Free The Briny Café by Susan Duncan

last. “It’s the lies that are wearing you out.”
    â€œAll I get is spin,” Kate says, pulling the plug out of the sink. “One day, I’ll hear the truth and I won’t be able to recognise it and that’s just plain scary.” She uses the bottom of Ettie’s cloth to dry her hands as water glugs down the drain hole. “You know, when I was a young cadet on a daily newspaper I used to pity the subs who’d been there for years. I was told they’d been legends in their day. To me they just seemed like cynical old men hanging out for their lunchtime beers. But now I worry there’s a very real possibility that I could turn into them.”
    â€œSo that’s why you’re in Cook’s Basin. You’re looking for a bit of sanity, which is a bit weird if you don’t mind me saying so, ’cause most of the population thinks you’ve got to be nuts to live here.”
    Kate laughs. “Maybe my mother is right, then, and I have lost the plot.”
    â€œOr maybe you’re just beginning to find it,” Ettie says gently.
    Kate’s grin lights up her pale face. “Maybe I am.”
    Ettie tries not to think about her own scrambled existence. Was there a turn-off to fulfilment somewhere along the way that she missed? A fork in the road that failed to mention left was for battlers, right for swanners? She wonders if Kate is still young enough to believe that something wondrous will suddenly pop out of the ether to light up a new path. Ettie has been burned too often to trust in miracles herself. A failed marriage. An erratic career as an artist and illustrator. A few attempts at jobs such as corporate catering (the company went bust) and therapeutic massage (an ad in the paper prompted so many late-night calls for the wrong kind of massage she gave up).
    There was also a brief, horrendously misjudged plunge into running a florist shop where she built the business but could never resist adding one or two extra blooms to a bunch, thus cancelling out the profit margin. Until then, she’d never realised generosity could send you broke. She also understood that it wasn’t enough to be good at your job. If you wanted to run a successful business, you needed to understand the bottom line. And she just didn’t get it, no matter how hard she tried. She quit at the end of her first year, wiser but with virtually nothing to show for twelve months of hard slog. Trusting in miracles, she believes, is borderline suicidal.
    Kate crosses the kitchen to open the freezer. A puff of misty air spreads across the room. She removes the last of the chocolate cake and holds it aloft with her eyebrows raised in a query towards Ettie.
    â€œYeah. Why not? A little sweetness takes away the fullness.”
    â€œChocolate does that?” Kate gives her a funny look.
    â€œWorks for me.”
    Â 
    Sitting on his deck with his all-time favourite dinner of sausages, garlic mashed potatoes and peas, Sam automatically checks to see that his barge is still safe on her mooring. She’s a miracle, he thinks, an indefatigable workhorse with shapely lines and a glorious rear end. He sips a frigidly cold beer and it hits him then that his fortieth birthday is a day away. He toys with the idea of throwing a last-minute bash but can’t work up the enthusiasm. A sign, maybe, that his priorities are shifting? He is hit by a wave of nostalgia and half-closes his eyes. In his mind his mother wanders down the jetty to meet him off the school ferry. Ready with a story: a snake in the woodpile … a duck with ten ducklings paddling in her slipstream … a blank-eyed stingray cruising the shallows. She would always have a tea towel over her shoulder. A short-sleeved floral shirt. Plain cotton shorts. Her feet were bare and brown. Legs and arms, too.
    â€œGood day?” she’d invariably ask. And he’d shrug by way of an answer.
    â€œDaisy’s boxer had her