by Lisa Moore
The day before, I’d let myself in the front door of our downtown house after one last, confirming visit to the condo with Marion Sullivan and I’d looked down the long hall to the kitchen where Kevin had been standing at the counter making a sandwich. He was lit up by the setting sun from the patio doors at the back of the kitchen. He winked out of view; I heard the kiss of the rubber seal on the fridge door as he pulled it open, tinkling the jars and bottles, and he winked back into view.
Kevin had sprouted during the divorce. He’d shed a stunting dormancy, arms and legs telescoping out, shoulders broad and muscled. The growth was accompanied with unexpected elegance, loping grace.
In that instant, while he was backlit with blinding sunlight, I thought Kevin was his father. I thought my husband had come back, or more accurately, had never left.
* * *
What’s happening out there, I asked the man at the Low Point beach. A lockjaw wince stole over his face before he spoke.
Fish, thousands of fish, he said. He was one of those men who deliberately pause too long before answering. That kind of subtly coercive silence that counts on you to be polite and wait it out.
I saw that there were lots of people around. It looked like the whole town had stopped to take in the leaping bodies of the fish. Cautious stories on the news, lately, of a return in the cod stocks. But cod don’t usually do what I was seeing. They don’t behave that way under normal circumstances.
Percy Strong picked me up from the beach that night and drove me up the hill to the store. Percy owns the only other house on my lane, his lights visible through a stand of whispering aspen and a few birch. Percy’s daughter, Jocelyn, lives behind my cabin, an acre of hay between us, and a row of high white rose bushes. Jocelyn has put in one of those motion-sensitive halogen lights and it pierces the cabin’s kitchen in the middle of the night. A car or a coyote will set it off. The bright things in the kitchen flash, the chrome kettle, the stainless-steel fridge. When I flick on the light to get a glass of water, after a bad dream, the picture window in the kitchen goes black and reflects everything in the room. Even the panda bears on my flannel pyjamas are visible. Perfectly delineated bears, little white chests, each chomping on a branch of leaves. Sometimes, I’ve wandered out to the kitchen for water just in my T-shirt and underwear, and there I am, lit up, but pale.
* * *
On the day I thought Kevin was my husband: we had a stained-glass fish, a sculpin (mouth hanging open, protuberant saucer eyes) made by a local craftsperson, suspended in the window transom above the front door. The reflection of the fish was visible on the wall, red and amber, floating without moving, as though the fish were working against a current too strong for it. Kevin has his father’s posture, his voice.
The illusion afforded a reprieve so tender and dreamlike it weakened my knees. I stumbled over the boots in the front hall and had to hold the bannister.
Part of the reason I was buying the condo was that Kevin had decided to live with his father and his father’s girlfriend; they were renting an apartment on Waterford Bridge Road. Kevin was moving out of his bedroom on the second floor, full of dirty dishes smeared with hardened ketchup, the wall-sized flat screen for video games, the blasts of pseudo-automatic rifles, the way he talked (too loud because he couldn’t hear himself with the headset) to people all over the world, somehow sounding in command, offering strategy, logistics, in a voice both calm and full of intelligence, cajoling, instructive, often playing through the night; the hole in the wall where he had smacked a basketball hard against the Gyproc, the posters of rap artists smoking joints, the electric guitar and amp, the pile of laundry.
The house was too big for me if I was going to be living alone. Selling it for a condo was also a fuck-you to my husband. I expected him to intervene. I expected him to decide to come home once there was no home to which he could return. I wanted him to think I’d moved on.
At the bank, Kevin had sprawled in the chair beside mine, his legs flung wide. He shot questions at the manager. He finagled me a lower interest rate by threatening to go to another bank. But the threat was so pleasingly articulated, amid banter about the relative advantages of investing in lithium or cannabis, the young manager complied without argument.
Once we were back outside, Kevin dropped the skateboard and put one foot on it to keep it from rolling away.
What will you do with your life? I said. He told me that a friend’s dad, driving them from a field party at four in the morning, kept saying that Kevin should do communications.
I want a job where I convince people to buy things, he said.
What sort of things? I said.
You gave up too easily, he said. Then he blushed, but his eyes met mine. A floater, opalescent and the size of a loonie, dropped onto his mouth. When I looked away it hung on the brick pillar of the bank. Kevin asked what was wrong and I said I had something funny going on with my eyes. He said I should get it checked out, that I was probably dehydrated.
He said, You look pale.
Your father did this, I said. I flung my arm out at the bank as if everything we had just experienced in there proved I was the injured party.
Please, he said. Really?
What should I do? I said. You tell me.
It’s so easy, he said. He was rolling the skateboard back and forth under his green and blue suede sneaker.
* * *
My husband had given me the funds to refinance the convenience store and I celebrated by taking Kevin out for dinner at the Keg. Kevin said there had been a fight between my husband — my ex-husband — and his new girlfriend. She didn’t think he should bail me out; hadn’t things been squared up in the divorce? She said it wasn’t his fault if I wanted to throw all that money away. They had both raised their voices. She’d started to cry, according to Kevin, and she’d asked if my husband really loved her.
What did he say? I asked. But Kevin, who was eating a steak, just looked at me with surprise and pity. He put down his fork and knife and with his elbows on the table, held his face in his hands. He stayed like that as he drew in two long, deep breaths and sighed. Then he picked up the knife and fork again and devoured the food on his plate and took the napkin off his lap and tossed it on the plate and said, I’ve had enough.
It had begun to rain that night, on the drive back to the cabin; the wind was so high I had to grip the steering wheel tight to keep the car from swerving across the line. Water shivered down the glass. A transport truck passed, covering my car in a hard wave of slush, and I could see absolutely nothing except the writhing tail of black rubber, still detached from the passenger wiper, squiggling so hard it looked as though it was trying to bore its way through the window to suction itself to my face.
* * *
Marion Sullivan wore linen in earth tones, drapey things. Not the gabardine navy suit jackets with brass buttons, the tight all-weather Reitmans skirts stretched across thighs gone to fat, worn by most of the real estate agents I’d encountered.
Marion didn’t say anything about my husband’s betrayal; there was nothing cloying in her approach to selling real estate.
She was offering a deal. Not a great deal, but a credible deal.
When I said that my husband was seeing someone else she touched my hand with her fingertips. My hand on the table and she’d stroked it; I felt her long false nails graze the skin on the back of my hand. An erotic charge that radiated from between my legs all through me.
She leaned in over the table, her high cheekbone resting on the heel of her other hand, and talked without drawing breath about the man she was seeing.
He’s not much to look at but I’m telling you, the arms on him, the muscles he got, she said. Works in a camp outside Fort Mac, up on that scaffold, and you have to haul things up with rope, a hundred feet sometimes. There’s some that complain about the food, but you don’t hear him complain, she told me. They has steak once
a week, they has chicken. Six weeks on and two home, and I give it to him. I make it worth his while. What he lavishes me with. You see this pin. That’s a diamond chip.
But you can’t go walking in the woods up there, the wolves will get you. They can be aggressive. And the bears. Coyotes are shy, but they get together in packs on the periphery of what do you call society, they attack. The money is good but you’re a hundred feet up and dangerous? If somebody up there gets word, or say somebody passes it around, that you used to have trouble with your back, that’s it, you’re gone. You’re done. They don’t invite you back. There was them that had to go further north and by the time they drove back they were two hours in the bus and starved then and missed supper. And some of them complained and they were let go, complaining does not go over.
Marion Sullivan touched me for the second time then. This time pressing one knee between mine under the table.
Do you hear me, she asked. I said I had heard her.
Complaining gets you nowhere, she said. This is a man, we sleep together when he’s in town. Not a looker, but the arms on him. She was gathering our napkins and the empty Styrofoam soup bowls, the plastic spoons. Squishing it all together.
You have to make people do what you want, Marion Sullivan said. People love to be guided. You’re doing them a favour. The hardest thing is deciding. Decisions are exhausting. You ease them toward what you want. Jimmy, that’s his name, he does what I want. She was standing up and she blew a breath up over her top lip to get a wisp of hair off her forehead. You decide for people they will follow you. Doesn’t matter what you decide, they follow.
Let’s go see this condo, she said. Two walls of glass. View of the harbour. I think you’ll be excited.
* * *
You would not believe the money I make on a bucket of salt beef. They buy it by the piece. The stuff turns me; the brine watery, a dark-wine colour, smelling mineral. Thick clots of fat floating on the top, thick as candle wax, and the way the chunks of meat roil up from the bottom when people dig around with the ladle for a choice piece — so I make them do it themselves. There’s a box of surgical gloves next to the tub. They are powdery inside, an invisible talc, and the tongs are attached by a string to the bucket.
Everybody coming into the store in August was talking about the fire in Bay de Verde. The fire meant the plant had shut down before everyone had earned enough stamps to get them through the year. They wouldn’t be eligible for EI. There had been a promise; the plant owners were committed to providing work. But there was the question of how many hours. Everybody needed hours. They needed the overtime for their stamps if they wanted to get through the winter.
* * *
I went with her to view the condo. The two walls of glass were covered in plaster dust. The milky light. High ceilings, and noises reverberated without the furniture to absorb sounds. Plaster dust on the hardwood, floating in the air like smoke. A man on a ladder with a mask and goggles turned off the sander and twisted to look at us.
In the sudden quiet, without the sound of the sander, his breathing in the mask was loud, like a death rattle — a sound I knew because my mother had died earlier that summer and I had been present when it happened, a rasping, ragged breath, strangled and wilful. Even Marion Sullivan shut up for a minute or two as the dust whorled; cloudbursts of silt, billowing in the draft that had come in with us. The dust looked like two figures waltzing, twisting around each other. There was a white film on my jacket when I stepped outside again.
It turned out that Marion Sullivan — a lively, but not manic, former social worker — was borrowing from investors at eighty percent interest. She had borrowed from a city councillor. She had borrowed large sums from all the real estate agents in her office, who were devoted to her. She had not paid them anything in months.
Soon there were delays with the renovations. That happens. With renos there are always delays. Then one of the condo buyers wanted his down payment back. Next people were phoning the radio call-in shows. They were reporting that Ms. Sullivan was not returning their calls. I left a message on her cell. Then several messages.
At first, I will admit, I could not accept she had lied to anyone. I felt indignation on her behalf, a fierce but ultimately shallow loyalty. Then, though I understood she had lied to most of her customers, I could not believe she lied to me.
Finally I understood. Everything I had taken from the divorce was lost.
* * *
Jocelyn Strong, my neighbour in the back, Percy’s daughter, has five children: the eldest, Libby, is seventeen, the first to move out, gone to live in St. John’s. I’d heard, while I was working behind the counter at the store, that she had shacked up with an abusive boyfriend and I’d heard drugs and maybe sex work.
People will say anything. Then I saw her in town, while I was shopping at the Dollarama. I needed plastic platters to put out baked goods at a fundraiser we were having for the people who lost their homes in Bay de Verde. I knew they had silver-looking platters that weren’t bad for what I needed. There was a woman in the line-up ahead of me with a dozen coffee mugs. Libby Strong was serving behind the counter, wrapping the mugs in individual sheets of paper. My sister, who was with me, had struck up a conversation with the woman about Lysol wipes.
You just keep them under the bathroom sink, my sister said. Toothpaste or whatever, you can just pull one out and wipe things down. It’s very convenient. Everything is sterilized.
The woman stepped out of the line to pick up the Lysol wipes, and she was standing there, reading the instructions. My sister said she didn’t know how she had got on without them.
You have three sons, you want something you can clean up after them with, she said.
When I got to the counter I said hello to Libby. She had the white, white skin of her mother, of all the Strongs along the shore, with the same freckles, the orange-blonde hair, pale eyebrows, blonde eyelashes. Three studs in her plump lower lip, a lot of concealer around her left eye.
Libby Strong’s eyes like her grandfather’s, pale blue with a black rim around the iris. The girl spent a long time with Percy when she was little. She has his composure. Wiry like him, stalky. Comfortable with prolonged silences in conversation. The kind of quiet talk that occurs in people who live in rural areas. The sense that insight forms long before the utterance. Not a need to drag things out, but no impatience. As if speaking were a minor sacrament or a cost.
Libby, I said. Look at you.
I like town, she said with instant defiance.
I suppose you got your high school?
I got all As, she said. She was checking in the woman’s Lysol wipes, but the scan wouldn’t read the bar code so she was passing it vigorously in front of the scanner, over and over, and each time it dinged to let her know it hadn’t registered. Finally it went through.
All A-pluses, actually, she said. They told me I was going to win two prizes, and one of them was for perfect attendance, and the next day I told Mom, I’m staying home. I wasn’t walking across no stage for perfect attendance. But the scholarship I got, that’s what let me move to town.
Your mother was in, showing me the pictures from the prom, I said. I don’t know where you got that dress. I know it wasn’t from around here.
Online, and I’m after selling it on Kijiji and making fifty bucks off it.
I hope you never had a stranger come to your home, I said.
We met at a Tim Hortons downtown, she never had a car, Libby said.
Your mother mustn’t be very happy with you gone.
Even up in Cowan Heights I can see Cabot Tower, she said. I can see all the way downtown because in Cowan Heights, you can see. You can see everything up there.
Are you going to university? I asked. All you Strongs are so smart. You could do anything you want.
No, I got this job, she said.
Your mother must miss you, I said. She w
as counting my plastic platters. I knew there was a rift between Libby and her mother. They weren’t talking.
You got six here, she said.
Six, is it?
She held up a single platter to the pricing gun and the red laser flickered and the tone rang six times.
Mom is too controlling, Libby said.
My sister put the Lysol wipes on the counter. Ring them in, she said.
I’ll pay for them, I said.
She’ll pay for them, my sister said. I’m going to give them to her. Make a convert. She’s a skeptical one, but I can break her spirit. I mean if you have them in easy reach. The toilet bowl. You live with men you have to be wiping the toilet all the time, they don’t do it.
Libby Strong met my eyes when my sister said about living with men. So Libby knew that my husband and I had separated. Maybe she even knew the divorce had gone through. That meant the whole shore knew. Of course she did. Even out here in Cowan Heights, with a new life ahead of her. Even at the age of seventeen she would know everything. She had also figured out that my sister didn’t know most of it. She had weighed my failure to communicate this against her leaving her mother’s house. She had weighed my humiliation against what she was doing to her mother. She saw she had the upper hand. She wouldn’t give me away, but I’d have to stop trying to make her feel guilty. I glanced at my sister and felt a shooting pain, brief, near my temple, and I could see the floaters again. I tried to determine if I felt weak, or if my heart was beating faster, or slower. If there were any accompanying symptoms. A splotch in my vision obliterated a row of BIC lighters in a cardboard display box near the cash. When I looked up at Libby one of the floaters trailed down her cheek and onto the nametag pinned over her chest.
