‘That sounds good,’ she says. ‘Will you cook?’
‘Of course not. You’d rather starve.’
It’s an old joke between them: when he was a teenager Dylan decided he was going to try making dinner for his parents and tried to serve them half-cooked chicken. The next time he offered to make a meal, Laurie said he’d rather starve.
‘I might,’ Trudy says. ‘But I wouldn’t care. As long as you’re there.’
‘I always will be, Mum.’
She feels like pinching his cheek, just as she used to when he was half her size. There is, however, something she can offer instead.
‘Come inside,’ she says. ‘You need a trim.’
Dylan laughs and runs a hand through his hair. ‘I guess it’s a little shaggy.’
‘It’s a lot shaggy. In you go.’
But he stands back for her to enter first, just as his father taught him to do.
After he’s sitting in a chair, with a cape around him, Trudy picks up her scissors and as she snips they make plans for lunch, and for Christmas, and for Dylan to bring his family to Terrigal over the next summer holidays.
