Free The Goodbye Ride by Lily Malone Page A

Please, love, I’ve got
anti-histamines up at the house. Mark knows where they are.”
    “You don’t stop breathing or anything do
you?” Owen called, hanging secateurs and loppers over the trellis wire.
    “Just hurry,” his aunt waved her hand at
him. “The doctor said I have to take the anti-histamines quick.”
    “Shit, hold on then. Look after her, Liv.”
Owen set off for the cottage at a flat-out run.
    Liv shrugged out of the Felco pack and laid
the pruner at her feet. “What can I do?”
    “Just come here, love, please. Make sure I
don’t faint.”
    Faint? Liv’s nonchalance fast dissolved.
    Squeezing through a hole under the canopy,
dodging over black plastic irrigation pipe so she didn’t trip and land flat on
her face, she tried to remember what first aid she knew for anaphylactic shock.
“Make sure you flick out the sting, Margaret. Don’t pinch it or you’ll only
inject more poison.” Big help.
    By the time Liv emerged into Margaret’s row
and spun toward the older woman. Margaret’s entire body was shaking.
    “Margaret? Hold on!” Liv rushed up the vine
row. It was only as she got closer, she realised Margaret’s shakes were from
suppressed laughter, not pain.
    God. She’s hysterical. Do I slap her?
    “ Oscar-winning if I say so myself.
You two are such a pair of suckers.” Margaret wiped tears from her eyes and
patted Liv on the arm. “I’m fine, Liv. I wanted a chat with you without my big
lug of a nephew around, that’s all. There’s no bee. Now come here and let me
look at you. Show me your hand.”
    Liv baulked, still trying to make the
light-year jump from paramedic to palm subject.
    Margaret flashed a smile. “You don’t mind?”
    “No, I don’t mind. Just let me get over my
heart attack.” Liv peeled off her work gloves. “Does it matter which hand?”
    “Some people say a woman’s dominant hand
shows more of her past and the other shows the future. I think that’s baloney.
It doesn’t matter which hand.”
    Liv chose her left. “If it says I get hit
by a bus tomorrow. I don’t want to know.”
    Margaret grasped Liv’s hand with fingers
that were wrinkled with age. First, she held Liv’s hand in both of her palms
and then she examined the back of Liv’s hand before she turned it over.
    “What do you know about palm reading,
Olivia?” Margaret asked.
    “I read a magazine in a doctor’s surgery
once that said if you have fat thumbs you’ll end up rich.”
    Margaret rolled her eyes. “It’s these
little criss-cross lines I’m interested in,” she said, indicating across the
top of Liv’s palm where faint vertical lines intersected a single deeper
horizontal stripe. “My nan used to call these shine lines.”
    “Shine lines?”
    Owen’s aunt nodded. “Nan always said they
had a different kind of light. She said the skin around them shone. I see them
that way too.”
    “They shine ?” Liv stared hard at her
hand. Margaret’s fingers were tracing a section of her palm that looked like a
drunken doctor had sewn up a scar. “So what do mine say?”
    “They tell me your life needs a haircut.”
    “That’s way too cryptic for a Sunday
morning.”
    “Think of it like this: sometimes a girl
has a few split ends and she can get a pair of scissors and snip them out.
Sometimes she can change her conditioner or her shampoo and that helps.
Sometimes no matter what she tries, those split ends just get worse. That’s
when she takes herself off to the hairdresser and says cut three inches off.
When she walks out of that salon, it’s amazing how her whole world seems
lighter.”
    “O- kay, ” Liv said doubtfully. Owen’s
aunt had officially lost her marbles. “So I need a new hairdo?”
    Margaret laughed and let Liv’s hand down,
placing it gently at her side. “You just need to snip out the things in your
life that don’t make you happy, love. Concentrate on the things that do.”
    Right.
    “Speaking of which,” Margaret murmured
under her breath.