The story behind why I started writing these short stories.
Speaking of why I started writing these little stories, there’s actually quite an interesting story behind it.
But to tell it properly, I have to start with my mother.
I don’t know if there was a particular look on your parents’ faces that made you nervous when you were a kid.
For me, it was my mother’s constantly furrowed brow.
In my memory, those two lines between her eyebrows hardly ever seemed to disappear completely.
It wasn’t because my younger brother and I were especially difficult children.
The main reason was that she was raising the two of us on her own. Her English wasn’t very good back then, yet she still had to find a way to keep a family going by herself in a completely different country.
She worked two jobs, but somehow there was always something else that needed paying for.
Sometimes at night, she would sit at the kitchen table and open the letters that had arrived.
Rent.
Electricity.
Phone bill.
Letters from school.
You name it.
Whenever she came across something she couldn’t understand, she would push the paper over to me.
“Bradley, help me see what this says.”
The truth was, my English wasn’t all that good either.
Most of the time, I could work it out.
If there was a word I didn’t know, I would look it up in the dictionary.
Sometimes the two of us could spend a very long time working through a letter that wasn’t even very long.
But Mum never rushed me.
And when we finally figured out what it said—especially when it turned out to be another bill that had to be paid—her brow would usually tighten a little more.
So when I was young, I tried to make things a little easier for her whenever I could.
If I could handle something myself, I did.
I helped out around the house without being asked.
And if my little brother ran into some small problem, I usually tried to take care of it before it ever reached Mum.
Unfortunately, there was one thing I really couldn’t do much about.
My own grades.
I was never what you would call a good student.
So report-card day was never something I looked forward to.
I still remember the time when I put my report card in front of her.
She picked it up and slowly read from the first line to the last.
I had no idea how much of it she could actually understand.
But from the number of Bs and Cs alone, she could probably tell roughly how I had done.
She didn’t scold me.
She didn’t even raise her voice.
She just finished reading it, went back to the top, and read the whole thing again.
Then she said:
“Try a little harder next time.”
That was all.
But I would almost rather she had told me off.
Because I saw those already furrowed brows tighten just a little more.
A few years later, my younger brother started school too.
The first time he brought home a report card, I was there.
I don’t remember what the teacher had written on it anymore.
But I remember the grades.
There were As all over the page.
And I’ve never forgotten her face after she read it.
Because I think that may have been the first time I realised—
those two lines between her brows could actually disappear.
After that, my brother kept doing well at school.
Whenever he brought home a good report card, I’d see those lines soften again.
But usually not for long.
There was always something else waiting for her to worry about.
It stayed that way until many years later, when my brother received his university offer.
But that time was different.
Her brow stayed smooth for days.
I remember thinking:
Maybe if my brother and I kept doing well, Mum would have less to worry about – maybe one day, nothing at all.
Eventually, time moved on.
I got married and had a family of my own, and my brother graduated from university and found a decent job.
All the things that had consumed her for more than twenty years finally seemed to fall into place.
I genuinely thought that this time, she could finally relax and start living more for herself.
But whenever I went home and sat with her in the kitchen, those same familiar lines were still there.
She would ask how much we still owed on the mortgage.
She would ask whether my brother’s job was secure.
She would ask whether we would have enough money if we had children one day.
She still went to work as usual, still bought things on special, still saved every cent she could.
Slowly, I realised that when one thing ended, Mum didn’t actually worry any less.
She simply cleared a little space in her mind and filled it with the next.
One day, watching her, I suddenly thought about those few days after my brother got into university.
I hadn’t seen her that relaxed in years.
There had to be some way to make that furrow disappear again.
The first thing that came to mind was buying her a present.
I had a few ideas, but I thought I’d ask around first.
One day during my lunch break, I asked a few colleagues what they usually got their mums.
The answers were all more or less the same.
Flowers.
Scarves.
Perfume.
To be honest, the moment I heard flowers and perfume, I could already imagine Mum’s reaction.
But the scarf made me think.
That might actually work—at least it was something practical.
So on the way to see her, I stopped at Kmart and picked out a scarf that looked decent enough.
She looked at it.
“How much?”
When she heard the price, instead of relaxing, her brow tightened even more.
“I already have scarves. Why waste money on this?”
It was pretty much the reaction I had expected.
Still, hearing her actually say it left me a little deflated.
Even so, from the way she put it, the problem wasn’t that I shouldn’t buy her anything at all;
It was just that she genuinely didn’t need another scarf.
After dinner that day, Mum got busy again, just as she always did.
I sat there watching her for a while and thought that next time, I’d get her something she would actually use.
Better yet, something that might save her a bit of work.
What that was, though, I had no idea.
Maybe I could save some money first and figure it out along the way.
The trouble was, saving money back then wasn’t exactly easy.
I was married, we had two children, and mine was the only income coming into the house.
Slap!
That was the third time I had hit myself across the face.
My right cheek was starting to feel numb, and my ear was ringing a little.
But at least I was awake.
An Australian summer is never a good time to be driving long distance.
Because I often drove at night, I would try to find somewhere during the day to get a few hours of sleep.
Whenever I could, I parked the truck in the shade.
The problem was, the sun moved.
And so did the shade.
Before long, the cab would be hot again.
When I really couldn’t take it anymore, I would start the truck and turn on the AC.
Cool the cab down.
Switch off the engine.
Try to sleep.
Wake up from the heat.
Turn the AC on again.
Try to sleep again.
Wake up hot again.
Of course, there were motels along the road.
A real bed. A cool room. Curtains drawn.
At times like that, there was almost nothing more tempting.
But every time I thought about the cost, I would tell myself:
I can probably manage a little longer.
So unless I really couldn’t stand it anymore, I usually climbed back into the cab.
The other drivers never missed a chance to make fun of me for it.
“Bradley, what the hell are you saving for?”
“This bloke’s going to take his money into the grave with him.”
Sometimes they would even ask if I wanted to borrow five dollars so I could get myself a proper meal.
I usually just laughed.
They spent their money.
I saved mine.
There wasn’t much to argue about.
The truth was, I didn’t actually love money as much as they thought I did.
I had simply learned something when I was young:
Money should be spent where it matters.
I suppose I learned that from Mum too.
It was just that during that particular period, I was being even more careful than usual.
After all, this time I really was saving up for something.
I still had no idea what I was going to buy Mum.
I only knew it couldn’t be another scarf.
If I was going to give her something, it had to be something she would actually use.
Better yet, something that would make her life a little easier.
So whenever I went to see her, I started paying more attention.
What did she actually spend her time doing?
What took up the most time?
What had she been doing for years, over and over again, every single day?
One day after dinner, I was sitting in the kitchen as usual.
Mum packed away the leftovers, then started clearing the plates from the table.
One.
Two.
Three.
Then she turned on the tap and started washing them one by one.
I sat there watching for a while.
And suddenly, it came to me.
A dishwasher.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
Mum had probably spent half her life washing dishes.
After every meal, she cleared the plates, washed them, left them to dry, then put them all away again.
It was probably one of those things you do for so many years that eventually it stops occurring to you that there might be another way.
But sitting there watching her, I did.
Why was she still doing all of this by hand?
She didn’t have a dishwasher.
She would use one every day.
And after every meal, there would be one less thing for her to do.
Of course, I knew dishwashers weren’t cheap.
And knowing Mum, once she found out the price, she would probably accuse me of wasting money again.
But this was different.
She could live perfectly well without another scarf.
The dishes, on the other hand, had to be washed every single day.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I became.
So once I had saved enough, I bought her a dishwasher.
On the day it arrived at the house, Mum didn’t even know what it was at first.
When I told her, she stood there looking at it for quite a while.
“You won’t have to wash the dishes yourself every day anymore,” I told her.
“After you eat, just put them in.”
She looked at the dishwasher.
Then at the kitchen.
Then at me.
And smiled.
I smiled too.
Because her brow had relaxed.
In that moment, I genuinely thought I had finally got it right.
Unfortunately, it only lasted a little while.
“How much?”
There was that question again.
I didn’t really want to tell her.
But she kept asking, so eventually I did.
The smile slowly disappeared.
The brow that had only just relaxed tightened again.
“That much?”
“It wasn’t that much.”
“Where did you get that kind of money?”
“I saved up.”
That was not the answer she wanted to hear.
She knew what things were like for me at the time.
I was the only one earning money.
We had two children.
The mortgage came due every month without fail.
Long-distance trucking paid reasonably well, but with a family of four, there was always somewhere for the money to go.
And now she knew that I had spent all that time saving only to use the money to buy her a dishwasher.
“Take it back.”
“Mum—”
“Take it back.”
I told her I had already bought it.
I told her she could use it every day.
I even reminded her about the scarf.
She had told me not to waste money on something she didn’t need.
Well, this was something she did need.
At least, that was how I saw it.
Mum understood what I meant.
I could see that.
She ran her hand over the machine and looked at me again.
For a moment, her brow softened.
But then she shook her head.
“How tiring can washing a few dishes be?”
“I’ve been doing it for years.”
“Keep the money for the grands”
In the end, the dishwasher went back.
This time, I was much more disappointed than I had been over the scarf.
With the scarf, at least I understood.
She didn’t need it.
Fine.
I would get her something she did need.
But now I had done exactly that.
She never owned a dishwasher.
She washed dishes every day.
I bought her one.
She understood why I had bought it.
And still, it didn’t work.
Later, Mum made it even clearer.
“Don’t buy me things like this anymore.”
“I don’t need anything.”
Looking back, maybe returning the dishwasher wasn’t entirely a bad thing.
At least I got the money back.
Because if Mum had kept it, and a few months later I had come up with something else she “definitely needed”…
I’m not sure I had another round of saving like that in me.
My face probably didn’t either.
Joking aside, I listened to her.
For a long time after that, I stopped trying to think of things to buy her.
Not because I was angry.
And not because I thought she was ungrateful.
I just slowly began to think that maybe she was right.
The things she wanted, she already had.
And the things she didn’t have, she didn’t seem to think she needed.
So what was left for me to buy?
And so I let the whole thing go.
Until one year, just before Christmas, I went over to help Mum clean the house.
Calling it a big clean-up was probably generous.
Most of our time was spent arguing over the same basic issue:
I thought something should be thrown away.
Mum thought it could still be kept.
While cleaning out one cupboard, I found a small metal box tucked right at the back.
It wasn’t very big, about the size of a deck of cards.
Some of the paint had chipped off the corners, and there were a few patches of rust. On the lid were some faded red plum blossoms and a few Chinese characters.
I vaguely remembered seeing it when I was a child, but I had never known what was inside.
“Mum, do you still want this?”
“Yes.”
She answered immediately without even turning around.
I opened it.
There was nothing valuable inside.
Just an old key and a small piece of paper, folded several times and yellow with age.
I unfolded the paper.
There was only an address written in English.
I stared at it for a moment.
“Mum, what address is this?”
She had been sorting through some things nearby.
When she heard me, she stopped.
She came over and took the paper from my hand.
“This was the first home your father and I lived in.”
I looked at the key.
“And this?”
Mum looked at me.
“What do you think?”
I laughed.
“Why did you keep it after you moved out?”
“Forgot to throw it away.”
That was what she said.
But then she carefully folded the piece of paper and put it back in the box.
I pointed at the writing.
“Did Dad write this?”
“Mm.”
She looked down at the paper and smiled.
“My English wasn’t good then. He was afraid I’d go out and not be able to find my way home.”
“You could really get lost?”
“Of course I could.”
She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Then she told me that when she first came to Australia, she couldn’t even work out where she was supposed to get off the bus.
Once, she went shopping by herself and missed her stop on the way home.
By the time she realised, she had no idea where she was.
There were no mobile phones back then.
They didn’t even have a telephone at home.
And she could barely speak any English.
So in the end, all she could do was hold on to the piece of paper Dad had written for her and show it to people whenever she got lost.
Eventually, someone understood what had happened and was kind enough to drive her home.
She laughed as she told me.
“So what happened next?”
“Well, I got home, obviously. Otherwise, where would you have come from?”
I laughed too.
At first, I had only asked about the address.
But Mum kept talking.
She told me how small their first place had been.
The kitchen was so tiny that two people in it already felt crowded.
In winter, it was cold, and somehow the wind always found its way in around the windows.
They barely had any furniture at first.
Some of it had been picked up from the roadside after other people threw it away.
Then she started talking about Dad.
Apparently, when he was young, he had no idea how to fix anything, but always seemed to believe he could fix everything.
Once, something in the house broke.
He spent ages trying to repair it and somehow managed to make it worse.
Mum started laughing before she even got to the end of the story.
Then one story led to another.
At first, I was still crouching there cleaning out the cupboard.
At some point, without even noticing, I sat down on the floor.
Nobody cared about the cleaning anymore.
I just listened.
I listened to her talk about the young version of my father I had never known.
And about the young version of herself that I could barely imagine.
After we had been talking for a while, I noticed something.
Mum’s brow had relaxed.
I didn’t say anything.
I just kept listening.
A little while later, I looked at her again.
Still no furrow.
I can’t remember exactly how long we talked that day.
I only remember that by the time we finally remembered we were supposed to be cleaning, the cupboard was almost as messy as when we started.
But those two lines on Mum’s face had stayed away the whole time.
I had spent so long trying to find something I could give her.
The scarf hadn’t worked.
The dishwasher hadn’t worked either.
And yet what made her brow relax that afternoon was an old key that could no longer open anything and an address she no longer needed.
I thought about that for a long time.
Maybe Mum had been right.
Maybe she really didn’t need anything.
Wait…
Maybe what she actually needed…
I had to find out.
After that, I started paying more attention to the past.
Whenever I talked with Mum, I would ask her things.
Where had she lived as a child?
What did she buy with the first money she ever earned?
What had been hardest to get used to when she first came to Australia?
What other stupid things had Dad done when he was young?
Some questions got only two or three sentences.
Others were like that old key.
You turned them, and suddenly something opened.
And once it did, Mum could talk for ages.
Slowly, I realised that afternoon hadn’t been a one-off.
Whenever we happened to touch on something she really remembered, Mum changed a little.
She talked more.
She laughed more.
Sometimes she suddenly remembered the name of someone she hadn’t mentioned in years.
And most importantly, those two lines between her eyebrows would disappear for a while.
Later, I started becoming interested in other people’s pasts too.
Over all those years of long-distance driving, I met plenty of people.
Other drivers.
People working at service stations.
People I met in little towns along the road.
And people I sat down with over a cup of coffee, talked to once, and never saw again.
Gradually, I realised Mum wasn’t the only one.
Ask someone in their sixties or seventies what they ate yesterday, and they might have to think about it for a while.
But mention a car they drove when they were young, a song they heard decades ago, or a shop that closed down years ago—
and suddenly they might talk for half an hour.
And while they were talking, something often changed.
A voice that had been slow and quiet picked up.
Someone who had been sitting back suddenly sat a little straighter.
Their hands started moving.
But the biggest change was usually in their eyes.
A moment earlier, they were calm and ordinary.
Then they started talking about someone they knew when they were young, or a car they once owned, or some stupid thing they did fifty years ago—
and their eyes light up.
For a little while, you could almost see the younger person still in there.
I found myself enjoying those conversations more and more.
Eventually, I started writing some of them down.
At first, it was only a few lines.
A name.
A place.
Some little incident I didn’t want to forget.
Over time, there were more and more of them.
Then one day, I had a thought.
If a name, an old key, or even a simple question could take someone back all those years—
what could a story do?
So I tried writing one.
Then another.
And eventually, they became the stories you’re reading now.
So if you ask me why I keep writing these little stories about the past—
I suppose it’s because many years ago, I spent a very long time trying to find something that would make my mother’s brow relax.
And in the end, I realised something.
I had spent all that time wondering what new thing I could give her.
But what finally smoothed the lines from her brow were memories of things long gone.
