Bungalow on Pelican Way Read online

  Relax. Pshaw. What did she know about relaxing?

  At some point in your life you had to give up and do what you knew how to do, and she knew how to take care of people. It was what she did, what she loved. They might as well bury her now if she couldn’t do that.

  But the girls — they didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand her. And perhaps it wasn’t their fault. She’d kept so much of herself from them. Had it been a mistake?

  She’d only wanted to protect them. To give them some semblance of stability. But they were grown women now. Maybe it was time. The next visit, she’d sit them down and tell them all about why this inn mattered. How it’d saved her. Why she was the way she was. What she’d been through, what she’d kept hidden. Yes, it was the right time. They were ready, and now she had no reason not to break open the past and let its secrets spill out like stagnant water from an old vase.

  Kate washed her hands at the sink, then examined the produce, turning the vegetables over in her hands, her mind running through all they had to get done before service began that evening.

  One by one, the kitchen staff filed in. They greeted her, then chatted together as they set about doing their various tasks. She missed the camaraderie of being one of them. She was the boss, and as much as she’d worked to make that happen, she hadn’t realised it would be such a lonely job.

  The phone on the wall rang, a high-pitched jangle that pierced the air and reverberated off the white, tiled walls. One of the staff answered, then met her gaze with the earpiece extended toward her.

  “It’s for you, chef.”

  She set down a bunch of greens with a frown. Who would be calling her at the restaurant? It could be Davis, he didn’t call often, but maybe he’d had a change of plans and couldn’t meet her tonight for tea. Irritation bristled over her skin. He’d been doing that a lot lately, canceling on her. How did he expect them to enter into a lifetime of wedded bliss if they never saw each other?

  She took the phone and pressed it to her ear, already considering the things she’d say to Davis if he canceled again. She’d be calm, mature, but firm. He couldn’t keep backing out of their plans last minute, it wasn’t fair to her or to them. They were building a life together and he should prioritise that.

  She wouldn't raise her voice or let her temper flare up, the last thing she wanted to be was some shrill housewife demanding her future husband spend more time with her. And Dad had always told her she should begin as she intended to go on, in relationships and in business.

  She’d be kind, patient, loving, but make sure he understood that she wouldn’t stand for second best when it came to their relationship. Either she was his priority, or she wasn’t. In her mind it was simple. She hesitated for a moment before speaking. What if he decided she wasn’t his priority? Her stomach twisted into a knot.

  “Hello? This is Kate Summer.”

  “Kate? Is that you, Kate?” The soft, wobbling voice threw her.

  “Yes, this is Kate. Who is this?”

  “Oh good, I’m glad I found you sweetheart. It’s Mima, from the inn.”

  “Mima? Wow, it’s good to hear your voice. How are you?” Unexpected tears pricked the back of her throat. She should visit them more often. She hadn’t realised how much she missed the entire crew from the inn. After all, it’d been her home once.

  “I’m good honey. Not as spry as I once was, and one of my knees has been playing up. But otherwise, I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I hope everything’s okay.” Why was Mima Everest calling her at the restaurant in the middle of the day? Her stomach knotted as she waited for Mima’s response.

  She heard a rustling sound. Mima cleared her throat, soft at first then with a loud, grizzled cough that hacked at her lungs. She was about to speak again, when Mima’s voice echoed down the line.

  “Look, sweetheart, there’s no easy way to say this.” Her voice broke, and Kate turned away from the kitchen to face the wall, her breath caught in her throat.

  “Your Nan died this morning. She’s been having some trouble with her ticker as you know, and she took a walk along the beach, like she always did, but as she was coming up the path to the inn she fell over. Thankfully, Jack saw her and came running to help. We called the ambulance right away, but it was too late I’m afraid. Jack performed CPR, and mouth-to-mouth, he knows about all that stuff from being a lifesaver for years. But she was gone just the same.” Mima sniffled and coughed again. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I know how much you loved her. We all did.”

  Kate’s breath finally released, and she inhaled again with a sharp intake of breath. “No,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Sorry, what was that, love?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Thanks for calling to tell me, Mima.”

  “You okay, sweetheart?”

  No, she wasn’t. How long had it been since she’d seen Nan’s sweet face? Christmas at least. She’d gone to the inn for Christmas but hadn’t stayed for New Year. Davis had wanted them to go to some party at one of his colleague’s fancy penthouse apartments. Anger burned in her gut. Why hadn’t she stayed longer? Nan had asked her to, but she’d turned her down. There was always next year, she’d told herself, only now there wasn’t. There never would be again.

  “Kate?”

  She realised she hadn’t answered Mima’s question. “I’m… I don’t know, Mima. I’m wishing I’d come down there. I didn’t know about her heart. Why didn’t she tell me?”

  Mima sighed. “I thought she had told you. She promised me… but you know your Nan. Stubborn as the day is long.” Mima chuckled, but the sound faded away.

  The sounds of the kitchen hummed behind her and Kate rested her forehead on the cold wall beside the phone. She squeezed the earpiece until her fingernails dug into the flesh of her palm.

  She cleared her throat. “Have you spoken to Reeda or Bindi yet?”

  “I talked to Reeda a few minutes ago. I have to dig up Bindi’s phone number. I couldn’t find her at work. I tried you earlier, but I guess you weren’t there. No one answered.”

  “I just got in,” Kate responded.

  “That makes sense. Reeda’s hopping on a flight to the Gold Coast airport tomorrow morning. I don’t know when Bindi will be coming.”

  Kate’s head spun. They were unveiling the new menu; everything was riding on her. Marco was counting on her. And she had to go to Cabarita Beach to say farewell to her grandmother. Her stomach roiled.

  “I guess I’ll go home now and pack. It shouldn’t take me more than a couple of hours to make the drive. I’ll be there before tea.”

  “Okay, love. I can’t wait to see you, sad circumstances notwithstanding.”

  “You too,” Kate replied, numbness filtering through her body.

  She hung up the phone, but stayed still, her forehead pressed to the wall. She pushed her hands against it as well, and hovered there for several long moments, willing her body to move.

  “You okay, chef?” asked a voice behind her.

  She nodded. “Fine.” And pushed herself back from the wall.

  3

  August 1995

  Cabarita Beach

  Leaving the city had frayed Kate’s nerves. The ferry ride back to Kangaroo Point. The walk to her unit where the lift wasn’t working and she had to climb eight flights of stairs, then leaned, puffing against the door before she could extract her keys from her purse in a haze of oxygen deprivation.

  She’d packed a bag without a clear thought. She threw in a bikini before remembering it was the middle of winter and she wasn’t likely to want to swim, then thought perhaps she should keep the bikini after all since her surfboard was stored at the inn. She wondered briefly if it was bad form to think about bikinis and surfing when her grandmother had recently died and slumped onto the bed with her hands pressed to her face.

  Her thoughts were tangled, and she struggled to extract a strand long and straight enough to focus on getting out the door an
d into the car. After that, she’d run into a traffic jam, and it’d taken three hours to drive from Brisbane to Cabarita Beach. She’d tried to find a radio station with soothing music to help slow her heart rate, but all she could find was something called Trance Dance, and another pumping out a loud, alternative rock song where the vocalist’s almost on-pitch nasal growl tugged on her frayed nerves.

  She switched off the radio, letting her thoughts wander. Her mind kept flicking through a slideshow of images. Nan in her rocking chair laughing over something she and her sisters had done. Nan marching along the beach in her gumboots, waving a stick at a seagull who’d had the nerve to steal a hot chip from Nan’s hand. Nan sitting astride her favourite chestnut mare, then digging in her heels to send the animal into a gallop over the golden sand.

  She was only a few minutes away from Cabarita and her pulse accelerated at the thought of what she’d find there. The Waratah Inn, with no Nan.

  The sun set in a lazy haze beyond the distant mountains. Shadows lengthened over the straight, narrow road that was called a highway but was really only wide enough for two cars to squeeze by each other with dust and gravel flying up beneath the tires that tickled the edges, and her stomach was clenched in the same knot it had been ever since she took that phone call from Mima.

  Rolling dunes undulated toward the blue sky to her left with hardenbergia, dianella, and lomandra plants dotted here and there and lining the uneven edge of the bitumen. To her right, squat casuarina and banksia trees shielded a fragile grassy plain and hid the road from the bulk of the sunset’s blinding rays where they shone through the breaks between foliage in bursts.

  Kate chewed a fingernail, the other hand holding tight to the steering wheel of her blue Honda CR-V. She’d taken her first trip down this road the year she turned eight. Her parents brought her and her sisters up from Sydney for a visit. They’d hired a car at the airport and taken this road to the inn. She recalled her father’s words, as he leaned forward to peer at the narrow stretch of bitumen over the steering wheel, his knuckles white.

  “I mean, what were Mum and Dad thinking moving all the way out here? Good Lord! I know I grew up here, but I didn’t realise it then: we’re in the middle of nowhere. Where are we?” He waved a hand with enthusiastic abandon toward the windscreen. “You’d think they’d want to see their grandchildren occasionally, but no. They’re so caught up in taking care of other people, making sure strangers have the most tranquil beach holiday of their lives, that they can’t spend time with their own family! I was sure they’d have given it up long ago.”

  Her mother had sat mute through his tirade, one elbow resting on the car windowsill, her hand pressed to tight lips, an unfolded map occupying her lap. They’d been studying it earlier, looking for things to do on their holiday.

  “And…” her father had continued, “do you know what she said when I asked her about it? She said they couldn’t leave the inn for long anymore, because it couldn't run without them and was getting busier every year, that it was time for us to make the trip. Can you believe it? I mean, when I pointed out that retirement was supposed to involve relaxation, maybe a trip to Europe, she laughed and said, ‘To each their own, my darling boy’.”

  He’d huffed in frustration then and pointed out that the map they were using didn't have the road the inn was on. “What kind of place isn’t on the map?”

  Kate remembered being quietly fascinated by her own grandmother then. Her father was right, she hardly knew either of her grandparents, since she often only saw them once or twice a year. And every time had been either at their home in Sydney, or at a campground halfway between the two locations in Scott’s Head on the verge of a long, horseshoe beach with soft rolling waves.

  She loved the idea of moving to a remote beach as they had, to a place that didn’t show up on the map and starting a new life. A life that didn’t involve stop and go traffic, private school, or boys that pushed you over in the playground and laughed when you grazed your knees.

  Instead they could live in a mysterious inn that wasn’t on the map, along a road with not a single car anywhere in sight, fringed by waves. That kind of life would be fine by her.

  And that was her first memory of admiration for Nan. There had been so many times since that she’d lost track, and at some point, she’d begun to take her grandmother for granted, assumed she’d always be there, and stopped wondering, stopped being fascinated by the details of her out-of-the-ordinary life. She was just Nan. The woman who baked the most delicious cinnamon tea cake in the state, or the most scrumptious scones. The woman who loved to sing to her chooks while she scattered seed on the ground for them to peck at. And the woman who loved the ocean almost as much as she loved her granddaughters. Almost, she’d always remind them with a wink, but not quite.

  Kate’s eyes misted and she wiped them with a quick movement, peering through the tears to find the road’s uneven edges and make sure to keep her car firmly between them.

  Her mother had made some comment then. Something wise in her kind, patient voice. Something that’d soothed her father’s nerves and made him smile, wiped the anxious lines from his face. She’d always done that. Been able to smooth his uneven edges. Then she’d turned to look back at her three girls, wedged side by side into the back seat of the car, smiled and patted their knees one by one. She didn’t have to say anything. Kate knew what it meant. She’d had a special way of making Kate feel as though everything was all right. So many years later, she hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

  The CR-V’s tires slipped and skidded as she pulled the car into the inn’s driveway. She’d almost missed the turn, distracted by a possum’s last-minute twilight dash across the road. She pulled the car onto the verge, her breathing ragged. A cloud of dust swept over the car, enveloping it like smoke from a campfire, the headlights dimming in its midst.

  Kate’s eyes squeezed shut a moment and she exhaled with slow deliberation. An image of the startled possum barely escaping her tires flashed across her mind’s eye. She shuddered. Just as her heart rate was about to return to normal, a thud on the car’s bonnet sent a bolt of adrenaline through her body.

  In the dim dusk light, she saw a familiar face. Jack, the handyman who’d worked at the inn for almost as long as she could remember and who had to be at least seventy years old, grinned at her from beneath a worn, tan Akubra hat. Behind him, a lop-sided timber sign painted in a gaudy dark pink announced The Waratah Inn, Beachside Bed and Breakfast.

  She pushed the car door open with a smile. “You scared the life out of me.”

  He chuckled, then stepped forward with open arms to embrace her. She wrapped her arms around his waist, enjoying the familiar scent of fresh cut timber, leather, and Old Spice.

  Her memory flashed back to another time. Jack had taught her to ride. The horse’s name was Janet. She’d laughed about that at the time and asked him what kind of person called a horse Janet. He’d told her it was as good a name as any for a horse, and besides, didn’t she look like a Janet?

  He’d held the reins while she and Janet walked around the yard. Then he’d shown her how to hold on with her legs and use pressure from her heels to urge the horse forward. Finally, he’d given her a lesson on how to hold the reins in her hands, loose but firm enough to be able to communicate with the animal about where she wanted to go and when she wanted to slow down or stop.

  That had been a good day during a time when good days were few and far between. After the accident, Nan had remained in her downstairs bedroom for weeks, unwilling to come out and face the world. Mima and Jack had been the ones who’d comforted Kate and her sisters, taken them to town to buy groceries, watched as they swam or ducked waves, and helped them buy the school uniforms they’d need to start attending the new school.

  When Jack brought Janet up to the inn, Kate had been sitting on the verandah, staring off into the distance, thinking about all the things she missed. All the things she’d never have. She’d smiled at the sight o
f the horse, then felt immediate guilt over that smile, wiping it away and replacing it with a scowl. He’d pretended not to notice, and patted Janet’s long, brown neck instead.

  “Isn’t she a beauty? I was hoping you might help me with her. She needs someone to take care of her, and I’m so busy with everything around here…”

  She hadn’t needed a second invitation. With a few bounds she was down the stairs and standing beside the bay horse, her hand pressed to the animal’s fine fur coat.

  “She’s so soft,” she’d said. “What’s her name?”

  Jack had been the one to help her onto Janet’s back, and ever since, she’d loved horseback riding. It was an escape, an adventure. And she’d be forever grateful to him for introducing in her a love of the majestic animals.

  He faced her now with a smile, his eyes gleaming. “Good to see you, love. I hope the drive wasn’t too bad.” He shifted his hat back with the tip of one finger.

  She shook her head. “It was horrible, but it’s over now. I’m glad to finally be here.”

  “Let me help with your luggage.”

  “I should move the car, I’m in the way here,” she said, scanning the winding gravel driveway that encircled the inn’s front yard.

  “I’ll help you inside then move the car to the parking lot for you.”

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  He patted her on the back, an awkward but sweet gesture that made her throat smart.

  “You’re welcome, hon. I’m glad you’re here. We’ve missed you.”

  Jack was a fixture at the Waratah Inn. He repaired anything that needed it, and Nan counted on him to help her keep the place running. Generally, he kept to himself and barely uttered a word to anyone. These few words of greeting were the most he’d said to Kate in years, and they meant a lot.

  She couldn’t speak as a wave of sorrow washed over her. She’d been gone too long. Nan had asked her to visit, maybe she’d even suspected she was sick but hadn’t wanted to say anything. Now Kate would never know, and she wouldn’t see Nan’s smiling face or bouncing grey curls as they marched along the sand together, arm in arm, ever again.