‘Your mum doesn’t have to cook me breakfast every day, JT,’ Brix hissed beneath his breath, three days later, as he sat at the table beside Jaydah, contemplating another plate of heart-attack material. Keith Tully must be such a mean slippery bastard even cholesterol wouldn’t stick to his veins.
‘I’ll talk to her,’ she promised.
‘She doesn’t have to clean my house either. She’s not here to be the maid!’
‘I know. I’ll talk to her.’
‘Don’t make it seem like I’m not happy about it though.’
‘I won’t. Don’t worry.’ She shushed him as Rosalie came into the room, having called Jasmine inside to have her breakfast.
The three women sat and waited for Brix to begin first, like they had on the other mornings. He felt like Caesar, or Hitler, or some desert sheik with a harem. He felt a bit like Keith Tully, which made him want to poke his eyes out.
‘Rosalie, please eat. You don’t need to wait for me.’
Dutifully, Rosalie picked up her bowl of rice and began to eat. She finished first—it was a very small bowl—and waited for the others, taking plates and cutlery to the sink as they finished.
‘More coffee?’ Rosalie asked Brix.
‘No. I’m good thanks.’
Then she took dishwashing gloves from beneath the sink and loaded the sink with dishes, even though Brix had a perfectly good dishwasher that wasn’t getting any use.
He sliced through a piece of toast and bacon—Rosalie cooked it that perfect shade of crunch—and instead of enjoying his breakfast, he got more and more ticked off.
‘Rosalie?’ he said, bringing Jaz and Jaydah’s heads up, swift as horses.
Rosalie snapped down on the hot water tap to stop its flow and jumped to face him. ‘Yes?’
‘You don’t need to cook me breakfast every morning, Rosalie. I mean, thank you for the last couple of days, but I can get my own breakfast. I can look after myself.’
She twisted her fingers in her apron. ‘I am sorry.’
‘Please, there’s no need to be sorry. I’m not angry. I’m not upset. I just don’t want you waiting on me, okay? There’s no need to do that. I can show you the dishwasher too. You don’t have to start washing dishes the moment we finish a meal, okay?’
‘I’m doing it all wrong,’ Rosalie said, and her cheeks crumpled.
‘You’re not doing anything wrong, Mum,’ Jaydah said. ‘Don’t worry.’
Beside him, Jasmine wrapped her arms across her stomach and rocked forward and back in the chair.
‘This house has never been cleaner, Rosalie,’ Brix said, wanting to explain. ‘I mean, everything’s spotless. It looks amazing. But you don’t need to clean my house. I mean, you’re welcome to and thank you, but I can clean up after myself.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t need to be sorry.’ He waved his hand, and all three women watched it in such a wild-eyed way that he rubbed his palm on his jeans and left it there, as if he’d stuck it with glue.
He took a deep breath and started again. ‘Jaydah tells me it’s years since you were in touch with your parents, Rosalie. Would you like to ring them?’
‘Ring them?’
‘On the phone. You can use the phone here.’
‘We aren’t allowed to use the phone. Daddy says we might break it,’ Jasmine said.
‘A phone is pretty hard to break,’ he said mildly.
‘We didn’t have a landline at the farmhouse,’ Jaydah said. ‘We only had my mobile and Dad’s mobile.’
‘We can easily buy Rosalie a new phone,’ Brix said.
‘Mum shouldn’t use the phone,’ Jaz said, shaking her head, rocking from her hips so that the chair creaked and the legs scraped the floor.
‘Do you still have the number, Mum?’ Jaydah said.
Rosalie shook her head. ‘Your dad said it didn’t work. He showed me on his phone when I asked and I could hear the woman’s voice saying to me please to dial the number again.’ Rosalie batted her hand towards Jasmine. ‘Jazzy, please don’t worry. I won’t use the phone.’
Jasmine stopped rocking.
‘He probably didn’t dial the country code properly,’ Brix said. ‘He might not have had international roaming.’
‘I don’t know about the roaming thing. I don’t know what this is. He tells me my parents changed the number,’ Rosalie said. ‘I think the news about Jasmine’s birth … he told me they lost face because she wasn’t born right. Your father says they changed the number because they didn’t want to remember they had a …’ her eyes skipped around the room and she whispered, ‘a granddaughter who was a retard.’
Jaydah put her fork down and sat ramrod straight in her chair. ‘He said that to you?’
‘He says it all the time.’
‘We should be proud of Jaz, Mum. She’s a beautiful girl and a wonderful soul. Don’t listen to him. He’s a monster.’
‘Jasmine is not like you,’ Rosalie maintained.
‘No. She’s not like me. But she’s still special. She’s our family.’
Brix put in, ‘Well, maybe you can write to them and ask for the number and explain you’ve moved from Chalk Hill? Send them a new address and give this phone number. At least then you’ll know you’ve done what you could. Would you want to visit your family in Manila again, Rosalie?’
‘Yes. Of course I would like that. But I am not allowed to fly there. I might never be allowed to leave if I go back. I might never be allowed into Australia again and I’d never see the girls. Keith says they can make me stay at the airport forever.’
Jaydah stabbed at her toast so hard she broke a hole through the bread. ‘You’re a permanent resident with a permanent visa, Mum. Don’t listen to him! Of course you could visit home if you want to and come back.’
Rosalie said solemnly to Brix, ‘I would like to try to contact them. I will take you up on your kind offer to write to them. Thank you.’
‘No problem at all. Please feel free. I want you to feel at home here,’ he said, and then he thought: in for a penny, in for a pound. ‘You can start writing that letter right after we finish your first driving lesson.’
‘Her what?’ said Jaydah, brown eyes going wide.
‘I’m going to teach you to drive. You need to learn so you can drive yourself when you want to go somewhere.’
‘Where would I go?’
‘You know, to the shops or something. To work if you want to …’
‘You want me to work?’ She took off her apron and hung it on a hook near the sink.
‘Mummy is lazy,’ Jaz said. ‘She’s lazy, my mummy.’
‘No, Rosalie. Not right now for the work, okay? This is still holidays. I mean later, when you feel settled here. You might want to work. How about we have a driving lesson today?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Yes you can.’
‘I don’t know how. I don’t know anywhere. I don’t know the roads.’
‘We’ll just drive on the farm and I’ll show you. We’ll do lessons.’
Jaydah snort-laughed beside him.
‘We can start in one of the paddocks where there’s nothing else around, nothing to run into, and see how you go.’
‘Go on, Mum. It’s a good idea,’ Jaydah encouraged.
‘Daddy always drives,’ Jasmine said. ‘Mummy is too stupid.’
‘Your mum isn’t stupid, she just hasn’t been taught how,’ Brix said, a little sharply, without really thinking about it. Jaz picked up her toast.
‘I’ll show you how to stack the dishwasher, Mum,’ Jaydah said, putting her hand on Brix’s shoulder. ‘I think learning to drive is a brilliant idea and we should do it.’
‘That’s settled,’ he added, grinning at his mother-in-law.
‘Okay,’ Rosalie said, looking like she might cry.
* * *
‘For a start, Rosalie, this car is a manual. You have manual cars where you have to change gears.’ He tapped the gear stick. ‘This is the gears here. And you have automatic cars where you just put them in Drive or Park or Reverse or Neutral and the car changes the gears for you. Automatics are easier, but this car is a manual. If you learn in a manual, you can drive an automatic too, but if you learn in an automatic you can’t drive a manual.’
Rosalie stood in the gap made by the vehicle’s open door, with Brix in the driver’s seat pointing out gear sticks and brake, clutch, accelerator, indicators, ignition and windscreen wipers.
Jaydah and Jaz both stood watching his demonstration from the shade of the peppermint tree under which Brix had parked the Toyota.
Then he swung his legs out and stood up. ‘Okay. Your turn. In you get.’
Rosalie’s legs were far shorter than his own and he helped her adjust the seat and seatbelt, showed her the mirrors and adjusted those too. When he thought she was comfortable, he walked around to the passenger seat and hopped in, buckling his own seatbelt.
‘Okay. So when we start a manual car, we want to be in neutral, and to change gears we should depress the clutch, so can you do that?’
‘Yes.’ Rosalie looked at him through big brown eyes, so like Jaydah’s, and didn’t move a muscle.
‘The clutch, Rosalie. Remember? The pedal on the floor on the left.’
Rosalie looked at her feet and slowly, carefully, pushed down on the brake.
‘Not that one, Rosalie. The clutch.’
Rosalie pushed the accelerator and Brix gritted his teeth. ‘Nope. Not that one either. The clutch is the other way … all the way over.’
This time Rosalie pushed in the clutch.
‘Good job. Keep your foot there. Now see what this does?’ Brix put his hand on the gear stick and moved it left and right. ‘Now you can move the gear stick easily. That’s in neutral now.’
Rosalie moved the gear stick as if to nudge it would break it.
‘You can’t hurt the car, Rosalie. It’s tough, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘So neutral is the easy one. That’s when you can push this stick left and right like this. All this way.’ He put his hand on Rosalie’s and they moved it together. ‘Neutral is where we start. Now keep your foot on the clutch and I’ll show you first.’ He moved their hands. ‘Second. Third. Fourth. Fifth. And this one is reverse, when you want the car to go backwards. Reverse is a bit harder to find. We won’t worry about four-wheel drive for the moment.’
He took his hand away and Rosalie moved the gears herself.
‘Excellent. So let’s turn it on, shall we?’
* * *
‘You should see your face!’ Jaydah said, about an hour later, when his Toyota was safely parked back beneath the peppermint tree and his world had stopped being one of lurch, stop. Lurch. Stop. Stop. Lurch. Hop. Stall. Start again.
‘I think that was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done in my life.’ He glanced across at her mum to see if she was listening. She wasn’t. Rosalie had grabbed the broom and was sweeping the verandah.
He let her sweep.
‘Do you know your mum doesn’t know her left from her right?’
‘She does so.’
‘Not in my car, she doesn’t. I’d say the indicators were on the right and the next second she’d have the windscreen wipers on. Jaydah, she has no idea.’
‘It’s just nerves, Brix. It’s a complete unknown for her. She’ll get better if she keeps at it. You put yourself in her shoes. She would never have had a car in Manila. I bet no one she knew there owned a car and she never would have travelled anywhere by car. Then she came to Sydney where there were buses and trains to wherever she needed to go, and then we came here and my dad always drove. He didn’t want her to be independent so he never allowed her to take lessons. Driving a car is like something from the movies to my mum. I think she did pretty good, actually.’
‘Pretty good? I don’t think we got out of first gear unless we were in reverse, and I reckon she goes backwards faster than she drives forwards.’
Jaydah grinned at him. ‘It was your idea, Brixy. Next time just let her make you breakfast and wash the dishes.’
‘Come here and call me Brixy, and we’ll see what happens to you.’