Each summer, we commission some of Aotearoa’s finest writers to tell us a short tale. This year’s theme is “second acts”.

The hot pink fringe came last.

Joan saw the shoes first. The paint-splatter brightness of them, displayed in the window of a boutique with two security guards positioned out front. Initially, she’d walked on. Even if she could afford it – and after selling her home, she probably could afford it – she’d never purchased anything from a shop whose threshold required a line of defence. But those magenta shoes followed her for a whole block, muting every other colour, and eventually, she doubled back. When she left that fancy store an hour later, Joan was giddy with fluted champagne and showered attention. Even the security guards smiled when she stepped outside, swinging her two large shopping bags like she was in a movie.

It wasn’t until she showed her hair stylist the shoes, and the silk cocktail dress in the same hue, that he suggested she colour her fringe, too.

“You’ll rock this fabulous outfit!” he’d clapped. “Let’s give you pink feathers to match.”

When Joan got back from the salon, no one said a thing. Not about her extravagant purchases that afternoon, nor the new, vivid streaks through her grey hair. Her daughter-in-law’s top lip might have curled slightly, and her son might have sighed, but he always sighed on Friday afternoons, as if the working week had deflated him.

Her granddaughter, Remy, never even looked up from her phone.

The next Thursday morning, Joan dresses as carefully as a bride. When she emerges from the bathroom, she is powdered and perfumed, her new dress gleaming. Waiting outside for her pre-booked taxi, she realises what the fabric’s colour reminds her of. It’s those old Cuisenaire rods that help children learn to count. When her son was small, she’d had to scoop one of the smaller, magenta rods from his mouth right before he choked on it. Such an intimate gesture, unthinkable now, but Joan can still remember the relief of that hard, wet plastic in her hand. The shocking pink of it, and how she understood why her son had thought to taste it. Immediately, she’d packed all but the dullest colours away.

As the taxi turns into her son’s street, his teenage daughter bolts out the door, late for school as usual.

“Woah, Nan!” Remy says over her shoulder as she rushes past. “You totally look like a flamingo.”

“More like mutton dressed as lamb,” Joan hears Robert mutter, as if he’s standing right next to her.

“Shush!” she says, even if he isn’t really there.

The taxi drops her at the station, where Joan takes a seat on the express train to Flemington Racecourse. It might be her third year attending Oaks Day, but she remains enchanted by the carnival of colour surrounding her, all the shimmer and sheen, and sparkling handbags crooked into over-bronzed arms. There must be three women to every man in this carriage, she notes. Ladies’ Day indeed. Her son calls horse-racing a mug’s game. Her granddaughter calls it … barbaric. But this day is one that Joan will not concede to them. After all those years she missed.

“Why bother wasting your money,” Robert used to say. “When it’s right there on the TV.”

It’s harder to hear her husband’s voice on this train. That’s part of the charm of this day. How noisy it is. What it drowns out, and all the things Joan can hear instead. Like the watery sniff of the girl who has just sat down across from her. She’s been crying, evidently. And when Joan silently offers a pack of tissues from her bag, fresh tears spill over.

The sympathy of a stranger will do that to a person.

“Thank you,” the crying girl whispers as she crumples a tissue into each hand, making two fists.

“I’m such an idiot,” she says into the air.

“I doubt that,” Joan responds kindly.

“No, really,” the girl looks directly at her now. “I slept with my ex last night. And it turns out he’s still a dick this morning.”

“Ah.”

“Sorry if that’s a bit personal,” the girl quickly adds. “But you remind me a bit of my grandmother. She loved pink, too.”

Loved.

“You were close?” Joan asks. She never assumes.

A nod, and then another sniff.

“She was my favourite person. And this was her favourite race day. Which is why I’m forcing myself to go. Despite … well, despite, you know.”

Joan doesn’t know, exactly. She’s never woken up next to an ex-boyfriend, only to regret it. At 74, she doubts she ever will. But she does understand getting out of bed when you don’t want to. Putting on a nice outfit, and dusting yourself off, even if your hands shake while you do it.

“I started coming to Ladies’ Day soon after my husband died,” she tells the girl. “Not because he loved the races, but because I do. And I never got the chance when he was alive. It’s hard to do something that might make you happy when you’re supposed to be sad. But it’s essential, I think.”

“Essential?”

When she sees the girl is no longer crying, Joan leans forward in her seat, gently conspiratorial.

“Yes. Because the sadness is always there. It’s happiness you have to keep asking back into your life. Time and again, you have to make space for it. Until it knows it’s always welcome. That you don’t only want to be sad.”

“Wow,” the girl sighs. “Wow. That’s really beautiful. And so are you.”

Joan leans back and smiles, but not too broadly.

Last year, she spent the ride to Flemington comforting a newly divorced woman. The year before, she cheered on a nervous 18-year-old who had just moved to Melbourne on her own. It has become the best part of her day. This Ladies’ Day, where Joan is not a widow or a mother who reluctantly moved in with her grown son after two mini strokes. Nor is she a woman who spent most of her life doing what her kind but fusty father, and then her kind but fusty husband, said.

On Ladies’ Day, she is the person you want to sit across from on a train.

They spend the rest of the journey talking about the girl’s oma. How she never once placed a bet but always picked the winner. By the time they reach Flemington, it’s not only Joan who is smiling.

“Thank you for cheering me up,” the younger woman says earnestly, as they prepare to exit the train. “You really do look beautiful.”

“Not bad for an old flamingo,” Joan says with a wink.

Hours later, heading for home, Joan sees the same girl sitting, bare-footed, near the entrance to the train station. She is with a flamboyance of young women, and she’s laughing so hard she appears to be crying again.

“Hey! Flamingo lady!”

The girl has seen her, too.

“I got happy!” she yells from the ground, giving Joan an exaggerated thumbs-up.

Shifting from foot to foot to ease the delicious ache of her new shoes, Joan returns the gesture, before running her fingers through her hot pink fringe. Her new feathers. She thinks about how some birds aren’t born so bright.

Flamingos, for instance, have to grow into their colour.

Jacqueline “Rock” Bublitz is an award-winning writer who lives between Melbourne, Australia, and her hometown in Taranaki. Her next novel will be released in 2024.