It wasn’t as if she were lying around doing nothing and wasting her time. She had a full life—sometimes almost too full. Between work shifts and taking care of Gran, the past few months had been busy. A sadness welled up once more at the thought. She missed the afternoons sketching in Gran’s garden after a morning of weeding. Last night, as she flipped through her sketchpad, she came across a few drawings of Gran sitting in her wheelchair, watering her garden. While Elle took care of the more physical tasks, Gran still insisted on doing the watering and Elle had loved sitting out there, capturing those quiet, precious moments. Gran hadn’t thought she was wasting her life. Whenever Elle had an argument with her parents about her future, Gran would always comfort her. ‘Darling, don’t you worry,’ she would say. ‘Everything blooms in its own time.’

TWO

Two

Pat tried to keep a straight face as she passed on the message. ‘Elle, Trudie just called down from the office and said Mr Brown wants to see you.’

Elle always found it amusing to hear her boss referred to as Mr Brown. She’d gone to school with the Browns, and it was weird to call Michael Brown, who was only a few years older than her, Mister. She still remembered him as the school geek, who used to get picked on by the footy guys and anyone else he might have annoyed, with the pompous air he’d had even as a kid. Having a father who owned most of Jessup’s Creek seemed to make him think he was local royalty, which hadn’t gone down well with the kids at school. It was unfortunate that her brother, Lachlan, had been on the football team back then. Elle was pretty sure that was why Michael seemed to hold some kind of grudge against her.

‘Wonder what I’ve done this time,’ she said with an eye roll as she left her register. Michael had taken over managing the store from his father two years ago, and was always calling one of them up to the office to nit-pick or explain some new procedure he wanted to introduce.

‘Elspeth, take a seat,’ Michael said, indicating the vacant chair across from his desk as she walked in, without looking up from the paperwork he was signing.

She used the time to study the framed black-and-white photos on the wall of the office of Brown’s Grocer through the ages, all the while thinking that if he wanted to go back to the original way of writing out their change slips, she would lose it. They’d just spent the past two weeks changing a perfectly good system to one that involved twice the amount of paperwork, simply because Michael felt the need to shake things up a bit.