Salt Rain by Sarah Armstrong

his Dad, she felt a flush of embarrassment for how much she had wanted him when she was younger, and how obvious it had been. How she had longed for his shining face, the perfect curve of his muscles, his innocence. Even Julia could see how innocent he was. It wasn’t fair that Mae chose him—there were other boys who wanted Mae. Older boys like the dark-haired second cousin from town who came, slim-hipped and knowing, to deliver gas bottles.
    When Saul came back from Tasmania, Julia realised that nothing about him stirred her anymore. He wasn’t innocent these days, just unimaginative, still willing to get up at four a.m. to work for his father although Julia knew that they barely broke even. He was too willing to slip back into the valley ways.
    A couple of weeks after he returned, Julia was collecting milk and cream from his father while Saul cleaned out the dairy after a long morning’s milking. She called across to him as he scrubbed out a vat, ‘What on earth possessed you to get back into this dreadful routine, Saul?’
    He walked towards her, smiling. ‘There’s something about it I enjoy, you know, I missed it when I was away…the cows, the dawn…’
    She shook her head and started out the door with her plastic jug of milk.
    His voice sharpened. ‘You kept the dairy going after your father’s accident. What’s the difference?’
    She replied as she walked away, ‘The difference is that I loathed it.’
    ‘So why did you do it?’ he called after her.
    She crossed the yard, knowing he was leaning in the door watching her. She had once dreamt of telling Saul, telling everything to his calm smiling face and she had woken from the dream with her heart pounding and, for a moment, filled with an incredible relief.
    He waved at her as she drove out, an amused smile on his face. It didn’t matter to her if they all thought she was crazy, it kept them at a quite satisfactory distance.
    She squatted and cleared the grass from around one of her trees. It had a flush of tender green leaves and she imagined its roots working their way deep into the soil. There were thousands of her trees now, spreading like a balm on the land. She wiped her hands on her pants, picked up her bag of lemons and started back to the house. Her mother would have known how to organise a birthday party for Allie. She tried to remember her own fifteenth birthday but couldn’t recall a thing. Mae would have been gone two years by then, and her mother was just starting to get ill, short of breath and tired all the time. On Julia’s eleventh birthday, Mae had tied a rope to the head of her bed, and when Julia woke, as Mae was getting ready for milking, she found it, a line of rough twisted hemp leading out of the bedroom, through the house and down the steps, across the yard, to a bulky parcel of newspaper. Inside layers of paper was the china doll of Mae’s that Julia had coveted for years. Mae’s rope had led her straight into the dark little dairy storeroom that Julia had long since boarded up. ‘Did you go in?’ Mae had asked when Julia came back to the house cradling the doll. ‘Did you go right into the storeroom?’ Julia had clutched the doll and refused to answer.
    Inside the house, Julia put on an apron and started squeezing the lemons, imagining Mae making lemon sponge pudding for Allie in that poky little kitchen in Sydney. She had been surprised how little evidence there was of Mae in the house, surprised that they had been living there for six years. It seemed like they had just moved in, with no pictures on the walls and cardboard boxes still stacked in corners.
    She separated the eggs, sliding the bright yolk from shell to shell. She was making the pudding from memory. Before she died, her mother had destroyed her handwritten recipes and written them in code on index cards. Julia still couldn’t interpret some of the symbols, strange curling shapes obscured by an old butter or jam smear. Julia’s grandmother had given