Free Dinner at Rose's by Danielle Hawkins Page A

lines of Prague or Nice on a foggy autumn evening you would decide they were pretty dreary places, too.
    Scott lived in a tiny little box of a house on one of Waimanu’s dodgier streets (and in Waimanu we do dodgy quite well). His section was fenced in three-metre-high corrugated iron and his lawn was home to about five dead cars. I was pretty sure he lived like that mostly to annoy his parents, a prim couple who wore matching beige shoes and were leading lights of the local bridge club.
    His tiny living room was overrun by small children – Clare’s biggest boy Michael had wrapped himself in a Harley-Davidson flag and was running around like a small caped crusader, while Lucy was sucking hopefully on the top of an empty beer bottle. I smiled widely; it was very nice to see Scotty with his unkempt goatee and leather vest balancing a baby on his knee as he opened a bottle of bourbon and cola.
    Brett and Clare were there, obviously, and Cheryl and her husband Ian/Alan. I didn’t know anyone else by name, although a couple of people looked vaguely familiar.
    ‘Aunty Jo!’ Charlie shouted, and threw himself at my knees in a frenzy of welcome that gave me a little warm glow inside until I realised it wasn’t me he was interested in but the junk food I was carrying.
    After half an hour or so Scott returned the baby to Cheryl and wandered out to the garage to light the barbecue. All of the men went with him to supervise (although even with a whole team of barbecue experts the sausages still turned out burnt on the outside and pink in the middle), while the women stayed in the lounge to chat and wipe noses and break up the fights that broke out between overexcited preschoolers.
    ‘It’s frightening, isn’t it?’ I said to Cheryl, putting my bottle of cider under my chair so I could have a turn cuddling her baby. ‘Look at us; you’d think we were grown-ups.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I suppose our parents felt the same – like they were only pretending to be adults but they were actually still sixteen.’
    ‘This is a particularly cute child you’ve got here,’ I told her, letting young Maxwell chew my index finger. ‘Well done.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said seriously. ‘I quite like him. You should consider it yourself.’
    ‘I’m beginning to think you’re right. I just have to decide between Bob McIntosh and Dallas Taipa as potential fathers.’ Dallas was grossly overweight with trousers that sat somewhere mid-bum and personal hygiene issues, and he had a severely inflamed tendon sheath in his right foot.
    Cheryl spluttered a little on her glass of orange juice. ‘What a depressing thought,’ she said. ‘Surely you can find someone a bit more useful than that.’ She smoothed a strand of cobweb-fine hair off her small son’s brow. ‘Do you think you’ll stay round here, Jo? I’m only going to want to come back to work part time, and Sue at the hospital was telling me she’s keen to get you onto the staff up there.’
    ‘No idea,’ I said cheerfully. ‘I’ve decided not to think about it for another six months.’ All my life I had carefully weighed up every decision. Lamb or calf for Pet Day? Public or private practice? Come home for Christmas or pay off my credit card? Rent a house or get a mortgage? I wrote lists of pros and cons and spent weeks in painstaking research – it once took me a week to decide between a navy and a beige pair of three-quarter pants to wear to work. And my meticulous planning had led to a temporary job in a one-woman physio practice where my constant companion was a girl with the brains of a goldfish and sinuses like Niagara Falls, a flat where someone banged on the bathroom door if I showered for more than two and a half minutes and most of my income going to pay a mortgage on a house in Australia that I was never going to live in. A little bit of spontaneity seemed like a good idea.
    Matt, accompanied by his pretty blonde girlfriend, arrived late and with his arm in a