Page 9 of Queenslander
The girl looked skeptical.
They watched Frozen and ate macaroni. Rainbow could read thick chapter books and could spell words likeespeciallyandinconceivable. She practiced her recorder before bed—a show both hilarious and baffling—and slept with a stuffed unicorn in her mum’s bed despite being too old for that.
Ronnie wasn’t concerned.
At bedtime Rainbow produced a glossy picture book from her backpack with a sparkly photo of a blue morpho butterfly on the cover. Rainbow began reading aloud.
Later, Rainbow closed the library book, clicked off the lamp and snuggled under the weight of Ronnie’s tattooed arm. Ronnie inhaled the smell of fruity shampoo and farts, then sighed contented. She had the best daughter in the world. She loved this little dork so much.
This was safe; bedtime was safe.
Ronnie could love things that didn’t happen every day. “Tomorrow morning what say we go to the farm?”
The girl nodded, small body a weighted blanket against Ronnie’s side. “Can I ride Brighty?” Her child voice rising, light and sweet.
“Yes, you can ride the pony.” She kissed the crown of her daughter’s head. Absence makes the heart fonder. That’s all love was: an urge to protect forever things that didn’t belong to you.
3
FARMHAND
EIGHT YEARS EARLIER
Last week of March, end of the wet season. The gravel car park at the pub had flooded on one side. Nev parked there anyway. Inside, not too many people yet, a small crowd of regulars at the bar. No live music. If there was, she would be it. She hadn’t brought her guitar or fiddle tonight. She hung her wet barn coat on the wall.
The barmaid who was the owner’s daughter poured Nev a schooner: amber liquid, nectar of the gods, foam on top the color of teeth and eyes. Nev felt the question in the woman as soon as she sat down at the bar. Debbie Collins—pretty, middle-aged, smelled like jasmine. Nev had tried when she was twenty and Debbie was twenty-three, had been shot down, no hard feelings. Not a large dating pool in Lionheart: big families, everyone related, people stuck around.
“Nev Darlin’,” Debbie said. “Looking for another hand on the farm?”
“That depends. Who’ve you got?” Nev asked.
“Reg Madonna’s looking for work for his girl.”
Nev sipped her Carlton Mid. That name again. Debbie’s mother, Peggy, who in addition to owning the pub also answered the phone for the Lionheart police department, had helped Nev figure out the intruder’s name two years ago.
Ronnie Peterson. Only girl in town who looked like that. Reg Madonna’s baby mama’s other child. Had the mother’s last name but not the mother.
Pregnant kid with the cricket bat out on parole. Who was she without the baby and the bat?
“Oh?” Nev’s breath slowed and her palms began to sweat. She had resisted the urge to follow up on the kid after the break-in. It had taken her a year to finish putting the family room back together, and by then there was no family left to live in it. Her parents’ rapid decline had taken precedence over home renovation.
She hadn’t asked Peggy at the station for gossip.
The paper had printed the details of the domestic violence trial and name of the victim—Maude—over eighteen. Unusual case.
Juvenile sentencing was strange. Four years sounded like a long time and yet not a long time for attempted murder. Two years inside, two on parole.
“Why isn’t she looking herself?” Nev asked.
“You’ll understand when you see her. Not a lot of prospects in town.”
“She should be in school.” Knee-jerk reaction. Manual labor’s a bleak future. It gets old fast, like the people who do it.
Debbie shook her head. That was one thing Nev hated about this place, the casual disregard of higher education as a means to a better life. That rural mentality translated into a general lack of ambition. But who was she to judge? She hadn’t done anything to write home about since ‘94. Managing a thousand sheep bound for slaughter wasn’t glamourous jet-setting orsaving the world. Now that her parents were both gone—step-mother dead of an aneurism two years ago, her father of heart failure two months later—she wouldn’t know where to send that letter anyway.
“Bad kid, could be a hard worker,” Debbie said. “The Madonnas are a tight bunch; she’ll straighten out. The family’s protective. My cousin’s her probation officer. To talk to her he has to talk to all of them.” You couldn’t throw a stone around here without hitting a Madonna or a Collins. There were black Madonnas and white Madonnas, same as the Collinses.
Nev’s people, the Bickermans, had only been here four generations, not enough time to spread out. She considered herself the only child of an only child of an only child. The last one. They waited too long to have kids in her family. At thirty-eight, she was turning out to be no exception, but her dad had guilted her into freezing her eggs before he died. Small price to pay for the peace of mind of a dying man.
