Finding my mother's magic.(Story)(Short story)

Cups of tea blew steam into the air and Aunty Flo scratched her chin. She looked at Mum across the kitchen table. Mum sat with her elbows resting on the table and her hands coveting her nose and mouth. Because she didn't sit like that very often, I remember it more than shivering in the dark and cold when we started to walk home.

Mum was usually too busy around the farm for any sitting down at all, let alone resting in what I think of now as her had-enough pose. I caught her at it other times when she didn't know anyone was watching. She'd sit there for a few minutes, moving her hands up and down her nose and sighing into her fingers. But that night was the first time I'd seen her doing it with anyone else around.

I scuffed my shoes on the dirt floor and looked at them both. Mum didn't seem to notice that the rain was getting heavier. She didn't call my brothers in from the porch. She'd said they could play out there, just for a few minutes, if they put their jackets and hats on. I don't think she wanted them inside. She never let them play outside, ever, on nights that cold.

My eldest brother, Peter, had disappeared into the barn. I wondered whether he might go and comfort Fella, my horse. He was really Peter's, but when I was five, I liked to think Fella was mine. I knew he'd be scared with the wind starting to pick up. The paddocks were all thick up with cloud and dark and Fella was probably running away from the wind hooting at him out of wire fences. That was if the sound of gum trees wrestling with each other wasn't enough to scare him.

"So Harry's out there in the car on Grampians Road and he just let you lot walk home?"

Aunty Flo stared across the table.

"Yes," Mum said, stretching the word out and rubbing her head. "When we broke down he said he was stopping there for the night. And he just lay back and before I knew it he was snoring. I couldn't get out and try and get the car going myself. And I wasn't going to stay out there all night with the kids. They'd have bloody froze."