It was Lloyd Snedden who unwittingly let Ross into their lives. It started at seven-thirty when a stranger awakened Ross from a deep, dreamless sleep by hollering down the telephone line that he needed to come and look after the kiddies because his missus was crook, whatever the hell that meant.
Flat on his back amongst a tangle of bedclothes, Ross cracked an eye open at the ceiling and tried to make sense of the long-winded story. He was fighting a mammoth hangover from the previous night’s drinking binge with Jeff at several bars in the Viaduct Basin. His mouth coated with fur and his stomach churning, Ross remembered why he’d given up this kind of stuff when he finished college.
‘Fine,’ he croaked. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
Ten minutes in the shower revived him sufficiently to stumble into some clothes. The whites of his eyes were riddled with red, and his beard made him look like a grizzly. Ross ran his electric razor half-heartedly over his jaw and stumbled downstairs to the basement parking. The early morning sun felt like bamboo sticks poked into his eyes.
Mia was ecstatic to see him. Her ear-piercing shrieks grew the bamboo sticks into trees being driven into Ross’s skull. Matt looked at him and said, ‘Dad used to look like you do in the morning.’
Lloyd Snedden was a bowed, weather-beaten man with bandy legs and faded blue eyes set in a permanent squint from years spent outdoors. His washed-out shorts were belted beneath his paunch and flapped about his skinny legs like sails in the wind. He’d already sent Deryl home to bed, but he seemed dubious about leaving the children in Ross’s care. ‘You sure you’re not crook as well?’
‘No,’ Ross said. ‘Worked late last night, that’s all.’
With memories of Deryl’s doctoring of his tea still fresh in his mind he wondered if her sudden illness was alcohol-induced, but was hardly in a position to voice his suspicions to her husband, who’d obviously guessed the reason for Ross’s less-than-stellar appearance.
‘Nice work if you can get it,’ Lloyd observed dryly. ‘Reckon you’ll manage then, son.’
After Lloyd had left, Ross recalled that he hadn’t yet spoken to Danny about her sitter. He didn’t buy what the PI had heard her say about Deryl Snedden being a teetotaller.
Ross headed to the kitchen to make the blackest cup of coffee he could. Mia and Matt followed him and sat at the table watching while he searched fruitlessly inside the cupboards for coffee.
‘Has your aunt got anything to drink besides tea?’ Ross asked desperately.
‘We’ve got some Milo,’ Mia said.
‘Milo? What’s Milo? Is it like coffee?’
‘No,’ Matt replied.
Ross felt his left eye begin to twitch.
‘We used to have some when Dad was here,’ Matt continued. ‘But now Dad’s dead, Auntie Danny doesn’t buy it. She says it’s too expensive, and anyway she doesn’t like it.’
Ross’s right eye began to twitch. He needed a cup of coffee.
‘Want to go to Starbucks?’
It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to let the kids eat triple chocolate cake at nine in the morning, but Ross really didn’t care as he took his first sip of strong black coffee and settled down to peruse the morning paper.
Bad move.
Matt and Mia began to get bored and squabble about two minutes after they finished their chocolate cake. He tried to ignore them by hiding behind the paper.
‘Uncle Ross?’ Matt said.
Ross grunted.
‘Uncle Ross, I think Mia needs to go to the toilet.’
‘I don’t!’
‘Yes, you do. You’re wriggling around like you always do when you’re going to wet your pants—’
The wet-your-pants part got his attention. Mia had her legs clamped together with her hands buried between them. She saw his horrified expression, burst into tears and wet her pants.
‘Oh no…’ Ross groaned, and she cried harder.
‘I told you,’ Matt said.
Ross took Mia to the bathroom where the three of them did their best to clean her up. There was nothing for it but to head home and change her clothes.
It was then that Ross discovered the shoelace dangling from the toilet cistern. ‘You use a shoelace to flush the toilet?’
Matt nodded. ‘Auntie Danny fixed it. Pretty clever, eh?’
Ross stared at the shoelace. This was a freakin’ nuthouse.
‘We can’t afford a new one!’ Mia danced up and down the hallway in a clean pink dress which flapped up to display her bare ass. ‘I know all the ABBA songs and I’ve made up some dances to go with them.’
‘Maybe show me later—right now put on some underwear.’
‘Oh, yeah! I forgot!’ She bounced off down the hallway, her bare bottom flashing with every shimmy and bump.
Ross returned his attention to the toilet. He hated seeing things in a state of disrepair. He looked at Matt. ‘Got any tools?’
When Matt showed him Pat’s extensive toolkit, Ross smiled wearily. It was so typical of his brother. He’d purchased the most expensive and, in several cases, the most obscure tools money could buy, and they were covered in dust—not grease or dirt. It didn’t take Ross long to figure out that the whole toilet had to be replaced.
He called Jeff. ‘Any chance of finding me a plumber to do a couple hours’ work?’
‘You’re kidding me. On a Saturday? At short notice?’
‘I’ll pay him double the going rate.’
A plumber was found, the brother of one of the guys from the hospital construction site. He was a huge Maori guy named Joe.
‘You get the new bog, buddy, and I’ll start ripping out the old one,’ he told Ross after he’d checked out the plumbing and assessed the state of the toilet. ‘This plumbing is pretty old, bro.’
Ross nodded. ‘What’s a bog?’ The only bogs he knew of were Irish swamps.
‘A dunny—a loo—a toilet.’
Ross was unsure about leaving Joe in Danny’s house. He could imagine what she’d do if she arrived home unexpectedly and discovered a stranger ripping out her toilet. He was about to head out the door with the kids when Matt suggested it would be a good idea if Mia used the toilet before they left.
She insisted she didn’t need to go. Ross insisted she did. Mia reluctantly disappeared into the toilet while Ross, Matt and Joe waited in the hallway. Joe had mentioned he had four kids and had been off work for the past six months since hurting his back. Reading between the lines, Ross guessed money was tight.
‘Nothing came out!’ Mia shouted.
‘Sit longer!’ Ross called back.
Silence.
‘Nothing!’
‘LONGER!’
They were eventually rewarded by the sound of Mia peeing, but his relief was short-lived.
‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ Matt said. ‘She often wets her pants ten minutes after she’s been.’
Ross checked his watch. It was only eleven. He had hours of this torture left.
They went to the bathroom fixtures supplier that Joe had recommended, and Mia sat on all the toilets.
‘You know you can’t actually use them, don’t you, Mia?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not stupid, Uncle Ross. Can we have a pink one?’
They made one visit to the shop’s bathroom after Mia managed to fall inside one of the display models and Ross had to fish her out.
‘No more sitting on the damned toilets! OK?’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Yes, Uncle Ross.’
Matt wore his disapproving face.
Ross wasn’t above bribery. ‘How about we go get a popsicle?’
‘A popsicle?’ The tears miraculously dried. ‘You mean an ice block?’
‘If you say so.’ He took Mia’s hand. ‘Have you ever thought of a career in acting?’
She trotted along beside him. ‘Auntie Danny says I belong in Hollywood.’
On the way back to Danny’s house, Ross watched the children in the rear-vision mirror. Matt was plugged into his iPod and in a world of his own. Ross thought he was extraordinarily mature for an eleven-year-old boy, unlike Mia who was still like a little girl. Ross hadn’t paid attention to music until he was thirteen, and then only because it was something to talk about to the girls he’d suddenly noticed.
‘What are you listening to?’ he asked.
Matt reluctantly pulled off his headphones. ‘Nickelback. You probably don’t know them.’
‘I know Nickelback,’ Ross replied. ‘Who else do you like?’
‘Coldplay, Gorillaz, Nellie Furtado…a whole bunch of stuff.’
‘Do you like the Red Hot Chili Peppers?’
Matt was shocked. ‘You know them?’
‘Calm down, we don’t want the shock to blow your iPod.’
‘The Chili Peppers are mint! I want to get Stadium Arcadium.’
And Matt was off on a complex discussion about his favourite groups, most of whom Ross didn’t know but wouldn’t admit to. But he only had to nod and say Uh huh every so often to keep his end of the conversation going. When Matt began to wind down, Ross told him he’d finished the book that Matt loaned him.
‘You read it?’ Matt blinked in surprise. ‘Really?’
‘Yeah, really.’
He looked sceptical. ‘What’d you think?’
They launched into a discussion about It Came From Beneath the Sink, which Ross had actually enjoyed.
Mia watched the scenery and hummed to herself. ‘I still think we should have got a pink one.’
Ross and Matt exchanged puzzled looks in the mirror.
‘You mean a pink toilet?’ Ross clarified.
She nodded.
Matt pulled a face. ‘Ugh! Gross!’
‘It is not gross!’ Mia cried. ‘You’re gross!’
‘And you’re just a stupid girl!’
‘I am not!’
‘Yes you are, you’re—’
‘ZIP IT!’ Ross bellowed. ‘Do you two get an allowance?’
They nodded cautiously.
‘Have you ever heard of performance reviews?’
Mia looked at Matt; clearly she was nominating him as the party spokesman.
‘No,’ he said. ‘What’s a performance review?’
‘It’s when the person who pays your wages—or allowance—decides if you’ve earned what you’re being paid. It’s when that person decides if you deserve a raise.’ Ross paused to allow time for the information to sink in. ‘I’m instigating a performance review, starting today.’
‘What’s that mean?’ Mia asked.
‘We might not get our pocket money,’ Matt said.
‘But Auntie Danny pays our pocket money!’ Clearly when it came to money Mia wasn’t as blonde as she looked.
‘There’s been a change in fiscal policy,’ Ross said. ‘From now on I’ll be paying it.’
The children exchanged worried looks. ‘When are you going to do a performance review?’ Matt asked.
Ross smiled. ‘Now, that’s the best part—I’m not telling you.’
Joe was reading the paper and smoking a cigarette when they got back. ‘I had a look at the rest of the plumbing while you were out. You need to do some work around this place, mate.’
‘That bad?’ Ross asked.
Joe snorted. ‘You could say that.’
While Joe got on with changing the old toilet connection for the new, Ross looked at the outside of the house. He’d earned extra money during college working on construction sites and knew enough to see Joe was telling the truth.
Once upon a time the old house had been beautiful, but it had gradually fallen into disrepair. Joe was right about the plumbing, and the wooden window frames were rotten in many places. Closer inspection explained why several parts of the wide wooden verandah were blocked off—it was rotten, too. Restored to its original beauty and with its stupendous view over the Pacific Ocean, the house would be worth a lot of money. Danny might be cash-poor but she was asset-rich.
Ross was planing the front door when Lloyd arrived to check on the kids and mentioned that he owned a welding torch. He eyed Ross speculatively. ‘Been meaning to fix that trampoline leg for the kids.’
Matt was sitting on the front step, and Ross sensed his sudden alertness. ‘If you lend me the equipment, I’ll fix it.’
The kids joined him in the garden to watch the trampoline being repaired.
Matt watched dubiously as Ross donned safety goggles. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ His dad had been famous for starting to fix things and either never completing the job or botching it.
‘I think I’ll manage.’ Ross pointed to the verandah. ‘Go and sit up there out of the way.’ Once the children had done as he’d asked, he lit the welding torch and set to work.
‘Can we play on it?’ Matt asked as soon as Ross had finished.
‘Not just yet.’
Mia pouted. ‘I’m hungry.’
He sighed. No rest for the wicked.
They trooped into the kitchen. Ross made the kids chocolate and banana milkshakes, and reluctantly fed them some black gunk sandwiches, after they insisted it was what they wanted. He poked about the kitchen cupboards while the children ate. The contents were hardly inspiring. Danny seemed to buy a lot of oatmeal.
‘What sort of things does Auntie Danny like to cook?’ Ross asked.
Matt and Mia stopped chewing and gazed at him blankly.
‘What’s Auntie Danny’s favourite recipe?’
They frowned.
‘Does she like to cook pasta? Or fish?’ Ross prompted. ‘Or vegetarian?’
Mia spoke up. ‘Auntie Danny says being in the kitchen is like being in a laboratory.’
‘A laboratory?’
Matt nodded. ‘Sometimes her experiments go wrong.’
‘Then what happens?’
‘Then we have porridge.’ Mia licked a milkshake moustache from her upper lip. ‘Auntie Danny makes really yummy porridge.’
Danny couldn’t cook.
There was a slight hiccup when Mia asked if she could go to the toilet before they’d finished installing the new one. Ross was watching Joe screw the bolts into the base of the toilet when Mia appeared in the doorway. She jiggled from one foot to the other. ‘Uncle Ross! I need to go!’
Matt popped up behind her. ‘I’ve got to go, too, Uncle Ross.’
What was it with these kids? Were they camels in another life?
‘Go round back and pick a tree.’
Mia stopped jiggling. ‘I don’t think Auntie Danny would like us doing wees outside.’
He noticed the distraction lessened her sense of urgency. ‘Auntie Danny won’t mind when she sees the nice surprise we’ve got for her.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Hey, Mia!’ Matt headed outside. ‘Let’s sit in our trees and wee!’
Ross was certain Auntie Danny would disapprove of that one. He sure as hell wouldn’t want to be one of the chickens or sheep below.
After the new toilet was installed and Ross had checked that the trampoline was safe for the kids to play on, he decided to take a horseback ride in the sunshine.
‘B’s not a nice horse,’ Matt warned.
‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘She tries to bite Auntie Danny.’
Ross decided he liked the horse. ‘What else?’
‘She bucks sometimes when she doesn’t want Auntie Danny to ride her.’
Ross decided he loved the horse. ‘Does she buck Auntie Danny off?’
‘Sometimes,’ Matt replied. ‘Auntie Danny says she’s a strong old bitch.’
He kept a straight face. ‘She won’t buck me off—I’m too heavy.’
B did buck him off. Fortunately it happened at the bottom of the hill, well away from the house and out of sight. It took Ross several minutes to catch her again and remount, and he was filthy, sweaty and cursing by the time he rode her back up the hill.
Danny tried not to work on the weekends so she could be home with the children. It put a dent in her pay, because weekends were some of the most lucrative shifts, but the Saturday after Deryl’s tea party she was on duty. When Danny arrived home, Ross’s car was parked in the driveway. She sprinted to the house. The first thing she noticed was that she didn’t have to shoulder charge the front door—it glided open with a gentle push. The house was ominously silent. She hurried into the kitchen and out onto the verandah, which stretched around three sides of the house.
Matt and Mia were bouncing on the trampoline, which stood squarely on all four legs. They waved when they saw Danny, and Mia shouted, ‘Look, Auntie Danny! The trampoline is fixed!’
Danny nodded absently and searched the trees and paddocks beyond the garden for a dark, curly head. ‘That’s great. Who fixed it?’
Matt pumped his knees and flew high in the air, sending Mia bouncing precariously close to the edge of the canvas matting. Danny opened her mouth to tell him off.
‘Matt!’ Ross shouted. ‘I told you not to do that when Mia is with you!’
Danny watched him amble up the slope of the back paddock on B, their old mare. She could have sworn the crabby horse had a smile on her whiskery muzzle.
Ross stopped the horse at the fence and watched Danny walk towards him across the grass. He tried not to stare. She was wearing a short, flirty blue skirt. It matched her pale blue peasant blouse and the ballet flats on her feet. She had legs—pretty ones with dainty ankles. Ross searched, but there was no sign of a tattoo.
Danny stopped at the fence. ‘What are you staring at?’
‘I’m searching for cloven hooves.’
‘Very funny. What are you doing here?’
B leaned over and made a half-hearted attempt to take a chunk out of Danny’s shoulder. Ross pulled the mare’s head away. B flattened her ears and flung her head up and down.
‘You should be in a can,’ Danny said. It was an empty threat, just like B’s attempt to bite her. She swiped green-flecked foam from her bare arm and asked again, ‘What are you doing here?’
Ross stared at her face. ‘Your bruises have gone.’
She bent and wiped her fingers on the grass. ‘Well, duh? What did you expect?’
Not what he was seeing. She was still no beauty queen, her face was too angular, her amber gaze too challenging, her jaw line too determined—but put it all together and the result was—Ross searched for the right word—arresting. The recent sunny weather had put pale streaks through her light brown hair. The ends and part of her fringe were painted pink today, instead of blue. Ross supposed it would be too much to expect Danny to get her hair and her clothes to match. The peasant blouse had a scooped, gathered neck and tiny sleeves. It clung to her small breasts and revealed the fragile hollows above her collarbones.
‘Did anybody ever tell you it’s rude to stare?’ Danny asked.
‘Can you turn around?’ Ross replied.
She eyed him suspiciously. ‘Why?’
‘I want to see if you’ve got a tail.’
‘Hah! Like I’m the one who’s likely to have one of those.’
Ross recalled the report from the private investigator who Allan Nicolls had hired. Allan had been concerned about Danny’s plans to rub Ross out and feed him to Deryl’s pigs. Ross had kept a straight face while he reassured Allan, but afterwards he’d taken the report back to his apartment, poured himself a glass of Merlot, reread the contents and laughed. The only part of the report he didn’t enjoy was what Danny had told Vanessa about the conversation between Matt and Mia.
As Ross read the report, an idea for a story had begun to take shape. He grabbed a pen and a block of paper and poured his ideas onto the pages as fast he could write them. After months and months of drought, his mind was on fire; his hand could hardly keep up.
‘Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?’ he asked.
‘I did some shopping after I finished work,’ she propped her hands on her hips. ‘Answer my question: what are you doing here, Fabello?’
The afternoon had turned hot. The sun beat down out of a cloudless blue sky, and beyond the green paddocks the Pacific Ocean sparkled in the sunshine. Ross’s hair stuck to his brow in tiny curls, and his burgundy shirt clung to his chest. His olive skin had darkened even more since Danny had last seen him, which made his teeth look very white. She guessed that was what happened when you had nothing else to do but laze around sunbathing at your penthouse apartment and bug the crap out of people.
In contrast, Danny felt pale and unattractive. She watched Ross raise an arm to wipe the sweat from his forehead. His shirt parted company with the waistband of his jeans to reveal the lower half of a six-pack bisected by a thin line of black hair. Danny felt cheated. Ross wasn’t covered in thick fur as she’d hoped. She felt even more cheated when he lowered his arm and his shirt covered the view.
‘Take a guess why I’m here.’ He was obviously in the mood to yank her chain.
‘To break the news that the Mother Ship has returned, and they’re taking you home to remove your anal probe? Just answer the damned question!’
B shifted from one foreleg to the other, shuddering to dislodge a persistent fly. Ross draped his wrists across her withers and smiled mockingly. ‘Fixing your trampoline; riding your horse.’
‘Don’t get smart with me, Fabello! Who let you in and—’ Danny frowned. ‘Where’s Deryl?’ She spun around in a circle, searching for her neighbour, her little blue skirt flaring out.
Ross enjoyed the view. ‘I murdered her and buried her under the chicken shed.’
‘Where’s Deryl?’
He sighed and climbed off B. Underneath the short skirt and clinging top, the Wicked Witch was alive and kicking. ‘She’s sick. Lloyd called me to look after the kids.’
‘Lloyd? Called you?’ Danny was shocked. ‘But…but she was fine this morning!’
Ross undid the girth and lifted the saddle from B’s back. She shuddered luxuriously. ‘Were you away from nursing school the day they explained people can get sick without warning?’ He propped the saddle against a fence post. ‘I offered to help.’
‘The only person you want to help is yourself, Fabello.’
He braced his hands on the mare’s glossy back. Danny wondered why B didn’t snake her head around and try to bite his arm off. And why did Ross suddenly have thick, curly eyelashes? They weren’t as long as Patrick’s or Matt’s, but that wasn’t the point—that wasn’t where he was supposed to have excess hair.
‘Deryl got sick. Lloyd called me about seven-thirty this morning to say he had to take her to the doctor and he didn’t like to call you at work, because it’s hard for you to come home when you’re in charge.’
Danny took a step backwards, away from the wolfish smile and those evil black eyes. ‘Lloyd should have called me.’
‘Don’t bother saying thank you.’
‘Don’t push it, Fabello.’ She watched him remove B’s bridle. He had strong forearms and long, blunt-tipped fingers. There was nothing sensitive or artistic about his hands; they looked as if they’d be equally at home wrapped around the handle of a pneumatic drill—or someone’s neck. Danny knew she was stupid to keep baiting him, but it was as if she was set on Self-destruct Mode. ‘I’m going to phone Deryl.’ The distant sound of her cellphone crowing reached them from inside the house.
‘I bet that’s her,’ Danny said, and took off across the grass.
He watched her smooth legs swing and her cute little butt sway beneath the short blue skirt. If only she was mute, she’d be perfect.
Thanks to the PI’s report, Ross knew about the missing passports and Danny’s plans to give them to Vanessa. He wanted those passports. Danny might not have any money, but Ross was sure her accomplice Ms Cooper could be persuaded to contribute to the cause if Danny decided to skip the country. The cursory search he’d made of the house hadn’t yielded anything. Either he was too late and Danny had found the passports and given them to Vanessa, or they were still lost. If they were lost, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, particularly if Ross reported them missing and filed for new ones. All he needed was copies of the children’s birth certificates.
He rubbed down the old mare and gave her the feed Matt had prepared. The PI had provided a lot of background information about Daniella and about Rose Smith, the twins’ mother. Mike Lawton had abandoned Rose and his daughters when they were teenagers and returned to his wife and children in England. He never contacted his New Zealand family again, and so didn’t know that Rose died from breast cancer a few years after he left. Mike never made any attempt to send money or find out how the twins were; he simply walked out of their lives and never returned.
The parallels between Danny’s parents’ relationship and Patrick and Nella’s were discomforting. Mike wasn’t there for Rose when she died. Danny couldn’t reach Patrick when Nella needed him. The PI reported that it was Danny who took charge of the family after her father left. Rose and Daniella had been cut from the same cloth—both had been careless about money, lived beyond their means, and avoided anything to do with wills, mortgage agreements and debt repayments. Danny had been the glue that held everything together.
Ross could understand why Danny was so hostile towards him and his family, and why she was so worried about the children building a relationship with their father’s relatives. She was trying to protect them from being hurt the way she’d been, and he had to admit she was right to be worried. Matt expected the worst from Ross, and Mia dreamed of the impossible. Ross wasn’t father material, never had been. He hadn’t made the trip to New Zealand with the intention of stepping into Pat’s shoes, although, considering the kind of father Pat had been, Ross couldn’t do any worse. He didn’t want Matt and Mia thinking in terms of forever, but that hadn’t stopped him from finishing the book Matt had lent him and fixing the trampoline.
Inside the house Danny was becoming agitated. Ross had done a lot more than look after the kids and fix the trampoline and front door. He’d fixed the toilet!
When the toilet flush had first broken and Danny had made inquiries about getting it repaired, she was told that that particular model hadn’t been made for years. As the cost of a new toilet was beyond her, Danny came up with the ingenious solution of tying a shoelace to the plastic arm which when pulled made the toilet flush. It was cheaper to replace the shoelaces than the broken part.
‘You fixed the toilet!’ She accused when Ross came inside to wash up.
‘I fixed the toilet.’ He brushed past her and went into the bathroom.
Danny followed him. ‘But it’s a whole new toilet!’
Ross bent over the low bathroom vanity and soaped his hands. ‘You’d rather have stuck with the shoelace?’
‘No…but…’
‘You have a pathological inability to say thank you, don’t you? Do you think spending a Saturday morning fixing the john is my idea of relaxation?’
‘No, I’m sure it isn’t. It’s just I could have fixed it myself.’
Ross looked over his shoulder and raised a brow.
‘I could!’
‘Then why didn’t you?’
Danny wouldn’t answer him. ‘How much do I owe you?’
Ross watched her in the mirror above the bathroom vanity. She looked tense. ‘Nothing.’ He turned to the towel rail and began to dry his hands. ‘I couldn’t have put up with that damned shoelace every time I wanted to use the bathroom.’
Danny released the breath she’d been holding. ‘Your visit today is a one-off, Fabello.’
He ignored her and inspected the front of his shirt. ‘Why did you name your horse after a bee?’
‘It’s not the insect—it’s the letter.’
He tugged the shirt over his head. ‘The letter?’
Danny watched the burgundy shirt slide down his arms. There was no hair on his back, just smooth, olive skin stretched over broad shoulders and a long, tapered spine. The shirt dropped to the floor. The view from the front was even better.
Ross braced his hands on his hips. ‘Are you ogling me?’
‘Of course I’m not!’ Looking for excess hair follicles wasn’t ogling.
‘Are you planning on standing there watching me wash up?’
‘No!’
‘Then take a hike!’ Ross grabbed Danny by the elbows, lifted her into the hallway and shut the bathroom door in her face.
Danny stormed away. The call on her cellphone hadn’t been Deryl, and she made a quick call to check on her. The mere fact that Deryl had visited her doctor was worrying—the only time Deryl consulted a health professional was to call the vet for her pigs. When she’d finished talking to Deryl, Danny dragged Patrick’s suitcase from beneath Nella’s bed and hauled it to the bedroom door. There was no way she was letting Ross wander about the house half-naked. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself from searching for signs of abnormal hair growth.
Ross stepped from the bathroom as Danny arrived at the door. As she’d expected, he was bare-chested. He had a towel draped about his neck and his dirty shirt in his hand.
She dropped the bag on his foot. ‘Here.’
‘Ow!’ Ross snatched his foot from beneath the bag. ‘What is it now?’
She pointed at the bag. ‘These are Patrick’s things. Put a shirt on.’ Danny headed back down the hallway.
The Louis Vuitton suitcase lay on its side at Ross’s feet. He squatted and touched it hesitantly. Ross clasped his hands between his spread knees: he didn’t want to touch his brother’s things. He shook his head impatiently. He was being stupid; besides, if he didn’t sort through Pat’s belongings it only meant one of his sisters or his mother and father would have to do it.
The zip whirred softly and the two sides parted. Ross opened the case and took a deep breath. It was a mistake. The smell of Pat’s cologne filled his nostrils. It flooded into his bloodstream, coated his nerves and seeped into the pores of his skin. Ross slumped back against the wall, feeling sick and shaken. He clenched his fist and braced an arm on his raised knee as the scent of the cologne seemed to grow stronger.
Danny’s blue ballet flats appeared beside him. She briefly touched the bare skin between his hunched shoulders and knelt down to zip the bag closed. ‘Stay naked.’ She grabbed the case handle and stood up. ‘Your chest distracts attention from your nose.’
The ghost of a smile curved his mouth. Even when she was being nice, Danny was a bitch. It had happened again—that connection between them. She’d known how he was feeling and that he didn’t want hugs or kind words. Her fleeting touch on his back had been enough, and her smart-assed remark about his nose was just what he needed to break the tension.
Ross watched Danny haul the suitcase back to her sister’s bedroom. It was much too heavy for her, she bent sideways and had to use both hands, but Ross didn’t offer to help. He knew she didn’t want it. He braced his elbows on his knees and dug his fingers into the damp curls springing to attention on his head. There’d only been four years between him and Pat, not that huge a gap, but the gulf between them had nothing to do with age. Pat had always been jealous of Ross. Once, in a fit of anger, he’d shouted, ‘I’m always trying to get out from under your shadow! Nobody notices what I achieve!’
The whole family had willed Pat to achieve something, anything that would make him happy. But he never settled, never finished anything he started. He was always chasing something just over the horizon that had never been there in the first place. Ross suspected Pat had made him the children’s guardian as a joke. As the second eldest of six kids, Ross had done his time wiping snotty noses and fishing Barbie dolls out of the john. He’d listened to his sisters’ sob stories about the guys they were in love with who were in love with their best friend, the guys they didn’t like but who were in love with them. On a couple of occasions he’d been called in when some of their boyfriends stepped out of line.
‘You don’t have to do anything nasty,’ Annie had said ingenuously. ‘Just be yourself.’
Then there were the weddings—oh sweet Jesus, those weddings! Three of them.
Ross was sure it took less effort and theatrics to run a presidential campaign than it did to get a Fabello woman to the altar. Breda became demented. The bride cried a lot, yelled a lot, called it off, called it back on, fought with the rest of the family, fought with the bridesmaids, and generally became a pain in the ass for the two years leading up to the big day. Ross had the utmost respect for his brothers-in-law, who’d somehow survived this baptism of fire without turning to alcohol or mood-enhancing drugs. The girls were always warning Ross that someday he’d wind up like them with kids and the obligatory station wagon. The idea made him break out in a cold sweat—he’d get a vasectomy first.
Breda went into orbit. ‘Over my dead body, Ross Fabello! No doctor will be fiddling with your…bits.’
‘They’re my bits, Ma.’
‘Don’t be smart: your father and I made them. I don’t know what’s got into you. You were raised a good Catholic. Children are God’s gift to us.’
Yeah, but did the Fabellos really need so many? Ross never joked about vasectomies again around his mother, but he took care to ensure that God sent all His gifts his sisters’ way.
The irony of his present situation wasn’t lost on him. Pat had trussed him up like a turkey. He was stuck at the bottom of the world, legally responsible for two kids, and trying to get along with a razor-tongued harpy who wanted to rub him out and feed him to some pigs.
Before he left, Danny told Ross: ‘Thanks for the fixing the toilet, Fabello. I owe you—one.’