The Good Parents Read Online Free Page A

room. ‘I’ve never known
     anyone who died before.’
    Why was she talking like this? She’d never once met Dory. And even as she spoke she remembered Miriam Kershaw.
    To sound innocent.
    Jody raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows. ‘You could always send some flowers.’
    ‘How do you do that?’
    ‘There’s a florist round the corner. They’ll deliver them for you or you can take them yourself.’ She started to edge gently
     around Maya. ‘I’ll speak to the girls. We’ll send a card or something. That poor guy. Any kids?’ She hesitated at the door.
    ‘A son. Grown up.’
    ‘You OK, sweetie? Going to close up for the day?’
    ‘Yes, I will. I’ll take the family some flowers.’ She hadn’t known this was what she was going to do until she heard herself
     say it.
    Everything was speeding up. She was in a taxi holding a bouquet as big as a baby, wrapped in mauve cellophane, the stems like
     limbs across her knees. They were racing down a freeway, in a direction she’d never been before. Billboards, overpasses, factories
     stood to attention beneath a sombre sky. She was like an official mourner, sweeping past in a motorcade. The taxi was filled
     with the freshness of her flowers.
    Why this terrible rush? She’d run into the florist’s, pointingto irises and hyacinths and orchids and flowers she didn’t know the name of, as long as they were purple or mauve. She’d never
     been in a florist shop before, and the exotic blooms, the leafy hush and tang went to her head. In Warton if people gave you
     flowers, they would have grown them.
    She hadn’t asked how much they’d cost – nearly as much, it turned out, as a really good haircut – just signed her credit card
     and rushed out again to hail a taxi. As if she were late. For what? To show him her support? So as not to be left out?
    Her mouth was dry and she was sweating inside her coat. She caught a glimpse of her half-profile in the taxi’s tinted window,
     and for a moment she thought she saw Dory. But Dory looked nothing like her.
    She’d spotted a photo once in his wallet and made him take it out and show her. Dory with baby Andrew beside a potted palm
     in a studio in Jakarta, a creased little colour print, faded now, washed out. The tiny boy was fat and gingery, his face a
     smudge, screwed up ready to cry. In contrast, Dory was very striking, like a sixties pop-star, with a beehive of black hair,
     pale pink lipstick and dark, kohl-lined eyes. She was Dutch-Indonesian, Maynard said. (My father is half Dutch! Maya told
     him, but as usual, he didn’t seem to hear.) He’d met Delores in Java in his days as a saxophonist with a touring band. She
     taught Indonesian in a language school. Later he went into business for a while with her father. Dory wore white gloves and
     a collarless mauve coat with large mauve cloth-covered buttons. Her smile was serene, her eyes shy, shining. ‘She looks happy,’
     she said to Maynard as he slid the photo back into his wallet. He said nothing.
    In her mind, as time went by, the name
Dory
came to have a sort of orchid-coloured glow.
    They were off the freeway now, charging into a suburb. Themain street of every suburb here was a city in itself, stacked with shops and cafes, under rows of swinging wires. This was
     what Dory would have seen when she first came to Melbourne, looking out a taxi window over little Andrew’s head.
    The flowers were for Dory, of course.
    The Flynns lived in a dead-end street that finished in a shallow rise of bushland. The houses were packed in, side by side,
     close to the road. In Melbourne everyone lived closer together. Some of the houses were modernised, with glass and timber
     additions and frondy landscaped gardens, but the Flynns’ house was bare and treeless, like it would have been when it was
     built.
    So this was where he came from and returned to. Winter sun shone briefly through the clouds, but the house looked dark, stricken,
     closed in on itself.
    It was