‘Look at me, Mumma!’ Charlie’s bright blue eyes are alight with mischief, dimpled smile beaming through the white foam. He takes my hand and places it flat on the side of his face, just like Cam used to let him do when we were helping him shave.
‘I’m Dadda!’ he says, laughing.
Oh, God.
I don’t think I can do this.
1
‘Grace, please come away from the window!’
She’s pulled back the curtains in my front room, flooding it in late-winter sunlight. Ensconced in the window seat with a glass of sav blanc in hand, she’s brazenly gawking at the guy moving in across the road.
Charlie’s been playing something other than Minecraft for more than ten minutes, and I feel like an excellent mother. It’s such a rare victory that I’ve celebrated by reopening the manuscript of the literary novel I’ve been pushing uphill since the Neolithic Age, about five words at a time.
‘Your new neighbour rocks a flannie,’ Grace says. Ash-blonde hair backlit by the setting sun, she is ethereal. I watch as she stretches her long legs across the window seat and adjusts her forest-green maxi dress over high-heeled boots, and I wonder how I ended up with such a glamorous friend.
Grace and I are so close, I struggle to believe I’ve only known her six years, since Cam and I dragged ourselves away from Melbourne and moved to Queanbeyan, near Canberra, so he could lecture at the Australian National University. Meeting her at indoor netball in our mid-thirties was like finally discovering the Diana to my Anne. The Louise to my Thelma. The Diaz to my Barrymore.
‘Wonder if he’s DTF,’ she muses, before taking another sip of her wine.
‘Department of Treasury and Finance?’ I ask. ‘Wait, no. That’s two separate departments . . .’
She drags her focus away from the man across the road for long enough to properly observe me, incredulous at my na?veté.
‘What? Oh, is that some Tinder acronym?’ I ask. I have zero intention of mastering online dating. Or any kind of dating at all. Online or off, speed, double, group – I’ll have none of it, much to Grace Randall’s everlasting disappointment.
‘Yes, obviously DTF is a Tinder thing, Kate. It means Down To—’
‘Shush!’ I say, pointing in Charlie’s direction.
‘That man does not look like a public servant,’ she observes. Grace has been public-sector-averse ever since a bad date with Gerry from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority, who mansplained commercial fish statistics over a prawn cocktail, even though she’d already told him she was vegan, and allergic to maths.
‘There are attractive public servants,’ I argue. ‘I used to be one myself, remember? A public servant. Not—’
‘Shut up, Kate, and just look!’
I’ll get no peace until I join her at the window, so I save my document and set the laptop down. As I cross the room towards her, I slide black-rimmed reading glasses down my nose and fold my arms in preemptive disapproval. Here comes the Fun Police.
She gives me the once-over and frowns. All right, yes, there’s nothing glam about black leggings, mismatched socks and a sky-blue penguin Oodie, but if I can’t be comfortable in my own house, where can I be? I’ve twisted unmanageable auburn curls into a bun that’s loosely held in place by the pencil I’ve been using to hand-write a list of inconsistencies in my novel. Thanks to rapid-fire interruptions, the list is almost as long as the novel itself. How do other mums do this?
I look out the window.
‘Don’t let him see the penguins!’ Grace instructs, glaring at the Oodie. ‘Kate, you look the complete opposite of DTF right now.’
I am the opposite of it. I’m about to remind her of the reason for my multi-year celibacy streak, when the object of Grace’s fascination emerges from the truck. Sandy blond hair. Five-o’clock shadow. Ripped everything – jeans, six-pack, biceps. There’s something very Jon Bon Jovi in Moonlight and Valentino about the way he’s getting the job done. No fuss. Unintentionally gorgeous.
‘I know you’re grieving, Kate, and Officially Not Interested, but come on now. Surely even you can’t fail to appreciate this.’
He tilts the king-size bedframe he’s carrying, and we tilt our heads in unison, hypnotised. Gawd! I feel instantly guilty, and take a step back from the window into the shadows.
‘You are allowed to notice other men,’ Grace says, more gently now. ‘The whole world knows you’ll love Cam forever.’
Yes. ‘’Til death do us part’ was just the start of it.
I thought love would fade, the way grief does. Was terrified it would, at first. Scared a day might come when I’d forget the exact shape of the hairline at Cam’s neck. Or the way the scent of Aramis would announce his presence behind me, fresh from a shave and a shower, towel wrapped around his waist, drops of water falling from the tips of his hair onto my skin as he kissed me.
I needn’t have worried. Once the sharpest angles of early grief softened and blurry glimpses of a new life without him began to come into focus, my love for him only intensified exponentially, rendering all other men incomparable.
Even Grace’s guy across the road, now coming back out of his house. He bounds up into the truck and drags a chest of drawers carefully down its ramp on a trolley, shifts a few boxes to make a path for it and disappears back inside. Capable. Focused.
‘Good work ethic,’ I note. From the expression on Grace’s face I can tell the observation falls flat.
People tell me I’m still young. They say I’ll meet someone else. They point out that, at forty, my longest relationship might still be ahead of me. I get it, intellectually. But Cam is an impossible act to follow. Ours is an impossible vibe to recreate. It’s why I cannot be standing here at my front window, leering at some flannelette-clad, DTF non-public-servant as he wields half of IKEA out of a truck, solo.
‘It’s been two years,’ Grace reminds me. I bristle at the implication that I should be over my grief by now. Or that it might be time to ‘move on’。 The thought of doing that panics me. How would I even conduct a first date with some unsuspecting victim who hasn’t been properly briefed on the extent of my brokenness? Why would anyone sign up for what can only ever be a half-share of me?
‘I’m not ready, Grace. I’m not even interested in the idea of it, academically. I’ve got Charlie, and the novel, and Mum, and work—’
She silences my catalogue of excuses with a gentle hand on my arm. ‘You’re scared.’
Grace should be scared too. Her backstory wasn’t easy either. A grand romance that swept away most of the last decade and spat her out, at thirty-eight, straight into an IVF clinic with borderline unviable eggs and a dream so tenacious even the fertility specialist’s ‘five per cent chance’ hasn’t dulled her hope. I don’t know how she isn’t terrified of relationships now, like I am.
Of course, just as I’m about to retreat to the safety of my manuscript, the guy across the road glances up at my house and catches the two of us ogling. Fantastic.
‘To hot new neighbours,’ Grace says under her breath, waving her wineglass at him through my window as if we’re admiring him across a bar.