Meant-To-Be Mother

chapter SIX


‘SO HOW was your big date?’ Matt asked, through the flywire screen he was busy cleaning, as James came through the front door of his Apple Tree Drive home.

James all but jumped out of his skin. ‘Don’t do that, mate! Seriously!’

He threw his keys on to the hall table and continued through to the kitchen, where he buried his head in the fridge though he wasn’t quite sure what he hoped to find in there other than a place to hide from Matt.

But, alas, that wasn’t to be. Matt’s head appeared over the top of the fridge. ‘Don’t leave me hanging.’

‘It wasn’t a date, Matt,’ James said, reaching for an apple he didn’t really want. ‘I just met her for coffee to thank her for patching Kane up yesterday.’

‘You could have fooled me, Jimbo. What with the jacket and all, if I didn’t know you were meeting with her, I would have thought you were off to a day with the investors.’

James looked down at his outfit. ‘You’re imagining things.’

Matt reached out suddenly. James ducked away but he was too late to stop Matt from swiping a finger along his cheek. Matt smelled his finger. ‘Aftershave. The good stuff. Did I also imagine you had left the ironing board open?’

James stifled an oath and slowly bit into the apple as a big goofy smile grew on Matt’s lined face.

‘It’s okay, dude. It was an amateur’s mistake. Now spill. How did it go?’

James slumped into a chair by the round kitchen table. It had been a day filled with many firsts—his first date in several years, the first time he had found a woman whose hand fitted into his as though it was made to be there, and the first time he had ever told anyone how much he hoped Kane was like him. Anyone …

‘It was strange,’ James admitted, trying the words on his tongue rather than on his fingertips, and finding they didn’t taste as sharp and hurtful as he had expected they might. ‘Terrifying, mystifying and enjoyable by turns.’

‘Fantastic!’

‘Fantastic?’ He shuffled higher on the chair. ‘Matt, I have no idea what I was even thinking. Kane still stays up talking through his day to Dinah before he goes to sleep, and every morning is still spent in hope he’ll go to school without some sort of hypochondriac complaint. I’m not sure he’s anywhere near ready for anything of this sort.’

‘In all those lame excuses you didn’t say one word about how you feel about this girl.’

James let that comment lie.

‘Am I trying too hard? Trying to get back to the dating scene like it’s part of some twelve step programme to becoming a proper human being again? When really, maybe, I don’t ever have to go through it all again.’

All that feminine mystique. All those girls’ nights out wondering if this time she might not come home at all. And all that pain in wondering that if he had done more to try to stop her, to tame her, to need her the way she needed him, everything might have turned out differently.

‘Okay. That’s a fair point,’ Matt said, straddling the chair next to James. ‘But answer me this: why now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you been thinking about your twelve step theory for some time? Or is this the first time it has occurred to you?’

James wasn’t entirely sure. He had touched on it in his blog, but it had always been a rhetorical argument. A question sent out into the void with no hope of a response.

‘I hadn’t really considered it in detail until now,’ he admitted.

‘You mean you hadn’t considered it in detail until you met her?’

James let the words tumble about in his mind until he was pretty sure that was exactly the right answer. He dropped his face into his palms.

‘Fine. Then tell me why when she asked me about Dinah I said that she was incandescent.’

Matt laughed so hard his whole body shook. ‘You told her Dinah was what?

‘Incandescent. It means—’

‘I know what it means. I also know that to be putting stuff like that out there on a first date you are either terrified of how much you like this girl or the complete opposite. And only you can know which.’

Matt patted him on the shoulder, then stood and left him to his thoughts.

His thoughts? His thoughts weren’t the problem. It was his conscience that was having trouble keeping up.

‘So how was your big date?’ Rick asked Siena when she came out of the body shop staff bathroom all dolled up in her now cola-free Dolce suit, looking and feeling much more like herself than she had in the last twenty-four hours.

‘It wasn’t a date,’ she said, as she ran a finger around the edge of her lips to make sure her lip gloss was picture perfect.

She swung her Kelly bag into the cracked vinyl lounge chair in Rick’s office before following in its wake, letting her legs flop straight out in front of her and slinging an arm over her tired eyes.

She heard Rick sit down in his bouncy office chair on the other side of his big messy desk.

‘If that nice James Dillon had anything to do with it, that was a date,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t know what you two are playing at, Siena. He has a kid and he never did answer me properly about his wife.’

She shifted her arm and glared up at him. ‘He’s a single dad, Rick. His wife died over a year ago, but I hardly wanted to bring that up while introducing you to the guy. God, Rick. What sort of person do you think I am?’

‘I see you so infrequently, Siena,’ he said, his face hard, ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know.’

‘Well, know that I would never date a married man, or actively not date one, as the case may be. And, to put your troubled mind at rest, I have no intention of throwing my terrible self at nice James Dillon either. I’m leaving tomorrow. There would be no point.’

‘So how about your fellow in New York? Why didn’t the fact you were leaving the next day stop you from hanging out with him?’

She glared at him from beneath her arm to find him spinning a grimy old soccer ball on the end of his finger. ‘James asked me out because he is a kind man and I agreed because I have seen enough of your ugly mug for one visit!’

Rick rocked back in his chair and watched her. ‘Here we go again.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You bounce about like a jumping bean while here, and bounce away before anything gets too settled. But this Dillon guy sees past the jumping bean, and that’s a rare quality. Probably more than you deserve.’

And there he was—the Rick she had run from the minute she’d had the chance. She was shocked it had taken him all of twenty-four hours to tell her she was worthless.

Siena’s blood quickly reached boiling point. Rick had cast off enough such throwaway comments at her as a kid that she had begun to believe them.

But she had shown him that she was better than that. She had shown the world she was better than that. She had flown into town for a personal meeting with Maximillian, for goodness’ sake! If that didn’t show Rick that she was deserving, then she had no idea what would.

Siena tried to sit up to defend herself but Rick threw the football at her and she slumped back into the couch, trapped and winded.

‘He’s a keeper, Siena,’ Rick continued. ‘He’s financially successful and, according to the girls who were watching you guys leave, he is—and I quote—a “hottie”. Don’t do a typical you and blow him off like you’ve blown off everyone else who has tried to get close to you.’

She managed to pull herself upright and keep her skirt from hiking under her armpits at the same time. ‘I don’t blow people off,’ she said.

‘That’s exactly what you do, Siena. You couldn’t give Dad the time of day from the second you became a teenager.’

I was a teenager! she wanted to scream. All teenage girls go through that cringe against their father. Especially ones who had always been daddy’s little girl. That didn’t mean that it was her fault that his heart had given way.

‘Heck, you tried to blow me off long ago,’ Rick said, ‘and you would have succeeded if I didn’t give you free rein on the end of a long rubber band. But I always knew you could never fly so far away that you would never spring back.’

‘Please! You have nothing on me.’

‘Of course I do. I am your family. As is my wife, who adores you. As are the twins, and I can see how your face turns all soft whenever they call you ‘Enna. And, as to little Rosie—she looks so like you did as a baby it brings tears to my eyes.’

‘Hang on a minute—’

‘Siena, do you really think you can pull anything over on me any more?’

She had tried, so many times, to break the pull and tug of authority and self-reliance that had framed her childhood, and in leaving she had always thought she’d won the tug-of-war for good. But now she was back she knew the war had never been over, it had just been an intermission.

A knock came at the door. It was one of Rick’s employees. ‘Um, yeah, hi. There’s a guy here in a blue suit and a funny hat who says he’s here for your sister.’

Siena stood and placed the football carefully on his desk to show Rick exactly how much more mature than him she was. ‘That will be Rufus. My driver. Thanks.’

The guy blushed beneath the grease streaks on his cheeks and left.

She waited for Rick to make some smart comment—wondering why she hadn’t used her driver the day before rather than crashing his car—but he instead let go of a long high whistle.

‘Well, you’d better fly. As always.’

‘Afternoon, Rufus,’ she said as he opened the back door of the thankfully air-conditioned limo for her.

‘Ms Capuletti. You really should have called me to drive you to your old neighbourhood yesterday,’ Rufus said as she slid into the back seat. ‘You could have been hurt.’

She thought she heard the words ‘women drivers’ muttered under his breath as he shut the door but she was too shocked to care.

‘You heard about that?’ she asked when he got behind the wheel. She shuffled forward to lean on the open partition between them.

‘I know a guy who knows a guy,’ he said, watching her in the rear-view mirror, his beady blue eyes actually almost smiling, but Siena was pretty sure she didn’t want to know about the marginal kinds of guys Rufus knew.

She sat back with a groan. Really this place was just so small town it made her sick.

‘Oh, just shut up and drive, Rufus,’ she said.

He laughed before gunning the engine. ‘Yes, Ms Capuletti.’

The drive up to the beaches of Far North Queensland was glorious. They passed the Skyrail with its tiny round pods taking tourists by the hundreds slowly up the almost vertical cliffs covered in lush green vegetation towering forbiddingly to her left. For that lovely trip alone she knew she would now never regret having come back to Cairns.

With a deep breath she tuned that out and looked deliberately to her right where perfect white sandy beaches blinked between black rocky outcrops and intermittent tracts of sugar cane farms and banana plantations slowly growing anew after the devastation of a tropical cyclone.

They passed Palm Cove, a haven of resorts, lavish gardens and beachside bliss. In an alternate past she would have not called Rick and would have stayed there instead, working on her tan, spending the day at a resort spa or taking a boat out to Green Island for a glorious day snorkelling.

She couldn’t help sitting higher in her leather seat to get a glimpse of the ocean, laid out blue and green and magnificent all the way out to the far horizon. She had to admit that of all the beaches in all the world this area was as beautiful as any she had ever known, and she had known a few. And most people would think themselves blessed to be surrounded by palm trees and year-round sunshine.

A half hour later the car slowed as they reached Port Douglas.

They passed the pristine manicured lawns of the world class golf course, hooked a right towards the beach, then a left through a set of large guarded gates. At the end of a straight white gravel driveway sat the palatial Palazzo Maximillian. It was a grand, symmetrical, three-storeyed, white and gold monstrosity surrounded by ubiquitous Queensland palm trees.

Maximillian, bald and tanned from head to toe, met her at the car door in a smoking jacket and white satin trousers and carrying a martini. Siena wondered if he was in fact waiting for a camera crew rather than just little old her.

As he drew her into his home, she shot one last look to the front driveway to find Rufus and the safety of his limousine heading back out the distant guarded gates.

‘Siena,’ Max drawled, his broad American accent evident even in that one word. ‘Glad you could come.’

‘No worries, Max,’ she said, doing her best to act cooler than she felt.

‘And do call me Max,’ he said.

Siena groaned under her breath, counted to ten in her head in an attempt to control her breathing and yelled at herself mentally to just relax!

He pointed the way through his massive marble-floored foyer to the back of his house where a huge crystal blue pool lay shimmering in the golden afternoon sun.

She had a good look at the man behind the name. He was handsome. Tall, imposing, dripping in money. But, for all that, he had nothing on the understated magnetism of James Dillon.

Focus!

So you like James, she said to herself. So you have a little crush on the guy. Okay, so it’s more than a crush. The way he looks at you makes your poor little heart flutter. You’ve admitted it. Good for you; now shelve it.

Max led the way to a couple of deep-set white cane chairs beneath a wide baby-blue umbrella. The view to one side was all golf course and, to the other, ocean as far as the eye could see.

‘So, Siena,’ he drawled when they sat, ‘I would think that, considering the world class rumour mill working at MaxAir, you have some idea why I have asked you to meet me here today.’

Siena nodded, but she kept her mouth shut. Though rumours did tend to be true, she had no intention of putting her foot in her mouth any more that day than necessary.

Max’s wide mouth broke into a blindingly white smile. ‘Fabulous, so this will be a quick meeting. Siena, I have been more than pleased with the result of our recent teaser campaign featuring your face in billboards across Australia. It seems yours is a face that gives consumers confidence.’

Oh, God here it was—he was about to ask her to stay!

But what would she say if Max offered her the permanent job as face of MaxAir? Would she beg him for Rome? If he said no, would she quit?

She suddenly had no idea.

But she did know that something in her felt changed, and she did know that, no matter what Max offered her, she would not go back to the regular old routes that a few days before had been fine. A few days ago they had been ample. They had been great. They had been enough.

But now she wanted … more.

Siena’s fingernails dug into her hot palms as she watched and waited. Her heart thundered in her chest.

‘You may have heard that our Rome/Paris run,’ Max continued, ‘the leg that MaxAir began with ten years ago, the run of my heart, has been taking a beating from some of the other bigger carriers over the past year. As such I want you there. I want an injection of delightful Australian youth. I want you to turn Rome on its head.’

Siena waited for the other shoe to drop, the shoe that was all about promotions and Cairns and staying put, when a waiter in a white suit appeared from nowhere with a fresh Martini for him and a pitcher of ice-cold lemon-flavoured water and a tumbler for her.

‘I will be basing you out of Rome,’ he said after the waiter disappeared as quietly as he had arrived, ‘putting you up in your own apartment. I like my Rome girls to be fresh so you need not work more than three days out of seven and two months out of three. I look after my Rome girls, Siena, so if you thought you were flying high now, you have no idea what you are in for.’

Her thundering heart dropped to her stomach, creating a hollow ache deep behind her ribs.

Rome. After all her worrying and concern and soul-searching, Max was actually giving her Rome—her dream, the pinnacle, the position that would prove to all and sundry that she had really made it.

‘Why me?’ she asked, suddenly unable to stop herself from looking as stunned as she felt.

Max smiled at her ingenuous question, though it never quite reached his eyes.

‘In all of our market research, you were consistently the number one most recognised face of all the boys and girls we have used over the spring. Your performance reviews have been consistently excellent. You have changed routes, crews, positions over and again without blinking an eye, without taking family concerns or boyfriends, or any of that jazz, into consideration as many of my girls have.You probably have no idea that you’ve only had—’ he looked down at a piece of paper that Siena hadn’t even noticed was there ‘—two sick days in seven years.’

It hit her as if he had just thrown the pitcher of ice-cold water in her face—the reason she’d never said no to a challenge was because, whereas her colleagues had been living well-rounded lives, she’d never had family concerns, or boyfriends, or any of that jazz to consider. Since the day she had run away from home she had kept on running and somehow she’d found herself employee of the millennium.

And suddenly she wasn’t sure why she wanted to be that person after all.

When she didn’t answer, Max’s eyes narrowed and his smile broadened. He unfolded a piece of paper on MaxAir baby-blue stationery, grabbed a gold pen from a hidden pocket in his smoking jacket, made a few alterations to the page, then slid it over to her face up. ‘This is my offer.’

Her head told her not to look, told her that it would be too good to be true and that she would drop to her knees and kiss his toes, while her heart told her to think on it.

But she was a sticky beak of the worst sort. Always would be. So she looked.

The money was double what she earned now. She would have free airfares with MaxAir anywhere any time for the extent of her contract. She would continue to have a driver—which Rick and Rufus would both be thrilled to hear!—and a moving allowance to take her to Rome within the week, which was why she hadn’t been emailed a new schedule.

The deal was so good a mighty swear word slipped loudly from her mouth.

Max grinned. ‘Do I take that as a yes?’

Siena’s mind was tripping. Overloaded. The deal was something that most people would have accepted without a second thought. It was a deal that a week before she would have accepted without a second thought.

For all Max’s kind words about loyalty, she was suddenly proving herself hard work. Trouble. Inconsistent. Just as Rick had accused her of being all these years.

She took the piece of paper, folded it twice and popped it into her handbag. ‘How long do I have to think about it?’

Max’s smile faded, but only slightly, before beaming back at her ever brighter. ‘Twenty-four hours ought to do it.’

She nodded. A day. She had her last day in Cairns to think about it. ‘I’ll have an answer by this time tomorrow.’ Max stood and shook her hand.

Siena felt a presence behind her. Rufus was back. She realised that meant it was time to go.

She grabbed her handbag and followed Rufus, wondering how he survived in a three-piece suit on a day such as this. She was sweating and weak under the heat of her cream summer-weight tweed. Or maybe she was trembling because she had just been handed her dream on a platter and found she needed time to think about it.

‘How did it go, Ms Capuletti?’ Rufus asked when they reached the huge marble lobby.

‘Perfect,’ she moaned.

He shot her a sideways glance, his beady eyes burning into her, and again she wondered if he was only moonlighting in this job until the army needed him for some special operation.

‘How do you feel about Rome?’ he asked and she was no longer surprised that he knew everything before anyone else did.

‘I love Rome. I adore Rome. The Trevi Fountain, the shopping, the cappuccinos, the prestige … It’s what I’ve always wanted. And I told Max I have to think about it. Am I nuts? Should I run back in there now and tell him I was kidding and yes please and thank you and I’ll pack the minute I get home?’

Rufus held open the limo door for her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Make him wait. He doesn’t get that nearly enough.’

He smiled, and it highlighted a long crazy scar on his right cheek, but Siena still smiled back. She had long since decided Rufus was a good person.

‘Max’s new training facilities are on the property,’ he said. ‘He thought you might like a tour while you’re here.’

She nodded, thankful that she had a bit of time to collect herself. Rufus drove her to the training rooms which were located in a big blue and white office building just outside the security gates.

Inside they were glossy, retro-looking and state-of-the-art. And, despite herself, she was impressed. Seven years before, she had done her training in a rented office block on the outskirts of a dodgier suburb of Melbourne. She and Max had both come a long way since then.

‘You are Siena Capuletti, aren’t you?’ someone asked from behind her.

Siena turned to find a group of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed trainees, all clones of Jessica of the bendy straw and juggling fascination. ‘Yeah, I’m Siena.’

‘When those new ads started running,’ the blondest one said, ‘we had bets going that you weren’t really a sky girl for MaxAir. None of us had seen you on our runs. So are you really one of us?’

‘Seven-year veteran at your service. I’ve done mixed overseas runs for the last three years, so maybe that’s why we haven’t met.’

‘I would just die to get an overseas run,’ Blondie said, her eyes misting over all dreamy.

And then Siena noticed the tiny diamond glittering on the young woman’s left ring finger. She felt a momentary shot of empathy for the poor girl. That was never going to happen.

A flight attendant’s life was transitory. Living out of a tiny suitcase. Working odd hours. No opportunity to settle down. All things which had attracted Siena in the first place. But for a young woman in love?

A MaxAir girl’s version of love was getting pinched on the backside by a commuter. Or being offered gifts of lost property by baggage handlers. Or having a guy in every port …

‘I know this seems silly,’ Blondie said, ‘but could I grab your autograph?’

‘Sure.’ Siena signed away. She didn’t have the heart to tell the girl how hard it was going to be.

‘Happy trails,’ the girls called out in unison as Rufus beckoned her to the entrance.

‘Same to you,’ Siena said before walking off into the bright afternoon sunshine, feeling strangely sad, as if the trail beneath her feet was like a pure beach after high tide.

The only set of footprints on her beach to date were hers.