The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

  He also knew that it was all a battle he had lost years before, lost so completely that even trying to fight it again was only delaying capitulation. Because he’d fought again, lost again, because she knew she’d win eventually, simply by holding her ground. He knew it, and worse, Liz knew it, too.

  The doorbell rang again. He heard the one closing note. He was surrounded by sawdust at that point, fragrant sappy spruce sawdust that had been thrown out of the mitre saw and hung in the basement’s fluorescent lights like static, granular smoke. If Liz had been home, he’d have been wearing a mask. Since she wasn’t, he’d blow his nose later, looking into the Kleenex at the sawdust-darkened mucus with a small thrill of satisfaction.

  He took the board away from underneath the saw and listened again until he was sure. It was the doorbell, thready and always sounding like it was short a critical part of its insides. When Leo finally made his way up from the basement, he saw that it was the Lung Association woman again. Mary.

  She held her clipboard out in front of her, like she needed a barrier between them.

  “I forgot what to put on the receipt. It was $50, right? They’ll send it in a week or so.”

  “It was $15, sure.” Leo could feel himself smiling at the mistake, could feel his lips pulling up at the corners as if they had nothing to do with him.

  “Was it now? You’re sure?”

  And she looked sharply at him, measuring. She only paused for an instant.

  “You know, my uncle still hasn’t found that guy. They’ve been all up and down the hill, and they haven’t been able to find where he lives. And they’ve got a pretty good head of steam on, too.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?” Leo said.

  “I don’t know. I just know they’re looking, and when they’re looking, they like to find something. And sooner or later they’ll be asking me, ‘You sure it was Signal Hill Road?’ Maybe they’ll be asking if it was this street. Like if I was confused, and it was one of your neighbours or something. I mean, I’ve been a lot of places, one house looks like the next — I could’ve gotten it wrong.”

  “So what is this about?” Leo said sharply. “Some kind of shakedown?” He was trying to sound angry, but he was suddenly tired. He knew he had to be firm, but felt the resolve fast running out of him like water down an open drain.

  She smiled again, a real smile this time, and he caught another glimpse of that tooth, dark enough that it looked almost grey at the root. He was watching her face, and saw the way her eyes hardened into an appraising stare before her face cleared again.

  “No. But are you good at lying?” she said bluntly. “Are you going to be able to convince my drunk uncle that it’s the first time you’ve heard about any of this? You don’t even have to try to answer that.”

  Leo reached for his wallet, hoping that there actually would be $35 left in there.

  She laughed at him when she took the money.

  “And poor you. You didn’t even get to have your feel,” she said. She cycled her hips crudely toward him just once, her mouth hanging open as if she was panting, before letting the screen door slam back hard on his arm, the arm he’d somehow forgotten to put back down by his side.

  “See you,” she called back to him without even looking.

  Leo remained at the door long after she’d left. The day had changed, he thought. It had, sometime in the afternoon, crossed the line between fall and winter — from now on, the snow wouldn’t be tentative sweeps across the pavement. It’s exactly like that line, he thought, between when someone barely knows you, and the point when you know each other all too well. The other side of the line when you stop telling each other stories about your earlier lives, and start any conversation with the shorthand you both know, and don’t even enjoy anymore. Where you don’t even have to talk to each other to know exactly what’s going to happen, what direction everything’s going in, where everything’s going to end.

  He finished the shelves that weekend, and the following Saturday morning was starting on the varnish. Three coats, just enough time left for the last one to be dry and the basement all aired out before her flight came in, and he would, of course, meet Liz, her luggage and her intercontinental exhaustion, at the airport, right on time, just like he was supposed to.

  The first coat was done, tacky to the touch, when the doorbell rang.

  “Collecting for the Heart and Stroke now,” Mary said.

  Leo saw the top of a fresh DuMaurier cigarette package lipping out of her jacket pocket like a rude red tongue, and he knew that it was there to call him a liar. She’d given up even the pretence of carrying the clipboard.

  “I’m thinking another $50.”

  Darden Place

  “There they go again. It’s so cute!” Anne Warner said, her voice thrown high at “cute.”

  She was holding a cup of coffee and looking out through the front window into the cul-de-sac, watching Mrs. Anderson and Roxy slowly make their way up Darden Place, the leash between them limp in a long downward loop and dragging along the road. Mrs. Anderson was wearing her springtime beige duffle coat, Roxy a tattered burgundy dog jacket.

  “They look so much alike — they even have the same haircut,” Anne said to her husband, Mike, who was back behind her in the kitchen. And they did, Roxy with her downward terrier face, the hair on her small head falling away to the sides of her ears, and Mrs. Anderson with her grey hair cut in an easy-to-care-for short wedge.

  The pair was moving slowly, and from behind, they had the same stiff-hipped back-and-forth slow rock.

  “Rain or shine, they won’t miss their walk,” Anne said.

  In the kitchen, Mike grunted, struggling with the coffee machine. “Isn’t it supposed to stop dripping when you take the pot out?” he said, irritation clear in his voice. “Damn useless imported useless crap.”

  Helen Anderson had cinched the dog jacket on, clipped the leash onto Roxy’s collar before she opened the door, not that there was any danger that Roxy was going to dart outside into traffic: there wasn’t any traffic at the end of the cul-de-sac, and Roxy was too old and slow to be darting anywhere. The vet had told Mrs. Anderson that Roxy’s hip was arthritic. The doctor hadn’t said anything about Mrs. Anderson’s hip, because she hadn’t asked. The extendable leash always hung on the hook closest to the door to the driveway, right next to Helen’s husband David’s coat. David’s coat wasn’t going anywhere, either, Helen thought — David was gone, dead for six months now, but his things were still all over the house, essentially where they had fallen or, more often, where they still fit.

  “Time for a walk, Roxy?” she said. Roxy looked at her with round wet brown eyes — intelligent but unable to express anything more about what the dog was thinking — and whined softly. Roxy’s pink tongue licked out around her mouth, where the hair was a dirty brown like she’d been eating messily, and then tucked back in.

  Out on her driveway, Helen stopped for a moment, looking at the street. Roxy kept ambling forward, pulling the retractable leash out slowly as she walked. Eight houses both sides, Helen thought, and we used to be friends with all of them. Used to know all of their stories, too: Alan Weeks with the rude mouth when he’d had too many drinks, married to long-suffering Ellen; Barb and Mark the competitive gardeners; Wally and Juliet Allwood — Juliet, Helen thought, making up for her virginal Shakespearean name by dressing like the neighbourhood slut well into her late fifties.

  All summer long, it was one barbecue after another, everyone taking turns to be the ones to buy the wine and make the dinner, the others on rotation bringing bread, salad, dessert. David used to call it “the camino de San Darden.”

  “The shortest and most sacrilegious pilgrimage in the world, with the added benefit that you never need a taxi home,” he’d say, smiling as if the same old line could never get tired.

  At least the grass is green now, Helen thought, even if it’s still cold out. She started forward, pressed the button on the leash handle, the spring wi
nding in some of the slack. Roxy’s even, plodding pace didn’t change. There was a time when Roxy used to strain against the leash, urgently trying to find the sources of the things she was smelling. Then again, Helen thought, there was a time when we were all straining against the leash.

  They took the same stumping walk every day: up to the top of Darden walking on the street, then left onto the sidewalk at Prine. They were so used to it that Roxy almost always stopped to pee in the same two places, and Helen didn’t have to get the plastic bag out until they were almost home again.

  Roxy didn’t change her pace, always followed the same pattern: she’d pee, take a step forward, then her back legs would reflexively flick back and forth — one, two, three, four times — as if burying any trace of her own urine, but only managing to decorate it with blades of torn grass.

  They came around the corner as the letter carrier came the other way — the mailman was a mailwoman now, Helen thought — and the woman bent down and let Roxy smell her hand before ruffling the dog’s ears and scratching the white dog under her chin.

  “She’s gorgeous,” the letter carrier said. “What’s her name?”

  “Roxy — she’s a Westie, a West Highland terrier. They’re a very smart breed.”

  “You can tell.”

  Roxy looked back and forth at the two women, then started forward, unravelling the leash.

  “She always makes a dignified exit,” Helen said.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “That’s a skill most of us are missing,” the letter carrier said. She waved as she walked away, and then ordered the letters in her hand as she turned onto Darden.

  One by one, the guard has changed at every single house but ours, Helen thought, wondering, as she had before, if there was some crucial point of timing she and David had missed.

  Juliet and Wally first: they had cashed out when real estate prices were high and Wally had a prostate cancer scare — “I’m not shovelling that driveway by myself all winter,” Juliet had told Helen, saying they had their eye on a seniors’ condo. “We’re just ready,” Juliet had said, while Helen looked at the deep open vee of Juliet’s blouse and wondered how ready the other condominium owners were going to be for her.

  At first Helen and David thought their new neighbours were less concerned about the perfect party and more about the perfect lawn; for the first few months, the new owners appeared only to pry weeds from the grass with a variety of medieval-looking tools, long-handled and short-, the digging almost ritualistic. Their names were Beth and Tony, and they barely had time to say hello.

  One night, Helen and David had gotten a little tipsy and David had said they should go out and collect bunches of the white-parachuted seeds from the dandelions in their backyard. “We could go across under cover of darkness and start shaking seeds on their lawn, just so that they’ll still have something to do next year.” He laughed until the coughing started. He could cough until his lips changed colour, looking like they were stained with juice from blackberries.

  He was calling his lungs “the pipes” by then, and would talk about how, when it was damp, it was a bad day for the pipes, and the first spring after his diagnosis, it was always damp. Helen would wake up and hear him coughing raggedly in the front bedroom — he’d creep so quietly out of bed that she wouldn’t feel the mattress move, and would only startle awake if he didn’t manage to stifle the upwelling cough for long enough to get almost out of earshot.

  “Pipes aren’t happy,” he’d say when she asked how he was feeling.

  David’s doctor had been blunt: “It’s not the kind of thing that gets better. Your best option — your very best option — is for it not to get worse quickly. But it will get worse.”

  It did — not so much at first, and in fits and starts, but it wasn’t long before David was on oxygen whether he was awake or asleep, a plastic umbilical cord connecting him to the tank.

  The next couple to go were the gardeners: Barb and Mark sold their now-too-big house with the ornamental crabapple trees on either side of the driveway to two lawyers, a professional couple who promptly cut down one of the trees so that they could widen the driveway and park side by side and never have to move each other’s car. Helen thought the missing crabapple tree made the house look strangely unbalanced: she also thought the garden under the front window, especially the irises, could use a weeding, at least until the lawyers hired a company to come in and pull everything out and replace it with no-fuss creeping ground cover.

  At first, they tried: the new families and the older couples had a few parties where everybody was invited, but it was like a junior high dance where the boys lined up along one side of the gym and the girls on the other, no one willing to be the first to cross the wide-open space between.

  The new people seemed to have much more in common with each other: the older residents stayed in a knot at one end of the living room while at the other, the couples all talked too loudly about how smart their children were.

  Then overbearing Alan Weeks died and Ellen came out of her shell all at once. She’d had too much to drink and then lost it altogether over a quinoa Greek salad at the last all-street party they were all invited to: “For Christ’s sake, what’s next? If the Peruvians ate bird shit, would we have to spend months eating that, too?” Then she tried to come on to both the lawyers — male and female, and twenty years younger than her —and threw up spectacularly on the hood of someone’s car, and, after the vodka ran out, teetered sideways, crying, down the driveway toward number 6.

  After that, David and Helen heard parties on the street from the couch in their living room, watching out the big 1970s picture window as the tide of new neighbours, more and more it seemed every time, washed home like sea wrack heading for the tide line. Even at that point, David could still handle the short walk up and down the street, the wheeled tank behind him like his own small dog, but he knew people found it unsettling, the occasional hiss, the rough hospital-like join of nose to plastic tubing. The in-your-face mortality of it all.

  “We didn’t insult anyone’s salad,” Helen complained one evening, looking through the gap in the curtains at the newest couple walking by with a saran-covered glass salad bowl. “No,” David said, the air hissing softly in the silent room. “We insulted them by association.”

  Still, Helen had laughed a couple of weeks later when they were sitting on the back deck in the sun and David deadpanned, “Look — a robin’s gone and done his quinoa on the railing.”

  Doing anything away from the street was even harder — wrestling the tank in and out of the car, making sure there was enough oxygen, the worry about whether there would be parking within David’s limited walking distance — so they hardly went anywhere at all. Helen handled the shopping and got the car serviced. David paid the bills and circled the house at the end of his plastic tether. Helen was almost sure she could see the line at the very edge of the hose’s reach, like grass pounded down by a chained dog.

  The sicker David got, the less she saw people on the street. They would wave, but it was almost as if they would speed up if they saw her coming around the corner with Roxy, hurrying indoors to avoid contagion. And then number 1 went up for sale, the Brysons’, and even though Art and Eve Bryson had always been on the edge of the neighbourhood social circle, it seemed like the end of an entire era to Helen. At that point, David wasn’t going anywhere anyway, but the sale of number 1 still seemed as final as a slammed door.

  David’s death, as it turned out, just felt like a piece of the changing neighbourhood; Helen hadn’t been waiting for it, but she had been expecting it, in the same way that when a clock keeps losing more and more time, you’re not surprised to wake up one morning and find that it has completely stopped.

  She woke up and found David, but Helen kept that to herself: she didn’t think there was another person in the world who could share the complete horror of it.

  Juliet came by afterwards with a lasagna and a very short black
skirt. Barb and Mark sent a condolence card from rural Nova Scotia, where they had bought a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse that seemed to specialize in falling down around their ears.

  The new people on the street stopped and offered their condolences when Helen and Roxy ran into them while walking.

  Anne watched Helen coming back down the street and turned toward the kitchen again, to where Mike was back fussing with the coffee maker.

  “Next time I bake, I should take her some fresh cookies,” she said. “I can’t imagine she’s doing any baking for herself these days.”

  Roxy ambled into the end of the Warners’ driveway and disappeared behind the parked SUV. Anne could only see the leash pulled tight, like a long, low clothesline extended from Helen’s hand.

  “I feel bad that we don’t ask her over with the other neighbours now, but it’s awkward now that she’s alone. She’s the only one of the old group left here.”

  “We tried, remember?” Mike said. “She sat there like she was made of stone, and the only thing she said was that when the Weekses owned our house, they had more art on the walls. Then she just stared like she could still see it all hanging there, like she was still looking at it.” He was holding the coffee pot as if it were the answer to what should be a particularly obvious riddle. “How many stories about the good old days are you willing to listen to, anyway?”

  “Maybe if we invited her another time she could bring Miss Roxy as her date,” Anne said. “There’s a dog that would look great sitting at the table with a napkin tucked under her collar.”

  Mike laughed — Anne smiled, too.

  “I just think we could be making a bigger effort,” she said. “I mean, put yourself in her shoes. What if we were the last ones? What if it was just me or you?”