Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [47]
Of course, she’s subsequently turned around and surprised us by becoming very successful at her chosen profession, a beauty therapist. At twenty-three she’s opened her own salon in the local shopping strip and employed her first staff member. She roped all the family into helping with a letter box drop around the neighbourhood and it seems to have paid off, as things are going gangbusters. After all that she turned out to have a head for business, our Em. In twenty years she’ll probably be richer than the rest of us put together and in the meantime Mum and I get all the free facials and manicures we need. I call that a win, win, win.
Unlike her sad-case older sister Emma never wanted for admirers as a teenager, on the contrary she was the most lusted after girl in her school year. She had a series of boyfriends throughout high school whom she treated with complete disdain. Each lasted about a year before she’d get bored and dump him. Mum and Dad would be left with the job of consoling the grief-stricken youth/potential stalker while she moved on to the next victim (there was never a shortage) to repeat the pattern all over again.
Then when she started in her first job word quickly spread around our suburb about the hot new beauty therapist. Slick young real estate agents in their aviator sunglasses, buffed mechanics in their greasy overalls, spotty-faced bank tellers in their badly-ironed shirts: they all beat a path to her door. I’m not sure what excuse they made up to visit a women’s beauty salon - I can only assume that a lot of mothers were pleased with, if a little surprised by, their birthday presents that year.
Not one of these guys was successful in securing her interest, so much so that I began to wonder if, in fact, my little sister didn’t bat for the other side.
That was until a day around this time. Tony and I had attended the Saturday night wedding of one of his particularly late-straggling-to-matrimony friends and Mum had babysat Issy overnight for us. Thus I was privileged to be actually present at my parent’s house that Sunday morning when my sister made her announcement. Mum and I were having a cup of tea together in the kitchen when Emma emerged from her bedroom just before midday, mascara ringed around her eyes and looking a bit worse for wear.
‘Attention everybody! I have an announcement. I am officially in love!’ Obviously an inclination to theatrics hadn’t completely deserted her.
‘Really! No way! Who’s the lucky guy - or girl?’ I asked.
‘Guy,’ she said, screwing up her nose at me in an offended manner.
‘It’s a reasonable question seeing you’ve never seemed very interested in any of the men you meet.’
‘Until now that is…I was just waiting for the right one to come along. Besides, I’ve seen enough pussies in my line of work to know that’s not my cup of tea.’
Mum shook her head. ‘Oh Emma Jane Parkes, must you always be so crude!’ My mother likes to present herself as quite the matron these days, but of course we all know about her dirty book collection.
‘So tell us about him,’ I said.
‘His name is Daniel. He’s twenty-five and he’s a truck driver.’
A truckie?
Mum echoed my thoughts, ‘A truck driver?’
‘Yep - he has a huge rig too.’ I think Emma was being deliberately suggestive here but we pretended we didn’t get the joke. ‘Anyway,’ she said, turning to Mum, ‘you can meet him yourself later. He’s taking me to see a new metal band at some pub out west.’
A metal band? The story got more and more intriguing.
Mum was fairly bursting when I dropped Issy off at her place the following Tuesday. Her description of my sister’s new love: tall and thin, with long black hair down to his waist and a moustache, plus multiple ‘horrible’ tattoos and piercings. He