Grace's Table (12 page)

‘I don't ever want the kids to know about this. It's not how they see you.' Susan left at once and Grace never did find out why she'd called in.

Jack left soon after Susan that morning – believing, Grace guessed, that he'd contributed to the filth.

But eventually he returned, and Grace received him keenly.

Ada limped slightly on her left leg as Grace moved them on to the kitchen.

‘Ada,' Richard said, as the two women entered the room, ‘tell me who it was and I'll get my best men onto him right away.'

‘Whoa!' said Jaxon.

Jorja leant up against a kitchen bench, flicking through a magazine. She half-saw Ada's face from behind her fringe, and winced at the sight.

‘Oh, Ada. I had no idea how bruised and swollen you were. You poor thing.' Susan fussed with a kitchen chair for Ada. ‘Come. Sit. Sit.' She gestured towards the seat. ‘Or maybe you'd rather lie on the sofa? We can take you in the lounge, if you like.' Susan looked torn between pushing the chair back in and steering Ada out the way she'd just come in. ‘I could prop you up with some pillows. Bring you in a drink – a nice cup of tea, maybe.'

‘Stop fussing. She's fine.' Grace manoeuvred Ada towards the chair. ‘I've got a good bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. How does that grab you?'

‘Perfectly.' Ada accepted the chair.

Grace hoped no one else noticed the soft tremor in her friend's hand as she gripped the chair back and the cautious way she lowered herself into the seat.

Grace took the wine from the fridge and passed it to Richard. ‘Would you mind doing the honours?'

Richard cracked the seal on the bottle. He poured three glasses and passed one each to Grace, Ada and Susan; Susan's was three-quarters full, Grace's and Ada's less than half.

Grace held hers up and inspected it. ‘Tide's out a bit, isn't it?'

‘Oh, sorry, do you want more? I thought you'd want to take it easy.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, you know – Ada already being a bit wobbly on her feet.'

‘She's not on her feet now,' Grace said, ‘and mine are rock solid.' She worked the hinges of her knee joints up and down. ‘Do I look like a well-sprung grandma to you, kids?'

Jorja grinned.

‘You look as springy as a slinky to me, Grandma,' Jaxon said.

With wine glasses topped up, Grace raised hers to Ada. ‘To the stars,' she said.

‘Yes, the stars.'

Susan and Richard looked at one another.

‘Stars?' Grace said, encouraging Susan to raise her glass as well.

‘Ye-es – stars.'

‘Celebrity stars?' Jorja asked. ‘Which one?' She held up her magazine to show Grace a page covered in women with scant parts of their skin covered by glittering sequins.

‘No. The real ones. Above us.' Grace lifted her glass to the ceiling. ‘More inspiring.'

Richard looked troubled as he went to the laundry to get a beer from the tub of ice. Was it the ambiguity of the toast that had unsettled him, suggesting the start of dementia, perhaps, or concern about their alcohol consumption? Either notion annoyed Grace.

The empty wine bottles at Grace's house now were insignificant compared to the number of beer bottles that once accumulated against the back wall of Des's shed. They were stacked almost a metre high. Get me half a dozen tallies, Des would say to Grace if he knew she was going to the shops. Once he started brewing his own, an obsession that kept him in his shed for hours at the weekends, a balance was struck between those he emptied and those he filled with home brew. Sometimes during the week, Grace would hear one of the bottles explode in his shed. It would remind her to check how many there were in the fridge. She always restocked it if there were less than four.

But perhaps she was being unfair on Richard, perhaps he didn't think they were going senile or drinking too much. What if he considered himself their protector, just as Grace saw herself as one to her friends? Her toast might have set off a small blip on his radar; nothing more than a note-to-self moment alerting him to keep up surveillance.

If Bev had been here today, she might have stirred Grace's conscience again: reminded her that careless comments or actions didn't necessarily mean there was a lack of care, so much as a lack of understanding. There were many such things Grace would like to talk to Bev about, to have her wisdom again.

The last thing Bev had given Grace had been the recipe for her chocolate brownies. In some ways, Grace would rather not have had it.

Bev wrote it for Grace in a shaky hand on a square of hospital paper towel. Bev's eldest daughter, the one who had been the large bump under her dress at Claire's sixth birthday party, had not long left the room. She had just changed the coloured scarf covering her bald head, taking the old one home to wash.

Bev wrote the title
Bev's Brownies
on the yellowed paper.

‘No, keep it a secret,' Grace said.

But Bev ignored her, added a subheading,
Ingredients
.

Grace watched her friend's once neat hand – the neatest of any nurse she'd worked with – struggle to grip the pen.

Under
Ingredients
she wrote
½ cup dark chocolate, chopped
, then
¼ cup chopped walnuts
. At this point she rested a moment.

Grace watched without willing the tears to stop; they embarrassed neither of them.

Next, Bev wrote
½ cup chopped soft caramels
, followed by
1 chocolate brownie packet mix
. Under a heading of
Method
she wrote
Follow packet, add chopped ingredients to mix
.

Grace laughed when she read it, filled the room with the first sound of humour in ages.

‘No wonder you never told me. A packet – you cheat. You said it was a secret recipe from a Canadian penfriend!'

‘It was – once. Then brownie packet mixes came in so I changed to those. None of you noticed.' Bev was weak but smiled still. ‘A girl has to have her secrets.'

The brownies never tasted the same, though, not even when Grace bought the most expensive chocolate and caramels.

Bev had been right, without her hand beating the mix they were no longer special. And neither were they as sweet. Grace still protected that recipe, written on its original paper and tucked safely away in a plastic sleeve, as much to protect the memory of Bev as to safeguard those secret ingredients. She looked at it from time to time, had even memorised every letter of every word that had a quiver to it – the vertical line to the ‘l' in caramels; the horizontal bar to the ‘t' in packet.

She used to make them from time to time, just to pretend Bev was there in her kitchen. She'd even ask her friend's advice as she chopped ingredients or beat the batter, questions posed out loud. But the silence was cruel, so she stopped doing it.

10

A deep voice called, ‘Hey,' from the back door. Grace looked up to see Nick clattering through the kitchen screen, esky in one hand and a bunch of carnations in the other.

‘I'm here,' he announced, as if there was any need.

Grace still struggled to associate her first-born grandchild with the young man who stood in front of her now, a full head taller than anybody else, pressing pink blooms towards her. But she struggled even more with the fact he was Peter's. Peter, the methodical accountant, the one who ruminated over his columns of numbers just as his father had ruminated over the careful weighing of meat, each taking great care to ensure the balance ended up just right. Nick, on the other hand, breezed into Grace's kitchen in all his scruffy, clumsy, loud recklessness, esky banging against doorframe and cupboards, and sporting a new piece of silverware to his eyebrow and a t-shirt with an Andy Warhol nude on the front, the black and red claws of something tattooed on his skin showing just below the sleeve. His whole chaotic and colourful arrival seemed like a one-man carnival entering.

‘Happy birthday, old girl,' he joked, and lowered the esky to gather Grace into a two-armed embrace.

‘Thanks, Nick,' she said, and hugged him back.

‘How are you, Nick?' Richard extended a hand to his nephew.

‘Still breathin'.'

‘That must be a relief.'

Jorja stared, starstruck, at her cousin. Jaxon gave him a high-five.

‘Holy shit, Aunty Ada. What happened to you?' Nick's brow-piercing got lost in a fold of concern.

‘Mike Tyson,' Ada said. ‘This is nothing – you should see the state of him.'

‘Respect.' Nick gave her a gentler high-five than he'd given Jaxon.

‘Hey, Aunty Susan.'

Susan offered her cheek to Nick. ‘You not with your mum and dad?' She looked to the back door.

‘Nup. Mobile now. Anyone want to see my new car?'

‘I do,' cried Jaxon.

‘Me too,' said Jorja.

‘I might have a look next time, if you don't mind, Nick,' Ada said.

Touching her friend's shoulder as she passed, Grace joined the conga line out the front door.

Parked in the driveway was what could have been a large item of rubbish, but was in fact Nick's red Suzuki hatchback. It showed signs of having been a workhorse: small dents and scratches to most panels, the hood and roof dulled and whitened in places by a long life in the sun, and the blistered paint at the bottom edge of the driver's door suggesting rust. It featured recently blackened tyres.

Nick placed his hand on its faded roof and beamed back at the family. ‘What d'you reckon?'

‘Awesome,' reckoned Jaxon.

‘Looks like a death trap.' Richard bent to check the tread on a tyre.

‘Is it roadworthy?' Susan asked, looking from one end of the car to the other, face crinkled.

Grace watched Nick's smile shrink a little.

‘It's a beauty,' Grace said. ‘Will you take me for a spin?'

‘Sure.'

The passenger door rolled back soundlessly on its hinges as Nick opened it for Grace. ‘Your chariot,' he said with a flourish and helped her into the car.

‘Can I come?' Jorja called.

‘Me too?'

Jorja and Jaxon clambered into the back, and their parents looked on as though the children were being abducted by aliens.

Grace wound down the window. ‘Don't wait up,' she waved as they drove away.

Looking into the back of Nick's car, it was hard to imagine fitting three children there – the car wasn't as wide as Des's Belmont had been and her two grandchildren's tangle of bare arms and legs took up most of the seat. The nudging went on the same these days though, but with less meanness, and Grace couldn't imagine it would ever end in the same violent outbursts she remembered from Des.

‘Enjoying the ride?' she asked them.

‘Great,' Jorja said.

‘Does it go any faster?' Jaxon asked.

‘Not with you in it, mate. Your dad'd have a fit.'

‘Where'd you get the money to buy it?' Jaxon ran his hand over the cloth seat, flipped the back ashtray lid open then snapped it closed again.

‘Weekend jobs – saved nearly every cent. Took a while, but I got there. I know it looks a bit rough but it gets me to uni and back, all right.'

‘I think you've done very well,' Grace said. ‘Not many young men can boast buying their own car at nineteen.'

‘I'm gonna do the same,' declared Jaxon. ‘How old do you have to be to get a job?'

‘You won't even pick your schoolbag up off the floor so how are you going to do a real job?' Jorja asked her brother.

‘If I was paid to pick it up, I would.'

‘You are. It's called pocket money.'

‘Get real – ten dollars a week is nothin'.'

Grace smiled as she listened to this exchange. Yes, little had changed. She recalled similar conversations when the going rate was twenty cents a week.

Nick cruised the suburban streets; his greatest challenge was when he had to dodge a bag of rubbish that had rolled onto the edge of the road from the nature strip.

He was a careful but confident driver, unlike his grandfather who had been a slow and nervous one. Car journeys with Des that went beyond the local shops had frustrated Grace beyond any of his other tedious ways. She'd sit there willing him to press the accelerator further to the floor. He never did though, apart from the odd occasion when he had to overtake another, even slower, vehicle. And rarely did he take a hand from the steering wheel, unless it was to smack at legs along the back seat. Instead, he gripped it in two places as though it might try to steer itself off in another direction altogether. If the kids played up, he'd shout quickly, easily, so that everyone could feel his tension, palpable as a pulse inside the car.

Grace would offer to drive before they set off from home, but she'd always get the same response:
How would it look for a man to sit up front while his wife drove?
She supposed she should have thought him brave, for not taking the easy way out – she knew he feared the machine. But she couldn't get beyond his cowardice.

The slow pace meant family trips of more than an hour required a roadside stop – sometimes two – for Des to have a smoke. Grace would stay seated and gaze absent-mindedly at the countryside during these stops. Des leant against the bonnet of the car, one foot on the front bumper, casually taking his cigarette. She would listen to the tick of the cooling engine or the erratic buzz of insects. Sometimes, if a good song was playing on the radio – Johnny Nash or Neil Young – she'd turn up the volume and sing along, drumming her fingers to the beat on the door's armrest. The kids might get out of the car if Des allowed it, and they'd busy themselves taking potshots at trees with stones or foraging with sticks in roadside gullies, which was all the better fun if there'd been recent rain and they held pools of water.

After five minutes Des would bellow, ‘In the car!' and they'd come scuttling back up embankments or from behind trees while Des carefully ground his butt into the dirt with the heel of his shoe, checking it was all out once, twice, sometimes three times, before getting back into the car himself.

As Peter got older, his conversation invariably turned to cars on these slow journeys. ‘Hey, Dad, what d'you reckon about me getting a Charger when I'm old enough to drive? A yellow one with a black hood and side air-extractors and a spoiler on the back
and
the front.'

As Grace remembered it, he was still a long way off being able to reach the clutch at the time.

‘Nah,' Des said. ‘Bloody dago's car. Stick with a Holden.' He risked taking one hand from the steering wheel to slap the dash. ‘You know what you're gettin' with a Holden.'

‘What about a GTS Monaro then?'

‘Too powerful. Kill yourself in one of them.'

‘I'm going to get a Datsun,' Susan said. ‘A lady's car.'

‘Can't trust 'em,' Des said, ‘more plastic than anything else, being made by the Nips.'

‘Well, I'm getting a pony,' Claire declared. ‘A white one.'

Grace turned to look at Claire, sandwiched between her two older siblings on the back seat, and tried not to laugh. Her youngest child had thinned her lips to a stern line and folded her arms across her small chest, daring anybody to tell her what she was or wasn't going to use to make her mobile in the future.

‘Gonna take you a long time to get anywhere.' Des laughed.

‘Maybe she reckons a white one will go faster.' Peter nudged his sister who wasted no time in nudging him back.

‘How many horsepower you reckon it'll be, Claire?' Des asked. ‘'Bout four legs and a tail?'

‘Don't tease her,' Grace said, looking at Des.

Peter pushed Claire again, which sent her into Susan who pushed her back into Peter.

‘Oi,' Peter shouted, and pushed her again.

‘Clair-e,' Susan whined, as Claire was sent rocking back into her sister like the smallest of a matryoshka doll.

‘It's not my fault,' Claire said. ‘Peter keeps pushing me.'

‘Do not.'

‘Do so.'

‘Do n—'

‘Shut up, you two,' Des thundered.

Grace turned round to placate them. ‘Come on,' she said. ‘Be nice to each another.'

‘It's Peter's fault, Mummy. He keeps pushing me.'

‘Do not,' Peter said, and he pushed Claire again.

‘Clair-e,' Susan whined, and it was about to start all over again, except Des stopped it.

He risked a hand off the steering wheel, reached behind him and brought it down hard half-a-dozen times at random on the bare legs along the back seat. Most of the blows landed on Claire, an easier target in the middle.

All rocking and shouting was shut down in the back. The only thing Grace could hear was the restrained sniffs of Claire. She knew she'd be fighting back the urge to cry.

Grace reached her hand over the seat back and caressed Claire's leg, hoping she'd fallen on the spot where Des's hand had landed the heaviest.

‘Don't care. Still getting a pony,' Claire mumbled.

When Nick pulled back in front of Grace's house, she saw Peter's clean, white Statesman parked in her drive.

‘Looks like the olds are here.' Nick pulled the handbrake on and turned off the engine.

‘Thanks for the drive, Nick. And you're right, she runs like a dream.' Grace patted the dash.

Peter came down from the porch to meet them. ‘You're back in one piece then?'

‘I'd expect no less,' Grace said. ‘Nick's a very good driver.'

‘A driver's only as good as the vehicle he's in control of.'

‘Have you been here long?' Grace asked, changing the subject, knowing where her son's conversation was headed.

But Peter was never easily circumvented. ‘About ten minutes. I offered to take him to the government auctions, you know – help him buy a good solid Holden or Ford. But he took himself off and got this Asian rust-bucket from some dodgy backyard dealer instead.'

‘At least there's no question of ownership,' Nick said.

Peter guffawed. ‘Not now, maybe.'

‘There wasn't when I bought it either.'

Father and son locked eyes. Nick's face looked the more dangerous, given his stubble and glinting metal. Peter's showed his age: he'd lost some of his menace with his receding hairline and puffiness under the eyes. His words could still pack a punch though.

‘How could you tell? You didn't even know to look for a compliance plate.'

Grace reached out and squeezed Nick's arm, willing him to let it go. The muscles felt taut under her fingers.

‘You should be proud of him,' Grace said to Peter. ‘At least he had the gumption to go out and buy his own car and with his own money. If my memory serves me correctly, you were more than happy to accept your father's Belmont for nothing – regardless of how old it was or its history.'

Grace subtly propelled Nick forward. ‘Let's go inside,' she said, carefully.

Why couldn't her children be more kind?

Susan looked flushed when they got back into the kitchen and her wine remained untouched on the bench. Ada, glass empty in front of her, was nodding politely at Richard, who was enlightening her about the efficacy of one pain reliever over another. Richard loved nothing more than an ear to bend on the wonders of pharmaceuticals.

Jane's wine glass was nearly empty. ‘Happy birthday!' She clicked across the tiled floor on high heels to drape both arms and the glass round Grace's shoulders. The many gold bangles on her daughter-in-law's wrist clattered against Grace's back, and what she always suspected were breast implants pressed firmly into her front. ‘Sorry we're late. Bit slow out of the starting blocks this morning, weren't we, Pete? Work function last night. A biggie, as it turned out.'

Susan scraped the last of a salsa dip from its jar into a serving bowl. She banged the spoon loudly on its edge. Grace hoped the bowl wouldn't break too.

‘Well, you're here now.' Grace patted Jane's back – the biggie, she noticed, still laced her breath.

‘Happy birthday, Grandma,' Meg said from the table where she was colouring in. ‘If you come here I'll give you a special birthday kiss.'

Grace obeyed, bent down to her youngest grandchild.

Meg gripped Grace's face in her small hands, kissed one cheek, then the other. ‘That's how the French do it. Mummy told me.'

Grace smelt Jane's fragrance on her granddaughter's neck.

Stroking Meg's hair, Jane said, ‘She's a sponge, this one. Remembers everything I tell her.'

‘Don't bump, Mummy. I'll go outside the lines.'

‘You didn't tell me we had to be here by a certain time.' Peter looked at Jane. ‘I thought it was a late lunch.'