I only half expected him to come, but just after six he appeared around the corner of the house, wearing jeans, a dark green polo shirt with Coromandel Auto Spares across the front and a slightly wary expression.
I was feeling a little wary myself, having spent most of the time since our earlier meeting wondering just why it had seemed like such a good idea to force dinner onto someone who only wanted to be left alone. However, here he was, so I smiled at him through the open kitchen window and said, ‘Hi. Come on in.’
‘Jed,’ said Mum warmly as he paused in the kitchen doorway. She put a big cut-glass bowl half full of trifle down on the table and advanced to meet him. ‘Lovely to see you. This is Mike, Robin and Lia’s half-brother.’
The two men nodded to one another, and Mike, opening the fridge door, asked, ‘Beer?’
‘No thanks,’ said Jed.
‘Juice?’ Mike took a bottle out of the fridge and held it up to the light. ‘What’s this, Maggie? Apple juice?’
‘Onion juice,’ said Mum. ‘Carole gave it to me. Bit of an acquired taste, but it’s very good for you.’
Mike opened the bottle, sniffed cautiously and made a face. ‘I’ll take your word for it.’
‘It really is,’ Mum said. ‘Apparently it aids digestion, lowers blood sugar, it’s good for all sorts of allergies . . . I’ve got a fact sheet somewhere. And you can rub it into your scalp to reverse hair loss.’
Mike, whose hair was indeed wearing a little thin on top, gave her a pained look as he replaced the bottle.
‘It’s usually best to stick to water in this house,’ I told Jed. ‘Or bought drinks, as long as the seal’s unbroken.’
‘Don’t listen to her, Jed,’ said Mum. ‘Mike, if you’ll just get the potato salad out of the fridge I think we’re ready to eat.’
Dinner went off much better than I had feared. This was almost entirely thanks to Mum, who can maintain a pleasant, lighthearted conversation with anyone from hostile teenagers to religious fanatics.
‘Please have some more trifle, Jed,’ she said, spoon poised over the bowl.
He held out his plate. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good man,’ she said. ‘Come on, everyone, tuck in. I don’t want to have to put all this food back in the fridge. Mike?’
‘Couldn’t possibly.’
‘You’re a great disappointment.’
‘So I’m told,’ he said serenely, and she smiled at him across the table.
‘Are you opening the café tomorrow, darling?’ she asked me.
‘No. We’re going to bake like demons and fill the freezers. And then we’re open every day till the end of February.’ I rested my elbows on the table and my chin on my hands.
‘It seems a bit ironic,’ said Mike. ‘You live at the beach, and you miss most of summer.’
‘Well, you spend most of summer dagging lambs,’ I pointed out.
He made a face and turned to Jed. ‘I suppose this is your busy time at the garage, too?’
Jed nodded. ‘The last couple of weeks have been crazy,’ he said.
‘There may be something to be said for Monty’s approach to the busy season,’ I said, taking a sip of Mike’s beer. ‘He just closes up and goes fishing if he feels like it, and the customers can get stuffed.’
‘I’m surprised he has any customers,’ said Mike.
‘He has more now that Jed’s working for him,’ Mum said. ‘But Lia tells us you’re moving, Jed, to be closer to your little boy.’
‘Yes,’ said Jed. ‘Working for Monty’s only a short-term arrangement. He just wanted a hand for a few months – he’s a good friend of my boss in Thames.’
And that, I thought, would explain why the man was happy to live in a sleep-out the approximate size of a toilet cubicle. You can put up with anything when it’s only temporary.
‘You’ll be missed,’ said Mum. ‘It’s been a novel experience to take the car in for a warrant and get it back the same day.’
The conversation drifted on, touching lightly on the chances of getting Nana to Rob’s wedding (nil) and more heavily on Mum’s proposed grey-water veggie garden sprinkler system (tricky, but doable), until eventually it reached the subject of wedding marquee placement.
‘There’s more space on the top lawn,’ said Mum. ‘It’s just that the nicest vista in the garden is the start of the path between the perennial borders, and nobody will be able to see it with a great big tent in the way.’
‘Would a marquee fit on the bottom lawn?’ Mike asked.
‘Well, it might. Although the ground does slope away quite sharply at the edge, there.’
‘Should we go and measure it, or just sit here and speculate?’
‘It’s so much easier sitting here and speculating.’ But she got up and opened the drawer under the microwave. ‘I thought there was a measuring tape in here somewhere . . . Have you seen it, Lia?’
After some time, the tape was run to ground in the fruit bowl, and they headed purposefully for the bottom lawn.
‘Any plans for tomorrow?’ I asked Jed, getting up to start clearing the dishes. ‘Don’t worry, that was just idle conversation; I’m not going to invite you to a family picnic or anything.’
He smiled and pushed back his chair. ‘Fine. Don’t, then. See if I care. I thought I’d go in to the workshop and start clearing the backlog.’
‘On Boxing Day? Monty will be horrified.’
‘Monty might not mind having days’ worth of work backed up and people getting pissed off, but I do,’ he said, beginning to collect glasses.
‘You do realise it’ll be back to that as soon as you leave?’ I said.
‘I know, but at least I won’t be there to see it. Is that you and your brother?’
He was looking at the framed school photo of Rob and me, aged seven, which stood on the dresser. Rob was smiling cherubically at the camera, but I looked mildly apprehensive. Both of us were missing our two front teeth.
‘Yep,’ I said. ‘That was my all-time favourite T-shirt.’ Bright pink, with a My Little Pony (Wind Dancer, if memory serves) outlined in glitter on the front. It had clashed badly with ginger hair and freckles.
‘Craig has a pair of Transformers pyjamas that you’ve got to remove by force to wash,’ Jed said.
‘And then does he stand by the washing machine and sob?’
‘He did the first time.’ He looked at the next photo along. ‘You and Mike?’
‘Rob and Mike.’ It was a lovely picture – Mike, aged about eighteen, on a farm bike with a fat curly-haired toddler straddling the petrol tank in front of him. They were both laughing. ‘Mike was such a cool big brother. We used to go down on the bus in the school holidays to stay with him and Dad. Dad’s got a sheep farm down Taumarunui way.’ Paternal visits would have been pretty bloody grim, actually, if not for Mike. Dad didn’t bother much about us, but Mike blew turkey eggs for Rob’s and my collections and took us swimming in the river and taught us to drive the motorbike.
‘How old were you when your parents split up?’ Jed asked.
‘Eighteen months. That picture must have been taken just beforehand.’ I put down a pile of crockery on the sink bench and began to scrape the plates into the compost bucket. ‘Goodness knows why my parents ever got married. They must have been a terrible couple. You could scour the earth and not find another two people with less in common. What about your family?’
‘My parents live on a small block just north of Taupo,’ said Jed, putting a handful of dirty glasses down at my elbow. ‘And I’ve got one sister – she’s been in London for the last two or three years.’
‘You guys don’t do the family Christmas thing?’
‘Mostly we do,’ he said. ‘But this year Mum and Dad are in the Marlborough Sounds on a friend’s boat.’
‘Nice.’ If perhaps a little offhand, when their son’s life had just turned to custard.
‘Mm. Do you want this stuff covered before it goes back in the fridge?’
‘Yes, thanks. Just with a plate – they’re in that cupboard over there. Mum thinks using cling wrap is blatant eco-terrorism.’
There was a small silence while I filled the sink with hot water and Jed covered the ham and leftover trifle. He wedged both dishes into the fridge and picked up a tea towel.
‘So, what did you do before you bought a café?’ he asked, coming to stand beside me at the sink.
‘All sorts of random things,’ I said. ‘I studied ecology at university, then went trapping stoats and possums in Fiordland.’
‘Really?’
‘It was very cool. It’s the most amazing bit of country. But I tore all the ligaments in my knee and couldn’t walk up hills, so that was the end of that. Then I tried teaching and hated it, then went overseas for a bit, then worked in a nursery, then did a bit of rousying for a shearing gang – and then Anna and I started a café.’
‘What gave you the idea?’ he asked.
‘Um,’ I said. ‘We both like food and cooking, and we both had a feeling that it was about time we did something productive with our lives. We were just playing with the idea, really, and then the place came up for sale, and we borrowed every cent we could get our hands on and bought it. I can’t quite believe we had the guts to do it.’ I slid a stack of plates into the sink. ‘I’m still not sure we’ll pull it off, to be honest.’
‘You have pulled it off. It’s a great café.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But we’ve got a really big mortgage.’
He smiled. ‘Me too. That’s why I live in a cupboard.’
‘It’s a bummer being grown-up and responsible, isn’t it?’
‘Sure is,’ he said.
‘So what did you do, before coming here?’
‘Left school, did an apprenticeship as an auto mechanic, got a job, bought a house, got married, had a baby . . . All very predictable.’ He picked up a plate I’d just washed, looked at it and slid it back into the sink.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked. Married? Crikey, he really was a grown-up.
‘You’re supposed to get the food off.’
‘That’s what the tea towel’s for.’
‘And you work in the food industry,’ he said. ‘Frightening.’
I like this guy, I thought, applying myself to the next plate. And he’s married, and he’s in the middle of a custody battle, and he’s leaving the district. Oh, well done, Aurelia.