“I’ll get her,” said Lyn. “I’ll get her to come now.”
“Oh, that’s not nec—”
But Lyn was already rushing for the phone.
When Cat arrived, she presented her to Hank, dragged Michael away to help put Maddie to bed, and stayed in the kitchen. About twenty minutes later, Hank came inside looking for the bathroom.
Lyn took a pot of coffee outside and sat down in front of Cat. She put her elbows on the table.
“That man,” said Cat slowly, looking at her fingernails, “wants me to do a proposal for a book. He seems to think there could be some money in it. Potentially quite good money.”
“So are you going to do it?” asked Lyn.
Cat smiled. It was the wicked wide grin of ten-year-old Cat, hatching up another plan to swap classes or skip school or get around Maxine. Lyn hadn’t seen her smile like that since before she lost the baby.
“You bet I am.”
“Dad. How are you?”
It still gave Lyn a little start, seeing her father open the door to the house in Turramurra. There was a tea towel over his shoulder.
“Never better, love.”
In fact, thought Lyn, he had never looked older. His cheerful grin hadn’t changed, but his cheeks seemed to have sagged and there were two deep crevices on either side of his mouth. Her eternally youthful father suddenly looked his age.
The attack on his mother had deeply affected Frank. He couldn’t read the paper or watch the news without winding himself into a frenzy. Maxine said that he’d been having nightmares. He kept leaping out of bed and abusing various pieces of furniture.
It seemed that at the age of fifty-four, Frank Kettle experienced a terrible revelation. All those bad things that happened on the TV news—knife attacks, terrorist attacks, sniper attacks—actually happened to real people. They could happen to anybody. They could happen to his family. He wrote letters to his local MPs. He talked at length about “sick lunatics” and “murderous bastards.” He wanted capital punishment. He wanted longer jail sentences. He wanted the lot of them bombed.
“He’s experiencing empathy for the first time in his life,” said Cat, with a noticeable lack of empathy. “About time.”
“He’s just surprised, poor Dad,” said Gemma, who had always suffered from excessive empathy. Lyn had seen her walking down a street of parked cars, wincing each time she saw a parking ticket on a windshield.
Lyn was surprised at her own reaction. All her life she had thought her father didn’t take life seriously enough, and now that he was, she wanted him to stop it. She wanted to shield his bewildered eyes from the world and bring back silly Dad; Dad who used to be so absurd that Nana would say to him, “Stop being such a ham, Frank!” One day Cat changed it to: “Yeah, Daddy, stop being such a ham sandwich!” which Gemma thought was so incredibly funny that she literally fell off her chair laughing. After that they’d always be saying, “Daddy’s being a ham sandwich again!” while he pranced around, doing the most stupid, slapstick things; anything for a laugh.
She remembered their trips to Manly Beach and how they always had to run to catch the ferry. It drove her mad. She’d look back and see him staggering along, carrying Cat and Gemma under each arm, making grunting sounds and wobbling his head, because he was pretending to be a gorilla, for goodness’ sake! Lyn would scream, “Come on, Dad!” What an uptight child she’d been.
“Sleeping better?” she asked now, as she followed her father down the hallway.
“Max tells me I had it out with the wardrobe last night,” said Frank. “I don’t remember a thing. I think she’s making it up.”
“Why is there a tea towel on your shoulder?”
“My turn to cook,” said Frank. “I learned it from your mother. The first rule of cooking—carefully drape tea towel over left shoulder.”
Maxine was sitting in the living room drinking tea and doing the crossword. “Maddie hasn’t woken up from her nap,” she said, taking off her glasses. “Have a cup of tea with me? I’ve just made a pot.”
“I’ll just get back to slaving away in the kitchen,” said Frank.
“You do that, dear.”
“You take turns to cook?” asked Lyn.
“Of course!” Maxine poured tea for her. “We’re a new-age couple.”
Lyn raised her eyebrows and didn’t comment. “How was Maddie today?”
“Dreadful.” Maxine waved a dismissive hand. “I wanted to ask you something. How do you and your sisters feel about us being back together now?”
“Um,” said Lyn. She wasn’t ready for the question. Her mind was feeling pleasantly stimulated by her day’s work. Her new assistant wanted to introduce a “Frequent Brekkie Buyer” program. She was very professional and not annoyingly enthusiastic, but quite funny and nice. Actually, Lyn thought, she was probably going to be a new friend. It had been years since she’d made a new friend—it was a little bit like falling in love, except without the stress.
“At Christmas lunch when you went off in a huff,” began Maxine.
It felt like centuries had been and gone since Christmas.
“It was a very stressful day,” said Lyn. “I thought my head was going to explode. I shouldn’t have reacted like that. Sorry.”
Maxine looked irritated. “No, don’t say sorry. Tell me what you felt. I don’t think we do enough of that in this family.”
“Are you kidding? I think we do far too much of that in our family!”
“I meant in a calm, rational way.”
“All right.”
Lyn lowered her voice. She could hear Frank whistling “Rhinestone Cowboy” in the kitchen, accompanied by clattering pots.
“I always thought that Dad treated you badly,” she said quietly.
“Speak up! He can’t hear a thing! He gets deafer every day.”
“Dad treated you badly. I remember. So, when he made his announcement, I just felt—”
Maxine interrupted her, and Lyn smiled into her teacup.
“He did treat me badly. I treated him quite badly too. But we were different people! That’s what you girls don’t understand! Do you remember when I was seeing that orthodontist? He admitted that he’d been dreadful to his ex-wife. I didn’t care! He was an extremely uninteresting man, as you know, so that was the end of that, but my point is that when I think about Frank’s ex-wife, she seems like a stranger! I don’t think about her as being me! He has mistakes in his past. I have mistakes in mine. The fact that we actually are each other’s mistakes is irrelevant!”