PRIORITIES

May 27
7 min read

Updated: Jun 7

She found the pistachio shells everywhere.

In the camper's folds, between the cushions, in the pockets of the boys' bags, in places she couldn't explain and didn't try to. The residue of midnight card games and helpless laughter, scattered through every corner of the mess he had left behind.

She cleaned it all. The dishes, the laundry, the shells gathered one by one. She didn't mind. She was happy, in the particular way of someone who believes they are building something — who finds evidence of it even in the chaos, especially in the chaos, because chaos means people were here and people were laughing and this is what a family looks like from the inside.

She collected the last of the shells and thought: this is family life.

She was still thinking that when her mother collapsed.

Her mother collapsed on the kitchen floor on a Tuesday.

Evie heard it from the hallway — a sound that had no business existing in an ordinary afternoon, wrong in the specific way that the body knows before the mind catches up. She was there before she had decided to move.

The boys stood in the doorway, frozen.

She did not freeze.

She held it together the way she always held it together — completely, without asking whether she had the strength for it, because there was no one else and the boys were watching and her mother needed her and that was simply what was required.

The ambulance lights filled the walls. Blue and red and blue again, crossing the ceiling of the house she had fought so hard to make safe.

Thorne took Wilder's hand without being asked.

She noticed that. Filed it away for later, when she would have time to feel things.

Two days later the second call came. This one for her.

She stood at the kitchen window with the speaking stone in her hand and listened to the healer's voice and looked at the old gum tree outside and thought about the boys asleep down the hall and felt the information arrive in her body the way cold water arrives — all at once, everywhere simultaneously.

Cervical cancer.

She put the speaking stone down on the bench.

Then she made breakfast, because Wilder would be awake soon and he would want pancakes and the world was going to have to keep moving whether she was ready or not.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, Wilder turned two.

Two years old. Still at the age where a birthday is enormous and entirely dependent on the adults around him making it so.

She had meant to bake a cake. She had been meaning to for weeks — had known the birthday was coming, had pictured it, had thought about what he would love. But the days had filled with other things. Dion's happiness, and especially Robbie’s needs as the new relationship bloomed. The careful work of making space for two people who had not asked her to but whom she was making room for anyway, thoroughly, down to the last detail, the way she did everything.

On the morning of Wilder's birthday she stood in the kitchen and looked at the time and went to the shop and bought a cake and iced it herself at the bench.

It was a good cake. He loved it. He was two — he didn't know.

She knew.

She had known Dion was away — the boys' weekend, the coastal trip he'd been planning for weeks. She hadn't asked him to cancel it. She hadn't asked for anything.

But she had thought — she had simply, quietly thought — that he might remember.

A message. A word. Happy birthday to the little one. How are you holding up.

Anything.

Dion was not silent that weekend. Messages came through regularly — the ride, the trails, the easy freedom of men with no responsibilities pressing against them. He had things to say. Plenty of things.

Just nothing about her mother.

Nothing about Wilder turning two.

Nothing came.

Not on the birthday. Not the day after.

She told herself it was an accident. That the days had blurred for him the way days blur when you're away and time moves differently.

So she reached out. Carefully first, lightly, the way you approach something you don't want to startle. Then less carefully. Then more desperately, though she would not have used that word at the time.

He went cold.

Said her attitude was ruining his weekend.

Said she was guilt-tripping him.

She didn't hang up. Didn't walk away. She adjusted — found different words, a different angle, a softer approach — because somewhere underneath the coldness was the man from the blanket by the river and the pistachio shells and the maker's bench, and if she could just say it right he would come back to her.

Right?

He crashed his bike on the second day of the trip.

She knew before he told her — a cold premonition, the gift turning itself toward something she didn't want to see. The speaking stone lit up with his name and she felt it already in her chest.

The message that followed had a particular quality she was learning to recognise — the performance of vulnerability deployed at exactly the moment it would be most effective.

Hey. Came off the bike. I'd understand if you don't want to see me.

She looked at those words for a long moment.

Then she replied:

Come here. I'll take care of you.

Evie recalled how she had set up the yard for Robbie on their second time together.

She had wanted something that would make a boy who was navigating his parents' separation feel like this place had been made welcome for him. She had spent money she didn't have on targets and hay bales and a proper archery set, arranged them in the side yard where the light was best in the afternoon. She borrowed her mother's cart to collect the hay, the good one, and loaded them in without thinking too much about what hay does to carpet. She arranged them in the side yard with the archery targets, the light falling right in the afternoon.

Her mother had spent the rest of the weekend pulling hay needles out of the cushions. She hadn't said a word about it. Just worked at it quietly, methodically, the way she did everything that needed doing — because her daughter was trying to make a little boy feel welcome and that was reason enough.

Robbie had arrived and seen the setup and his face had done the thing children's faces do when they understand they have been considered.

She had thought about his son from the very beginning.

She was still upset about Dion's lack of mutual consideration for Westley while she cooked dinner, and then she wondered why Dion hadn't taken Robbie on the boy's trip, even though he loved mountain bikes.

She thought about it while she cut Dion's food into pieces he could manage one-handed. Was he capable of considering anyone else? She wrapped up his bandage, helped him into the shower and waited outside the door to pass him a towel.

Evie stayed awake that night, listening for his breathing, getting up twice to adjust his arm when he shifted in his sleep and winced.

Later she sat beside him at the kitchen table and tried to tell Dion about the week. That maybe if she explained well enough he would understand, and would care. Her mother. The diagnosis. Wilder's birthday passing without a word.

He nodded. Slow and distant, his eyes slightly unfocused in a way she didn't understand until later.

He didn't remember a word of it.

At six in the morning he ordered a conveyance home. Said he'd be back in a couple of hours.

She went about the morning. Made coffee. Looked at his plate still in the basin, the towel she'd used to dry his hair still draped over the chair.

The speaking stone lit up.

She read it once.

Then again.

Then a third time, slowly, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense.

It became fairly apparent to me that you don't really care about what happens to Robbie—

She stopped.

Read it again.

The hay bales. The archery targets. The afternoon she had spent arranging the yard for a boy who wasn't hers because she had wanted him to feel considered.

—you only cared that I was at your house to help you—

Twelve hours ago she had been cutting his food.

—I'm not abandoning my kids and life just for you—

She called.

Blocked.

She stood very still for a moment in the kitchen.

Then she went outside — she didn't decide to, her legs simply moved — and stood on the grass in the early morning light and felt everything that had been holding her upright simply stop holding.

She went down slowly. Knees first, then hands pressed into the damp grass, the world rearranging itself around an accusation so completely inverted from the truth that she could not find the floor of it.

Around her the garden was very still.

The fountains had gone quiet — all three of them simultaneously, the water simply stopping, the way the forest goes silent before something significant moves through it.

The old trees stood motionless.

Watching.

The speaking stone lay on the grass where she had dropped it.

His reasons didn't make sense, she thought. They weren't even true.

She pressed her palms into the earth and stayed there until the fountains began again — slowly, one by one, the water finding its way back.

Then she went inside.

Dinner still in the pot.

His plate still in the basin.

The towel on the chair.

She sat on the couch — the same one — and looked at the room that still held the shape of him.

Twelve hours ago I was holding him.

She didn't move for a long time.