Kate, Rory completed in his mind.
‘Anyway, having help means Sophie gets some time off for a change,’ Smiley went on. ‘So she’s good. She’s getting tips on baby-catching, she calls it, and thinkin’ of doing her midwifery.’ He looked back at the road. ‘When do you go back?’
Kate the teacher for Sophie? Of course she’d changed. What did he expect? That she’d still think he, Rory, held the answers to the universe?
‘I’ve a week off. I’ll stay over at the Hilton until RFDS can pick me up in a couple of days.’
The Hilton was the town’s tongue-in-cheek name for the extremely run down boarding house presided over by a tough ex-army nurse, Betty Shultz. Shultzie swore she’d never leave Jabiru Township, then again, Shultzie swore, loudly and often, all the time.
Her Hilton was nothing like the chain of exclusive hotels of the same name; her establishment was bare minimum and held together by pieces of wood nailed over the top of other pieces of wood.
‘How was Charlie’s retirement party?’
‘Good food,’ Smiley said. ‘Don’t suppose you’d want his job?’
After flogging himself to higher and higher levels until last month’s appointment? Volunteer ambulance in the bush instead of Deputy Commissioner of the entire state? Actually, it held some attraction. Back on the road instead of budget meetings and troubleshooting.
‘No. Afraid not.’
They didn’t speak again until they drove past the huge cattle yards on the outskirts and pulled up opposite the rundown hotel in the main street of Jabiru Township, population a hundred and fifty through the week, three hundred—mostly ringers and cowboys—on the weekend. Town, sweet town.
He looked around. A big change from Perth city.
Another whirly wind scooted past Rory as he lifted his swag out of the back and he glanced at the pale sky for the first streaks of cloud. Not yet.
He thumped the roof and Smiley lifted his hand and drove away. Rory watched the truck until it disappeared in a ball of dust and wondered if he could change his mind and ride it back out to the airstrip.
He’d never run from a challenge before. Funny how attractive that thought was right now, but only for a moment.
Well, he’d arrived. He needed to stop making such a big deal of a visit home. It wasn’t as if he had family here any more. He squashed that bitterness away too. The rest—meaning his reaction to Kate—would have to take care of itself.
He looked at the mostly boarded shops in the deserted street. It wasn’t like Kate’s father’s homestead and the home station where he’d grown up, but in the years since he’d been to the commercial part of Jabiru not much had changed.
Except the collateral damage he’d caused to his family by his liaison with Kate.
Kate Onslow was born into the pilot’s seat of an aeroplane; luckily, because it made the distance she needed to cover so ridiculously easy.
The two-hour drive between Jabiru Homestead and Jabiru Township was dust all the way and to fly cut the distance down to twenty minutes. Her great-grandfather had settled on the station a hundred years ago and when the township had grown exponentially her grandfather had built a new homestead away from the madding crowds. Though a hundred people didn’t seem ‘madding’ to Kate, she could understand the improvement in position for the family headquarters.
The new Jabiru Homestead, many-gabled, encircled by verandas and sprawled over an acre, nestled below a range of ochre mountains that bordered the Timor Sea; the peaks gave water and provided glorious waterholes and a lush rainforest pocket, and all only a short distance from the sparseness around the house.
The old homestead at Jabiru Township that she could see in the distance now from the air, held the hospital clinic, the pharmacy, the one-roomed library of donated books and the garage for the town’s only four-wheel drive ambulance truck.
As she closed in on her destination Kate saw the Royal Flying Doctor plane take off from the town strip and her heart rate dropped in a swoop as if she’d flown through a sudden wind shift, something her aircraft had been doing all flight, but this internal updraught made her sick to the stomach.
She’d had three radio calls already to tell her Rory McIver was coming to town to see her.
Last month it had been hard enough to come back and face her belligerent father and the reality of his illness but that paled in comparison with Rory’s unexpected visit.
She’d been able to face the idea of coming home because she’d known her father would never change her mind about anything again. But Rory? Once he’d been the world to her.
She would just have to survive this too. Her independence would help her survive it. The sudden sting of threatening tears she ignored—they never came to anything. She hadn’t cried since all that had happened ten years ago and the lies. But the emotional turbulence had started and she hadn’t even seen him. She was a big girl now and not some needy teenager with an adolescent crush on the manager’s son.
Kate took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. Too many years she’d spent telling herself she needed to stand on her own, rely on herself, be strong, and that determination would not be undermined by a man who had been out of her life for a long time. What did he want to see her for now, anyway?
Kate stripped Rory’s intrusion from her mind and concentrated on her descent because that was her strength. Single-minded concentration on what needed to be done. But, as soon as the plane grounded, as soon as room for distraction arrived, the thoughts returned to stick like the plane’s wheels to the ruts on the strip.
She gritted her teeth and secured her aircraft but the worry nagged at her all the way to town in her vehicle. Nagged her through the first half hour at work, right up until sixteen-year-old Lucy Bolton presented with the worst case of indigestion she’d had in her life.
Jabiru Township Clinic serviced the small town set in the baked earth at the edge of the station’s southern mountain ranges, a place that hid lush waterholes and settlements, plus far-flung aboriginal communities and out camps for the station. If the situation was dire, the doctor might be able to fly in once a week—unfortunately he’d been in yesterday.
Kate took one look at Lucy and put her to bed in the four bed ward. ‘Under those covers, young lady. No arguments. Where’s your mother?’
Lucy was a big-boned, hardworking girl whose mother leased one of the four pubs in town from Kate’s father. Usually happy-go-lucky and fun, Kate knew Lucy wasn’t one to complain. They bred them tough out here—had to—it was a long way to twentieth century medicine.
‘Mum’s tired.’ Lucy sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and kicked off her shoes. ‘There was a big outfit in town yesterday and I didn’t want to wake her.’ Lucy sighed as she rested her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. ‘The queer thing is, Kate,’ she whispered, ‘I haven’t eaten a thing ‘cause I feel so rotten, so how can I have indigestion?’
‘That’s not good.’ Kate stared down at the young girl and in a swirl of memories saw herself. ‘Poor you.’ She stroked her hair. She saw the slight puffiness around the eyes, the tiredness, that protective maternal hand that crept over her stomach. Her voice dropped. ‘Any chance you’re pregnant, Luce?’
Lucy’s eyes flew open and the sudden fear in the young girl’s face was enough confirmation. Kate sighed under her breath for the loss of youth coming Lucy’s way and a smidgen for the prick of envy. She wished she’d had the sense to ask for help like Lucy had.
Though in Kate’s day Mrs Schulz mightn’t have been as easy to approach as Kate or Sophie would be, even if Kate had been able to get all the way to the township from the home station.
She stroked Lucy’s shoulder. ‘Everything will be fine. I’ll just take your blood pressure, poppet. You don’t