Dina said Heidi and her family should stay the night in the house behind the restaurant, in a spare room they kept for visitors. Dina said it would be a shame to come back and act like a foreigner, to sleep in hotels everywhere. And she already made the bed ten minutes ago.

In the spare room, Emily asked to sleep on Rick’s coat in case she wet herself again—her tone embarrassed but insistent—and he spread his coat across the mattress and slept on the floor, while Heidi shared the bed with her daughter. In the dark Emily said she was forgetting some details about Ian Asquith, whom she referred to as my father. Heidi said loss of memory was normal. It was your mind trying to protect you after a bad event. Your brain was beautifully built, she said to Emily. It was good to forget certain things. Emily said she could recall the way her father had looked at her at the train station, like he’d got them both lost. But still, she wanted to know: what colour were his eyes?

Chapter 15: 2002

2002

1.

Emily sat at the desk in her hotel, calling ex-franchisees, asking about their careers, their thoughts about Lucky Mallios, seeking anecdotes that she might nest in the background sections of her story. A woman named Evdokia Lukowski said she’d emigrated from Ukraine in 1952, pregnant and single. She was transferred to an Australian displaced persons camp in Benalla, Victoria, where the staff pressured unmarried mothers to offer their infants for adoption because, the punishing administrators claimed, single migrant mothers would face extreme difficulty marrying or finding work, would fail to assimilate, would over-rely on public housing and other forms of social assistance. As a consequence of this attitude, said Evdokia, single women who arrived in Australia pregnant, and who kept their children, could stay for years in this particular displaced persons camp, tasked each day with childcare and make-work chores. These mothers, she said, truly languished. Evdokia didn’t intend to raise her daughter in Block 3 Benalla. She wrote a letter to Lucky’s office in Sydney, explaining her situation, declaring she’d cooked for her family in Ukraine and now for people in the Australian camp, and she would work harder than any man or woman in the business. If you could maintain and cook on a Ukrainian pich oven you could use any stove. Lucky offered Evdokia a half-share in the Newcastle franchise.