Jacinta Takes a Walk
Copyright© 2025 by BarBar
Chapter 27: Sunset
Maya met me at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, great. I was coming to look for you. We’re on dinner prep together. Let’s head into the kitchen.”
As we walked in that direction, she pointed out a chores whiteboard with our names down one side and a series of columns for different days and the assigned chore for that day.
I pointed out an X next to my name instead of chores on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Maya nodded. “That means you’re not available on those evenings. Do you have an outside job or something on those days?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, they’ve worked around that. During school holidays, you’ll have a chore you can do in the daytime on those days.”
“Okay,” I said.
We went into the kitchen and washed our hands and donned aprons. Max put us to work peeling and slicing vegetables. At another table, a second group were making what looked like a mountain of sandwiches. Each sandwich got wrapped and a note scrawled on the outside saying what was in it.
“School lunches for the week,” explained Maya. “We grab a sandwich for tomorrow to put in our bags. The rest go in that freezer. It’s a good idea to grab a sandwich the night before. If you leave it until morning, they don’t always thaw out completely by lunchtime. In the middle of summer they do, but not so much when the weather is cooler. There are worse things than cold sandwiches, but it’s easy to avoid having to eat cold sandwiches, by taking them out of the freezer the evening before.”
“Okay,” I said.
We got back to peeling and slicing. As we worked, Max talked to us about what we were doing. We were making meatloaf, and a vegetable mash, plus a big pot of peas and corn that we cooked from frozen. He showed us the recipe for the meatloaf. It had proportions needed to feed 4 and next to it, proportions needed to feed 20. We were obviously making the larger version. He talked us through the process and had us do each step with him. I realised he was teaching us how to make a simple healthy meal. I can cook some, but mostly what I can cook is cheap and simple, but not necessarily good. The emphasis at home was always about what was cheap. Healthy was rarely an option.
The vegetable mash was mostly potato, pumpkin, carrot and parsnip. We cubed it all, boiled it, and then mashed it fine using a mixer. After that, we added milk and some grated cheese, and mixed it some more.
The meatloaf was mainly made out of ground meat, breadcrumbs, finely chopped onions, eggs and milk, plus some spices.
“I used to make a lovely sauce to go with the meatloaf,” said Max. “But most of the residents would turn up their nose at my homemade sauce, and add standard tomato sauce instead. Because of that, I stopped wasting time and energy and money on my fancy sauce. Now everyone gets tomato sauce.”
I’ve rarely seen an adult pout, so it caught me by surprise when Max did it. Then I figured out he was being playful. He was exaggerating how upset he was in an attempt to be funny. I didn’t laugh but I thought it was a bit funny.
“Maybe you should’ve hidden the tomato sauce on meatloaf nights,” I suggested. “Then everyone would have been forced to use your special stuff or go without.”
“Excellent idea,” said Max. “I like the way you think.”
Maya had been looking down at what she was doing. She paused and looked at me without lifting her head, so she was looking out from under her eyebrows.
“I’m pretty sure that in every state of Australia, hiding the tomato sauce is a crime,” said Maya. “In terms of seriousness, it’s somewhere between eating a meat pie with a knife and fork, and telling foreigners the truth about drop bears.”
Max drew in a hissing breath between his teeth. “She has a point. There are some laws that should never be broken.”
“I gather,” continued Maya. “That people found guilty can be sentenced to up to a year of living without vegemite.”
I nodded and frowned. “I guess we better not do that then,” I conceded. “I’m not sure if I could live for a whole year without vegemite.”
We grinned at each other and got back to work.
Mixing the meatloaf ingredients involved getting our hands down into the bowl and mashing it all together with our hands. That was fun. Max pointed out how we had to keep mixing until there were no dry sections, but then we had to stop. Because, he said, if you overdo the mixing it would come out tough. Then we rested the mix, shaped it into loaf shapes on the tray and baked it. Once it was baked, we rested it again, before cutting it into slices ready to serve. Max really emphasised the importance of letting it rest after it was done cooking. That gave it time to soak up all the juices. If you cut it immediately out of the oven, the juices would spill out and it would end up tasting dry. Max explained how leftover slices could be reheated or eaten cold in sandwiches. I was sold even before I tasted it.
Roseanna came in and took over from us when it came time to serve, so that we could eat with everyone else. The meal was delicious. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a meal that I had a hand in cooking, that was as good as that meatloaf and mash with peas and corn. A little drizzle of tomato sauce across the top made it perfect.
I sat with Maya and Jana and Pramun and Jasper. It seemed like there was an unofficial thing where people sat at different tables each meal. I asked about that and Maya said there wasn’t really a policy or anything, but that it tended to happen. Some people had favourites they often sat with, but by mixing around, everyone got to talk to everyone else sooner or later.
Maya was interested in how my day had been and if I was having any problems settling in. I said no problems. I still felt like I was being rushed here and there. Also every little thing was something new, so I was still a bit overwhelmed. Despite that, I was coping, so I said I was fine.
I told them that I’d been to Family Court to get my status formalised and they all nodded. They’d all been through something similar. That started a round of them each telling stories about their own experience with Family Court. I very quickly got the impression that my experience had been both typical, but also less complicated than for some. Maya and Jana both had parents in prison and no other suitable family option. Maya had a grandmother in an aged-care facility so her grandmother was unable to look after her. Jana had two grown cousins who might have been suitable guardians if they hadn’t been only just released from prison for one thing and waiting on trial for something else. She didn’t give details. Pramun and his sisters were orphans. Jasper’s mother was mentally ill and incapable of caring for him.
Pramun mentioned that he and his sisters had an uncle back in Indonesia who had tried to claim them. But Pramun’s father had a file on this uncle with evidence of some of the illegal things the uncle got up to, including running a prostitution ring with underage girls. Fortunately, one of Pramun’s friends in Roxby had a mother who was a lawyer. She had helped Pramun present this information to the Family Court. It wasn’t enough evidence to prove the uncle was guilty in a criminal court, but they were hoping that it was enough to convince the judge in Family Court that sending Pramun and his sisters back to Indonesia to live with this uncle would be a bad idea. The woman helping them had discovered that the uncle did have previous convictions in Indonesia for various crimes, including one for rape. When the judge was presented with the evidence and the uncle’s criminal record, he had been convinced enough to prevent the uncle claiming the three siblings, and they’d been put into the care of DCP.
Jasper told us that he had been knocked off his bicycle by a car which left him a paraplegic. Soon after that, his father had died of cancer. His mother’s mental illness meant that she couldn’t give him the sort of care that any child needed, let alone a young paraplegic. Someone had reported his situation to the DCP and they’d investigated and taken Jasper out of the house. Jasper still resented the DCP for intervening like that, even though he knew it was probably the right thing for them to do. Jasper’s time in Family Court had involved a lawyer from DCP arguing with a lawyer representing his mother about whether or not his mother was capable of giving him an appropriate level of care. Jasper had hated having to listen to the things that were said about his mother by the lawyer representing DCP, even if it was mostly true. He’d also hated having to sit there and have it spelt out the kind of extra care that he needed. Jasper said he regularly visited his mother and often spoke to her on the phone between visits. But without Jasper living with her, his mother had gotten worse to the point of being hospitalised a few times. He was clearly very worried about her, but couldn’t do much more than what he was doing.
The conversation moved on from Family Court, and I found out a bit about what plans they had for the future.
Maya had recently received confirmation that she had a full scholarship for a nursing course. It was what she wanted to do after school and she was pretty excited about getting the scholarship. If she hadn’t gotten it, she would have had to get a job and done nursing in night school. Jana was wistful about college but pragmatic. She had good grades but wouldn’t be able to afford to go. She was already attending trade school instead of regular high school, and training as a cook, the type that works in pubs or cafes. Both Maya and Jana would turn 18 later in the year and the DCP was already talking to them about moving them into transitional housing sometime soon, so that they would be set up to finish the year.
Pramun said he was thinking of going into the military after he finished high school, probably the army, but that was still a couple of years away. If he got good enough grades, he might get into officer training, otherwise he would be happy to go in as a grunt. When Pramun talked about the army, Jasper joked that maybe he should try that. He said driving a tank can’t be that much different than steering a wheelchair. He kept making jokes about how he could be useful in the army, even without working legs. It was pretty funny, but I think he was hiding a sadness about his condition. The others joined in on his jokes and laughed with him. Nobody said anything about how it was all impossible.
My cramps weren’t terrible, but during dinner I swallowed another couple of the pain tablets to help ease them a bit.
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