Still Here

Mel Harding is fifty-four, two years a widow, and very good at being fine. She runs The Potting Shed, the little garden center she and Rob ran together for twenty-one years. She signs every text “Love Mel”, even to the gas company. At Friday drinks she is the one everyone else leans on.

Since Rob died, she has told nobody how she felt on the morning he died, walking out to the car park into the ordinary sunshine. Not her daughters. Not her four best friends. Only the app on her phone, at one in the morning.

Then a man in an old Akubra walks into the nursery to buy six grevilleas for his mother, and Mel hears herself lecturing him about the word “native”. Pete Morrison was her first love, at Narrabeen High, more than thirty-five years ago. He whistles bird calls, thinks for a long time before he speaks, and doesn't seem to be in any hurry at all.

With the lease on the nursery running out at Christmas, a first grandchild on the way, and her younger daughter telling her to get on a dating app, Mel is running out of ways to be fine.