Life and Lemons

“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

-Modern proverbial phrase.

I should not have been using a paper bag for the lemons I was picking, after the morning's deluge. They were irresistible; large, plump, and waxy, an outrageous shade of yellow, like little suns peeping through the green foliage. I picked too many, and inevitably the dampened paper gave way, sending lemons tumbling over the lawn. Just then Sophie came around the corner of the house, and she knelt and helped me gather them up and place them in a pile on the step.

‘I’m ready to go,’ she said, shaking her feathery dark hair out of her eyes with the characteristic backwards toss of her head. ’ She was our younger daughter, waifish in appearance but deceptively tough. ‘Love you Mum. See you in a couple of weeks.’ She put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a searching look. ‘Are you going to be ok?’ She had been furious with her father when she heard. ‘How could you do that to us, Dad? Your family?’

‘I’m sorry love. I’m truly, truly sorry,' he said. He looked it too, looked close to tears himself.

‘Don’t do it then! You’re just being selfish.’ She kept it up until I made her stop.

‘I’ll be fine, Sophie,’ I said now. I hugged her goodbye and felt the familiar sting of tears. The girls’ departure, which a week ago would have been routine, had become a Rubicon I had to cross. From now on I would be living alone. Liam had gone and the house was much too big, an assemblage of empty rooms.

I was still numb. I hadn’t seen it coming. Had our twenty year marriage lost its spark? Maybe that was it. We were comfortable and content, or so I thought. We had planned to love each other always, together through old age and beyond. Instead, I would be alone, solely responsible for everything from changing a light bulb to paying the mortgage. The future looked grim. Who was this woman busy cooking meals, weeding the garden, making cups of tea? From a silent recess I watched her wading through my life. For the moment that meant stowing the lemons, in a sturdy plastic bag, on the passenger seat of the car. Luckily, I had somewhere to go once the girls had left.

‘What’s with the lemons, Ma?’ Sam slung a duffel bag into the back seat of her car. She was compulsively soft-hearted , radiating calm and strength from her wide spaced green eyes, shadowed now with concern. She had been quiet and sad all week, and unbearably kind. The week had been tough for them both. Today they were up early, bustling with bedding and backpacks, eager to return to student life in different cities far away from our small town.

‘I’m taking them to Gina at the beach. She and Jack have that place by the river mouth now,’ I said. ‘She called this morning and asked if I wanted to stay for the weekend.’ It was exactly what I needed, after an emotional week. Liam’s bombshell had shattered all of us.

‘Aha, so the lemons are for the G-and-T’s I suppose…hope you don’t need that many!’ she joked. ‘Say hi from me. And message me when you’re back, ok?’ Another hug, more pricking tears, and Sam was gone too.

The house screamed silence, and I set off myself as soon as I possibly could. The road to the coast was winding and I was driving too fast. As I swung the wheel hard on a sharp bend, a waterfall of lemons cascaded onto the floor around my feet. I braked but, ominously, there was no response. The car veered across the centre line, and I clung to the wheel as a jolt of panic clenched my stomach. I stamped harder on the pedal and the lemon jammed there disintegrated, releasing a citrus tang. The brakes responded abruptly and I was back in control. Mouth dry and chest hammering, I pulled over to collect and bag the lemons for the third time that day.

The lemon was a mature tree when we moved in, over twenty years ago. I lavished it with water and compost, and it repaid me with copious crops of fruit. One winter night there was a minus nine degree frost, and after a few days the whole tree began to wilt. At length, a dry skeleton was all that was left, mournful and ugly. I trimmed the branches and found no sign of life but put off uprooting the stump to a later date. Then to my amazement, in the spring, shoots began to appear and before long it was clothed in furious green growth. It was a year before I could pick lemons again but it never looked back.

I usually enjoy driving by myself. It’s a good time for reflection or planning, or a time to simply turn the volume up and sing loud to my soundtrack of favourite hits. Today, singing didn’t work; every love song was a bitter reminder of what I had lost. One week ago, I had been about to make a start on burning the garden waste. The sun was out and the breeze was steady, blowing away from the house. Ideal conditions. ‘Where are you going, Lise?’ Liam asked. ‘Come and sit down for a minute. There’s something I need to tell you.’ His upper lip was quivering. This was serious.

‘What’s up?’ My scalp prickled a warning.

He reached across the table for my hand. His was clammy, trembling slightly. ‘I don’t know how to say this,' he said. He removed his hand from mine and rubbed at the bristles on his chin with a rasping sound. 'I’ve felt for some time we’ve been drifting apart. Anyway... I’ve met someone. She’s become very important to me. We want to make it work together.’ I stared, uncomprehending. He reached back and gave my hand a squeeze. ’I'm so sorry,' he said. 'Say something, Lisa.’

I said what I was thinking. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘It’s true, though. You can’t have thought we were still in love. God knows you don’t act like it. You treat me like your flatmate.’

‘I thought we were content, and solid. If you weren’t happy, why didn’t you say something? I’m not a mind reader.’

‘I tried, Lisa, but I didn’t know myself what was wrong, just that it wasn’t working. Nothing worked.’

‘So that was why we had that trip to Fiji without the girls? And the edible undies, and the flavoured massage oil? I went along with all of it.’

‘It’s not your fault Lisa, it’s mine. It’s us. I think we just grew apart. I didn’t mean for this to happen. Eventually, you’ll see it’s better this way.’

‘Who the hell is this woman anyway? How did you hook up with her?’ He drew a breath but suddenly I didn’t want to hear. ‘No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about your cheating. That’s what it is, Liam, just cheating and there’s no excuse.’

‘You can call it what you like but it doesn’t change anything.’

‘I can’t believe you’re throwing away all those years together. The sharing, the hard work, the memories. We haven’t even tried. We could go to counselling! We haven’t tried that.’ I stared into his face, the face that I had loved for over twenty years. ‘Please Liam, don’t do this. I still love you; I do. We can make it work.’ My voice rose to a squeak, and the tears began. His face hardened and he looked away, through the window and towards his future.

‘It's over, Lisa. I’m moving out.’

An abrupt jolt from the car brought me back to the present. Not concentrating, and with tear-blurred vision, I had run over something hard and sharp on the road. Soon after, I heard the thunk, thunk, thunk of a flat tyre. Oh no, catastrophe! My whole life was a disaster, and now this. I thunk-thunked to the side of the road and switched off the ignition. The late morning silence was broken intermittently by a family of magpies squabbling in the gums beside the road, their piercing cries mocking my self-pity. I looked up and then down the empty road. My first thought was to call Gina. Jack would pop up the road in a flash and change the tyre for me. But when consulted my phone unhelpfully read ‘no service’. I was truly on my own.

I'm not sure how long I sat there. After a while, I accepted that I would simply have to change the tyre myself. I had seen it done often enough. How hard could it be? I unearthed the owner’s manual from the glovebox. In section six ‘What to Do in an Emergency’ were the pages I was looking for: ‘If You Have a Flat Tyre.’ Perfect.

The shoulder of the rural road was gravel and dirt, and I ended up with plenty of it on the knees of my jeans, while the underside of the car transferred more muck to my sleeves. I struggled with the jack, the wheel nuts, the spare tyre, going back repeatedly to check the manual, smudging the pages with dirty fingerprints. I was struggling to line up the spare when a vehicle crunched to a stop on the shoulder.

‘Need a hand?

‘I’ve nearly done it.’ Breezy, as if I change tyres every other day. ‘Maybe you could help me lift it on, I can’t quite….’

‘Here, let me do that.’ He chatted as he worked. He farmed just up the road, he said, with his adult son, and lived with his wife and three Irish Wolfhounds in the big old homestead. He was on his way to the beach too, to dive for pauas, which his wife made into the best paua fritters in town. His name was Nelson.

‘All done,’ he said. ‘Make sure you get that tyre fixed as soon as you can. You don’t want to get another puncture with no spare in the boot.’ He brushed a hand on his jeans and offered it to me with eyebrows raised. ‘Nice to meet you…’

‘Oh, I’m Lisa, thank you so much, nice to meet you too, Nelson.’ I put my dirty hand out to take his, realising I was filthy from top to toe. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m a bit grubby…’

His eyes, silver grey as his hair, glinted with what looked like laughter but his grip was warm and friendly. ‘You’ll be right. You’re Liam Gordon’s missus, aren’t you? I’ve seen you and him at rugby.’

‘Not now, I’m not.’ Might as well face facts. ‘He dumped me for his floozie.’ Saying it to an almost-stranger diminished it somehow. He didn’t look surprised so maybe he already knew. He nodded sympathetically.

‘You’ll be right,’ he said again.

And then I was on my way, Nelson’s black ute visible from time to time on the bends in the road ahead. The country was steeper and wilder here as the road neared the coast. Pockets of native bush flourished in some of the gullies but mostly the countryside was treeless, the hills jagged and folded, slashed with slips. Sheep dotted the steep faces like flies on a wall. For the moment the tears and despair were over.

Despite all that had happened, it was only two hours after I left home when I turned onto the approach to the bridge. The river mouth, with the brilliant blue sea beyond, came into view. Double lines of bright white foam marked the shore, waves frothing wide and tumultuous. The sun splintering off the water brightened all the colours. Jack and Gina’s bach perched between the road and the humpy paddock, which further back rose abruptly to the high, steep ridge looming over the beach. The river ran beside the road, green and swift, temporarily held at bay by huge lime rocks, docile today, although it threatened to create a washout in every storm. It didn’t seem possible that it was still the same day on which I had started the drive out here.

‘Perfect timing’ said Gina, holding out her arms for a motherly hug. As usual, Gina looked like she’d just come out of the shearing shed, in grubby sweats and a flannelette shirt, golden hair in a thick short bob swinging against her cheeks. ‘Come here, you poor old thing!’ She rubbed my back in comforting circles, compassionate as always. ‘Come and have lunch. But what happened to you? You look like you’ve been rolling in the mud!’

‘It’s been such an eventful drive! I nearly ran off the road once, then I got a flat tyre, and was rescued by a handsome hero. A silver fox.’

‘Ooh that sounds exciting,’ said Gina. ‘Who was it?’

‘His name was Nelson. Black ute, and a wife, unfortunately.’

‘Oh that’s Nelson Short. His wife is Danielle. They’re our neighbours in the next bach, just along the road,' Gina said. 'They’re coming over for a barbie tonight, with plenty of paua, and maybe some crays if we're lucky. Danielle is bringing the gin.’

Instantly, I recalled those tumbling yellow orbs and turned back to the car. ‘I almost forgot… I brought you some lemons!’

‘Ice and a slice!’ sang Gina later as she plonked some of each into three generous tumblers of gin and tonic. Danielle and I collected ours as Gina held her glass up and announced, ‘here’s to new friends!’.

‘To new friends,’ said Danielle. She was gorgeous, a tiny woman like a wee doll, dressed and made up to perfection, with sparkling eyes which looked deep into mine and seemed to read my thoughts. ‘And to the plenty of fish in the sea,’ she added, with a meaningful smile. I grinned back at her.

‘Come and get it,’ called Jack, as he shoveled paua fritters from the sizzling barbeque onto a platter dwarfed in Nelson’s hands. The western sky glowed rose and gold, embroidering the foamy surf, as the men joined us at the long pine table. We sat in a companionable row so we could all watch the sea as we ate. The breakers mumbled in soothing rhythm, as I absorbed the sweeping panorama of the painted ocean and distant horizon.