Season of Salt and Honey by Hannah Tunnicliffe

Author:Hannah Tunnicliffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Chapter Thirteen

• • • •

It’s comfortable inside Jack’s house. The kitchen is stripped, as though he’s in the middle of a renovation. All the cupboards above waist height have been removed, with timber shelves replacing them, and it’s clean if not finished. Huia shows her father the basket and they go through everything inside. Then Jack plucks two cups and saucers from a shelf—green cups with saucers covered in a floral print.

Huia is busy chatting about school. “And then Nora said she wasn’t going to get a pink backpack anymore but that her favorite color’s purple now because—”

“Fetch the banana bread, bub?”

Huia on one leg. “Because . . . purple . . . is . . . a . . . much . . . cooler . . . color.”

Jack rolls his eyes at me. “Right.”

Huia hops back with the bread. Jack cuts two thick slices and puts them into a toaster.

“Pink is for little kids.”

“Butter?”

Huia hops to the fridge. The kettle finishes boiling and Jack drops tea bags into the cups.

Huia stops hopping and looks at me. “Hopping’s hard work.”

“Sure is.” I try not to smile.

“So, Dad . . .”

“Yes, Huia.”

“I was thinking . . .”

“I’m not getting you a new backpack.”

“But I didn’t even ask yet!”

“You having banana bread?”

She shakes her head, disarmed.

“How about you do some coloring then? After we’ve had some tea I’ll get your dinner ready.”

I lean over the kitchen counter. “I don’t want to interrupt—”

Jack waves away my concern. “Nothing to interrupt. We’re just going about our boring business, eh, Huia?”

She nods, then dashes off down the hallway. When she returns she’s holding a very large notepad and a fistful of coloring pencils.

Jack plates up steaming-hot slices of banana bread with generous, melting swipes of butter, and nods towards the teacups. I pick them up and carry them over to the living room. There’s an old lounge suite in faded and nubby corduroy with fat arms that have wooden rests for mugs or plates. I take the couch and Jack takes the armchair. Huia crouches on the ground and lays out her paper on a pine coffee table. I blow on my tea and we both watch her. She declares that she’s going to draw birds for me, so I can learn. She expertly draws the outline of a wing, outstretched, and picks through her pencils to find the right shade of brown.

“Huia told me she’s named after a bird,” I say.

Jack nods. “That’s right. A New Zealand native bird.”

“But they’re all dead,” Huia says, lifting her head from her drawing.

Jack laughs. “They are extinct. But they were quite beautiful—a bluish black color with a metallic sheen . . . I mean, I never actually saw one. They had long tail feathers, tipped white—”

“And the female had a long, curved beak,” Huia adds, curving her index finger.

“Yup,” Jack says.

“And the boy bird had a short, stumpy one,” she says with a degree of satisfaction.

“Well, I dunno about stumpy.”

“Not as interesting.”

“Fair enough, bub, not as interesting,” Jack says.

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