“Let’s just say there is a God. And let’s say God wants you to do this. How do you know?” he’d asked Joe. “Did you hear him say so?”
“I don’t need to hear, or see anything. I just know,” Joe replied. Then he went walking along the shore in search of flat stones that he sent skipping out across the lake, and Alfred thought his heart would stop beating.
* * *
Joe’s likely downstairs now, watching hockey, Alfred tells himself, forgetting that Joe is away and had just called. Laurie is watching one of her TV programs in the bedroom, or she’s at the dining room table with her laptop, her eyes fixed on the screen, her periodic tapping at the keyboard telling him she’s playing a game, or researching vitamins and minerals, something to put more zip in his step. Or she’s talking to people—sometimes when he goes across the room, a person will peer at him from the computer screen, looking like they’ve just seen a ghost. Laurie laughing then, saying, they can see you, Dad. She tells the startled person on the screen, “That’s just my father.”
And he’d come to think of himself as being her father, too. Although the first time he’d seen her, he’d wanted to shut the door in her face. Verna’s sisters had said they often saw the girl going about town with her grandmother. Unfortunate, they said. A bit rough around the edges. But they held no grudge against Laurie who’d been an innocent bystander. Alfred came to agree, but it was another thing to see the girl on his veranda. He’d known immediately who she was, all that reddish-blonde curly hair, like her grandmother, Ivy, and his impulse had been to slam the door.
“Mr. Beaudry?” Laurie asked as though she suspected she’d got the wrong house.
Yes, he was that. He was Mr. Beaudry. Her jade green eyelids fluttered. Where had she got her height? he wondered, her grandmother and mother were half-pints. “And you must be the Rasmussen girl.”
“I’m Laurie,” she said nodding. “I’d like to talk to you about my mother. But I’ll understand if you don’t want to.”
“There isn’t much to say,” Alfred replied, his apprehension somewhat eased by her hesitance. Your silly chit of a mother couldn’t decide what to do with you. Whether to give you away to a good home, or to keep you. And so she tried to take you with her. And Verna went after her down to the river, to the nest of trampled grass she’d come across during one of her walks. Likely she thought that’s where your mother had gone and went down there, only to see her go flying off the bridge.
“That’s okay,” Laurie said in a way that suggested she didn’t expect anything more from him.
She turned to leave, and Alfred found himself calling out. “We have a picture of her, taken on the day she died.”
But when he went inside the house and looked in all the usual places, he couldn’t find it.
“Joe should be home soon, he’ll know where it is,” he told her and invited her to wait.
Laurie perched on a veranda step and Alfred sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, listening while she talked. She was like a cecropia moth in the way she was folded up into herself, her body covered in layers of clothes the colours of rust and earth, the peasant skirt meeting the toes of her crinkled suede boots. The frayed cuffs of her brown sweater were darned with what looked like white string and the child-like mending took away his remaining antipathy toward her.
She went on to talk about how much cooler it had been earlier in the morning when she’d got on the bus for the trip to Winnipeg. She’d spent half the day registering at a college, where, in September, she would take courses and become a dental assistant. And before she caught the bus home, she had to check out several more rooms for rent, as so far, she’d had no luck. Her earlier hesitance vanished and was replaced by a look of tragedy as she described the rooms she’d seen, about the size of a closet. “I wouldn’t let my dog stay in some of them,” she said.
“You have a dog?” Alfred asked. Joe was allergic to dogs, he did not say, but studied the thought for a fleeting moment, the fact that he was considering the consequences on Joe of her having a dog.
“It’s my grandmother’s,” Laurie said. “Our house would not be a house without a dog—one time we had three. Three rooms in the house, and we’ve got three dogs, can you imagine?”
No, he couldn’t, Alfred said.
“You’d never guess how much people are asking for a room,” she went on to say, and then described at length the bathroom amenities of that place where she would not leave a dog.
“That’s Joe coming now,” Alfred said. With him was Crystal, her arm linked through his, her spring plaid coat open and flaring with her spirited walk. Since their engagement, she’d become less of a mouse in the way she took over at the supper table, rising to go to the kitchen to get something Joe had forgotten, sending him and Alfred to the living room while she cleared away dishes and washed up.
Laurie raised her head, and Alfred thought Joe must feel her wavering smile half a block away, her exuberant mouth wide and bright with orange lipstick. Joe stood still, then came toward them, leaving Crystal hurrying to catch up.
“This is Laurie Rasmussen. The daughter of Karen,” Alfred said quickly to get it over with.
“Rasmussen,” Joe repeated, recognition dawning, and yet there was nothing in his face that said he was anything but curious.
Laurie got up from the step and went down to him, and Alfred noted they were almost the same height. “And you’re Joe. My grandmother has an album full of pictures of you.”
When Joe extended his hand, she hesitated before taking it, her mouth twisting with uncertainty when she did. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Joe said, surprising Alfred.
“And I’ve always wondered about you.”
Joe almost tripped over his feet as he turned to Crystal to introduce them. “My fiancée,” he said before saying Crystal’s name, as though he needed to establish that fact right off the top.
“Gosh, you two are engaged,” Laurie said, and Alfred thought she was like a bonfire suddenly flaring up, and Crystal looked as though she wanted to put some distance between them. Laurie was rough around the edges, like she was flying apart the way her hair was a pile of kinky wool on her head, about to come tumbling down. Her sweater hung low at the back and held the shape of her behind; the hem of her peasant skirt dipped lower on one side. She had dressed for the cold morning, likely, and it would be cold again by the time she left. But it had turned out to be a warm enough day. And it was still warm, yet she kept on the heavy sweater. Perhaps she felt she needed protection.
“So when are you getting married?” Laurie asked Crystal, making what she thought was small talk, Alfred knew, but he saw the pained look Crystal gave Joe.
“We haven’t set a date yet, but we’re planning on a year from now—next spring,” Joe said, and Alfred was surprised, thinking, so they must be getting their money together. Joe worked full-time now at the small tool repair depot where he’d worked every summer for years, and Crystal at the insurance company that employed her father.
The photograph Alfred hadn’t been able to find was up in his room, Joe said and he went inside to get it.
In his absence Crystal seemed not to know where to look, taking Laurie in with quick glances, while chewing on her bottom lip. Laurie sat back down on the top veranda step and tucked her skirt in tightly around her long legs, once again the cecropia, her wings folded. Alfred invited Crystal to sit in the other veranda chair, but she chose to perch on the bottom step instead.
When Joe returned with the picture, he sat down beside Laurie, holding it between them. Alfred listened as Joe told her about the film having been in the camera almost a year before they’d thought to have it developed. He went on to tell her that in the picture her mother was sitting on these very steps.
“My grandmother has never wanted to talk about what happened,” Laurie said. “I guess that’s because she not only lost her daughter, but her best friend, too.” She turned and glanced up at Alfred, measuring how he’d received what sh
e’d just said.
“That’s true,” Alfred said.
Then Joe told her all that he knew about what had happened that day, Laurie taking it in, their faces intent on each other, while Crystal looked up at them, spots of colour rising in her cheeks.
“You keep the picture,” Joe said to Laurie when he’d finished speaking.
“Are you sure?” she asked, saying, “Gosh,” when Joe assured her that he was. Then she cupped the picture in both hands and gazed at it for a moment before tucking it into her oversize bag on the step beside her.
And what had brought her to Winnipeg? Joe asked and Alfred heard the story of her long day, once again. That the college had proven to be on the outskirts of the city and she’d had to wait at least forty-five minutes for the right bus. And then by the time she’d found building C, where she was supposed to register, she’d almost been flattened by the wind. When she came to the point in the story where she’d seen the rooming house that was not fit for a dog, Alfred interrupted. There was an empty and good-size room upstairs, he said. Maybe she would like to see it. However, there would be no dogs, as neither he nor Joe was fit enough for a dog. She laughed then, her mouth wide open and head tipped back on her shoulders, and Alfred thought it had been too long a time since he’d heard someone laugh from their belly.
By the time summer and autumn had passed and winter set in, Joe and Crystal had gone their separate ways. And in the new year, after Laurie returned from holidays with her grandmother, Joe bought her a tube of red lipstick. And the following spring, he bought her a dark red pop-top that bared her midriff whenever she raised her arms. Laurie graduated from college, and by the time she’d moved out of the house and into her own apartment, she’d already been working a year. Instead of returning to university as Alfred had hoped, Joe continued to work at the small tool repair depot. Then he went into debt to open the Happy Traveler.
And now that business is belly up. Alfred would like to see the look on Joe’s face when he finds out about the money from Verna’s life insurance policy. When he learns that the cash from the policy his mother was able to pay for by cooking for and cleaning up after boarders had been invested wisely and now amounts to a million dollars. And it’s his. To do with as he sees fit.
After the nurses had settled him into the chair, they’d left him in peace to doze. But he knows they’ll be back, this time with a pole and drip. With a pad for his bed that will let them know if he’s up and roaming about, or if he’s thrown himself overboard. There’s no two ways about it, he’s old. Deficient and decrepit. And like the old, not to be taken seriously.
He looks for the metal chair, his way station to the room. When he doesn’t see it anywhere, he realizes the nurses have figured out how he managed to get as far as the window and have taken it away. He’s surprised to find that its absence makes his eyes grow wet. He recalls that when he was in the prisoner of war camp he sometimes saw the faces of men about to die suddenly stream with tears, as though a dam had given way inside. He sometimes saw them turn and look at something that wasn’t there.
Six
LATE IN THE EVENING Laurie enters the shopping mall foyer, intent on using a pay phone. When she sees the metal barrier closing off access to the stores beyond she feels affronted, as though the mesh curtain is a hand raised in her face.
A man using the instant teller glances at her when she goes over to the bank of phones. He keys in a transaction and the electronic burps are inordinately loud in the enclosed glass space; without the doors opening and closing with the constant traffic of people, the air has become overheated and stale. She anticipates Joe’s voice, while at the same time doubts that he’ll answer. More than likely, he’s got the cell turned off to conserve the battery. She hesitates, wanting to know that he’s all right, but dreading that he’ll tell her why he left. A second trip to Canadian Tire after she ran into Pete only confirmed that Joe wasn’t there, nor was he welcome to return. She calls his cell, feeling as though she’s caught in a patch of turbulence, not knowing when the ground might suddenly give way. He doesn’t answer.
She scoops up her change, drops what’s left of it into the sock. She went through a lot of money while talking to Alfred. She called him thinking to learn, without coming right out and asking, if he’d heard from Joe. Then she’d almost spilled the beans. Why was Joe working if they were on a vacation, he’d asked, and he hadn’t bought her lame answer. All she’d accomplished by calling was to alarm him, and she regrets that now.
Across Gibson Road the stark whiteness of the apartment buildings has faded to grey with the setting of the sun, and shadows darken the windows of the basement suites as though night is working its way up from the ground. Here and there, the anemic lights in windows brighten. It’s the time of day when she would go into Joe’s office and watch the cloud of gulls above the city dump, bright gold pieces flashing against the northern sky. During the time Steve was stationed in Germany she would think of him, that the sun had already set where he was. And as if he knew, he would sometimes call just as she and Joe were sitting down to dinner. When Joe had finished talking and passed the phone across the table to her it was a struggle not to react when Steve went on about how much he wanted her. Although they hadn’t seen each other for years, she’d always thought of him whenever she came upon the bustier, the crumple of butterfly thongs pushed to the back of her lingerie drawer. She wonders if the attraction will still be there, and what will she do about it if it is.
The instant teller whirrs and she turns toward the sound just as the man retrieves his money, folds it and jams it into his jean pocket. The doors swing open as he leaves, striding off toward a black 4×4 parked in the fire lane with its engine running. She realizes again that it’s Friday. People are going out and doing things, as she hoped she and Joe would do. She realizes she is hungry.
Although she knows it’s futile she goes over to the instant teller, takes the credit card from the sock and feeds it into the slot. The card came to Joe in the mail unsolicited, with a pre-approved ten-thousand-dollar line of credit. Within months that limit was increased to fifteen thousand and then twenty. As the machine tugs the card from her grasp she holds her breath, and when it’s ejected she’s surprised by bitterness, a seed bursting open on her tongue.
She’s about to turn away when she sees a transaction slip lying on one side of the shelf. Either the man forgot to take it, or, as she so often did, only glanced at it to reassure himself he wasn’t overdrawn and left it. His bank balance, she discovers, is half of what she and Joe would usually go through in a month. The thought makes her nauseous. She scrunches up the receipt and drops it into the waste receptacle. How little they had to show in the end for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, just the tables set up on the veranda and down the walk heaped with household goods. Boxes and boxes, crates and an assortment of laundry baskets covered the lawn, filled with pictures and books, cosmetics and sets of bathroom soaps, lotions and scrubs, still unopened. She’d priced CDs and DVDs at a dollar apiece, and some people had complained, and wanted to bargain. There were beautifully designed boxes of stationery, which, although she hardly ever wrote letters, she could never resist. But people at the garage sale had resisted, and in the end she’d foisted as much stationery as she possibly could on her friend Sandra.
Sandra had helped arrange the crystal on a special table spread with a dark cloth to better display it, including several pieces of Waterford alongside the hand-painted Japanese tea set, the wedding gift from Joe’s aunts, so appealingly colourful that for years Laurie had kept it out on the buffet. Laurie had set her Noritake dinnerware on the special table; the pottery she’d bought at various craft shows throughout the years; wood inlaid boxes and hand-carved bowls, and the blown glass pieces that leapt off the shelves and bit her while she toured a glassworks in Victoria.
She’d placed her marble chessboard at the centre, which for years had been set with the keepsakes she’d found in various shops acro
ss the country while travelling with Joe. She’d bought the chess set for the board so long ago she couldn’t recall what she’d done with the actual pieces. You’re not going to part with that, Sandra objected and offered to keep it for her, as she would the photo albums. A tiny clear glass moose marked the occasion of Laurie’s first orgasm with Joe. It had happened while they were on a canoe trip. Her moaning, he’d said, sounded like the mating call of a moose and he expected their campsite to be stampeded. A pewter rowboat and its tiny sailor marked the passing of Earl, Alfred’s long-time friend; the small amber egg, Steve’s gift when he returned from Germany, and when he’d dropped it down the front of her dress it felt like silk between her breasts. Yes, that, she’d said to Sandra. She was tired of dusting it.
The garage sale was an opportunity to be more discriminating, she told herself when she and Sandra hauled things out of the house. It was a chance to start over as she sometimes had with her wardrobe, emptying the closets and bureaus in one fell swoop, packing the clothing into garbage bags that she left at the various charity drop boxes. Then she’d go shopping. Only to discover a year later that discrimination had flown out the window and that she’d replaced her wardrobe with one that was almost identical.
In the past she’d sometimes happened upon the dismal displays of goods set out on yard-sale tables and the people perusing them, only steps away but a world apart, she’d imagined. She’d scrunched up her nose, thinking of the many times when, as a child, she went to church rummage sales with her grandmother, poking through the broken toys and smudged storybooks, the malodorous jumble cast off from other people’s lives. She refused to recall the excruciating anxiety of knowing there was a limit to the amount of money her grandmother would give her to spend, whereas the allure of objects proved to be unending. Invariably she wound up wanting what she hadn’t bought. Soon after she got her first job, she spent most of her pay-cheque on two pairs of shoes when she couldn’t decide between them, just because she could.
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