Clara sighed as she watched her brother-in-law, Neil, put the last of her boxes into his van. She felt Siobhan’s hand gently touch her arm.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, actually, better than okay.’ And it was the truth. She’d worked every available hour over the last couple of weeks, carefully packaging and boxing things. It had been a cathartic experience. As she’d suspected, Siobhan had all but forbidden her from giving the stuff to an op shop, convincing Clara to let her sell it to people who would truly appreciate it.
‘And then you can give whatever money I get to whatever charity you want,’ she’d promised.
Clara had agreed due to the sheer volume of stuff, which she suspected might overwhelm any charity shop if she dumped it on them all at once. And, since Siobhan’s youngest had finished school last year, her sister had been feeling at a loose end; she was over the moon to have a project to stick her teeth into.
‘Right then.’ Neil dusted his hands on his shirt. ‘I’ll be off. See you at home, love.’
He and Siobhan had driven over in separate vehicles and both were now at maximum capacity.
She kissed him goodbye. ‘Drive safely.’
The sisters stood together as Neil climbed into the van, his forehead red and shiny from all the box carrying.
‘Do you have to work today?’ Siobhan asked Clara as he started to drive away.
‘Not at the hospital.’ She glanced at her watch—it was not quite midday. ‘I’m on roster at Life After Loss this afternoon, but don’t have to be there for a few hours.’
‘In that case, do you have time for a celebratory drink?’
‘At this time of the day?’
Siobhan grinned. ‘It’s always 5 pm somewhere in the world, but I suppose I could make do with a cup of tea.’
Clara chuckled. ‘I’m not sure I have anything stronger anyway. Come on.’
They linked arms and turned back to the house.
‘When’s the real estate agent coming?’
‘Not for a few days. I wanted to have time to clean everything and make the place sparkle after the boxes left, before they took the photos.’
‘Good idea,’ Siobhan said as they headed into the kitchen.
Clara picked up the kettle and, as she went to fill it at the sink, Siobhan pointed to a couple of cardboard boxes perched on the kitchen bench. ‘Oh no, did we forget these?’
‘No. I can’t sell those.’
‘Why not? What are they?’ Siobhan lifted back the cardboard flaps on one and looked inside. She picked up a beer can and held it up like it was a dead rat. ‘Why on earth have you got all these?’
‘They’re Rob’s. He collected different cans. I’m not sure whether to call him and see if he wants them still or just take them round to Brenda’s place.’
‘You’ll do neither!’ Siobhan dropped the can back in the box and then wrapped her arms around it, holding it almost protectively against her chest.
‘You want the beer cans?’ Clara asked, even though she knew that wasn’t what her sister meant.
‘Very funny. Everyone thinks they’re a comedian. For one thing, you no longer have his phone number, remember?’
Clara refrained from reminding her sister that she still had the landline of the house where Rob lived with his mother.
‘Personally, I think you should chuck them.’
Perhaps Siobhan was right—if Rob really valued these items wouldn’t he have taken them with him in the first place?
‘But there’s also a box of old vinyl records that I found in the back of the garage and some of his band memorabilia.’ Clara gestured to another two boxes further along the bench. ‘I can’t just toss them.’
She might not have been the music fanatic her ex-husband once was but she knew how rare some of those records were. First albums of groups like INXS, Midnight Oil, The Police, Dragon and Cold Chisel. They’d been his idols but some had also almost become friends for a while. The LPs had been Rob’s prized possessions when she’d first met him—his passion, she’d go so far as to say his life—but the last ten years or so, he’d all but turned his back on music.
Siobhan sighed. ‘If I were you, I’d sell them and buy myself something nice with the profits but, sadly, you’re a much nicer person than me.’
Being ‘nice’ hadn’t got her very far in life but her sister was right—the guilt would eat Clara up if she didn’t give them back to their rightful owner. ‘Look, if I return these to Rob, then I’m done. That’s the last of his stuff in my life and once I sell the house, it’ll be like my marriage never even happened, so—’
‘So, I’ll take the boxes back,’ Siobhan said in her don’t-you-dare-argue-with-me tone.
Knowing her sister, the stuff would sit in Siobhan’s boot for a few weeks but at least she wouldn’t risk running into her ex by going there herself.
‘Thank you, that would be wonderful. And say hi to Brenda if you see her for me.’ Clara had always liked Rob’s mother and felt a little guilty that cutting him out of her life also meant losing contact with her, but the way Rob was, she didn’t see any alternative. It had taken her a long while to understand that with him it had to be all or nothing.
‘I will,’ Siobhan promised. ‘But now, enough about the past. I want to know if you’ve had any nibbles on the online dating website.’
Oh Lord, Clara would probably regret telling her sisters about that—at least she’d made them swear not to tell their mother. But, knowing Siobhan wouldn’t let it rest until she’d given her something, she said, ‘Come sit and I’ll fill you in.’
As she picked up the tea things and took them to the table, Siobhan carried over the plate of banana and caramel muffins she’d brought with her.
Clara reached for a muffin and took a bite. ‘Mmm. These are divine.’
‘Maybe you should only have half,’ Siobhan said, reaching across as if about to pluck the sugary delight from Clara’s fingers. ‘If you’re entering the dating scene again, you don’t want to get tubby because sooner or later you’ll need to get naked. It’s okay for me ’cos I’ve been married an eternity and on the rare occasions Neil and I have sex we hardly ever bother to take off our pyjamas, but you’ll want to put your best body forward.’
Clara yanked her hand out of her sister’s reach. ‘I’ll eat whatever and as much as I like, thank you very much. If I choose to eat well, it’ll be for my own health and well-being, not for some man.’ Although she shuddered a little at the thought of getting naked in front of another person again.
Deep breaths. There wasn’t any rush to jump into bed with anyone—she wanted companionship much more than she wanted sex.
‘No need to bite my head off.’ Siobhan reached for a muffin herself. ‘I was merely offering a little sisterly advice.’
‘I know. Sorry.’ But Clara took a large, rebellious and comforting bite of her muffin just the same. ‘It’s all a little daunting to be honest. Online dating wasn’t even a thing last time I was in the market for a man. Back then love was a lucky dip; it all seems so orchestrated these days.’
‘I think that’s a good thing. No more hanging around bars and clubs hoping someone will offer to buy you a drink. I’d usually gone to bed with someone before I worked out how unsuitable they were for me. There were a lot of uncomfortable mornings after before I finally hit the jackpot with Neil. This way you find someone who has the same interests and values before you even meet them in person.’
Maybe Siobhan had a point. Clara couldn’t help wondering if she and Rob had met online rather than in the hospital whether they’d have ended up together at all. Probably not. Quite aside from the fact that a nurse and a musician had little in common, imagining such things was pointless as Rob wouldn’t have been looking on the internet anyway. Back then, he had groupies falling all over themselves to go out with him. Someone like herself would never have even got close if it hadn’t been for his appendix.
She thought back to the evening she’d walked into his hospital room, unprepared for the flirting she was about to encounter, the feelings he was about to evoke. No clue her life was about to change forever.
‘Hello,’ she’d said with her usual cheery smile as she went over to lift the clipboard off the end of his bed. ‘I’m Clara, and I’ll be looking after you all night.’
‘Looks like my luck’s just changed then,’ had been his mischievous reply. ‘If I’d have known getting appendicitis would lead me to you, I’d have gotten sick sooner.’
And although she’d dealt with plenty of flirty patients before—usually old men who thought it funny—she couldn’t recall any quite as good-looking and young as this one. And his voice … It made her toes curl in her sensible flat shoes.
‘I need to take your blood pressure,’ she’d said, praying that the terrible hospital lighting meant he didn’t notice her blushing.
‘You can take whatever you like, sweetheart.’
She’d given him a stern look, trying to ignore the fluttering behind her ribs.
‘Sorry. It’s my natural instinct to flirt with a pretty girl.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘And I think I’m still a little bit woozy from the anaesthetic, but I promise to keep my hands to myself.’
‘You better,’ she’d said, but her heart had hammered in her chest and her fingers shook worse than they had the first time she’d taken anyone’s blood pressure. ‘So what do you do for a crust?’ she asked, trying to make small talk.
‘A bit of labouring during the day, but at night I play in a band. One Track Mind. You might have seen us at one of the local pubs.’
‘You sing?’ That accounted for the voice.
He’d nodded. ‘I sing, play guitar, write my own songs. I’m a man of many talents.’
‘And modest too.’ Yet, although the words sounded arrogant, for some reason he hadn’t come across that way. There’d been something almost vulnerable about him, as if he was seeking her approval.
Clara had been lucky (or unlucky, whichever way you looked at it) enough to be on night shift the next couple of nights and, used to late nights, Rob had often been awake when she went in to check on him. In her quiet times, she’d found herself engaging in whispered conversations with him. She’d told him about her family, he’d mentioned his mum and his dreams for One Track Mind to become the next big thing. We’re recording demos at the moment to sub to record companies.
And although she found him attractive—who wouldn’t?—she never suspected he saw more in her than a brief flirtation, simply part of his aspiring rock star act, so she’d been shocked when he’d asked her if she wanted to come see his band.
He’d saved her a spot right up the front of the pub where they were playing and she’d sworn he’d been singing every word to her. Afterwards he’d held her hand as he introduced her to his band-mates, but they’d only stayed for one drink before he’d whisked her away to somewhere quieter. They’d sat in a park and fooled around a little, but most of the time they’d simply talked.
Finally, at almost two o’clock in the morning, he’d taken her home and kissed her senseless on her doorstep. She got the impression he wanted her to ask him in and her hormones were yelling at her to do exactly that, but she didn’t want to be just another notch on his bedpost, so she’d summoned all her restraint to resist him.
‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he’d promised, and although it had been one of the best nights of her life, she didn’t really think he would. His life singing gigs in pubs was light years from her shifts at the hospital. She couldn’t imagine what he could possibly see in her when he could have had any number of beautiful girls who understood and were already part of his world.
But the next day she’d come home from work and her flatmate, a fellow nurse called Bonnie, had flashed a yellow post-it note at her. ‘Some guy, Ron I think he said, called. He wanted to know if you’re free tonight.’
Her fingers had closed around the tiny piece of paper and she’d almost had a heart attack right there in the kitchen.
They’d seen each other again that night, and a week later they’d consummated things. Rob was such a tender lover, so much more giving than the two men she’d previously slept with. She kept waiting for him to tire of her, but instead they grew closer and she started to see the real Rob, the hurting man beneath the cocky musician façade. The crowd might go wild when he sang, he owned the stage at the local pub as if it was a massive concert hall, but when they were alone, he was almost an entirely different person.
They hadn’t been together long before he’d opened up about his father’s death and the other tragedies in his past. Her heart had broken for him and she’d wanted to make everything better.
And for a while, it seemed like she did.
A few months after they met, a big record label had ‘discovered’ One Track Mind and, less than a year later, high on the success of his first album, he’d proposed. Their wedding day had been one of the best days of Clara’s life, but heartache and tumultuous times were just around the corner.
Now, she couldn’t help wondering what their lives might have been like if they’d each married other people. If Rob hadn’t got appendicitis, if he’d met and married someone else, someone whose body was compatible with motherhood, would he have been able to recover from the trauma of his youth? Would there have been more than one hit song? Would he have been able to stop at one celebratory drink?
‘Clara? Clara! Where are you?’
At Siobhan’s loud, urgent question, she blinked. ‘What?’
‘You went far away. I couldn’t reach you.’
Clara could tell her sister the truth but that would only solicit a lecture. And fair enough; hadn’t she resolved to move on?
‘Sorry, I was thinking about Gregg,’ she lied.
Siobhan’s eyes sparkled. ‘Who is Gregg?’
Clara took another bite of her muffin before replying. ‘Do you remember a guy called Gregg Callen I went to school with? I didn’t know him well but we did work on the yearbook together in year twelve.’
Siobhan bit her lip, a look of serious concentration lingering on her face a few moments. ‘No, I don’t think I do. Don’t tell me you’ve found him online after all these years?’
‘Yes, he’s one of the profiles that came up as a perfect match to mine. He’s divorced too.’ Clara didn’t tell her sister that Gregg’s ex-wife had left him for a woman five years ago. He’d made her promise not to feel sorry for him.
Siobhan leaned forward, eager to hear more. ‘And you’ve been communicating with him?’
‘A few emails have been exchanged,’ she admitted coyly.
‘Well, then, what’s he like?’ Siobhan asked, her excitement clear in her voice.
So Clara told her sister The Gregg Facts.
He had three grown-up children who were all living overseas; he was planning a trip to Europe in a few months to visit one of them. He wasn’t big on watching or playing team sports, but he liked bush walks, reading and watching foreign films. He was a non-smoker and really only drank on holidays, which he said he didn’t go on enough of but had made a new year’s resolution to fix—hence the upcoming Europe trip.
She liked that he’d decided to get out of his own rut and change his life as well. Although he only lived a couple of suburbs away, they hadn’t progressed past emails yet.
‘What does he do for a crust?’ Siobhan asked when Clara paused for breath.
‘He’s a high school history teacher.’
Siobhan grimaced a little. ‘History? He’ll probably bore the pants off you talking about world wars and every single wife of Henry the Eighth.’
‘I like history,’ Clara said in his defence. And the fact Gregg sounded so different from Rob only added to the appeal. If she was going to contemplate entering a relationship again, she wanted someone solid and stable, not another person she had to mother and look after.
‘Well then, in theory he sounds fabulous, but what does he look like?’
‘Looks shouldn’t matter, should they?’ Rob had been very good-looking when they’d met and look how that had turned out.
Siobhan rolled her eyes and Clara grabbed her phone to bring up Gregg’s profile on the dating website. She smiled as his cheerful face looked up at her and then she turned the phone to show her sister.
‘Wow.’ Siobhan let out a long, impressed breath. ‘He looks a bit like George Clooney—only he’s aged better.’
Clara grinned—that was high praise coming from Siobhan who’d harboured a crush on George since she’d fallen in love with him in that awful horror film Return of the Killer Tomatoes. ‘So have you done the deed yet?’
‘Siobhan!’ Clara rolled her eyes, thinking it was lucky her sister had coupled up before the advent of the internet, which had changed the face of dating. Siobhan would have been unstoppable if something like Tinder had been available back then. ‘We haven’t even met face to face yet.’
‘What are you waiting for? If he’s perfect on paper, then you want to ask him out before some other sex-starved spinster snaps him up.’
‘Who are you calling a spinster?’
They both laughed.
Siobhan thrust Clara’s phone at her. ‘There’s no time like the present. Why don’t you send him an email right now?’
Clara’s heart palpitated at the thought. ‘Isn’t the gentleman supposed to do the asking?’
‘What century are you living in, sister dear? These days men and women have equal rights and that goes for making the first move as well.’
But it wasn’t only the prospect of asking that terrified her. The word ‘date’ sounded so official, so binding, so serious. It sent an actual shiver down her spine. Was she really ready for this?
As if reading her mind, Siobhan softened a little. ‘Why don’t you just see if he wants to meet you for coffee? That sounds more low-key and you won’t be stuck with him too long if he bores you to tears in person.’
‘Coffee.’ Clara said the word out loud as she pondered it. Maybe she could do that?
‘I’ll think about it,’ she promised Siobhan. She needed time to work herself up to it and no way was she going to do it with her sister watching over her shoulder, making suggestions of what to say.
She pushed back her chair and scooped up both their teacups to show Siobhan that there would be no further discussion on this topic.
‘Okay.’ Standing, Siobhan picked up the plate with the remaining muffins. ‘But don’t think about it too long or you’ll chicken out, and make sure you let me know the moment Gregg replies. I’ll help with your hair and make-up.’
‘Deal.’ Clara smiled at her sister, making a vow not to tell Siobhan about anything until after it had happened. She was quite capable of making herself look presentable, thank you very much.