to Owen:
“Mum will want to do a reading next, see what Olivia’s shine lines say.”

Margaret slapped at Mark’s moon boot with
her Soduku book.

“Thanks to you carrying on about Vanessa
being my
girlfriend
this arvo, I was lucky Liv even let me in her door.”

“Ah. Sorry ’bout that, mate.” Mark didn’t
look sorry at all.

Aunt Margaret, playing peacemaker, changed
the subject. “So how is Granddad? Is Nance coming up to see him?”

Owen shrugged. “Mum said if she came up
every time a nurse said Granddad had
a turn,
she’d be up and down from
Mount Gambier like a yo-yo. You know how she is.”

Even when he’d had to come up to Adelaide
for the mediation session with the Parker family, Grace Carson cited the
four-hour drive as two hours too far. His father hadn’t come either. Mack
Carson didn’t think Owen had anything to apologise for.
You shoulda hit the
little shit harder. Broke the other elbow. Make sure as hell he never got up.

“At least she’s consistent,” Margaret said,
with a twist to her lip. “Least with my big sister you always know where you
stand. I’ll go in to see him tomorrow morning. I rang a few hours ago and they
said he’s settled now.”

“Did Granddad like the bike?” Mark asked.

“It was too late by the time I got there. I
can show him the Duke when he’s feeling better.”

“Not if you sell it to your little bit of
fluff and go spend another season humping polar bears in the snow.”

“Polar bears live in the Arctic, genius,”
Owen said.

“Penguins then.”

Owen picked his glove out of his helmet and
threw it at his cousin.

“Steady on you two. You’ll break
something.” Aunt Margaret crossed her legs in the chair, yoga style.

Owen knew that look. His aunt had something
weighing on her mind and it was about to be unloaded.

“So the two of you got a lot done today,
Owen?”

“I guess so. Liv has one of those
electronic pruners and she knows her way round with it.”

“And you’re
sure
she doesn’t expect
me to pay her for her time?”

Mark interjected: “She
is
getting
paid for her time, Mum. Owen’s giving her the bike, remember?”

“Not giving it. She’s buying it,” Owen
said.

“For fifteen hundred bucks less than you
paid.”

“I don’t want people thinking I’m taking
advantage,” his aunt said.

“You’re not the one they’ll think is taking
advantage,” Mark said, already ducking for cover.

Owen threw the second leather glove harder
and had the satisfaction of seeing it whack Mark in the back of the head.
“Dickhead.”

He pushed off the door frame and strode
down the hall.

“Owen?” Aunt Margaret called after him.

He stopped. “Yeah?”

“That human resource fellow from the
employment agency rang again.”

“Do I have to call him back?”

“He said to tell you he needs an answer.
They don’t have many places left.”

“Okay. Ta.”

He was sweating. Right now, a dose of ice
and snow would feel good; Arctic, Antarctic, or otherwise. Owen dumped his
jacket in the spare bedroom, stripped off his jeans, and headed for the shower.

Under the water, questions filled his head.

Am I taking advantage of Olivia?

He ruled that out pretty quick.

Should I do another season at Wilson?

That was harder to answer.

Last year the Parker family wanted him out
of Mount Gambier. They said their son didn’t need to be reminded of the past
every time he saw Owen at the supermarket, in the pub, or crossing the street.

“Jayden wants to turn a new leaf,” Mrs
Parker promised Owen at mediation, clutching a cup of black tea so forcefully,
the skin under her arms trembled.

“He’s a good kid. He never meant to hurt
Old Pop Carson—he was tripping out. He’d been hanging out with the wrong
crowd…”

Owen turned and let water rain on his back.
He’d heard all those excuses before. He’d heard them first-hand the night he’d
tracked Jayden Parker to that flea-pit rental on the west side of Gambier and
broken the kid’s elbow with a baseball bat.

“I didn’t mean it, man. I was tripping off
my fucking dial. I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry, okay?”

When he wasn’t the one brandishing the
weapon, Parker crumpled faster than a paper bag, tears mixed with the snot
clogging his face.

Owen twisted the cold water tap further to
the right and dunked his head beneath the spray.

He’d got about as far out of Mount Gambier
as it was possible to get on account of Jayden Parker last year, and he was in
no real hurry to do it again. Right now, spending time in the Adelaide Hills
seemed like a pretty damn good idea.

Spending time with Liv.

Chapter
7

When the radio buzzed at six-thirty Sunday
morning Liv was already awake, trying to determine whether her ride with
Owen—that scorching kiss—had been real or a dream. Finally, she rolled to the
side, batted at the sleep button and, when she couldn’t delay the moment any
longer, opened her eyes.

Riding leathers darkened the only chair in
the room and at the sight of them, a sweet little thrill sailed through her
ribs.
Real.

She dressed with a smile on her face.

The camellias had dropped more petals on
the kitchen bench and Liv herded them into a dustpan and tapped them into the
bin. After a cup of tea and two slices of toast with marmalade, she tackled the
cup and plate slopes of Dish Mountain. An hour later, she shut and locked the
front door behind her.

Clear skies had held during the night. The
air felt washed clean, the sky a bright foaming blue, and a layer of frost
sprinkled the garden like icing sugar. Even the radio Gods were in on the
winter wonderland gig—U2’s song
A Beautiful Day
burst from the speakers
and Liv sang as she drove out Old Balhannah Road, drumming the steering wheel
with her thumbs.

Three days she’d known Owen. Three of the
most exciting days in her life.

As she turned into the driveway, she wished
she dared ask Owen whether he intended to stay around. But sometimes, not
knowing an answer was better than hearing an answer you didn’t want.

That’s philosophical for you, Liv.

Owen was waiting near the shed, absently
rubbing the head and ears of the Border Collie on his boot.
Lucky dog.
The other dog chased her tail in the long grass off to the side.

“Morning, Lovely,” he called, as she
switched off the engine then emerged from the car.

“Hi.” It was almost a whisper, so clogged
did that single syllable feel in her throat. She tried it again, louder. “Hi.”

Owen jiggled his canine companion from his
toe and met Liv halfway across the space, planting a fast, but fierce kiss on
her mouth before he lifted his head and his eyes swept her up and down. “You
look just as hot in denim.”

Her hand closed around the smooth muscle of
his bicep and the part of her brain coherent enough for thought registered that
once again he wore a tee-shirt on a five-degree morning.

“Cool it, you guys! You’ll put me off my
Weet-bix.”

Liv’s head snapped toward the house where
Mark limped out of the front door. A small, beaming woman with a face of happy
wrinkles followed close behind.

“Come and meet my aunt,” Owen said, looping
his arm around Liv’s shoulders, covering her in his blanket of sunshine.

****

A woman’s strangled scream of pain cut
across the hypnotic snip of secateurs and a horror movie of severed fingers,
stitches and hospitals, flashed through Liv’s head.

“What?”

From out to her right, Owen echoed her
call: “What’s happened, Aunt M?”

Two rows over from Liv, Owen’s aunt stood
bent double, wringing her hands. “I’ve been stung by a bee.”

Compared to a severed thumb, that didn’t
sound so bad.

“You what?” Owen demanded, louder this
time.

“It’s a bee. It’s a bloody bee,” she
wailed. “I’m allergic, Owen. I swell up like a balloon. Please, love, I’ve got
anti-histamines up at the house. Mark knows where they are.”

“You don’t stop breathing or anything do
you?” Owen called, hanging secateurs and loppers over the trellis wire.

“Just hurry,” his aunt waved her hand at
him. “The doctor said I have to take the anti-histamines quick.”

“Shit, hold on then. Look after her, Liv.”
Owen set off for the cottage at a flat-out run.

Liv shrugged out of the Felco pack and laid
the pruner at her feet. “What can I do?”

“Just come here, love, please. Make sure I
don’t faint.”

Faint?
Liv’s nonchalance fast dissolved.

Squeezing through a hole under the canopy,
dodging over black plastic irrigation pipe so she didn’t trip and land flat on
her face, she tried to remember what first aid she knew for anaphylactic shock.
“Make sure you flick out the sting, Margaret. Don’t pinch it or you’ll only
inject more poison.”
Big help.

By the time Liv emerged into Margaret’s row
and spun toward the older woman. Margaret’s entire body was shaking.

“Margaret? Hold on!” Liv rushed up the vine
row. It was only as she got closer, she realised Margaret’s shakes were from
suppressed laughter, not pain.

God. She’s hysterical. Do I slap her?

“
Oscar-winning
if I say so myself.
You two are such a pair of suckers.” Margaret wiped tears from her eyes and
patted Liv on the arm. “I’m fine, Liv. I wanted a chat with you without my big
lug of a nephew around, that’s all. There’s no bee. Now come here and let me
look at you. Show me your hand.”

Liv baulked, still trying to make the
light-year jump from paramedic to palm subject.

Margaret flashed a smile. “You don’t mind?”

“No, I don’t mind. Just let me get over my
heart attack.” Liv peeled off her work gloves. “Does it matter which hand?”

“Some people say a woman’s dominant hand
shows more of her past and the other shows the future. I think that’s baloney.
It doesn’t matter which hand.”

Liv chose her left. “If it says I get hit
by a bus tomorrow. I don’t want to know.”

Margaret grasped Liv’s hand with fingers
that were wrinkled with age. First, she held Liv’s hand in both of her palms
and then she examined the back of Liv’s hand before she turned it over.

“What do you know about palm reading,
Olivia?” Margaret asked.

“I read a magazine in a doctor’s surgery
once that said if you have fat thumbs you’ll end up rich.”

Margaret rolled her eyes. “It’s these
little criss-cross lines I’m interested in,” she said, indicating across the
top of Liv’s palm where faint vertical lines intersected a single deeper
horizontal stripe. “My nan used to call these shine lines.”

“Shine lines?”

Owen’s aunt nodded. “Nan always said they
had a different kind of light. She said the skin around them shone. I see them
that way too.”

“They
shine
?” Liv stared hard at her
hand. Margaret’s fingers were tracing a section of her palm that looked like a
drunken doctor had sewn up a scar. “So what do mine say?”

“They tell me your life needs a haircut.”

“That’s way too cryptic for a Sunday
morning.”

“Think of it like this: sometimes a girl
has a few split ends and she can get a pair of scissors and snip them out.
Sometimes she can change her conditioner or her shampoo and that helps.
Sometimes no matter what she tries, those split ends just get worse. That’s
when she takes herself off to the hairdresser and says cut three inches off.
When she walks out of that salon, it’s amazing how her whole world seems
lighter.”

“O-
kay,
” Liv said doubtfully. Owen’s
aunt had officially lost her marbles. “So I need a new hairdo?”

Margaret laughed and let Liv’s hand down,
placing it gently at her side. “You just need to snip out the things in your
life that don’t make you happy, love. Concentrate on the things that do.”

Right.

“Speaking of which,” Margaret murmured
under her breath. “There you are, Owen love.”

Liv turned to see Owen jogging toward them.
He was gasping for oxygen, his face red.