The Silent Inheritance (11 page)

‘Pardon?’ she said, and he said words that looked like,
You have a win
. His hand wasn’t out for more money. She smiled, knowing that if she’d had a win it hadn’t been in last Saturday’s draw. She and Marni had watched it, and not one of their numbers had come out. She could have won something the week Crow gave Barbara Lane the job. Anything could have happened that week.

He spoke again, and his mouth may have said
Powerball.
She never bought Powerball. It cost more than Saturday Lotto, and even if all of her numbers came out, she’d need to have picked the right Powerball.

‘No ticket,’ she said. The queue behind her growing, the Indian man processed her numbers.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and walked back the way she’d come, eating grapes and looking at the sky. Mystical Melbourne was in for a storm. It would wash the heat away – or make it humid and hot. You never could tell with Melbourne’s weather.

They were still in the tearoom, Jackie, Rena, Shane and two part-timers. Sarah was making a coffee when Bob came in, so she made two – and she caught Jackie’s wink to Rena. Bob took his coffee back to his office. Sarah sat opposite Rena.

‘She’s eighty-two and still thinks she’s running the show,’ Rena said.

She spent a lot of time talking about her mother-in-law. Jackie spent a lot of time running down the conman she’d shed – and judges. Sarah never offered personal information. She’d told them she’d lost her parents in a car accident, that she’d lived in Perth with a foster family until she’d married at eighteen. They knew that Marni’s father had died of a brain tumour, but that was all they knew.

Everyone knew that Barbara Lane and David Crow had had a lovers’ tiff. She’d taken another day off this week.

‘He’s got her pregnant,’ Rena guessed, and Jackie laughed. In the smaller space of the tearoom, when sitting at her side, Sarah could hear Jackie’s laugh.

‘She came in late,’ Shane said. ‘He took her to lunch.’ Some mouths were easy to read. Shane’s wasn’t, but he had an expressive face, which made reading him easier. ‘His wife knows about her,’ he said.

‘She knew about Eve,’ Jackie said.

Eve was the blonde before Barbara. She’d worked in HR and had made a lot of noise the morning Crow’s previous manager had walked her out of the office.

Shane knew that Eve now worked for the estate agent who’d sold Crow the house Barbara Lane lived in. He knew that Eve had sent Maureen Crow an email about that house. He knew that the day Eve had been walked from the office like a thief, she’d vowed to get back at Crow.

And Sarah knew more than Shane. Bob was a gossip in the car.

‘Just between you and me,’ he’d say. Or, ‘This goes no further.’ Once he’d said, ‘This is for your ears only,’ then realised what he’d said, blushed and added, ‘I forget that you can’t hear a word I say.’

Marni said that. ‘I forget that you’re deaf, Mum.’

Lynette Clark used to say the same thing.

Bob returned to the tearoom to wash and dry his mug, and place it on the shelf.

‘He’s house trained too,’ Rena said to Sarah. ‘A house-trained man is a rarity, love.’

*

At four thirty that Friday afternoon, a taxi delivered Barbara home. She paid with a company cabcharge. She’d used a cabcharge this morning and it hadn’t taken that driver as long to process it.

Snatched the ticket when he was done and ran. Unlocked her front door and gave it an almighty slam behind her, flung her handbag at the couch, then howled.

Fridays were her days. They went out to dinner on Fridays, then David drove her home and stayed with her until Saturday afternoon.

‘Lying bastard,’ she howled.

And the air conditioner wasn’t on, and that bloody house he’d bought was a sweatbox without it, and she couldn’t find the remote.

‘Danni. Where did you put that bloody remote?’

She found it with the television remotes. Pointed, pressed, then pitched it at the couch and walked upstairs, yelling Danni’s name.

She wasn’t at her computer, wasn’t in her room. Barbara slammed both doors and almost lost her footing on the way down, and who needed a bloody house with stairs you spent your life climbing, looking for a twelve-year-old bitch of a girl?

She was stripping to shower when she remembered David’s pills. He left a packet in her bathroom cabinet, Xanax, his sleeping pills. That’s what she needed, to sleep and forget about him and his bloody wife and everything else. She popped one from its bubble wrap, washed it down with a handful of water then stripped to her briefs and crawled into bed, unshowered and smelling of him.

She’d thought he’d had something big to tell her, thought he’d taken her out for an early lunch and ordered champagne so he could drop an engagement ring into her glass, like she’d seen once in a movie. She wanted a ring, had expected something more than an afternoon in his bed.

That’s all she’d got, and when the bastard rolled off her, he’d said what he’d taken her out to lunch to say.

‘My in-laws are celebrating fifty years of marriage tomorrow night. I’ve been given an ultimatum, my pet. They’re meeting me here at four thirty.’

‘Your in-laws?’

‘Maureen and the children. I’m driving them up to Echuca.’

She was his life, not his bitch of a wife and her kids. She meant more to him than his stuffed-up life which she’d allowed to become her own stuffed-up life.

‘Fridays are mine,’ she’d said, and felt like his mistress, like his Friday night mistress.

‘Her father isn’t a well man. It may be the last time we see him.’

Then the bastard had looked at his watch.

‘If you go up there with her, it’s over, David,’ she’d said.

‘We have time for a shower, but insufficient time to argue, my pet,’ he’d said.

She wasn’t his bloody pet or his Friday night fling. She hadn’t showered with him. She’d dressed, called a taxi, slammed the hell out of his doors then left.

Beautiful little pill. She could feel it dissolving her anger, feel it untangling the coil of stress in her lungs. She loved his pill but hated him. She was going home. She was packing up tonight and leaving before the traffic got bad in the morning, and stuff him and his cow of a wife.

*

There was a queue of traffic waiting to make a right-hand turn onto Burwood Highway, a dozen cars, trucks and vans in front of them when Bob invited Sarah to his mother’s birthday party on Saturday night. She shook her head.

‘She’d like you to come,’ he said.

‘Marni,’ she said.

‘I mean both of you. It’s just family, and a couple of Mum’s mates. There’ll be kids everywhere.’

Marni would want to go so she could wear the new dress they’d bought for Samantha’s party, a cute girly dress that showed her legs and her emerging shape. The tram stop was a minute away from Bob’s mother’s front door. They could go for an hour or two and come home before dark – if it wasn’t raining.

‘What time?’ Sarah asked.

‘We’re walking in on her at seven thirty,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t know anything about it.’

They made the turn onto Burwood Highway, then took a roundabout route to Mrs Vaughn’s driveway, and Raymond’s Commodore was parked again in the Hyundai’s space.

‘Whose car?’ Bob asked.

‘Her son. We can’t make her car start. She don’t driving far enough to charge her battery, so he take sometime to drive … a long way.’

‘You drive?’

‘I can. No licence.’

She’d taken a twenty from her purse while he’d been concentrating on the road, and held it scrunched in her hand until they were in the driveway, when she opened his glove box, tossed the note in, and was out the door, her back turned to his argument.

Thought he’d left until she attempted to close the gate. Marni was outside, watering the daphne, and probably pleading with it not to drop its last half-dozen yellowing leaves.

‘It needs shade,’ Bob said.

They moved the pot into the shade between the unit and the western fence, and he spoke again about his mother’s party, and of course Marni wanted to go.

‘We will come for little while,’ Sarah sighed.

‘I’ll pick you up at a quarter past seven,’ he said, and was gone, when Marni took the hose around to the daphne’s new home and found the two twenties in its pot.

‘What’s this?’

‘Bugger! I give him for petrol!’

‘Forty dollars!’

‘For last week and today.’ Sarah took the notes, put them into her purse and removed the TattsLotto ticket. ‘The TattsLotto man say we winning something.’

‘When?’

‘Maybe the week when I don’t get the job.’

‘How much?’

Sarah shook her head and they went inside. ‘Have a look, Marni. Maybe from February.’

‘What did he say, Mum?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘He is Indian man. Talk funny. It look like,
You have a win.
’

‘He didn’t say Powerball or anything like Powerball?’

‘Why?’ Sarah opened a carton of eggs and found four. There was plenty of lettuce. A sharp knife got rid of the browning outer leaves while Marni turned on the laptop. It took time to warm up and decide to go, and lately, each time it showed a flickering light, they were pleasantly surprised. Had to take its battery out last week and give it a shake and a blow.

Marni left it to get its act into gear and went into the bedroom. Sarah watched a second light flicker on. In April, when she got her holiday pay, they’d buy a new laptop and a sim card for Bob’s old mobile.

They’d bought their flat-screen television at Christmas time, with Crow’s bonus. It took up less space than the bulbous old model it had replaced, which would have had to be replaced anyway when the television channels stopped broadcasting analogue signals.

Years ago, when she’d lived with the Clark family, she’d watched sitcoms, watched their action. She knew now why the Clarks used to laugh at
Everybody Loves Raymond.
They showed replays of that show now, with subtitles. They played old movies with subtitles. They were all new to Sarah.

And Marni was back at the computer, watching it with one eye and watching the contestant on
Deal or No Deal
with the other. He had six cases to open; one contained the two hundred thousand dollars and another one the seventy-five. The bank’s offer was forty thousand.

‘
No deal
,’ the contestant said.

‘He will lose a green,’ Sarah said.

‘He might have one of them in his case,’ Marni, the incurable optimist, said. They watched him choose fourteen, and it was the seventy-five thousand.

The bank offer still went up to forty-two. ‘Deal,’ Sarah urged.

‘
No deal
,’ the contestant said.

‘He’s brave,’ Marni said.

‘He is gambler,’ Sarah said. ‘Boiled egg with tuna salad?’

‘Boiled eggs in cups. We haven’t had them for ages.’

Boiled eggs were easy. Sarah turned on the rear hotplate, always relieved when she felt it begin to heat. She placed four eggs into a small saucepan and allowed the tap to run over them until the water ran hot.

‘You’re wearing a dress to that party, Mum?’

‘Jeans,’ Sarah said.

‘Dress, and your good shoes,’ her little dictator instructed. ‘Because I want to wear mine.’ She clicked the mouse. ‘Danni Lane wore a gorgeous dress to Samantha’s party and she left her hair hanging. She’s got yards of it. She said it used to be short when she lived in America and she never used to wear dresses. They lived on a ranch and rode horses.’

‘Her mother? Ride horses?’

‘She didn’t say her mother did. She said she took her to Disneyland, and Graceland – Elvis Presley’s house.’ She clicked again. ‘She’s been everywhere – the Grand Canyon even, and New York, with both parents, and now she’s not even allowed to see her father unless it’s at a police station.’

‘Why?’

‘Because her mother told a judge that he tried to kidnap her. She said she’s a hostage in her mother’s war game.’

The eggs were boiling. Sarah adjusted the temperature, set her timer for five minutes, then placed two slices of bread into the toaster.

‘It would be awful having a father you weren’t allowed to see, or if you found out that your mother had found a sperm donor father for you on the internet and that he had kids splattered all around the world—’

‘What!’

‘Internet sperm,’ Marni said. ‘They order it online and it gets posted to you in a bottle – or something.’

‘That what you learn at school!’

‘Samantha said it. She said there was this gay woman in a magazine who ordered some, and she found out later that he’d posted his sperm off everywhere … like her baby had twenty or thirty brothers and sisters—’ She stopped talking then, stopped clicking the mouse and stood, knocked her chair over in her haste to get away from the laptop, which she was eyeing as if it were about to explode.

‘Turn it off. At plug!’ Sarah said, afraid of fire, and when Marni didn’t move, Sarah moved towards the solo power point, provider of power to an overloaded power board.

It wasn’t smoking. She couldn’t smell burning, and Marni was crying and pointing to the laptop’s screen with a lotto ticket. Sarah took it from her, glanced at it. It wasn’t one of theirs. She bought a system seven in the Saturday night draw. The ticket she held had four rows of numbers.

‘I found two dollars near the escalator,’ Marni howled. ‘I was going to tell you.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘I had your purse … to buy Samantha’s present, and we only paid ten dollars for two pair … of earrings … me and Maria.’ And Marni’s howling mouth became unreadable. Her finger wasn’t, and it was pointing at the laptop’s screen.

They weren’t Sarah’s numbers. They were the Powerball numbers.

‘We got the third row, Mummy.’

Sarah worked with numbers. She could retain rows of numbers in her mind, but couldn’t retain these. Looked at the third row on the ticket she held in her hand. The Powerball was an eight.

You have a win
, the Indian man had said, and Sarah’s stomach rolled over and her heartbeat pounded in her throat.

‘Why you would doing this!’

‘Bob said he had a ticket. And Samantha was saying worse things than internet sperm. And there were boys listening, and Maria wanted to go, and I found the two dollars. And it was up to twenty-eight million and I had your lotto registration card …’ And she flung herself at her mother and clung.