The Second Last Piece

On the Monday morning we made the drive south from Jan's into Trinity the way we had made it on so many Mondays since August. On the first one, six weeks earlier, Sal had insisted on an early start rather than risk being late, and had messaged just after three to say she was done. This time nobody watched the clock. It was the very last time we would make that drive. We did not say much about it.

The rest of the day unfolded the way the six before it had. The bus to the Bunnings car park while Sal was in. Groceries on the way back through. Then across to Liz and Jeff's, where the driveway had become ours without anyone quite saying so, and where Jeff cooked and nobody argued about it any more. A hot shower inside a house, under a roof, which the bus with its outdoor shower cannot offer. Then bed in the driveway, our fourth stay with them in as many weeks.

Apart from the drive in, nothing about that Monday announced itself. But there was only one more day behind it, and when that day was done, Sal's one on ones would be finished.

On the Tuesday it was only a short run from Liz and Jeff's to the school, the kind of drive that barely lets the engine warm. The degree had followed us from the summit of Hartz Peak, where the acceptance found Sal in July 2024, across Tasmania and down the length of the east of the country, through intensives, workshops, tutorials, assignments and a placement. The part of it that had held us in Canberra would finish a few minutes from that driveway.

For two and a half years there had always been something due. It shaped the road more than the road shaped it. Drives were timed around video calls, and a day in the Pilliga was built around one. Campsites were chosen for whether the Starlink would hold. There were trips to Brisbane and Melbourne for intensives, and once a cyclone held her flight back a week at Lake Pedder. There were assignments finished at Chauncy Vale while Anth got over shingles. And it had ended in instalments, none of them with any ceremony. The last Melbourne workshop finished in July and we caught the train back to Albury. The last assignments went in at Mannus Lake on a Wednesday. The last online tutorial ended at the Higgins house sit, and the board games came back out after two years put away. Each time, one piece stopped and the next morning looked much like the one before.

The one on ones were the second last piece, and the biggest. They were the reason for Canberra: seven Mondays and five Tuesdays, the Bunnings car park, the driveway at Liz and Jeff's, camps chosen to stay within reach of the school gate. What remained was her online SMART Recovery groups, which would run from wherever the bus was parked and would be finished by the end of the year. For the first time in two and a half years, the end of the whole thing was close enough to see.

It ran out on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, at the same school gate as every other. Anth was waiting when she came out. The forty hours of one on one were done. Not every requirement of the Masters of Counselling, but the heaviest, and the only one that had tied us to a single city. Somewhere on the camera roll were the photographs from the week before, of Sal in the late warm light among the Canberra blossom, taken for a business that had always been something for after. After was no longer far away.

It needed marking, and Anth knew where. A week earlier Sal had led us to Goodberry's on the strength of a teenage memory, and the frozen custard had beaten Kingsley's Chicken by a distance. This time the suggestion was his. If the finish was going to be celebrated anywhere, it would be there, at her place, a few minutes from the school where it happened. He stood at the counter reading the flavour board with the seriousness of someone who knows he is running out of chances. There were so many of them, and who knew when he would be back to try the rest. Somewhere in seven weeks, a place from Sal's childhood had become a little bit his as well. We ate our custard, and that was the celebration: two cups of frozen custard near a school on a Tuesday afternoon, for six weeks of one on ones and two and a half years of getting there. It was exactly right.

The farewell dinner at Liz and Jeff's was set for Thursday, close enough now to plan around. We could have stayed on in their driveway for the two nights in between. Instead we chose somewhere near enough to come back from: Honeysuckle, up in the Namadgi foothills, where Anth had camped twice before and Sal once, and where the one good clearing gets enough sky for the panels and the Starlink. Last time the kangaroos had grazed within a few steps of the door, their joeys with them.

Then we turned the bus south, out past the last of the suburbs and up toward the hills, leaving the city for the second last time, with the part of the degree that had kept us there done.Read more