Stones

by William Bell

  chapter

  By failing to come home the night of the blizzard I had thrown a scare into my parents, and, as usual, they eased their nerves by ranting — after hugging and fussing over me when I walked into the house that morning. Then they ganged up on me as I was sipping a welcome cup of hot tea at the kitchen table.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Mom demanded.

  “That’s what the phone is for,” Dad put in.

  “Yeah, but the battery was flat.”

  “So? You could have recharged it from the cigarette lighter.”

  “I forgot the adapter.”

  Mom was leaning on the counter, arms crossed. “You drove off to the city without the adapter. Into the biggest storm in ten years. With the cell phone, without the adapter.”

  “Don’t rub it in. I didn’t know it was going to snow.”

  Dad added, “I keep telling you, don’t drive any distance in the winter without checking the Weather Channel first.”

  I stood up. “I’d love to stay and let you two hammer away at me some more, but I’m going to have a long, hot shower instead.”

  “Take the phone with you,” Dad said, and all three of us burst out laughing.

  2

  Olde Gold Antiques and Collectibles was a narrow, two-storey red-brick building with The Magus, a bookstore, on one side and an espresso bar on the other. The store occupied the main floor, with a showroom at the front, a small office and a workshop out back. Overhead was a stamped-tin ceiling, thick with many coats of paint, and the floor was made of pegged oak planks. There was a cellar, dark and creepy, where the bathroom was and where we stored pieces waiting to be refinished or repaired.

  Business was transacted in a time warp: cash only, unless the customer was local; then we would take a check. Each sale was recorded on an invoice, white copy for the buyer, yellow for us, and rung up on a huge ancient cash register with heavy nickel-plated trim. When the big round keys were pressed, labels popped up into a window, showing the amount of the sale, and the contraption let out a ring! that they could probably hear across the street in the library. There was no computer, no credit cards, Air Miles, special offers, coupons or mailing lists, no money-back guarantee.

  “Buy it, give us the money, and keep it” was Dad’s retailing motto.

  I worked there on Saturdays, opening up at ten and closing at five. I usually had the place to myself. When she wasn’t off chasing a story, Mom would be at home and Dad was usually on the road hunting up treasures at auctions and garage sales. There was a brass bell hanging over the front door that summoned me from the workshop when somebody came in.

  I liked the job. There had been a time when I’d had a burst of independence, insisting on a “real job” somewhere outside the family business. I found one, at a department store in the mall. After I’d been there a couple of months the manager told me to follow an old woman around the store and keep an eye on her. She was wearing a ratty old cloth raincoat with a scarf on her head. A toddler, wearing clothes that were too small for him, stood in the shopping cart, pretending to pilot it through the store as his grandmother pushed. I watched the woman pocket a kid-size toothbrush, a comb with a cartoon character head on it, a packet of gum. She got on the elevator and I slipped in just as the door was closing.

  “They’re watching you,” I said to the doors. “They know what you’re doing.”

  She rode the elevator back down, got off and put all the stuff back. It touched me when she did that. She could have dumped the items on the elevator floor or laid them on a shelf somewhere and walked away. They caught her putting the comb back in the display case. Security had called the cops.

  When the manager ordered me to tell Security what I had seen I said, “Nothing.” Red-faced and cursing, he fired me on the spot. When I left the store, the old lady and her grandson were sitting in the back of a police car. I guessed I wasn’t hard-hearted enough for the commercial world.

  Anyway, on a sunny Saturday a week or so after the blizzard, I opened the store as usual. Cars hissed past, throwing dirty slush to the edge of the sidewalk, and shoppers walked briskly in the chilly air. Across the street the giant icicles hanging from the eaves of the opera house were turned to crystal by the morning sun.

  I put a Mozart CD on the stereo and switched on the electric heater in the shop. Then I ducked into the espresso bar for a double-shot latte, took it back to the shop and put on my apron.

  I was working on a replacement slat for a crib bed — an easy job, just a matter of cutting it to length and planing it smooth. It was a slow morning, normal for that time of year. I sold a few pieces of the pottery we take on consignment from a local artisan, and a couple of old medicine bottles. Just before lunch the bell tinkled again.

  I brushed the wood shavings from my apron, drained the last of the latte and went into the showroom. Standing in the doorway, wiping her boots on the mat, was Raphaella.

  3

  She was wearing a red woolen Hudson’s Bay coat and a floppy white tam. The cold air had raised a bit of color in her pale skin, seeming to darken the birthmark. She caught sight of me.

  “Oh” was all she said.

  I couldn’t find my voice. I felt my neck and face flush hot, and something leapt in my stomach.

  “I didn’t know you worked here,” she said, pulling off thick knitted mittens.

  “Er, we own the place.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s great.”

  Her eyes roamed the room. Mine stayed locked on her. How many love songs had I heard that said, “She takes my breath away”? Now I knew what that line meant. My legs were numb. My vocal cords didn’t seem to work properly any more. I was painfully conscious of my stained apron and the block plane in my hand.

  “You have some nice pieces here,” she commented, running her hand along a maple sideboard.

  “Thanks. Dad finds them.”

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for the antique type,” she said. “No offence.”

  “I refinished almost everything here,” I blurted. “The furniture, I mean.” I shut up before I made another stupid remark.

  One corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile. She touched a water jug and porcelain basin sitting on a pine dry sink, then traced the grain in the wood with her finger. “Nice work.”

  “Thanks. Um, can I help you with anything?”

  “I hope so. You know, the OTG is putting on a musical at the beginning of the summer.”

  “Yeah, I heard something about it.”

  The Orillia Theatre Group put on plays and musicals regularly. Mostly musicals. I hate musicals, but I tried to look interested.

  “We’re doing The Sound of Music.”

  Great, I thought. The musical I hated most. A cute governess who knows everything, nauseatingly cute kids, cute songs, a few Nazis who were so stupid you’d wonder why anybody was afraid of them. And nuns.

  “I’ll have to try and take it in,” I said. If she was in it, I’d see it.

  “Good. Well, the reason I’m here, I’m the stage manager, and the official props-gofer. I was hoping your store — you — might lend us a few pieces of furniture for the set.”

  If she’d asked for the deed to the store and everything in it I’d have handed them over, no questions asked. Briefly, I wondered if Dad would mind if I agreed to lend the OTG what they wanted. Freddy Graham at the bookstore occasionally borrowed stuff from us for his window displays. Then I had a thought.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll lend you anything you want.”

  “Thank you. You’re very —”

  “On two conditions,” I cut in, bolder now. What do I have to lose? I thought.

  Raphaella smirked. “And they are?”

  “One, you’ll give us credit in the program. ‘Antiques courtesy of,’ something like that.”

  “Sure. We would have done that anyway.” She waited. “And the second?”

  “You’ll have that cup of coffee with me.”

  That
brought a deep laugh. She put a hand on her hip, arched her eyebrows. “I told you. I don’t drink coffee.”

  Her words lacked the dismissive tone I had heard in my one disastrous phone call to her.

  “Whatever you want, then. Herbal tea, hot chocolate, juice, milk, mineral water, ice cream, root beer, melted snow or —”

  She laughed again. “Okay. Juice. Apple, if you have it.”

  “And,” I said, “you have to promise not to call me Gannet any more.”

  “That’s three conditions.”

  “I drive a hard bargain.”

  “Agreed. Garnet.”

  “Good. Wait here. Take off your coat and relax. I’ll be right back.”

  A few minutes later I returned with two bottles of apple juice.

  “Let’s drink them back in the workshop,” I suggested.

  When she turned to walk where I pointed, I flipped the sign in the window around to read “Closed.”

  4

  Raphaella took off her coat and draped it over the back of a rock maple dining-room chair. On her black T-shirt was printed “I Hate Banks.”

  “Who’s Banks?” I asked.

  “Not Banks, banks.”

  “Oh, I see, banks.”

  “Right, banks.”

  I took up my work again, just to keep my hands busy and give me something to do. I knew I’d fidget if I didn’t.

  “That’s a beautiful crib,” she said. “It’s a cliché, I know, but they don’t make them like that anymore.”

  “They can’t. They’re illegal, considered an unsafe design. But I know what you mean.”

  I removed the slat from the vise and ran a bit of sandpaper over it. I had already drilled and countersunk two holes in each end, so I fitted it into place and screwed it down tight. Raphaella watched every move, making me slightly self-conscious, as if she was memorizing each step.

  When I put down the screwdriver and took a mouthful of juice, she said, “Are you sure you’re the same guy who was praising logic and reason in the debate?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You love wood.”

  She was inviting me to share something I seldom talked about, except to my parents. Before I knew it, I was babbling away as if I’d known her for years. I told her about the pleasure and sense of achievement it gave me to fashion something from a piece of walnut or oak, how I sometimes felt a sort of communion with the wood, how, when I worked, I entered a state of concentration that dissolved my sense of time.

  “That’s why, when I’m here alone on Saturdays, I only do simple jobs like this one,” I said. “If I get into a really complicated or delicate project, I lose track of everything else and forget to mind the store.”

  She laughed. “I’ll bet you’ve lost a few sales that way.”

  “Dad got some complaints there for a while.”

  “Have you ever made a piece of furniture from scratch?”

  “You mean copies?”

  “I was thinking about originals.”

  How had she known that was exactly what I wanted to do? When I had time on my hands, mostly at school when the teacher droned on about land formations or family planning, I doodled and sketched cabinets, chests, tables — whatever came to mind, then balled up the paper and threw it away.

  “I’m afraid to try, if you want to know the truth.”

  Raphaella made no reply.

  “I’m scared that if I try I’ll mess up and ruin everything. I sound like a coward, I know.”

  She shook her head, but still said nothing.

  “My dream is to find someone to teach me to design furniture, then open my own shop one day. I don’t care if I make a lot of money, just enough to get by and live the way I want.”

  “Then do it,” she said simply, as if she was commenting on the weather.

  I laughed self-consciously. “Yeah, all I have to do is convince my mother. She wants me to Be Somebody.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said.

  A little later, Raphaella looked at her watch and told me she had to go.

  “I enjoyed our talk,” she said at the door.

  It was only after she had left that I realized she hadn’t said a word about herself.

  5

  Normally when I talked with girls, I couldn’t relax. I believed that I had to say something clever or witty, or their attention would slip away. I’d make stupid jokes or end up saying something I didn’t mean. And I often had the impression girls felt the same way, so there was a constant tension that ruined everything. I couldn’t be who I was. I was always being judged, as if I had a meter attached to me that gave a reading somewhere between “cool” and “loser.”

  That afternoon, with Raphaella, it was completely different. Once I got over being rattled by her unexpected visit to the store, I talked like a normal human being. I wasn’t constantly monitoring my words or mentally checking the loser meter.

  What was it about her that had that effect on me? I didn’t know, but I liked it.

  chapter

  That same spring my family had been thrown into turmoil by what Mom and I had taken to calling the house thing. It was a typical Gareth Havelock scenario. The Bertram House, a Victorian monstrosity on the corner of Brant and Matchedash Streets with a mansard roof, a wrought-iron fence enclosing the yard, old hardwood trees shading the property, had come up for sale. Dad had had his eye on it for years, dying to buy it, renovate it and fill it with antiques. Mom was almost as keen as he was. I wanted to stay where we were, the house I had grown up in, but nobody asked.

  What should have been a simple real-estate deal — buy a house, sell the one you’re in, arrange a moving day — fell apart. We sold our modern bungalow on Peter Street across from the golf links — Orillia had a small course right in town — but the buyers wanted to move in before we got legal possession of Bertram. There would be a “little gap,” Dad told Mom and me. A gap of a couple of months. Probably. Unless the three parties could come to an arrangement.

  We couldn’t move into the apartment above the antique shop because the tenant had a lease. Besides, he was a family friend, a truck-parts salesman who was on the road a lot. Enter another family friend who owned and operated a mobile home park, Silverwood Estates, west of town. We would store our furniture and live in a trailer. Great. A trailer. Three of us. Way to go, Dad.

  As if things weren’t crazy enough, Mom got a call from National Scene newsmagazine and, as she put it breathlessly when we were on the patio finishing a course of semi-burnt Dad-style hamburgers, the magazine made her an offer “I can’t possibly turn down.”

  “Now, Annie?” Dad complained. “You want to go now, in the middle of things?”

  Mom looked at me, to share her excitement, I guessed. She didn’t see what she wanted.

  “Now just a second, you two,” she said. “Gareth, the things we’re in the middle of are all your doing, so don’t start playing that tune. Besides,” she added weakly, “there’ll be more room in the trailer —”

  “It’s a mobile home.”

  “— with me gone.”

  “I think the hedge needs trimming,” Dad said, getting up and heading for the shed at the foot of the yard.

  Mom blew out a puff of air in exasperation. “You just trimmed it yesterday.”

  “Well, I missed a few spots,” Dad mumbled.

  “Where this time?” I asked Mom after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence.

  The snip, snip of Dad’s shears seemed louder than necessary.

  Mom’s eyes took on the excited twinkle she got when a trip was coming up. “East Timor,” she said.

  “East where?”

  “Timor. East Timor. It’s part — or was, until it voted for independence — of Indonesia, which wasn’t happy about the vote and has been trying ever since to quash it with an underground campaign.”

  “And the magazine wants you to tramp right into the whole mess?”

  Mom went on to explain that there was trouble in Eas
t Timor — again — and the U.N. was planning to send in a peacekeeping force — again. The magazine wanted her in place when the U.N. came in, to cover their arrival and the reaction of hostile, out-of-control militia groups, which were apparently sponsored by the Indonesian army.

  “Sounds dangerous, Mom. Maybe you should reconsider.”

  “Oh, I’ll be all right,” Mom assured me. “I’m a tough old bird.”

  “It doesn’t matter how tough you are and you know it,” I said, my eyes on Dad’s back as he attacked the hedge. “If it was safe there, there’d be no story and you wouldn’t be going.”

  “I need to go,” Mom said. “In this business you have to keep up your momentum. If you’re off the pages for long, people forget about you.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “In a couple of weeks.”

  “I hope you get back while we still have a hedge left,” I said.

  2

  The day Raphaella had come to see me in the shop, I was, for once, in a pretty good mood when I came home after closing the store. Dad was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes.

  “Hey, Dad,” I greeted him, opening the fridge and taking out a can of pop.

  “Hi, Garnet. Good day?”

  “Not bad. Sold a few small things. Finished the crib.” I didn’t tell him the shop had been closed for a couple of hours.

  “Fine,” he said distractedly.

  “Um, Dad,” I began, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Would this be a good time to bring up my latest idea about school?”

  He groaned, almost, not quite, silently. “I guess you told your mother about not going on past high school.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “About what you’d expect.”

  He washed the potatoes and cut them into chunks, put them in a pot of water and turned on the stove.