that.
Not exactly.
But yeah. He knew Brant and Dusty were concerned about him. They weren’t all that subtle on the issue. Those frequent anxious looks, the muttered comments he didn’t always hear but could guess the gist of, the over-hearty suggestions about going for a beer, the occasional comment about a woman—nothing too crude, just “nice legs” and that kind of thing—after which they’d both nudge him for an agreement, which he would dutifully give.
Yes, she had nice legs, the blonde or the brunette or the farmer’s daughter with her hair hidden beneath her hat.
Brant and Dusty both thought it was time he moved on, found a new mother for his boys.
Callan had thought so, too, once.
Three years ago, to be exact, here at this same annual racing carnival.
To him, it felt like yesterday.
He could still remember the panic, the loneliness, the physical hunger, the ache for his own loss and the even harder ache for what his boys would miss without a mother, after that first endless year without Liz.
But, sheesh! What the hell had he been thinking that day? Had he really thought that a party-going, city-bred twentysomething with “nice legs,” carrying a glass of champagne in one hand and in the other a race guide she wasn’t interested in, could possess the slightest power to help him move on?
There had been a nightmarish wrongness about that woman’s body. The freckles across her nose weren’t Liz’s freckles. Her hair wasn’t Liz’s shade of blonde. Her curves weren’t right, or her voice. He’d been looking for all the wrong things, and he hadn’t even found those.
“They’re in the barrier,” Brant reported, his voice rising to cut across Callan’s thoughts. “He looked lively but not too wound up.”
“And Garrett is hungry for this win,” Dusty added. “He’ll ride him just right.”
Both men had binoculars pressed to their eyes, now. They didn’t want to miss a second of the race, or of their horse’s ride. They wanted Callan to care that Saltbush Bachelor was running with a good period of training and some successful starts behind him, and actually had a shot at a win.
The silk shirts of the jockeys shimmered with color in the bright sun, the way the desert air shimmered on the horizon. The nearby airfield had light planes lined up like minivans in a shopping mall’s parking garage, and the population of the tiny outback town had temporarily swelled from a few hundred to several thousand. Callan could smell beer and barbecued sausages, sunscreen and horse feed and dust.
He roused himself enough to answer his two friends. “Yeah, Mick Garrett’s a good jockey.” But he didn’t lift his own binoculars and barely noticed the anticipation that knotted their bodies and their voices as the race got underway.
Instead he thought about his boys back on Arakeela Creek with their grandmother, thought about what he’d need to do with the cattle next week when he was home, thought again about three years ago here in Birdsville and that disaster of a nice-legged woman who could never in a million years have looked—or felt—or sounded—enough like Liz.
He thought about the other woman, too, a few months later—a blond and freckled Scandinavian backpacker whom he’d permitted to camp down by the Arakeela Gorge water hole, and who had been happy to make all the moves in what had soon turned out to be a limp disaster of a one-night stand.
Lord, he hated remembering! He’d been so crazed with grief and loneliness, but how could he have thought that hooking up with some stranger would do anything to heal him, let alone anything to provide him or his boys with a better future?
Watching Callan’s mental distance and his thinned mouth, Brant and Dusty looked at each other again. Didn’t need to speak about it, but spoke anyway.
“Does he even know it’s started?” Dusty muttered.
“Knows,” Brant theorized. “Doesn’t care.”
“If Salty wins—”
“Won’t make a blind bit of difference to him. Hell, Dusty, what are we going to do? Being there is just bull. You’re right. We both know it. He needs action.”
“Action? We’re doing everything we can. When he wanted to pull out of our racehorse syndicate, we basically told him he couldn’t.”
“And his mother talked him round on that, too.”
The race wheeled around the far curve of the track and the jockeys’ colors blurred. From this angle, it was impossible to see how Saltbush Bachelor was running. As long as he wasn’t hemmed in at the rail. As long as Garrett didn’t leave his run too late.
Beside Brant, two would-be Paris Hiltons were screaming for the horse they wrongly thought they’d bet on. Van Der Kamp wasn’t running until the next race, but neither Brant, Dusty nor Callan troubled to give the two overexcited young women this information.
“Kerry’s worried,” Brant went on, still talking about Callan’s mother. “She phoned me last week and asked us to look out for him this weekend.”
“Like we wouldn’t anyway.”
The momentum of the race picked up as the horses came around into the home straight. The Paris Hilton girls had realized their mistake over Van Der Kamp and were cheering for the correct horse, now—Salty himself.
“He’s going to do it!” Brant yelled. “He’s up there. It’s going to be close. Can you see, Dusty? Callan?”
Callan didn’t answer.
The horses thundered past, their legs a blur of pistonlike movements, their jockeys’ colors once more tangled together. Just twenty meters to go, then ten.
“He’s there, he’s … no, he’s not going to win, but second. He’s—hell, he’s losing ground, but he’s going to get—” Brant stopped.
Second place? It was too close to call. They’d have to wait for the official result. Brant listened to the distorted sound of the PA system for several seconds and managed to catch winner and place-getters’ names. Even allowing for the distortion, none of them sounded remotely like Saltbush Bachelor. Their horse had lost out for third place by a nose.
“So much for omens,” said one of the Hilton types to the other.
“Guess we’re not scoring ourselves an outback bachelor today,” the other one replied.
Beside them, Callan didn’t even react—despite their nice legs—and Brant and Dusty could only look at each other helplessly once again.
“Talk to your sister, Brant,” Dusty suggested. A small, irritating bush fly buzzed near his lips. Like most outback-bred people, he’d learned not to open his mouth too wide when he spoke, which was an advantage in confidential conversation. “Maybe this needs a woman’s touch. Nuala has a good head on her shoulders.”
“A good head full of crazy ideas,” Brant said.
“Maybe a crazy idea is just what we need.”
“Yeah,
