The Turnaround Treasure Shop (4 page)

***

Weekend or not, Nick spent each day doing what he loved most. Hiding out and fixing things and he was on his way home now to do just those things. He changed gear as he turned the ute onto All Seasons Road. He made sure he went into town two or three times during the week, just to show his face. He'd learned quickly after moving to Swallow's Fall that the women in town would follow a man as far as his own hideaway house in order to say things like, ‘We haven't seen you in town lately, Nick. What do you do here all by yourself?' or, ‘Why don't you pop into town tonight and have a drink at the hotel?' The older ladies in town said, ‘Such a shame you're all on your own. How do you cope with the cleaning and cooking?' The younger ones, like Charlotte Bradford and Sammy Granger, were much less coy, smiling at him as they dropped off cakes and biscuits they felt he needed, wandering through his workshop, picking up tools and teasing him with ideas about setting him up with a blind date.

He liked their blatant feminine questioning and prodding. They weren't gossipers, they were simply trying to do something good for him, providing something they thought he might want. Well, they weren't far wrong about the wanting, but wanting something didn't mean the wish would be granted.

Nick came out of this reverie and pulled the ute over to the verge.

Janie-Louise Johnson struggled towards him, her body tilted awkwardly to one side as she walked down the road while holding the front wheel of her bicycle off the ground.

He might not seek Lily's company, but he was on good terms with her children. He rolled the window down.

‘Looks like hard work, Janie-Louise.'

The kid grinned. ‘Hi, Nick.' She lifted the buckled front wheel higher. ‘Mum's going to kill me.'

Nick smiled. Lily didn't have a kill-zone in her body. ‘Are you hurt?' he asked, getting out of the cab.

‘Scraped my knee.'

Nick ran a quick one-two over the graze on her leg. It didn't look too bad. ‘We need to get it washed. Then I'll run you home.'

He'd never been to the Johnson house. A five minute drive from town. Or a 20 minute walk, he thought, knowing Lily had been walking to and from work every day the last month because he'd seen her arrive in town for her working shift, and walk out of town when she'd done tidying the old shop or the library. He'd thought it might be because she wanted the exercise. But perhaps something had happened to her vehicle?

Nick opened the passenger door and got Janie-Louise to sit on the seat. He pulled a first-aid kit out of the glove box and took out saline to wash her knee, tweezers, and a large square plaster to cover the scrape.

‘Your bike's in a worse state than your knee,' he told her as he carefully used the tweezers to remove a couple of bits of gravel from the wound.

‘Ow.'

‘Sorry, trying to be gentle.'

‘My bike is my lifeline,' she said. ‘And it's died on me twice this week.'

Nick smiled, head bowed so Janie-Louise couldn't see his amusement. Then he stopped smiling. Lifelines. How many had he had? Enough to know he wouldn't be alive today without a couple of them. ‘Where've you been?' he asked.

‘Sammy and Ethan's place. I promised to look after Edie while they were packing.'

‘That was good of you.'

‘I love going up to Burra Burra Lane. I play with Edie and Lachlan a lot. They're cute little kids. Sammy bakes biscuits for us all, and if he's not called out to farms or somewhere, Ethan lets me look at the animals in his surgery. They've got a lost budgie who's just had babies.
So
cute. Do you know how impossible it is for budgies to live in the wild? They've named it Jammy.'

‘Where'd they find it?'

‘At the stables. Must have got out of its cage. Ethan's trying to find its owner. He said I might be able to take one of the babies, if the owner doesn't want them.' She paused.

Janie-Louise spoke faster than water ran down a drainpipe. Nick reckoned she had to pause on occasion before her second thought became the third and she forgot to voice the second out loud.

‘Ethan's got a cage I could have cheaply,' she said. ‘One he doesn't use. Because of course, I couldn't afford to buy a new one.'

‘There y'go.' Nick packed up the first-aid kit as Janie-Louise hopped off the passenger seat and went for her bike. ‘You work at the stables at weekends, don't you?' he asked.

‘Yeah.' She looked down at the buckled front wheel of her lifeline. ‘Or, I did.'

Nick hauled the bike into the tray of the ute. ‘I can fix the wheel for you. Nothing's impossible.'

‘Thank you very much.'

Nick liked the way her green eyes sparked in pleasure. He wondered if her mother's eyes did the same. He wondered how much pleasure Lily had in her life. ‘If you work,' he told Janie-Louise as they both got into the ute, ‘you ought to be able to put some money aside and buy a cage for your budgie — if you get it.'

‘Oh, I will. Soon as I've saved for my ereader. Do you read?'

Nick nodded. ‘Quite a bit.'

‘How many books have you got on your ereader?'

Nick opened his mouth to answer but Janie-Louise cut him off.

‘I've got two hundred and forty-seven books lined up for mine. I'll only be able to afford two or three books to begin with though.'

‘Do you use the library?' Nick asked.

She pulled a face. ‘They've only got knitting and kissing books at the moment.'

Nick couldn't hold onto his laugh. ‘You don't like the kissing books?'

‘Too young. Mum said it'll be another couple of years before I start looking at boys and hoping for yucky kisses. You don't know much about 12-year-old girls, do you?' she added, with a quaint look of shock on her face.

Nick shook his head. ‘Not much.'

‘I'll fill you in on the way home.'

‘Thanks. Do you think I should take notes?'

She skimmed a sidelong glance down his torso, his cargo-pants and his boots ‘What did you do in the Navy?'

‘I was a clearance diver.' He said it softly, almost beneath his breath.

‘A what diver?'

He pulled himself up. ‘I can hold my breath a long time.'

‘What good does that do you?'

He threw her a grin. ‘Nothing. I'm just showing off.'

She paused a moment longer than usual and Nick knew what was coming next.

‘Did you shoot anyone?'

He paused before answering. He could say no, but lying wasn't the right thing to do to a 12 year old who was seeking knowledge about the real world.

Captain Barton. Tactical Assault Group. Waterborne. Usual place of work — a 16,000 tonne warship or a fast insertion boat — anywhere explosive ordnance disposal or mine counter measures were required.

Not much need for that around here. Thank God. ‘I was in areas of war,' he said. ‘And things get seriously nasty before, during and after wars.'

‘I bet you did shoot someone.' She sighed. ‘I'm going to be a vet.'

Nick put the ute into gear and spun the vehicle in a U-turn. ‘Good idea, landlubber.' He'd joined the Navy when he was 18, game but green. There was nothing wrong with being in the forces, but after everything he'd seen he couldn't rightly say he'd want any kids of his to go to war. As he wouldn't be having kids of his own, he supposed the dilemma wouldn't arise.

‘Don't you do a lot of babysitting?' he asked, changing the subject.

‘Yeah, but I don't get paid for that.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's part of the Support to Survive program. Mum says we have to give our time and efforts freely.'

Nick knew about the program. Started by the town committee a couple of years back, encouraging the townspeople to give and support others by committing themselves to volunteering for community jobs, like Keep Australia Clean day or visiting the older residents, doing their shopping each week or reading to them. Whatever was needed.

‘Mum does her bit with the empty shop and the library and the museum.'

So Lily didn't get paid for those jobs. He'd wondered. It seemed too much to his way of thinking. She worked an eight-hour day at Kookaburra's five days a week then spent two afternoons of those days cleaning for the town's good.

‘Good thing you found me, Nick,' Janie-Louise said. ‘I'd have been seriously late if I'd had to walk home. Mum would have been frantic.'

‘Well, we don't want your mum worried, do we?' He turned the ute back into Main Street and headed south out of town. ‘We'll have you home in five minutes.'

Nick found a worried kink in the muscles at the back of his neck. Looked like he was going to get a second look at Lily this Sunday. He wasn't sure how he felt about that. It broke his routine, which was fine. He wasn't so sure how it sat with him emotionally.

Lily licked her thumb and wiped the small trail of glue from the edge of the rosebud wallpaper she'd used to line the drawer of a washstand. She'd sanded off the original ugly varnish and given it a coat of bluebell-coloured paint, using fine steel wool to sand that back until parts of the wood grain were visible. Now all that was needed was to fix the metal drawer handle back in place. She'd aged the handle by soaking it in a solution of vinegar and salt until it turned a bluey-aqua colour.

She stood back and admired her perfectly distressed work then checked her watch. Five thirty. Time to get dinner on the go. Sunday night; pizza night. Lily made the dough and the kids chopped up the toppings, according to wants, needs and what was available in the pantry.

She opened the bi-fold shutters from her workshop — the back lounge room — and walked into the open plan kitchen-dining room. ‘Open plan' was a term suggesting that Lily lived in a modern brick and tile house when, in fact, she lived in the old weatherboard and metal-roofed house she'd grown up in. The open plan area came about when Lily, her mother and the children had decided they needed more space and had taken an axe to the dividing wall. The house was lavish all the same, to Lily's mind. Especially with the re-decorating she and the children had done over the last few years, gathering junk and buying second-hand paint from neighbours who'd over-ordered or were throwing out, and giving their house a brand-new lease of life.

That's how her hobby had started, along with her boundless enthusiasm for everything out-dated and considered useless. She'd managed to pick up lots of interesting tools for her lounge room workshop from what had been her father's shed, now old and rickety. It also held numerous pieces of furniture her parents had discarded, stacked and stored over the last 30 years. In case they might be needed again.

Nothing went to waste in the Johnson household.

With lessons from Dan and Ethan Granger, Lily had discovered the art of ripping old furniture apart and piecing it back together with care. Not always as it had begun life. A wooden bed-head with knobs could be turned into a garden bench if it was put together with a slatted coffee table. She'd learned the art of distressing, waxing, ageing and sanding. She was damned good at it too, if she did say so herself.

Her teachers had smiled indulgently at her use of floral wallpaper, decoupage and candle wax to distress her household pieces but nothing deterred Lily from her quest, not even the cynical raised eyebrows of the two males.

Lily checked her watch again. The kids should be home by now. Andy was probably lurking around the agricultural museum at the back of the Town Hall, checking out the pioneer machinery and how it worked — but where was Janie-Louise?

She looked out the kitchen window when she heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the rough-hewn hill of the driveway through the back paddock.

In a split second she took in two things. Nick Barton's ute and Janie-Louise's bicycle in the tray.

She checked the windscreen of the ute and saw Nick's large body in the driver's seat and her daughter's smaller body in the passenger seat.

Nick at her house? He'd never been to her house before, why would he be coming now? It had to be Janie-Louise. Something had happened to her.

She ran to the back door and rushed outside, hugging her body with her arms and frowning as Nick drove up to the house and pulled up outside the old pig-pen.

‘What's happened?' Lily called.

‘Hi Mum. If you're going to kill me, please do it quickly.'

‘
What
?'

‘It's okay, Lily,' Nick said, a smile playing around his mouth as he got out of his vehicle. ‘Janie-Louise had a small accident with her bike, but she's fine.'

Lily looked over to her daughter as she bounded out of the passenger seat and lifted her right leg to show Lily. ‘It'll leave a huge scar, probably,' she said, grinning as if she'd been given a medal.

‘It's fine,' Nick said. ‘I washed it. It's only a graze.' He looked down at Janie-Louise and added, ‘A huge graze.'

Janie-Louise laughed and Lily saw Nick's smile grow. A real smile. One she'd never seen before. It lit his face, softened his masculine features and reached his leaf-green eyes.

Tenderness leapt in Lily's chest. Her daughter had always been a happy, giving child. Seeing friendship sparkling between her child and the tall man beside her revived a dream she'd once had but pushed aside. Her children having a father. One who loved. One who guided. One who cared.

She lifted a hand and tightened the knot of her hair on top of her head, sticking the pencil in more firmly. What was wrong with her? She hadn't had her head in
those
clouds for years. She stepped forwards, heading for the ute and the broken bicycle. How would Janie-Louise get around now?

‘How bad is it?' she asked, hands on the tray, peering at the bike.

‘Buckled front wheel,' Nick said. ‘I can fix it.'

‘You can?' Lily shot her gaze to him. He wanted to fix it?