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“Hi, Georgie.”
Georgie doesn’t speak until she remembers that Callum is there.
“Leonie,” she says quietly. It’s hard thinking of her as the suit when she’s standing there in gym gear.
“Congratulations.”
On what? Georgie wants to ask. Are they really going to do this? Toast this pregnancy? Stand around and discuss what good-looking children Sam produces?
Callum pushes the products across the conveyor belt, looking up at Georgie for her approval. Like he wants her to say that he’s the perfect helper. He gets nothing, because Georgie’s mind is a blank for a moment. She looks at the cardboard around his arm.
“A robot, are you?” she asks.
He nods as if relieved that she gets it.
She wants the guy behind the cash register to hurry up and stop procrastinating, to make up the price of the unmarked butter. Come on, Amal. Don’t grab the microphone, she wants to beg him, reading his name tag. But he does and it’s a couple more minutes of hell in her life.
“Can we talk, Georgie?”
Please no, Georgie wants to say. Read on my face that I can hardly breathe at the moment and every time you open your mouth, I can breathe even less.
“I know this is a long time coming, but I need to say it.”
While waiting for the price of the butter at the checkout? The suit’s workshopped this with her friends. Pick a place where Georgie Finch can’t make a scene.
“I thought he was looking for someone different, back then. Not something different. It was never to best you.”
When Georgie called a break, she never truly believed Sam wanted to walk away from her, despite some of the issues in their relationship. She knew it was about his job and life in general. That was why she gave him space, so he could sort himself out without taking their relationship hostage. Except she never imagined what it had done to his pride for her to call the shots. Sam had a capacity for coldness. He was passive-aggressive and too many things about Georgie were an issue for him. Her lack of ambition. Her reluctance to give in to him. Someone always has the power in a relationship, he told her once. She had told him in return to stop seeing life as one-upmanship.
The butter gets its price and the suit hands over the money, and the moment Callum walks away, to push the trolley back to where it belongs, Georgie speaks.
“Apart from my brother being blown up, talking about this is up there in the top three things that make me feel sick to my stomach, so I’d prefer that you never bring it up again because I’m not here to make you feel good with absolution, Leonie. I never actually got the turn-the-other-cheek lecture in religion. Don’t try this again, especially when Callum’s around.”
The suit doesn’t respond. She picks up her groceries and waits for Callum to return, and, clutching her shopping bag, she takes his robot hand and disappears around the corner.
Georgie would like to have been cooler about it. Flicked her hair back in disdain a bit more. Delivered it like maybe Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon in a movie, southern accent and all. But she knows her voice was wavering and her hands were trembling and her face was twitching with emotion.
“I can’t believe it,” Lucia says when Georgie rings her from the car park.
“Believe it. And she doesn’t even have a proper environmental shopping bag. Still using plastics.”
“What. A. Cow.”
She goes to the Union to speak with Tom. It’s five and she knows he would have started by now and she wants him to know about his father before he comes home that night. Doesn’t want to spring Dominic on him. Out of all the relationships, the one between her brother Dom and his son is the most fragile, the most heartbreaking. On a good day, she thinks that Jacinta and Dom will make it somehow, and that they shielded Anabel from it. But not Tom. Tom’s hero fell off a pedestal way too high and he smashed all over the place. If Georgie hasn’t been able to forgive aspects of life with Bill by her age now, she can’t imagine how long it will take Tom to forgive his father. Dominic and Tom were inseparable most of Tom’s childhood. The betrayal was felt deeply.
When she sees Stani, she points to the back and he nods. She comes around the bar and pokes her head in to where Tom works silently with a guy his age. How did he get to be so quiet? This boy who was born talking and who came from a family that never shut up.
“Tom?”
He hears her voice and swings around quickly, alarm on his face. Fear. Terror. Such despair. She knows that feeling too. Of believing that each time someone says her name, it’s to tell her that something bad has happened.
“It’s okay,” she says with a smile there. A tired one, but she watches his shoulders relax and he swallows hard.
He follows her outside, his trembling arm around her shoulder.
“You okay?” he asks.
She nods, reaching up and kissing his cheek.
“Tom, your father’s back.”
There’s a look of disbelief on his face, and she can see he’s fighting hard to keep some control.
“Where?”
“He’s back at the house, I think.”
Tom’s shaking his head. “Why? Why isn’t he up north seeing Mum? What’s he doing here when he should be fixing things up with her?”
She puts a gentle hand to his mouth. “It’ll be fine. He’s been sober for more than half the year, Tom, and he’ll be determined —”
He cuts her off. “You didn’t live with him,” he hisses. “When she left and I was living with him, he was determined every day.”
She doesn’t want to fight Tom. He’s too fragile and she doesn’t know how it will manifest itself.
“For most of your life, he was a pretty fantastic father and husband, and I think it will be very sad if you remember him for what happened when Jacinta left. I’d hate to think any of us will be judged on a handful of years, Tom.”
He’s shaking his head. He doesn’t want to hear.
“I have to go,” she says, taking a deep breath because she doesn’t know how she’s going to prepare for Dominic. “I’ll see you at home tonight. You knock on my door when you come up to bed because I’ll be awake until you come home. Do you hear me?”
He pulls away and goes back inside without responding.
Her brother is waiting for her on the front step.
Dominic Finch Mackee.
School captain of Saint Sebastian’s, with his stocky swagger that beckoned the world to follow. “He’s the bloody pied piper,” Bill would complain when Georgie and Joe copied everything he did. Dom, who got his girlfriend pregnant, married her, and dropped out of an honors law degree so Jacinta could finish hers, and never once in twenty years dared express a regret over what could have been. Dom, who made a speech on the Sydney waterfront back in 1998 when the Patrick company sacked their entire workforce in the dead of night as a threat against unionism. Delivered it with his four-year-old daughter in a pram next to him and his thirteen-year-old son by his side. But he could also be Dominic the bastard. He was a drinker, Dom was. Always had been. Enough to make him the life of the party when things were good, and when it got bad, enough to make him a bad-tempered bastard for at least three quarters of the day. So if his son grunted an answer back to his mother in a typical adolescent way, it was a shove up against the wall with enough force to bruise him. Until Tom learned to shove back and ended up spending most of Year Eleven with Georgie and Joe.
He looks thin, not the thickset build he’s always had. And there’s such a hollowness in his eyes. And he’s looking older. They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke. Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.