And if he got that, there was no way she could pay him out without selling and then where would she go? Where would she live?
What the hell was she supposed to do?
Dominic reached an intersection, knew he should turn right for the highway but inexplicably turned left instead, wending his way through streets marked with signs long past their use-by date. He didn’t need them anyway. He’d escaped his past a long time ago, he’d thought, but his past was still there, buried deep inside that box, waiting for the opportunity to burrow its way out.
His heart hammering, he slowed as he passed a tired shopping centre where all the windows wore security grilles and where half the shops were empty, feeling a strange lurch in his gut to see the laundromat shabbier but still open for business. His mother had found him crying in there, hiding behind the row of machines, bleeding from the split in his ear where a rock had caught him and from where he’d slid on gravel and taken the skin off both knees. He’d been ashamed he’d run. Ashamed he’d been caught. But most of all he’d been ashamed he’d cried.
And right there on the floor of the laundromat, amidst the steam and the hum and clang of a dozen machines, his mother had hugged him tight and cried right along with him. She would make it better, she promised him. She would take him away from his horrible school and the bullies who hated anyone who was good at anything. She would buy them both a house by the sea like Nonna and Poppa always talked about buying, somewhere he could be happy.
And his tears had dried as she’d woven her magic promises and spun a golden future for them both that he would dream about every night in bed, just waiting for the day, because his mother worked so hard and he knew she would shift heaven and earth to make it happen.
The shopping centre fell behind, his car seemed to be on autopilot, unravelling the years as it wended its way through the suburb until he was there, crawling along the narrow street to number twenty-four, more afraid now of what he would remember than what he would find. He turned up the airconditioning, his palms sweaty against the wheel as he passed the tiny playground where his poppa had watched him play when his mother was working, his poppa busy carving a piece of wood he’d pull from his pocket. He remembered watching the shavings curl as he worked the tool through the wood, creating another tiny masterpiece. And he remembered running back to the house at dinner time, and the smell of rich tomato dishes that met him, and Nonna in the kitchen wearing a white apron and letting him stand on a chair and taste the minestrone from what seemed then like a massive wooden spoon.
And then he did a double take when he got to number twenty-four, or what was left of it, little more than a burned-out shell, the tiled roof caved in and with police tape still stuck between poles. He got out of the car and stood there on the side of the road, the air still tainted with the smell of ash and burning.
Gone. All gone now. His grandparents and the fragrant kitchen. His mother and her promises and dreams. Even the very house where he’d nursed her in her final weeks before the tumour that stopped her in her tracks had claimed her for its own.
All gone.
‘You from the insurance company?’ A grizzled old man wearing a white singlet and shorts stood watering a stringy row of tomato plants next door with a bucket, clearly more interested in the stranger with the flash car.
Dominic shook his head. ‘What happened, do you know?’ And the old man frowned as he looked at what was left of the house. ‘Bad business. Some feud between some local school kids, barely out of primary school, not that they didn’t know what they were doing. A gang of them came around and threw home-made Molotov cocktails through the windows. The wife and I heard the crash. By the time we came out to see what was happening, the place was going like a bonfire. Too quick for the firies.’
God. ‘What about the people who lived here? Are they okay?’
‘Yeah. How they made it out in time, I don’t know. Single mum with a couple of kids. Another one on the way. A miracle they all made it out alive, we reckon.’
‘She was pregnant.’ He wasn’t really asking. He was thinking, his eyes on the burned-out shell of the house where he’d grown up.