Sisters of Mercy by Caroline Overington

Author:Caroline Overington [Overington, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Dear Jack,

Remember when I first started writing to you and you told me to point out where you’d gone wrong in your stories? Well, I’m going to tell you now that one of the things that really annoyed me was how you kept saying, ‘Oh, Snow found out when her dad died that he’d left half the family fortune to a sister she’d never met,’ but that’s not right, Jack. That’s just wrong.

What actually happened was, I’d been visiting Dad every four or six months in that year before he died, and I was always worried that something would happen to him because I was living in Sydney and he was in Deer Park and I couldn’t get to see him that often because I had the kids at Delaney House.

I wanted him to move out of the old house, but he kept telling me not to worry and that his neighbours dropped in on him. I was right to be worried, though, because just after his eighty-ninth birthday, he slipped in the kitchen and hit his head. He managed to call an ambulance and he got taken to Footscray and District Hospital. He said he felt fine but they insisted on doing a body scan and, just as they’d done with Mum, they found cancer. He called me from his bed to say, ‘Better come say your goodbyes. I’ve got the big C, and it’s gotten hold of everything.’ And I thought, ‘Right, okay, I’ll book a flight for next week,’ and next thing I knew, Doug was on the phone saying, ‘He’s dead.’

It annoyed me that he hadn’t told me how bad it was and I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to bury one of your parents, Jack, but if you haven’t, let me tell you it’s not much fun. You’ve got to track down people you haven’t seen for years, and you don’t know where to find them. You’ve got to book the funeral home and put a notice in the newspaper, so a bunch of people you’ve never met can come and eat the sandwiches you’ve paid for. And the funeral home that Dad wanted to use carried on like it was McDonald’s, trying to get me to upsize everything: are you interested in brass handles for the coffin, or just the cheap and nasty ones? Would you like flowers at the end of every pew or only on the coffin? Would you like hot food served afterwards, or just the tea and sandwiches?

I told them: ‘It’s just me. There are no other children, no grandchildren, no other kin.’ They said, ‘Oh, you never know, people come out of the woodwork.’ And do they ever: there was a crowd of at least fifty at the service, blokes long-retired from the railways, old ducks who used to get their toasters from old Jim at Olarenshaw Electrics, blokes from the Station Hotel, a couple of geeks from some

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