Free The Piper's Son by Melina Marchetta

while. Small talk, really. It reminds him of his father coming out here every night to water the plants, back before the water restrictions. “He’s always had a thing for old women,” his mother would joke. She’d call him the patron saint of the lonely. He could sit outside and spend hours chatting with anyone who just wanted to talk. “Even five minutes of your time can make someone’s day,” he’d tell Tom and Anabel.
    Tom was beginning to understand the five minutes a lot more these days.
    Later, when he’s back at Georgie’s, he finds her in the kitchen making a cup of tea. He thinks of those nights after Joe died, when Nanni Grace and Pop Bill returned to Albury, which was hours and hours away. In his own home, he remembers how his mum would sit on his bed at night, encouraging him to talk about how he was feeling, and the way Anabel would huddle onto his father’s lap and whisper for him not to be sad. He remembers the murmuring from his parents’ bedroom, always the murmuring. But had they forgotten about Georgie alone in this house? Were her friends there for her? Did they sleep alongside her? Is that how Sam came back into her life? Tom needs to know. Who kept one of their own from the mind-numbing solitude during those nights of hell? And because he can’t stand it any longer, because sometimes he thinks everything inside him will crack, he walks to where Georgie has her back to him at the sink and wraps his arm around her and they stand there for a long while, their bodies shuddering from the exhaustion of this dry retching of emotion.

When Georgie approaches the Union, her nephew’s standing outside, having a smoke during his break. He looks lonely out here on his own. When he sees her, he stubs out his cigarette and gives her a hug, but already there’s an irritated look on his face.
    “Don’t complain about the food.”
    “What a ridiculous thing to say,” she says. “Why would I complain about the food? I love the fact that Stani’s finally introduced it.”
    “I’m warning you.”
    When she follows him inside, her eyes go straight up to the blackboard menu and then back at him, with irritation.
    “Why introduce food if he’s only going to offer two plates?”
    “Georgie, don’t.”
    “I’m just saying . . .”
    “Go for the T-bone. You’ll love it.”
    He’s pushing her — no, actually he’s shoving her — toward the table near the door, and then Francesca Spinelli is there saying, “Georgie!”
    Georgie tries to move around Tom and fails. It’s like he’s blocking her, but Francesca manages to push him aside.
    “Oh. My. God. You’re pregnant!”
    For a moment, Georgie is stunned. Tom’s muttering while Francesca is grinning from ear to ear. “You look gooooorgeous.”
    There’s hugging all around, and before Georgie can stop herself, before she even wants to, she’s talking trimesters and morning sickness and the joy of her growing bust size and how she’s carrying it all at the front, which could mean a boy, and she’s saying aloud every single thing she was frightened to even feel. To this girl who used to hang out in her attic with her friends and Tom, playing music and arguing and calling him a dickbrain and every other suffix or prefix you could stick
dick
to. And there it was. A memory of a time when Tom was at his happiest and the girls were the key.
    Francesca kisses her with the promise of returning on her break and then she’s gone and Georgie sits at the table, the greatest of relief overcoming her. As if she’s been holding her breath for so long.
    She’s having a baby. Months or days don’t count anymore. It’s all about weeks now. Twenty weeks. Too late to change her mind. Too early to feel safe, but close enough.
    “How bloody rude was that?” Tom says with disgust, staring at the bar where Francesca’s serving. “I mean, what if you had a fat gut and a bigger arse because you’d put on weight?”
    “Oh, what a silver-tongued devil my