The Goodbye Ride Read Free

downshifted gears and dropped revs. Tyres splashed on wet
roads. It was easy to pretend she hadn’t heard.

Chapter
2
    Every muscle ached. The
bone-crunching cold made it worse and Liv’s thoughts were as bleak as her
steps. If a mugger decided to rob her now he could have snatched her bag
without a fight.
    She crossed the main road at
the only set of lights and limped around the corner into Old Balhannah Road,
trying to figure out what she would say to Ben. How did she tell him she didn’t
have the Duke? How did she tell him the goodbye ride was over before it even
began?
    When her brother was alive,
Luke and Ben rode to Mannum every weekend, riding double on the Ducati. Luke
said they could be themselves up there. Just hang out. No one knew them. None
of the local Redneck boys were there to give them grief.
    Of course, Ben would chip in
that it was really all about the cheesy bacon pies at the Mannum Bakery—how
they were the best pies in South Australia—because he just had to be contrary.
    Riding the Ducati to Mannum
was the best way she and Ben could think of to say a final goodbye to Luke—Liv
on the Duke, Ben on his Honda—it would have felt like Luke was riding with both
of them, one last time.
    She was the world’s biggest
idiot for getting Ben’s hopes up, but it had never entered her head that
someone else might buy the Duke. When she’d heard it was for sale, she’d
thought it was fate.
    Damn Owen Carson and his
big black wallet.
    Liv checked over her shoulder.
The road was clear and she crossed near the new childcare centre. Kids hung
tiny arms through the fence, noses pressed through bars, seeking the parents
who would soon finish work and take them home.
    “Hi, buddy,” she said to a boy
of about three who looked as sad as she felt. He’d jammed his plastic spade
through the bars and stood whacking it back and forth, crying, because he couldn’t
get it out.
    Liv stopped long enough to
twist the spade upright so it slipped back through the bars.
    “What do you say, Hamish?”
said a little girl solemnly, to the now-happy boy.
    “Fanks you.”
    Liv felt her lips curve in a
smile. “No worries buddy.”
    The childcare centre sat on
land that once belonged to the Hahndorf Private School. When they built the
childcare, the playground had been relocated further up Old Balhannah Road.
    She and Luke used to go to
that playground most days after school. The private school playground had
better gear than the public school where the Murphy kids went, and the private
school kids didn’t hang around to taunt her timid little brother. Even way back
then, children marked Luke as different.
    Liv stared over the fence at
the climbing frames and swings, see-saws, rungs and ladders—silent now and
still, waiting for something to prod it into action.
    A bit like my life.
    Now where had that thought
come from? She was happy enough in her life. Wasn’t she? She had her
work. Her health. Her friends. Well. She had Ben.
    It was hard to keep
friendships when she worked around the clock. She’d just come through her
second grape harvest season since starting her viticulture consultancy and that
meant most weekends from February to May she was too tired to do anything more
social than collapse into bed with a book.
    Liv didn’t do movies or make-up or
Facebook—she had more interest in cricket than clothes—and she’d been burned
before. She’d lost count of the girls who only wanted to be friends with her so
they could get closer to her gorgeous brother. As far back as high school women
saw the ‘turning’ of Luke Murphy as a personal challenge.
    Living with her parents didn’t
help either. It was impossible to invite people around when her mother couldn’t
stop herself following them around the house, a cloth in her hand to wipe beer
bottle rings from the coffee table.
    Dammit, Olivia. That’s
enough. Get over yourself!
    Before she had time to really
think it through, Liv lifted the childproof latch on