‘Glazed lemon cake,’ Pam said without missing a beat.
The girls laughed. ‘That’s right,’ Tully said. ‘You love lemon cake.’
As they started venturing into other foods – favourite breakfast, favourite snack – Locky wandered over and started playing too. You couldn’t have scripted a more lovely scene. Stephen was right, Heather realised. Of course this was the right place for Pam. She was exactly where she should be.
As if on cue, Stephen came over with a bright-eyed Miles still perched on his shoulders. ‘Is it time for the Bluey cake?’ he asked. ‘I’d like an ear, please.’
They all looked up, even Pam.
‘I want an ear!’ Miles cried.
‘There are two ears, baby,’ Tully said, getting to her feet.
‘And since you are the birthday boy,’ Stephen said, removing Miles from his shoulders and setting him back on his feet, ‘you can have first pick.’
Miles grinned and gave Stephen a high five.
Pam stared at Stephen, her nose scrunched, as if she’d smelled something that had gone bad.
‘Look out for that guy,’ she said, pointing at Stephen.
The warning was delivered in a quiet moment, when the music was between tracks and the lion’s share of the kids had gone inside to scavenge from the party food table.
‘What guy?’ Tully said. ‘You mean Dad?’
But Pam wasn’t listening to them; her gaze was still on Stephen. ‘He made my life hell,’ she snarled. ‘I should’ve left him years ago.’ She spat.
‘Yuck, Grandma,’ Miles said.
Stephen patted Miles’s head. ‘It’s all right, buddy. Grandma’s just a little confused.’
‘How convenient,’ Pam said.
Stephen opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Sonny appeared in his Bluey costume again and Miles let out a particularly shrill scream that had everyone wincing.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ Stephen said to Sonny. ‘Will you take off that bloody suit? You’re terrifying the poor kid.’
‘Go on, Sonny,’ Tully said, standing. ‘I’ll bring the rest of the kids in for pass-the-parcel.’
Everyone shuffled towards the house, grateful, Heather assumed, that they could move on from the awkwardness of Pam’s comments. But after everyone was inside, Heather noticed Rachel was still by her mother’s side, looking at her mother closely. After several seconds, she glanced back towards the house. She was staring straight at Stephen.
34
TULLY
‘What do you mean you took them?’ the lady behind the counter of the department store said to Tully.
Dr Shearer believed that returning as many stolen items as she could was an important step in Tully’s recovery. She wouldn’t be able to return every item, as a lot of things had been thrown out, given away or donated, but he suggested she start by choosing items that she had taken recently, ones that would still be stocked, and the ones that were most valuable. The goal was both to take responsibility for what she had done and to make reparations to the store where possible. Tully hadn’t been keen on the idea, but she’d made a commitment to do whatever she had to do to heal.
Sonny, too, had mixed feelings about the exercise. As a lawyer, he said, I’d recommend against it. If one of the shop owners calls the police, you could end up with a criminal record. But as a husband, I see that it’s important for your recovery, so I think you should do it. He added that, as a lawyer, it was a bad idea for him to go with her. And so Tully had had to swallow her pride and ask the one other person in the world she could tell without being entirely humiliated. Rachel.
‘You need to what?’ she’d said when Tully called her.
‘Return my stolen items,’ Tully explained. ‘I think it’s shame therapy. I must atone for my sins.’
‘And what’s my role?’ Rachel asked. ‘Am I your witness?’
‘Yes,’ Tully said. ‘And maybe my accomplice, if I have to evade arrest.’
Up to this point, the day had not been as bad as Tully had imagined, especially with Rachel coming along for the ride. In fact, it was almost fun, in a perverse kind of way. They’d visited six stores so far, bearing items to return. From the elderly woman who patted her hand and said, ‘I stole the most beautiful pair of earrings from a boutique in Paris once; I still have them somewhere,’ to the baffled woman at the hardware store who kept repeating, ‘A screwdriver? You took a screwdriver?’， everyone had seemed happier to gloss over it and move on rather than make Tully feel bad. But the lady at Myer – Judy, according to her nametag – didn’t seem to have got the memo.