Matthew’s ear, Meghan’s right to girlhood innocence, Tammy’s own neck.
Poor Tammy. She needed it said over to her. Over and over. And Meredith, she said it over, patient, every Tuesday.
Sally would fuss around her in the hall. “Oh, Tammy, you wouldn’t, would you?”
“You’d have to be nuts.” That was me put that in.
Marg, she said she wasn’t up for no more race car driving.
So far, Tammy hadn’t caved. She was in her apartment, keeping her kids safe, clean, and fed. Every day they all went for a walk with Marg.
Darlene and the dog sometimes went with them. Tammy’s kids took turns holding his leash.
I kept on working at McIlveen’s, talking calmer than ever to people whose biggest trouble in the world was their backed-up drain.
Meredith worked us over with her questions every week.
She drags it out of Marg that Marg is terrified of going to court again. We all have to go to Brent’s hearing. For Marg, the idea of doing that is bringing up everything from her father and the court case with him. Marg sits there, solid, though. She’s going to court for Josie. But it’s not good for Marg to be anxious like this. She’s taken to sleeping on the couch. Bed makes her too nervous. With Marg, you can pretty well tell how things are by whether she’s sleeping in her own bed. When she’s doing good, she can. When she’s upset, all the old stuff about bed comes back to haunt her.
Tammy is managing to feel guilty about Josie’s trouble. Tammy hasn’t got past that step where you figure everything’s your own fault.
Like me and the frigging bump in the sidewalk that Dave won’t let me apologize for no more. (“What are you, in the public works department? Did they send you to fix this sidewalk and you never done it?” He’ll say that now about anything that I’m trying to apologize for, that is not my fault—“You in the public works department?”)
Meredith drills away on us like a dentist.
And the worst of it is the breaks. We sit there on rainy nights. That stupid hotel of Josie’s is like it’s right in the room with us. You pretty near have to put your feet under the chair not to stub your toe against the concrete foundation. But now nobody says a word about it. What’s the use of talking about something that dumb now? It’s high time we got over that and grew up. That’s fantasy, not reality.
Who believes a bunch of broke losers like us are going to run their own hotel? How foolish is that? A room in the back for people like us! What would we do with a bunch more screwed up people?
We were mad at Josie. Nobody said it. But Josie’d got us worked up over nothing, took us in. And then she’d stranded us there with air. Nothing. Josie’s dumb daydream. Too stupid to mention. Right there in that plain waiting room, glowing like a rainbow so that alls we could do was stare into space and see it. God, could I see it! Stone on stone. Pine trees waving beside it. Bright lake dancing in front. We didn’t know enough at that time to tell each other. Sat quiet, like we were alone.
Josie laying there week after week. Doctor couldn’t seem to tell us much. You had to wonder what she’d be like when and if she ever come out.
The first good thing that happened in three months was Darlene broke up with the internet overseas guy. Said she didn’t need him now she had Josie’s dog.
Meredith’s trying to keep a sober face to respect Darlene’s feelings about breaking up. “Well, Darlene,” Meredith says. But it’s past what a human can do, eh, not to be smiling at this piece of news.
None of the rest of us are bothering to look polite. We’re all sitting there with our teeth hanging out, grinning.
Tammy says, “When I moved out, I should’ve took our dog.”
Darlene trading up from this guy she’s never seen to Josie’s dog. Meredith trying to figure out what to say about it other than hooray. Tammy wondering if we’d all have been better off with dogs instead of men. Me and Marg had to laugh at the bunch of them. Felt good to have a belly laugh. It had sure been a while.
Dave was doing great. Took his losses and got himself clear of them drug dealers, finally. Told them they could have the whole works. Said he didn’t want no more to do with it.
He was doing good at work. He was talking about going for this training course he heard about, to get some skills with metal construction the builder was into. Wood was old fashioned he said. Wood wouldn’t even be allowed for a building material if it wasn’t tradition. That’s what he said. Wood warps. It rots. It burns. There’s serious problems with supply. Takes fifty years to get a new stick of it. You invent a building material like that and you wouldn’t be allowed to sell it. No, this metal was the thing. I never seen Dave so keen. Done my heart good, sore as it was, to listen to him.
“And,” he said, “you know I’ve always had that idea I’d like to get into heavier construction some time.”
McIlveen’s give me a week off in August, and I took Jenny out every day for the whole week. We went bike riding. I had my old coaster there I had since I was fourteen. Bought her a little bike that fit her. Dave put training wheels on it for her. We pedalled, not too fast, but we done it, out into the country, exploring. Jenny said that we were looking for the doors that go into the hills, where the elf people have their homes. She loves being read to, eh. They were reading her fairy stories at the foster home.
Sally come with us one time. We rode all along by the water and found a nice spot to eat our picnic. Me and Sally sat on the sand, and Jenny, in her little red bathing suit, ran in and out of the turquoise waves, scooping with her yellow pail.
It’s funny how something can happen that’s so bad and you think the colour’s gone out of everything and it’ll never come back. But it does. It creeps up on you. I’m sitting there with Sally and Jenny and all of a sudden I notice the red and green and yellow. I look up and the sky is blue.
I turn to Sally. I says, “Hey!” I says, “I found the town!”
Well, Sally’s face!
She turns towards me, slow. Little bits of light are coming through her straw sunhat. She is working on taking in what I just said.
Pretty soon there’s more light under that hat than what there is shining down on the top of it.
19.
THE NEXT WEEKEND, me and Sally were leaving the farm country heading north in Sally’s old T-Bird. It hit me that months ago, when Josie was laying at death’s door and I was talking away to her, talking and talking about the hotel and the town, that what always come out of my mouth was “me and Sally.” “Me and Sally are going to go up there,” I said. “Me and Sally will check it out.” How did I figure it had to be Sally first?
Well, Sally works on faith. Not like Marg who’s got more sense.
Myself, I’m somewheres in between the two of them. But I had a hunch that what we could use right then was not being careful or planning but just a crazy burst. Some kind of a forward leap that nobody’d be wide-eyed silly enough to take but Sally.
Me and Sally got to Strone at eleven o’clock in the morning. Our idea was to eat lunch at the Good Luck Restaurant there and fool around town for the afternoon. We thought we might find someplace to take a swim. We were supposed to be at Dave’s dad’s by five. He was cooking supper. We were going to stay over.
We pulled up to the restaurant and the car bottomed out on a pothole in the parking lot. “Got to fix that!” Those there were the first words that come out of Sally’s mouth in Strone. Like it was her pothole.
That’s how it happened for her. No discussion.
The young woman there, Jinping, remembered me. When she give us our coffees, she said, “You will marry with Al’s nice boy.”
“You got a good memory,” I says.
“Last time spring, you know what kind of pie.”
“Listen, that’s a long story. I’m not a fortune teller or nothing. This is my friend, Sally.”
“Hi. Good morning.”
“Hi there,” Sally says. “Yous wouldn’t be looking for an experienced waitress, would yous?”
Jinping says to me, “Your friend is also fortune teller!”
It turns out that Jinping, just this minute, walked out here from the kitchen wondering what in the world she was going to do about the weekend lunch crowd that’s right ready to stampede through that door because her girl just quit with no notice. They get tourists here in summer.
“In kitchen,” she says, “I am one arm paper hanger in high wind, and now this girl quit and it’s very suddenly, but if you want start right now, seem like it is good luck. Do you wish to do so? Maybe had other plan?”
Sally, she says this fits in with her plans amazing. She stands up. But Jinping says, “Oh finish coffee. Have lunch, no charge. You save my life!”
Me and Sally look at each other.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Sally says. “We can look around the town when I’m done my shift.”
I can’t keep up with the pace here.
I says, “Shift? What did you just go and do, take a job up here? You got nowheres to live! Are you quitting Group? Don’t you want to think this over?”
“It’s the will of God,” Sally says, smiling at me, churchy, with the steam from her soup curling past her pretty face. She eats down the soup, tells me about fishermen that left their nets laying on the sand and took off after Jesus Christ. And then she gets up and walks to the kitchen, carrying our two spoons and empty bowls. Just like that.
“Rose,” she turns and says, just before she disappears, “I have set my hand to the plough.”
Five minutes later there’s Sally in an orange apron, all that blonde hair tied up cute with an elastic band. She’s running back and forth with dishes of soup and plates of egg rolls. The old guys sitting around in there are all perked up something wonderful.
I recognize the one they call Uncle Elmer. He tells Sally he’s looking for a woman that can fix a tractor.
Sally tells him, good-natured, that she’ll fix him if he don’t watch it. She looks like she was born here.
I have to smile at the talk. From what I can make out this Frank fellow, that they all talk about in there, seems to be keeping the whole town entertained as usual. Today, he’s got a forklift stuck up on a hill. Three of them’s going over after lunch to see what they can do. He’s up here from Toronto. Has a big summer place on high ground looking over the lake. He won’t pay none of the local guys to do nothing around the place. Always figures he can do it himself. They just wait till he screws up, and then they go and repair his repairs. They were saying they make more getting him out of the holes he digs for himself than if he paid them to do a job right in the first place.
“If I had his money, I’d burn mine,” Uncle Elmer says.
Sally is really going to do this! She hands me her keys, says take her car. So I walked out, dazed, into the bright August day. I drove over and stopped in on Jan.
Little Alexander was busy learning new words a mile a minute. Jan’s interested to hear about Dave and this course he’s going to take. She tells me her Tom was reading something about that metal framing.
Alexander says, “Framing.” And we praise him for the eighth wonder of the world.
We sit in Jan’s yard with the sheer rock that’s out there casting a deep shade. There’s a cool comes off of it. Felt good that hot afternoon. Alexander, he was sitting naked in his plastic pool, in the shadow of the tall rock, scooping up water and pouring it over his little pink knees.
I tell Jan about what just happened to Sally. Jan listens careful, keeping one part of her brain on Alexander, but listening to me too, the way good mothers can do.
My sister Sandra could never do that. She wanted to think about anything? She’d yell at Jenny to sit still and shut up. She can’t seem to divide herself into two, the way Jan here’s doing.
Jan says she might know some way to work things out for my friend if she wants to live up here. “Taa-taa not in your mouth,” she says. “You know we’re worried about Dave’s dad. We don’t think he ought to be up there in the winter alone. He’s a funny old soul, but he wouldn’t hurt a flea and he’s not hard to get along with. Mind you, you’d have to work it sneaky. Let him think it was his own idea.”
I walked around town, wondering, and then it was time to go back for Sally.
“Sally,” I says, as soon as she gets in the car, “are you crazy?”
“I don’t know,” she says, happy, gunning the T-Bird, ponytail flying out the window in the breeze. She wants to see the town. “Tips weren’t bad. Jinping and Hong are great. Grandma’s a sweetheart. I’m learning Mandarin.”
Well, we parked in town and Sally run to the hardware store. Starts peeking in the glass door.
“There he is! I bet that’s him!”
She’s hurting my arm.
He ain’t even that cute, to my way of thinking. She’s blocking the door. Nobody can get in to buy their nails.
“Josie said!” is all she can get out of her mouth, so I take and sit her on a bench. If she’s going to live around here, she better watch she don’t get a reputation for a nut case.
“Shhh! Sally! Act normal!” I’m saying, looking over my shoulder to see if anybody’s staring. They already think I’m crazy.
Josie told her she seen a hardware man taking something out of a box, and she seen Sally pregnant.
That’s what Sally wants more than anything, really, eh. But she’s never been able since she lost her little daughter. The men line up, of course. Sally’s so pretty and so sweet-natured. But she runs away. Scared she’ll have a baby and it will die.
“Now look here,” I’m trying to say, but I could’ve saved my breath to cool my porridge.
Sally was up off the bench tearing all over, squealing and staring, finding her town.
Sally was not kidding. She snowed Dave’s dad without half trying, had him coming up with the offer of his whole upstairs and year-round indoor plumbing before we had our peppermint tea drunk after dinner. They shook hands on it.
So there’s Sally on Tuesday night, at Group, giving her notice. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Everybody’s struck dumb.
Meredith fools around with her charm bracelet. “Well, this is sudden, Sally! Can you tell us about what led you to make these decisions?”
You can see Meredith thinking, same as I did, what? Are you crazy? (Poor Meredith. Here’s another one getting ahead of the program. Getting ahead of Meredith herself too, I’d say, looking back.)
You just know, eh, that you can’t tell a starry-eyed notion like about Josie’s town to Meredith. So we have to let her suffer.
Out in the smoking area, we had the real meeting.
“Rose’s got something to tell yous,” Sally says, and she sits Marg, Darlene, and Tammy down on the bench there, in a row. Being Sally, she’s got to mother them. “Brace yourself. This will surprise yous. Marg? No more of them palpitations lately?”
When she’s through, I say, “Okay, my friends. The thing is, we have found the lake and the town!”
So of course the next weekend we’ve got Marg’s Chev full of Tammy and her kids and Darlene, and Josie’s dog. Me and Sally and Jenny are with Dave in the truck, and we’re all heading north.
Me and Sally are trying to explain what all this is about.
I tell Jenny it’s a place our friend Josie seen in her dreams. Sally says it’s like make-believe. It’s a play place that we’ve pretended about, to make ourself feel better when we were sad.
That makes sense to Jenny. She nods her head, looking satisfied, as if, why wouldn’t you go and play in a magic place if you know one?
But Dave, he’s still having trouble. “Did they offer you better wages?”
Sally’s beaming. She says, “Not as good.”
Dave keeps his eyes on the road.
He really had to wonder when he seen us all loose in the town. We stand there looking at a lawn swing in the furniture guy’s front yard. How often, going through the hard stuff, did I daydream about that lawn swing? I remember doodling a picture of Tammy’s kids on it, little Meghan’s hair flying out free in the breeze.
We’re holding each other by the arms, patting each other on the backs, blowing our noses. Dave and the three kids and the dog, they all snuck off and played in the park, letting on they didn’t know us.
That was a day to remember, that first summer day, us all walking on air. You couldn’t have took us to no place, not if you flew us to the most famous place, or inside a movie star’s mansion, or what’s the name of that castle they got in India a king built for his dead queen and covered it in jewels? You couldn’t have took us anywhere on the face of this earth that would’ve meant what that little washed-out town meant to us, walking through it all together like that, with the sparkles from the pink rock flashing around our sandals.
We seen a chicken running loose, and we made such a racket that we scared it under a hedge.
I showed them the pie woman’s house and the pie sign hanging on her picket fence. And they read it out to each other like a poem. “Homemade pies. Ah.”
“Fresh local blueberries.”
Marg touched it with her little pudgy pink fingertips.
We went and stood on the corner, looking at the gas station.
Tammy, she keeps saying, “It’s another world! It’s another world!”
Part of my head keeps thinking, oh bull. It’s the most regular place I was ever in. But I sure knew what she meant.
Sally just beams and says that the good Lord works in mysterious ways.
Darlene says she wishes she lived here.
Marg says, “Hard to believe it’s real.”
Tammy, she nods, looking all around. Happiest look on her.
20.
Paper Stones Page 20
