A Father At Last by Julie Mac Page B

house and paddocks for animals and plenty of room for games when my friends came over. Dad used to make us huts in the trees, and take us kayaking down the creek.”
    The words were in a rush to get out, now.

    “He taught me to grow veggies, and helped me rear calves and lambs for ag day at primary school, and even though he didn’t like horses, he got me a pony and used to walk beside me down to pony club every week. It was the good life with capital letters.”

    “I remember that old pony. Big feet and a sway back, but friendly.” Ben exhaled a long breath. “And then it all turned to custard?”

    “Oh yeah. Big time.” Kelly unclenched her hands and flexed her fingers. “But you know all of this, Ben. I don’t talk about this with other people—ever—but you…you knew all this stuff before.”

    “There are bits I’ve forgotten. And before, you only used to tell me the bad bits—you never talked about the good bits.”

    Kelly closed her eyes briefly and nodded.

    “Do you want to keep talking?”

    She sent him a tiny smile. In a funny way, saying all this out loud now to Ben was almost a relief. She gave the briefest nod.

    “I was so proud of my Dad—I loved him, Ben. The saddest thing was, when everything went wrong, it was made worse because Dad had quite a high profile in the district. People sort of looked up to him because he was the leader of the volunteer firemen, and served on the community board and the district council. And his trucking business was really successful—”

    “And everyone loves to cut down a tall poppy,” interjected Ben.

    “Exactly. But he deserved their disdain.” She looked away, across the pond to the undulating lawn beyond and the low‐slung house, surrounded by verandas. It was a peaceful scene. “When I was young, Mum and Dad often talked about having a property like this, with sweeping lawns and a big house. It was their dream.”

    She drew a deep breath and turned back to Ben. “You know I said the trucking business was really successful?”

    He nodded.

    “Well, that was the beginning of the problems, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was too young to understand. All I knew then was that he’d been selling drugs and that’s Julie Mac
    why he was arrested, but Mum explained it to me in more detail when I was older. There was a fairly major downturn in the economy and Dad couldn’t afford to keep on all the drivers he’d employed to fulfil his contracts. So he started doing more and more driving.”

    She felt the same old scared feeling starting deep in her gut, the feeling she’d come to know so well as a child.

    “And then he had his council meetings and that year there was a long hot summer, so there were a lot of fire call‐outs. He was struggling to stay awake on the long hauls with his trucks. That’s when he started to take illegal stuff to keep himself going.”

    Kelly stopped and stared again at the pond. If only he’d sold the business. They could have quit the lifestyle block too and rented maybe, and then they’d have had enough money to repay the bank loans. Her mother had said that a hundred times.

    “He should have sold everything up, but he was too proud to admit defeat and so he continued working longer and longer hours to make ends meet and of course, he became addicted to the drugs he was taking to stay awake. He needed more and more, and struggled to pay for them, and his dealer came up with an easy solution—he could sell the drugs to other people and earn cash to pay for his own.”

    She felt suddenly foolish. Why was she explaining the process of using and dealing to Ben? She’d thought about him a lot in the last few days, and had come to the conclusion that he was very possibly a dealer himself. It all fitted—he could assimilate easily enough with the gang members she’d seen him with at court, but he could just as easily change his appearance to look perfectly respectable. That he was mixing with