wasn’t a date, Emma realised, while her father was agreeing enthusiastically to this plan, and reminiscing about the good times he’d had at the annual event.
‘It’s been going that long?’ Emma asked, and Marty laughed.
‘Your father’s not exactly ancient,’ he reminded her. He glanced at Ned. ‘You’d be, what, mid-fifties?’
‘Spot on,’ her father replied. ‘I took early—well, very early—retirement when Emma needed a bit of help, though for a few years I did a lot of supply teaching, filling in for absent teachers.’
Marty was delving into Hallie’s basket as her father explained, and now produced a paper plate piled with home-made biscuits and another with slices of chocolate cake.
‘Heavens!’ Emma said. ‘There’s enough food here to feed an army.’
‘Or two always hungry little boys who’ll love these leftovers.’ Her father smiled as he spoke.
‘Though, really, Marty should take it,’ Emma suggested.
‘And deny the boys Hallie’s chocolate cake? I think not!’
Laughing blue eyes met hers across the table and for a moment the air caught in her throat, just stuck there, as if she’d forgotten how to breathe.
Of course she could breathe!
In, out, in, out—simple as that.
But it seemed to take forever to get it sorted...
Not that her absence from the conversation was noticed as her father was now exclaiming about Hallie and Pop still being in Wetherby.
‘I met them, you know, quite a few times when I was a member of the surf club, and seeing a bit of Carrie.’
‘Small towns,’ Marty said, smiling again, but this time, thank goodness, at her father. ‘Carrie was one of the first children they took in, she was about twelve at the time so she was their first teenager. My lot—me, Izzy and Stephen, both of whom Emma’s met—and a couple of others were the last. I think all of us being teenagers together finally convinced them they’d done enough.’
‘What didn’t kill them made them stronger,’ her father remarked with a smile.
‘Dad was a high-school teacher so he knows all about teenagers,’ Emma explained, mostly to prove to herself she could speak as well as breathe...
The evening ended with complicated arrangements being made for her father and the boys to meet up with Carrie and her twins, the potential babysitters, and her father walked out to the car with Marty while Emma cleared the table and put everything away.
‘Well, that was fun,’ her father said, wandering back into the kitchen a little later.
The words sent a sharp pang of guilt spearing through Emma.
‘I’m sorry, Dad, I’ve been so selfish, letting you give up your life to help me out, first when Simon died and I lost the baby, and then with the boys. I hadn’t realised quite how selfish I’ve been until tonight.’
Her father put his arms around her.
‘You needed me back then, so where else would I have been? And wasn’t it me who talked you into having the boys, and didn’t I promise to look after them for you?’
He kissed her on the top of her head, adding, ‘And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but tonight, meeting Marty, and sitting out there just talking about nothing in particular, has shown me how restricted our lives have become. That was natural when the boys were small and very demanding, and the flat was really no place to be entertaining, but we both need to get out a bit more now, and the barn dance is a splendid idea.’
He was voicing the feeling she’d had back at Izzy and Mac’s place—voicing the fact that their lives had become too constrained, too centred around work and childcare.
She moved a little away from him and kissed his cheek.
‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘It’s time for both of us to get out and about. Who knows what’s waiting for us out there in the wild country town of Braxton?’
Her father chuckled and they parted for the night, Emma going quietly into the boys’ room and watching her sons sleep for a few minutes before dropping a kiss on each of their heads and taking herself off to bed.
Where, exhausted as she was, sleep was a long time coming.
Mainly because every time she closed her eyes she saw an image of a pair of laughing blue eyes.
She’d no sooner banished this image—with difficulty—when the barn dance hove into her mind. Though with Dad going too, the gossip mill could hardly slot her into the ranks of one of ‘Marty’s women’.
Could it?
IT WAS SOMEWHERE during this mental argument that she fell asleep, to be woken by two very excited boys telling her God had brought them a puppy.
‘We’ve been praying and praying,’ Xavier was saying, while Hamish, usually the leader, echoed the words.
‘Praying and praying?’ Emma muttered weakly, then remembered the playgroup her father and the boys had attended at a local church in Sydney.
But praying for a puppy?
It was the first she’d heard of it!
The boys were now bouncing on her bed so any thought of going back to sleep was forgotten, while their combined pleas to come and see it dragged her reluctantly out of bed.
The ‘puppy’, sitting quietly in the kitchen listening to a lecture from her father on a dog’s place being in the yard, was the size of a small pony. It leapt up in delight when it saw the boys and lolloped towards them.
And her, where it slobbered enthusiastically all over her pyjamas.
However, that gave her more time to check it out. For all it had, at some time, been well cared for, it was painfully thin and none too clean.
‘Sit,’ she said, and was surprised when he obeyed immediately. He’d definitely been cared for by someone who’d taken the time to train him.
But a dog?
A strange dog?
‘I think we should leave him outside until he’s had a bath,’ she said, which brought wails from both boys.
‘Well, go and play with him on the veranda,’ she compromised, following them as far as the door so she could keep an eye on all three of them, mainly the dog.
‘We can’t keep him,’ she said to her father over her shoulder. ‘He’ll just be something else for you to look after. Besides, he’s sure to belong to someone. We can take a photo, put up posters, maybe ring the local radio.’
Her father nodded.
‘I’ll do all that, and I’ll take him to the vet, get him checked out. He might be micro-chipped. But if no one claims him, well, the boys do love him already and he’d be great for them. I’ve been watching him closely and he’s certainly not dangerous. The yard’s all fenced and he’s big enough to handle two rough little boys.’
Emma shook her head, then realised the dog had taken up far too much time already and if she didn’t hurry she’d be late for work.
But a dog?
Were they settling in to country life so quickly?
The ED was quiet when she arrived, not quite late but close, and the chat about the triage desk was of the forthcoming barn dance—apparently one of the big events in the Braxton social calendar.
Maybe the animal shelter would take the dog.
She