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was asking about! Idiot! I could feel my guilty blush, something that had given me grief since the time I learned how to lie, wash away with relief.
    I don’t know. The same as usual, I suppose .
    She looked at me for a long moment, spade in one hand and baby tomato plant in the other, then sighed.
    Are you going out tonight? she asked after she’d planted the next seedling.
    I’ll probably head over to Tim’s later…. The boys are planning a big night .
    A Lakeside girl was meant to be having a party, some girl Tim was convinced was into him because she happened to say sorry when she stuck her artwork into his backside on the bus. I pointed out that her response was called everyday politeness. Tim, however, was certain that she wanted him, especially his backside.
    Oh . Mum nodded. OK then . And she returned to the digging, shaking, planting, patting.
    She stopped suddenly and looked at me again, her face a strange combination of a frown and a tight-lipped smile.
    What?
    How big a night?
    I grinned back. Relax, Mum, you can trust me . She rolled her eyes and returned to her plants. We had both found our place again and for the moment everything was as it should be.

The weekend of guilt
    It turned out I didn’t go over to Tim’s place after all. No real reason, but I figured I’d seen Jock and Tim make idiots of themselves plenty of times before so I wasn’t missing out on much. Hanging out at home was pretty usual for me these days, so Mum didn’t pick anything up on her maternal radar as she usually would have when there was drama in the air. Anyway, I reckon she liked having me kicking around the house.
    Mum looked pretty happy with herself after our quality time in the veggie patch. She always loved a project, especially anything to do with the house. That was her thing, the house. Well, if I was really honest, it wasn’t just her thing, it was her and Dad’s thing. You couldn’t separate the three of them. It was like the house was another member of the family.
    They bought this place the same year I was born, and it definitely needed a lot of love. It was a dump! But that’s what they wanted. They were into DIY way before it was on telly every night of the week. They wouldn’t go anywhere near IKEA or Freedom, though, like normal people did. Oh no, the Armstrong family had to get up at the crack of dawn every weekend and go to garage sales, junkyards, smelly old nana stores and freaky run-down warehouses. They would spend hundreds of hours happily trawling through crap, dirty crap, and get really excited when they found something that no one in their right mind would even touch. Then they’d spend whatwas left of the weekend and every weekend after that getting whatever piece of junk they’d found back to how it was originally. It seemed like a huge waste of time to me. So I’d point out that we were in the twenty-first century in case they’d missed it and they’d both smile as if I was the idiot and keep sandpapering the latest 1850s table they’d scored from somebody’s skip.
    Stuff was different now, though, weekends were different. There was no junk in the backyard, and no Armstrong projects. Except for the veggie patch.
    Which was how Mum spent most of Sunday morning, staring at the veggie patch over her pot of tea. Then she flicked through the weekend papers. That was weird. Before, she’d never allow them through the front door. She’d carry on that they were a journalistic disgrace and full of trash. Dad reckoned that was exactly the reason why you should buy them. They would sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table and throw smart-arse comments back and forth at one another that I had to dodge every time I went to the fridge. Now Mum’d actually go and buy the papers, sit down at the table in the same position and mutter as she flicked through them. I told her she sounded like a madwoman and she told me to get used to it because it was going to get worse with age.
    Sunday nights