Inconsolable (Love Triumphs 2)

“Then I’ll stay with you. My shift is over. Someone else is rostered on for the next stop.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Yeah. I do. I won’t hang with you. I’ll go over there,” he pointed to a low brick fence he could sit on. “I’ll just wait till road service gets here.” They stared at each other. “I’ve just totally creeped you out, haven’t I?” He sighed. He had nice eyes and an open face. He was a charity volunteer, he probably wasn’t a threat. “That was like the opposite of what I intended.”

The truck was idling and the driver was watching them. Foley got out of the car. “I’ll be fine. I can lock the car.”

“Mark, are you coming?”

He turned back to the truck. “Wait, Ange.” He looked at Foley. “Come with us, we can ask about your guy at the next stop.”

She shook her head. ?

?He’s long gone.”

“You never know.”

She put her hand over her face. “Oh hell, don’t encourage me.”

He grinned. “Seriously, this is a bad place for you to wait alone. The deal is either come with us, or I’ll wait with you, but you should ask the girls if they think I’m the next backpacker murderer or not.”

“Mark!”

Foley looked at Mark, then at her car. “Do you think it’s safe to leave it here?” Mark had trouble choosing an expression, his face settled on neutral with a chance of smirk. Foley laughed. He was kind of cute. “Say what you were going to say.”

He laughed. “No one is stealing that car.”

She rode in the food truck for the rest of the night, talking to the homeless who came for a meal, handing out water bottles, and laughing with Mark, Sarah, Angela and the other volunteers who came and went.

Mark hung out, even though his shift was over. After the second stop she gave up asking about Drum, Enid’s words running through her head.

If he were a decent man, he would be worried about her.

32: New Rules

It was a holiday town but it wasn’t yet holiday season and there weren’t any caves, so Drum bought an old tent. It was the fifth town he’d stopped at and it would do. He was bone tired of wandering, searching for things he’d left behind, Foley and his peace of mind chief among them.

He couldn’t think about Foley. It wrecked him to remember her face when he kissed her goodbye, to recall the sob she killed short and the scrape of her nails on the back of his hand as he pulled away. Whenever he thought about her, he went back to reciting the victim’s names. He’d been reciting a lot. He never missed a name.

If he’d been in hiding on the cliff, it felt like now he was on the run, and until he found a new edge to pull him up, give him focus, he floundered. He couldn’t settle. He lost his appetite and his sleep pattern was worse than ever, disturbed by old dreams and worried by new ones, all of them so tissue thin by daylight they burned off, leaving him dazed.

The tent was old and clunky, but he modified it with another tarp and fashioned himself a home on the far edge of an abandoned caravan park. The park was slated for redevelopment and the property was fenced off, but the amenities block was still functional and he had the place to himself. It was a good situation in a tolerant town.

But there was no work, no industry other than retirement and golf. He had two visits from the cops who tried to move him on half-heartedly. The local teenage bully, Jayden, and his pack of dickhead mates messed with his tent twice, but he left nothing of value in it so it didn’t matter. The problem was he couldn’t feed himself so he was forced to use his cash. It was better than being on welfare, but it irked him all the same, to need the earnings from his NCR shareholding when he’d done without them before. It felt like he was stealing from the charities the trust funded. Not that that made a lot of sense. He’d been the bum with a million dollar address at his disposal, how was it worse to be the bum who used a bank-teller machine card?

He should’ve bought Foley a new car before he lit out.

That was another mistake. The third one that last day. Not buying her a car, hurting her, avoiding Alan.

He should’ve whistled when he came up the stairs, cooked Alan bad eggs, spread butter on his toast and shrugged when he asked for jam. He should’ve made sure Foley knew it was okay to let Alan in the house, by showing her it was.

Alan Drummond liked his jam, primarily blackberry. But not getting jam on his toast that day would’ve been the least of his inconveniences. He liked his son to be a certain way: consistent, reliable, performing to expectations, conforming to established norms. And Drum simply wasn’t that person anymore and he shouldn’t have been afraid to show it.

He could’ve hashed up breakfast and told Foley how Alan was an excellent chemist, an outstanding chairman, respected, revered by his peers. That he was a patient man, who knew the value of testing and continuous improvement, but when it came to being a father he’d been ill-equipped to go it alone, hands off and trial and error, a clinical approach, more observational than active participant.

Drum had worked this out, though not in those terms as a kid. Like Jayden had worked out his mother, Melissa, could be pushed into a corner and once there, had no new game to bring and he’d get his own way.

Drum knew Alan’s one weakness was being a father. And that hadn’t mattered; there were two grandpas, and Benny. There was always an adult for basic needs and Benny for fun and games and teaching him things a kid probably shouldn’t get taught. All the best things, like how to build a billycart, fly a kite, chop a tree down, fish, fight and smoke a cigarette. He’d loved Benny because nothing Drum ever did displeased him. It was Benny who’d first called him Trick. But it was Alan who wore the hero’s cape and swooped in with stories of the wider world where amazing things happened in labs and test tubes. And Drum had loved him for the mysteries of that.