Just Not Mine (29 page)

Hugh woke to the sound of a knock at the metal door of the caravan. Christmas Eve, and not yet dawn.

The door opened with a creak.
“Time for my fishermen to shift themselves,” Josie’s father Tana called into the little space, and Hugh saw Amelia and Charlie stirring in their bunks.

“Right,” Hugh
said, sitting up himself. “Out in a flash.”

“It’s
early,”
Amelia moaned as Hugh switched on the light at his bedside, began to pull on his clothes. “It’s
dark.”

“Yeh,” Hugh said
. “It is. And I’ll bet Josie’s mum has a cup of Milo and a bit of brekkie ready for you before you go out on the boat, and that she’ll have something even better when you get back.” Based on the roast meal she’d provided the evening before, he’d have put money on it.

He was right, he saw when
Tana had declined his offer of help hitching the trailer to the ute and he’d taken the kids on into the house instead. He’d found not just Josie’s mum, but Josie, too, already in the big, old-fashioned kitchen. Not Milo at all, but genuine cocoa in big white mugs, a chocolate fish on each saucer, and a big plate of toast cut into fingers, a jar of Marmite and one of jam, and the inevitable Weet-Bix and milk, all of which the kids got stuck into pretty quickly.

“Mum,” Josie said from where she sat at the big rectangular ta
ble, sorting avocados, mandarins, and lemons from bins into plastic bags, twisting them shut with ties, and marking the bags with a black felt pen, “you’ll spoil them. Chocolate fish for breakfast? And here’s Hugh trying to maintain some level of nutrition and all.”

“Nah,”
Arama Pae Ata said. She was a handsome woman with Josie’s lustrous eyes and hair, her bone structure, too, softened by the lushness of figure Josie had dieted away. It was easy to see where Josie had got her looks. “They’ll need their energy, out there on the water at dawn. Besides, it’s Christmas. If you can’t spoil the mokopuna at Christmas, where’s the joy in living? Even you may be able to have a chocolate fish on Christmas Eve, my darling.”

“Or not,” Josie said.

Hugh sat down beside Josie, accepted a cup of tea from Arama with a word of thanks. “Looks like you’ve both already been busy, and the sun’s not up. What’s all this?”

“Gettin
g things ready for the honesty box,” Josie said. “Like old times, eh, Mum.”

“Oh, Josie was my little helper,”
Arama told Hugh. “On a stool at six helping with the washing-up, getting breakfast on the table by the time she was ten, filling the box every morning just like she’s doing today, taking her brothers to school on their bikes. I can’t tell you how I missed her when she left for Auckland.”

“Mum,” she protested. “I wasn’t that good.
Ask Rodney. He’ll tell you I was dead bossy, and that he wanted to chuck things at me half the time. You should tell Hugh that I was cooking breakfast because you were doing the midnight meal for two hundred at the packhouse. And look at me now, still having to get up at five. That would’ve been loads harder if I hadn’t grown up doing it. Funny how the things that happen in your life prepare you for the rest of it, isn’t it, hard as they seem at the time?”

“Or make you able to do what you have to do in the rest of it,” Hugh
said. “That could be it.”

“You said you helped your mum, Josie,” Charlie said
, happily dipping toast fingers into his cocoa. “You said that’s how you learnt to cook. She said I had to help you too,” he told Hugh. “And then Amelia and I could learn.”

“And have you learnt?”
Arama asked him.

“
Yeh. We make dinner all together, usually,” Charlie said. “And breakfast. I can’t do too many things by myself,” he admitted, “but I can do eggs now, and I do the salad too, most times.”

“Well
, that’s a good thing,” Arama said. “That’s a start.”

“Right, then,” Tana
came into the house, wiping his hands on a bit of rag. “I need a couple of keen fishermen out on the boat with me, and they’d better rattle their dags, because if we don’t get some hooks into the water sharpish, those snapper aren’t going to be biting anymore. We won’t have any fish for tea then, will we, and Josie’s mum will give me that look of hers.”

His wife swatted him with a
tea towel. “What look’s that? Here I am, got up to cook your breakfast, and you’re talking about looks? I don’t give you any looks.”

“The one that says you still love me,” he said with a grin and a wink for his daughter, “disappointing as I am.
I want the one that says I’ve impressed you, coming home with fish for your tea. That’s the one that gets me up in the dark.”

Josie finished shoving her plastic bags into a big pasteboard
box, stood up and hefted it. “Have a good time, you two. No worries, Dad always brings home the tea. And now we know why.”

Hugh got up himself and
took the box from her. “I’ve got it.”

“I carried this box when I was twelve,” she protested, but she was smiling all the same.

“Yeh, I heard. That doesn’t mean you have to carry it now.” He saw the look her parents exchanged, and he was just fine with that.

She had more surprises in store for him, he discovered a few hours later. After her two brothers and the elder one’s partner had come downstairs to join the others, after the kids and Tana had returned with four good-sized snapper, “and we helped clean them, too,” Charlie had reported proudly. After Josie and her mum had produced pancakes and caramelized bananas and bacon and sliced kiwifruit for nine.

“We’re going down to
Moore Park in a bit, meeting the cousins and some mates, chucking the footy around,” Josie’s younger brother Aaron told Hugh, pushing back from the table with a sigh of satisfaction. “Want to join us?”

“Sure,” Hugh said. “
What about the kids?”

“Let them stay here with us,” Arama said. “There are sure to be some cousins around.”

“And Mr. Anderson said I could ride the horse again today,” Amelia said. “I want to do that.”

“Right, then,” Hugh said. “
You coming, Josie?”

“Oh, yeh,” she assured him.

“Someone should stay and help Arama,” Rodney’s partner Charmaine, a slim brunette whose prettiness was marred by a petulant expression around the mouth, put in with a glance at Josie. “Never mind, though. I’ll do it.”

H
ugh wanted to ask exactly what Charmaine had been doing while Josie had been cooking breakfast, but it wasn’t his family, so he bit his tongue.

Arama
didn’t, though. “Oh, Josie’s earned a bit of a break,” she said easily. “She’s been up since sparrow fart. Go on and show Hugh your skills, darling. Bet he doesn’t know you’ve got them.”

“What skills?” he asked.

Arama laughed and gave Josie a nudge where she stood beside her drying dishes. “He won’t know what’s hit him, eh. You just wait, Hugh. You’ll see.”

He did see. When she was on the field with her brothers, her cousins and their mates, a few girls mixed in there
too, teenagers, mostly. When he was coming at her, not too fast, and watching her kick the ball away with a boot that would have done Charlie proud, then flashing him a challenging grin before jogging back into position. Or when she was lunging to grab the ribbon hanging from a hefty cousin’s waistband to save the try, with an effort that sent her sprawling onto elbows and knees, heedless of her scrapes and bruises.

She was fast, and she was fearless, and if he slowed down on purpose so he could wa
tch her dive across the tryline, slide across the grass with the force of her momentum, then be pulled up, laughing, into the embrace of her teammates—well, he was just a man, after all.

“Aw, mate,” her cousin Martin said, puffing up beside Hugh. “You’re letting us down here. Last time
we let you play opposite Bug. I thought you lot were meant to have the competitive fire no matter what game you were playing.”

“
Sorry,” Hugh said, his hands on his hips, grinning at Martin, then looking back at Josie, doing a little dance now that was making him laugh. “I can’t help it. She’s prettier than you. There’s a reason we don’t play with girls.” Because there were some flames that burned even hotter than the competitive fire, and he was discovering exactly what they were.

Another cousin, Conrad, was clapping Josie
on the back. “And that’s five more to us,” he said unnecessarily. “Put it between the posts, Bug, and you’ll have Hugh well and truly thinking twice.”

“He’s already thinking twice,” she said with a
saucy smile for him, then took the tee from her brother Aaron, set herself up, and took the kick.

The others hooted when she slotted the ball through, and Aaron picked her up in a hug that took her straight off her feet. “Haven’t lost your touch, have you?
” he said exultantly. “First to twenty, that’s what we said, and I’ll tell our All Black here, in case he’s forgotten how to keep score by himself, that Josie’s just got us to twenty-one.”

Hugh laughed himself. “I guess I know when I’m beaten.
”

The beer came out of the chilly bins then, and they were on the grass, and it was Christmas Eve, sun and beer and good mates, and Hugh couldn’t remember when he’d felt more relaxed.

“You know I have to ask,” he said, looking at Josie, lying on her stomach with her p
retty ankles crossed in the air—and, of course, no beer. “Bug?”

“My nickname,” she said, putting a cheek on a folded hand an
d smiling at him. “Feminine, eh. Awkward childhood revealed.”

“Because she looked like a stick insect,” Martin explained with a grin. “
All skinny arms and legs, huge eyes and a great wide mouth. Tagging around after the boys, wanting to play our games. And the worst part was, being good at them. I’ll tell you,” he said, taking another hefty swig of beer, “I was happy when she went away to school in Auckland.”

“Nice,” she complained.

“Because,” Martin said, ignoring her, “when she stopped being a stick insect—bloody hell, she was even more trouble. Us cuzzies had to have an eye on her every minute. Fourteen years old at the beach, and some thirty-year-old arsehole trying to chat her up, get her over next to the toilets. Can’t tell you how many of them we had to run off, eh, Conrad.”

“Too right,”
Conrad said. “A girl’s school was the only place for her. Or maybe a convent.”

“You make me sound like I was
man-mad,” she complained as everyone laughed. “I wasn’t even looking, you know that.”

“You looking wasn’t the problem,” Conrad said. “It was who was looking at you.”

“Worked out all right for her in the end,” her brother Rodney said, and his voice wasn’t quite as lazily good-natured as the others’. An estate agent, Josie had told Hugh, and a rapidly rising one. The one who’d achieved the kind of career she’d been meant to have.

“Still looking at her, aren’t they
,” Rodney went on. “The difference is, she gets paid for it now.”

That got Hugh’s attention
, and he could feel the mood of the group shifting a bit.

“That’s right,” Josie said calmly. “
I do. Hard to do my job without people looking at me.”