The Trouble With Choices Read online

  ‘Sophie?’

  She turned. ‘Just drop it, will you?’

  He held up both hands in surrender. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘You have no idea what I want.’ And she shouldered her way into the crowd gathered around the happy couple.

  Bloody Nick.

  Bloody Jason.

  Bloody men!

  Hannah met her threading through the crowd, took one look at her and said, ‘Jeezus, what happened to you?’

  She sniffed. ‘Nothing.’ Absolutely bloody nothing. That was the problem.

  Her sister shrugged. ‘Come on, then, we’re supposed to be bridesmaids, we better go wave goodbye to the happy couple.’

  Sophie was suddenly suspicious. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Nowhere. Just talking shop.’

  Sophie rolled her eyes. That’d be right. Hannah was vet first, human later. Mention the word ‘animal’, and Hannah would forget what day it was. Sophie squeezed her way through the crowd until they reached the front and waited while the bride and groom were kissed and hugged and blessed by what looked like the entire population of Norton Summit and the surrounding districts.

  She caught Dan’s eye first, saw his momentary frown turn to a smile and said, ‘Hey, big brother, congratulations.’

  He pulled her into a hug and squeezed her tight. ‘Thanks, Soph,’ he said as they pulled apart. ‘You okay?’

  Was he asking whether she’d forgiven him for setting his best mate to babysit her, or asking whether she was still tipsy? Not that it mattered. This was no time to take her brother to task. ‘All good,’ she managed with a smile, and pulled him down to plant a kiss on his cheek. ‘You’ve done well yourself this time, bro,’ she said, nodding towards the glowing Lucy.

  Her brother’s smile said it all. ‘Don’t I know it?’ he said as he looped an arm around his new wife and hauled her closer, pressing his lips to her hair.

  ‘Hey, Sophie,’ Lucy said, seeing her there, ‘thank you so much for being my bridesmaid. I can’t believe I have three sisters of my own, now. I love you guys so much!’

  Sophie blinked at the moisture in her eyes as they hugged. ‘We love you, too,’ she said. ‘Thank you for marrying our grumpy brother and putting him out of his misery.’

  ‘Hey!’ protested Dan, but he was smiling and looking down at Lucy, and she was gazing up at him with ‘that’ look again—the one that underscored Sophie’s loneliness like nothing else. Then it was Hannah’s turn to wish the newlyweds well, and Sophie allowed herself to be edged out of the way until she found herself squeezed to the back of the crowd. She stood apart thinking about what her new sister had said. ‘Thank you for being my bridesmaid,’ while her aching heart lodged and stuck in the back of her throat.

  Sophie had been possibly the crappiest bridesmaid in history. She could have ruined the wedding. If she’d fallen flat on her face walking down the aisle—if she’d picked a fight with Nick or even with Dan because she’d thought they were out of line … But it hadn’t happened and she had the rest of the night to be grateful for it. Lord knows, there was nothing else to do tonight. And she’d had such hopes for the evening. Such high, romantic and utterly pointless hopes for tonight, as it had turned out, given Jason had in all likelihood finished with her two weeks ago when he’d feigned illness. He’d just been too gutless then to tell her.

  God, she was all kinds of a fool.

  Dan and Lucy were making their final goodbyes. A handshake for Nick and a clap on the back for Pop, a big hug and a kiss for Nan, and everyone beaming. Everyone happy. And as the weight of the last twenty-four hours of disappointment weighed down on her, Sophie couldn’t stand it anymore. Even as a flurry of cherry blossom rained down on her, she turned her back on the joyful scene.

  There was a ripple of excitement behind her. A ripple that became a buzz and then a series of squeals and screams that managed to squeeze through a crack in her misery.

  She heard Siena cry, ‘Catch it!’ and turned in time to see a sea of clamouring hands and something flying through the air over the top.

  Before her brain had managed to connect the dots, a floral missile collided with her chest with a whump. Everyone clapped and cheered, and Siena jumped up and down and said, ‘Yay! Sophie’s next!’

  Sophie took one look at the crumpled arrangement in her hands and felt her heart crumple with it. Siena was in for a big disappointment.

  5

  Hannah

  Pop knew how to cut a rug. Or so he’d told everyone who would listen. He was doing his best to prove it on the dance floor, too, as long as the music lasted, despite his wife’s futile attempts to get him to act his age and take care of his heart and sit down.

  Hannah watched her grandfather bopping away to Elvis’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, while Nan stood nearby remonstrating with him, trying to get him to pace himself.

  ‘Who’s winning right now, you reckon?’ she asked Beth, watching on alongside, their earlier words forgotten. With the formalities over, they could all relax.

  ‘Right now, my money’s on Pop,’ Beth said. ‘He’s got a new lease on life since that bypass op.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s just hope it doesn’t kill him in the process.’

  ‘I don’t know. He seems in pretty good form tonight.’

  ‘That he does,’ said Hannah, chewing on her lip. She turned to her sister. ‘Beth, you know a thing or two about medical issues, do you think Nan’s okay?’

  ‘Well, she’s carrying a bit more weight than Pop is, and she isn’t up to his fitness levels, by the looks, but yeah,’ she nodded, ‘she seems okay.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean. Not exactly.’ She watched Pop twisting on the dance floor like he was back in nineteen fifty-five. ‘You don’t think she’s losing it a bit? Mentally, I mean.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Just today, when she was going on about all that baby stuff. She was so adamant.’

  Beth scoffed. ‘Funny, I thought that was you.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, so she just looked confused sometimes, like she’d lost track of where she was going.’

  ‘Oh come on, Han, it’s been a long day for a woman in her eighties. Of course she’d be tired with all the excitement, and that was before the disappointment of Sophie’s bust-up. Look at it from her point of view—she’d been counting on Dan starting a flurry of Faraday marriages and she knew damn well the next one wouldn’t be coming from you or me. I bet she’d already pencilled Sophie’s wedding into her diary, along with her babies.’

  Hannah bit her lip. ‘She did sound like she was counting on it.’

  ‘Yeah, and think about it. All that talk about women wanting babies to satisfy some deep-down biological need, from a woman who only ever had one child. She wants more great-grandchildren, that’s all, she just can’t come right out and say it. She has to dress it up in spin, and make it sound like we’re letting the side down—without actually saying that, of course.’

  Hannah had to admit that hadn’t occurred to her. ‘So, you otherwise think she’s okay?’

  ‘God yes, she’s as canny as she’s ever been.’ Beth turned her head back to the dance floor and nodded. ‘Jeepers, check her out now.’ Hannah did, and there was her nan, grooving it with Pop and laughing her head off. ‘Looking at the spark in Pop’s eyes,’ Beth added, ‘I reckon there might be some dirty deeds going down later tonight in Summertown.’

  Hannah looked at her sister, aghast. ‘No amount of bleach is ever going to sanitise my brain of that image.’

  Beth laughed. ‘You should try sex one day, Han. You might even find you like it.’

  ‘Who says I haven’t?’

  ‘Nobody. But then nobody said you had, so we all just assumed you were Norton Summit’s oldest virgin.’

  Hannah kicked up her chin, not liking the concept that her sex life, or lack of it, might be cause for speculation, though still not sure that her sister wasn’t just engaged in a digging exercise. In
which case, she could go right on digging because Hannah wasn’t volunteering anything. ‘I never realised my virginity or otherwise was a topic of local interest.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Beth, ‘this is a small town filled with orchardists and primary producers, true, but even so, we’re going to run out of weather talk at some stage. And if one sister can’t even confide in her twin …’ Beth arched a brow, the challenge obvious.

  Hannah swung her head back around to the dance floor. ‘So, you’re sure nothing’s wrong with Nan?’

  ‘I said so, didn’t I,’ said Beth, smiling at the side step. ‘What’s your excuse?’

  Hannah scowled. ‘I thought we were talking about Nan.’

  Her younger sister smiled. ‘Have it your way. Look, Han, I haven’t seen anything to think she’s losing it, any more than the next eighty-something-year-old, and I transport a lot of oldies who are.’

  Hannah nodded on a sigh, relieved with the opinion of her much more medically experienced sister—at least when it came to humans, that was. There was a reason she preferred dealing with animals. They came with neither subtext nor subterfuge. ‘Good to hear. In that case, I better try to prise Nan and Pop from the dance floor and get them home before we all turn into pumpkins.’ She looked around at the rapidly thinning crowd. The Elvis fest was continuing, this time it was ‘Always on My Mind’, and even Nan and Pop seemed to be enjoying the slow number. Hannah grimaced. It didn’t bear thinking about. ‘What happened to Sophie, do you know? I haven’t seen her for ages.’

  ‘Washing dishes, last time I saw her. Doing penance or some such, for getting herself blind before the wedding.’

  ‘Good thing too.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Han. Her boyfriend dumped her the night before the wedding. Of course she was going to feel a bit shattered.’

  ‘She didn’t have to get herself pissed.’

  ‘No, she didn’t, but there was no harm done and she knows she was out of line. And which one of us hasn’t ever done something we later regretted?’

  Hannah just sniffed and looked away. ‘I better go round up Nan and Pop.’

  6

  Beth

  ‘Why can’t we stay a bit longer, Mum?’

  ‘Because we can’t,’ said Beth, fastening her seatbelt, her mind still busy churning over her conversation with Hannah. ‘It’s almost midnight and I’ve got work in the morning.’

  ‘But we never stay late for anything because you’re always working.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yeah. As soon as you can drive or you can work and give me a day off, let me know, and you can make your own arrangements.’

  ‘Mu-um, that’s like, years away.’

  Beth nodded sagely. ‘Believe me, I know, so until then, I’m the worker and I’m the driver, which means I’m the boss. Okay?’

  Beside her, Siena gave a melodramatic sigh, crossing her arms as she slumped down low in her seat. ‘I just don’t know if I can wait that long.’

  Beth blinked as she felt an arrow from the past pierce her straight through her heart. ‘That’s your father speaking,’ she said quietly, as she headed out onto the windy hills road, her headlights cutting a swathe of light ahead. ‘Joe could never wait for anything, either. He was always rushing in.’

  ‘What was he like?’ Siena asked, not for the first time fascinated by the man who was her father, the father she would never know.

  ‘Well, you’ve seen the photos, but he had olive skin and dark hair,’ said Beth, remembering back, ‘and he had even darker eyes and long black lashes, and he rode a motorbike and in his leather jacket, he was sexy as hell.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Come on, Siena, of course he was. We were teenagers and crazy in love. Where else do you think you came from, the cabbage patch?’

  ‘We don’t have cabbages,’ her daughter protested with a yawn.

  ‘Exactly. So any more questions before you fall asleep?’

  ‘I’m not sleepy.’

  ‘No,’ said Beth with a smile, ‘you’re just resting your eyelids.’

  ‘Was he looking forward to me being born?’ her daughter asked, her voice as soft as the green dash lighting in the darkened interior.

  Beth caught her breath. ‘Yes. He was right by my side at your twenty-week scan and he was so excited. He couldn’t wait to meet you.’ But that was the problem. Joe found it hard to wait for anything. And this time, he hadn’t.

  There was no response, and as they passed under one of the rare streetlights between here and home, Beth looked over and saw that her daughter had fallen asleep, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. And not for the first time, Beth sent up a silent curse for all that had been lost, for the wedding that had never happened, for the family that had been torn apart before it had even got started. Her fingers curled tighter around the steering wheel as salt water leaked from her eyes.

  So unfair.

  Fifteen minutes later her headlights lit up the street number on the front fence that she’d fashioned herself from brightly coloured chips of tiles, and she pulled into her long driveway, thankful to be home at last. She tapped Siena’s shoulder until she was awake enough to walk to bed—her daughter was far too big these days for her to carry like she’d done for so many years—and Beth had a chance to change her clothes and clean off her makeup. But in spite of tomorrow’s early shift, she didn’t slip straight into bed like she probably should. Instead, she felt the tug of her studio calling, and the need to create. And it wasn’t just to make sense of the memories of Joe churning through her mind, because Hannah was mixed up in there, too, along with her secrets.

  In her sleep singlet and shorts, she circled the mosaic-topped table on the verandah and turned on the lights in her studio, sending colour popping from the walls courtesy of myriad artworks adorning the one-time garage: a fat fish in splashes of blue and green, an eastern rosella bold and bright, and a multicoloured lantern hanging from the ceiling. Benches lined three sides of the room, with an oversized sofa on the fourth, with a long narrow table dividing the space, much of its horizontal surface filled with jars holding coloured glass or beads or fragments of tiles.

  And there, in the middle of the table, lay her latest work in progress. A mother koala with her joey on her back, wedged in the fork of a gum tree. The young koala had been a regular visitor to their garden and when she’d arrived with a joey on her back, Siena had been entranced, and Beth had decided to immortalise the moment in mosaic. She’d mostly finished the tree and the grey-tan bulk of the mother koala, and was working on the detail of their sweet furry faces, the black button eyes and the enormous leathery nose.

  She got to work, sorting through black pieces of tile and glass to find the perfect ones, while her brain sorted through the conversation she’d had with Hannah, the conversation that had ended with a feeling that Beth didn’t know her twin half as well as she should. She understood a person wanting privacy, but this was her sister—her twin—and it was only sex. It wasn’t like it was that earth-shattering.

  Beth worked on, selecting fragments, discarding them, her eyes constantly weighing each piece. They’d been close as siblings. Peas in a pod, Pop had labelled them, and best friends as well as sisters through primary and high school, though Hannah had always been the boss. And then Hannah had left to study veterinary science in Perth, and Beth had missed her like crazy because the teaching degree she’d originally enrolled in meant she could stay right here in Adelaide. And then Beth had met Joe and her world had tilted towards a new kind of love.

  Joe was funny and sexy and hot-blooded and passionate, and it had taken away some of the pain of Hannah living so far away. Getting pregnant hadn’t been part of the plan, at least not so young, but they’d been planning on getting married one day, anyway.

  And then Joe had died, and Hannah had come back not for a wedding but for a funeral.

  Is that where she’d lost her bond with her sister? Because Beth had well and truly dropped the ball, quitting her s
tudies and spending the next year in a funk, before deciding that paramedics rather than teaching was what she wanted to do, even while she was trying to care for an infant. Had she inadvertently pushed Hannah away because she’d been so absorbed in her own misery? Was this the reason Hannah was holding back now, because they didn’t share the kind of bond they might have otherwise shared?

  Beth yawned, and stretched her arms high above her head as she surveyed the face of the koala she’d just finished and liked what she saw. Time for bed. She would be tired tomorrow, but she’d been tired since before Siena was born. Why should tomorrow be any different?

  7

  Sophie

  ‘Come on, Sophie,’ said Nick. ‘How about I give you a lift home.’

  The party was well and truly over. Sophie had stayed back to help clean up, though it was more about making up for her earlier behaviour than any need to hang around, especially when everyone else seemed happy to let it wait until morning. But now, the chairs had been stacked and the plates and glasses washed and put away, and there was nothing left to do.

  She blinked up at him as she wiped her hands on a tea towel. She’d been so busy focusing on what she was doing, she hadn’t realised Nick was still here. He’d dispensed with his suit jacket and tie at some stage and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, accentuating the tanned olive skin of his forearms. He looked like he’d been working. He looked—good.

  ‘Where did you come from?’

  ‘I’ve been outside helping out with taking down the lighting. Figured seeing you were still here, you could maybe do with a lift home.’

  ‘Thanks, but that won’t be necessary.’ It wasn’t like she was going home, it’s just that there was no rush to get there. Not anymore.

  ‘Sophie—’

  ‘It’s okay, Nick,’ she said, ‘Dan’s gone. You don’t have to babysit me anymore, I won’t tell.’ She saw the disappointment skate across his eyes and instantly regretted saying what she had. Just because she’d had a crap day and night, she didn’t have to take it out on him.