Read Online The Outback Heart by Fiona Palmer - Free Book Online Page A

irises. They were so mysterious, as if he were hiding dark secrets. She trembled at the thought. Finally, someone she didn’t know everything about.
    ‘Indi?’
    ‘Huh?’ She shook her head and realised Troy was waiting for her to join him. Crap!
Stay by my side
– isn’t that what he’d said? She jogged towards him and tried to hide her excitement. Inside her nerves were buzzing like fire ants under her skin. This was going to be the best football season ever.
    Indi pulled Trevor’s washing out of the machine and carried the basket outside to his clothesline. Already a week had passed since she’d officially become Troy’s right-hand woman. She thought there might be more conversation, more interaction, more learning. Hopefully that would come later.
    She started to hang up a large pair of white undies that could have been used to sail a boat. Just as she’d finished hanging up the last item, she collected the dry cotton shirts and underpants from the line. There was no way she was going to get old and wear big undergarments like these. She heard her name called and quickly grabbed the basket, heading back inside.
    ‘I’m here, Trevor. You okay?’ She put the basket on the floor in the small lounge room. The old brown carpet had seen better days. Indi knelt beside Trevor, who sat in his recliner. She put her hand over his frail, knobbly hand as she waited.
    ‘I was just saying, dear, that dinner smells like it might be burning.’ Trevor looked over his glasses at her. Any further down his nose and the large metal frames would fall to the floor.
    ‘I’ll go check.’ She patted Trevor’s hand and headed to his kitchen with its old-fashioned decorations. He’d lived in this house for most of his life. There was history in every corner, on every wall and in every drawer. Indi learnt something new each visit. Trevor was always telling her stories. Last week she’d cleaned out the linen cupboard that the mice had got into and found a collection of old wedding gifts they’d never used. Trev then told her all about their wedding day out on the farm and how fetching Elsie looked in her white lace dress. ‘I felt like the luckiest bloke in the whole world,’ he’d said, with a sparkle of life in his aged eyes.
    The casserole she’d made for Trevor’s dinner was perfect. ‘Here,’ she said, getting the tray table and putting his dinner down on his lap.
    ‘Oh, it looks great. Thanks, Indi.’
    ‘I’ll put the rest in little containers so you’ll have dinner sorted for the next few nights.’
    ‘Are you going to have some, dear?’ he asked in his gravelly voice.
    Trevor was eighty-eight, but still very switched on. Sure, he wandered off from time to time, could be vague on the odd occasion, but he was as tough as they came and there was plenty of fight in him yet. Which was why he refused to move into a nursing home. Hyden was his home. His wife, Elsie, was buried there and their only son was nearby. Indi could understand that he didn’t want to leave. Her mum had hated every minute that she spent in the hospital and longed to be home.
    ‘You cook like your mum, Indi. I miss her,’ he said, his fork hovering above his bowl.
    Indi had begun to fold his washing and paused to smile at him. ‘I do too.’ Every week her mum had dropped in on Trevor, to help him out and to cook him something nice. Even when she was sick she never missed a day. Indi had started going with her, often doing all the tasks while her mum chatted to Trevor. After her mum died, Indi just kept coming. She couldn’t abandon Trev, and now they’d formed an even deeper bond.
    Indi blinked away tears as she watched him eat. He was bald except for the hair sprouting from his ears, and he had a big nose that had hosted a few cancers. She loved him fiercely, as if he were her own grandfather.
    Indi had the washing all neatly folded on the coffee table and then glanced at her watch. ‘Oh, crap.’ She was late for footy training