Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  “I’ve got some paperwork here, may I come in?”

  “Sorry,” she said, stooping for a sandal. “I’m on my way out. Can I have a look at it on the porch?” She called back over her shoulder, while easing Barrett backwards, “Darwin, Paul, I’m going down to the hospital, will you wait till I get back before you go?”

  A shout of assent from the men and the children, and she could shut the door behind her, keeping the pollution of Barrett out of her house.

  “It’s awkward,” he was saying.

  “Oh, no, it’ll be fine, here, on the bench.” She swept toys aside, and let Barrett find his own space. “I assume the company wants me to resign,” she said, before he could spin it out into endless blaming and condoling.

  “Well. There were difficulties—I’ve got a form, and I’ll explain the notations…”

  He fumbled in the attaché case, the one his mother gave him for Christmas in 1992. She knew too much about this un-friend, and none of it good: his everlasting excuses for indolence; his pink satin tie, stained with a gravy-spot after the ’97 awards lunch; the way he clung obsessively to the fountain pen he was now pulling out, to witness her signing away whatever rights she probably had.

  “You know, I really don’t have time. Just point where to sign,” she said. She could hardly bear to be near him for another minute! But if she left now she’d have to see him again, to sign the damn forms.

  “And here, and…” He gave her a Gilman-Stott ballpoint and pointed to the arrows where her signature was required. “This is really too bad,” Barrett said, watching her sign and flip, sign and flip.

  Sign, sign, sign—she grabbed her copies. Her vacation pay, her waiver of claim, and a standard confidentiality agreement; a cheque attached, paying her out for the last year and a half of accumulated holiday time and employee benefits and disengaging her permanently from the firm. Several thousand dollars. That would be helpful, in the short term. Her pension buyout: a letter delaying that for a few months, but it would mean a lump for investing somehow; time to worry about that later.

  “You’ll need my keys,” she said, yanking them off her ring.

  “I’m distressed about all this, Clara.”

  “So what?” she said, straightening up to look him in the eye. “You’ve made no effort at all to help me. After twenty years in your office, I deserved better.”

  His eyes boggled. He must not have expected rudeness from her. Or truth.

  Well, there’s a limit, she thought, skipping down the front steps and off away from his gravitational pull—a comet passing Jupiter and spinning away, free!

  Lorraine was not completely coherent. She turned her head restlessly on the pillow, vaguely agitated, asking for Darwin.

  “He’s coming soon. I got to come first,” Clary told her, damping a cloth in cool water to wash her face. A clump of stray hairs lay on her pillow. Clary gently brushed them off.

  “That’s good,” Lorraine said. “That’s good.”

  “I know. I was just washing Pearce’s face, and his head—he had ice cream all over.”

  “Pearce.”

  “He’s fine, he’s with Darwin, they’re all finishing their dessert while I run in to see you. Darwin says they’re going to boot you out of here soon, that’s wonderful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he tell you about all the changes at the house? He’s got Mrs. Pell moved into my dad’s old shop, and she seems pretty tickled. As far as one could tell.”

  Lorraine smiled, her cheeks not moving. Clary washed Lorraine’s hands, putting each in turn back on the green hospital coverlet, and they lay where she’d put them, limp and white under the brown remaining tan. There was great satisfaction in doing this small service for her.

  “The children will be beside themselves with joy to have you home,” Clary said.

  Lorraine nodded. Without any change in her expression two tears slid easily from the corners of her eyes, and rolled down her cheeks. She made no move to wipe them off.

  “You’re too tired for chat,” Clary said. “You’ve been going through all this so well. A couple more days, and you’ll feel much better.”

  Lorraine nodded again, even more briefly than before, her chin dipping slightly. Clary leaned forward and kissed her ashy cheek. She was careful not to cry herself.

  In the other bed, the young woman lay flat, abandoned.

  Checking the mailbox when she got home, Clary found the phone bill. She opened it as Darwin was getting his keys and his hat. $439 in long distance—all billed to her phone card, which she hadn’t used for months. There was some mistake. Darwin came through the hall and patted her shoulder as he went out, letting the screen door bang behind him. Calls to Spiritwood, to Onion Lake, Meadow Lake, Stanley Mission, Winnipeg, La Ronge—all within a couple of days last month. Fort McMurray. She knew it before her plodding brain caught up. Clayton, calling around to find Darwin, using the phone card she had not missed from her wallet.

  The doorbell rang early in the morning, before the children had eaten breakfast. Barrett again, Clary thought, because of the angry insistence of the bell. She went reluctantly to the door, Pearce on her hip.

  It was Bradley Brent from next door. Brent Bradley.

  He burst into hissing speech, like a shaken beer bottle fizzing over. “What’s next?” He glared at her, but didn’t give her any time to respond. “What will it be? This is a respectable neighbourhood, where the bylaws still get taken seriously. The construction, the noise, the constant crying of that baby! And now some kind of ramshackle flophouse in the back yard.”

  “Our baby never cries,” Clary cried, honestly indignant. “For a minute, maybe, once in a long while. He is a very good baby!”

  “The baby has nothing to do with it. There is no bylaw—would that there were—against a crying baby. But there are rules and regulations about construction. I saw no permit posted, I saw no notice of intent to convert the house into a rooming house!”

  Clary’s heart was beating like a metronome, flap-flap-flap-flap, quick march time. Her mouth was open to rebut, but not being able to say Mr. Brent! or Mr. Bradley! with any kind of confidence seemed to be holding her back.

  His little eyes looked crazy, and his lips pooched out when he talked. “I serve you notice, I intend to fight this thing to the limit of the law. You are lowering property values and introducing a very low-class element to the street.”

  Trevor and Dolly had crept up to watch. How dared he say low-class in front of them?

  “The property inspector assures me that he will be paying you a little visit, very soon. And when he does—”

  “Listen!” she said, arresting him in mid-rant. “You’re disturbing us. If you don’t wish me to call the police, kindly get off my porch.”

  He gaped, the whites of his eyes showing. “You threaten me?”

  “Mr. Brent, stop! You’re mistaken. There was no construction, just finishing drywall in the basement, and I’m certain that my cousin, the builder in charge, saw that regulations were meticulously followed. The existing structure in my garden has been a temporary habitation for thirty years. When the property inspector, who I believe is still my father’s old friend Stan Granik, visits, I’ll be happy to give him a cup of coffee and show him around. I know he’ll be too considerate to arrive before the children have eaten their breakfast.”

  She shut the door. Her knees were shaking. Trevor squeezed her arm on one side, and Dolly patted her back on the other. She hoped that was true, that Moreland would have seen to permits. How badly she wanted to sit down! To be accused of lowering the tone of the neighbourhood—it was a joke. In a minute she would laugh.

  But her house was ramshackle. Children’s jumble crowded the living room: the rocking baby seat, the playpen, a huge box of Lego that Moreland had brought in from Davina (an extra half-hour of picking up at the end of the night), crayons, shoes, clothes. On the kitchen counters baby-food jars and cartoon plastic cups jostled appliances: the blender,
the toaster, the sandwich-maker. She shouldn’t give them grilled cheese sandwiches so often. The children’s room was so much theirs now that Clary couldn’t think what it had been before—the guest room, and before that, her own childhood room. She could hardly make her memory’s eyes refocus. Her father’s den had spun through the whole roulette wheel: first Clayton’s tainted room, then Mrs. Pell’s lair; now an empty shell waiting for Lorraine. At least that room was clean.

  Clary called Paul.

  “I’m going to pick Lorraine up from the hospital tomorrow,” she told him. “I didn’t want you to go looking for her and not find her.”

  But that was only an excuse. She wanted to talk to him, and had no other earthly reason but Lorraine.

  “Thank you,” he said. He sounded puzzled by her call, she could hear that.

  He could too, and was quick to correct it. “I’m sorry—I just got off the phone with my wife’s lawyer. Thank you, I would have been worried about Lorraine.”

  “They’re letting her come home, she’s officially in remission.”

  “That’s wonderful!”

  “No, it’s not real. They know they can knock out 99 per cent of the lymphoma, but it will definitely come back. This is just the first part. They’ll be waiting for her to recover for a couple of weeks and then she’ll go through it all again.” She felt an absurd hankering to cry. But it was not her who was in this terrible trouble.

  “Clary,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know that your mother’s death must be refreshed every time you enter that hospital.”

  Oh, why would he say that? Why get her started?

  “My father’s, too,” she said. “I thought I had forgotten it.” She was not sure whether she was crying or only breathing too hard.

  “It goes in waves, doesn’t it, the long period of mourning?”

  “His study is not his any more—my mother kept it bronzed! I’d always meant to do the basement but it’s—And now I’ve moved Mrs. Pell into his workshop, and I don’t even know where his tools are…”

  “I don’t think he needs a museum, Clary. I think if he is aware of your actions they must please him far more than keeping his tools in a vault.”

  If my mother is aware of my actions, Clary thought, the ether will be ringing with her wrath. And how she would hate Mrs. Pell!

  21. Queen of Spades

  A strange black van drove into the driveway. Dolly was at the window waiting for Darwin and Clary to come back from the hospital with her mom, who was coming home for a while, maybe a month. The van door slid aside and a woman’s thin, stiff legs folded partly out, a strange crop-haired puppet sitting still, not getting out after all.

  It was her mom, in new clothes. Dolly was supposed to run to the door and down the porch steps and into her arms, but not too fast, to hurt her or something. She stayed still.

  Darwin’s car drove up too and parked at the curb. He jumped out and yelled, “Dolly! Hey, Dolly! I need you!”

  Then Dolly could move again, and go to the door, and pretend to see her mother for the first time. She did a good job of it, she knew her mother was fooled. She danced down the steps quickly, dabbing her feet like a dainty girl—when all the time, inside her body, her huge clumsy soul was a rhinoceros galloping full-horn at a big rock that would smash her to pieces.

  “Dolly, Dolly,” her mother kept repeating in some stranger’s voice, still perched on the edge of the seat.

  Trevor tore down the steps, and threw his arms around their mother’s knees like he didn’t even notice that she was like she was. Dolly stood beside them, not moving away, but it was hard. Her mother’s arms moved like slow spider arms, patting Trevor’s back and gesturing to Dolly.

  Clary got out of the driver’s door, struggling with a whole pile of papers and files and a white pharmacy bag. When she saw that their mom couldn’t get up, she said, “Stay there a minute till I get this all inside, and—we’ll take the children out to the country. We’ve got this big van for the week, so there’ll be room for everybody! Trevor, shoes on. I’ll get Pearce.”

  Dolly pushed by Gran, who’d come stumping out to get a look, and ran back in the house to grab her book. Her mom’s hair! Cut off really short, and thin in strange places. She had known it was all going to fall out, but to see it patchy was weird.

  She ran down not looking, and shoved into the van, into the back seat, by the window.

  “Wait, Dolly,” Clary said, leaning in with Pearce’s car seat. “Maybe I’ll put Pearce in the back, here, where the tether strap is…”

  Dolly sat tight, listening to Clary clatter and chatter. Darwin’s face came over Clary’s shoulder, blocking out the whole doorway, his big huge face. He said, “You can do it, Doll.”

  They got sorted out, somehow, Dolly ending up beside her mother in the middle seat, Trevor on the other side. Her mother held their hands tight, one in each of hers. Every time the van turned a corner they would sway, and her mother would press on their hands more to keep upright.

  The interior of the van was very dark grey, like a funeral car. Staring at her mother, Dolly looked particularly at the piece of skin from underneath the ear down to the chin. It was stretched over the bone under there, the jawbone, too tight. When her mother tried to answer Clary’s questions the skin had to move over the bone, there wasn’t enough room for it to relax. The collar of her blue sweater sagged away from her mother’s chest and Dolly could see the skin too tight there too. The collarbone stood out like a kite stick. Dolly sat still as a stone, waiting for her mother to speak and the skin to move. She wished she could read her book.

  Trevor sat on Lorraine’s other side, breathing slowly through his pursed mouth to learn whistling. Holding on to her arm through the blue sweater. They went on along the river, beside the row of churches and gradually farther-apart houses and out into country. The roads out there were straight on the flat ground. Not like Trimalo, where roads ran up around hills or through trees, wherever was possible, not where the map would like it best.

  “Isn’t this nice, to be out,” Lorraine said. Her voice sounded like half of herself, to Dolly.

  Gran was up front with Clary. Clary told her to open the shopping bag at her feet, and she rustled around awkwardly for a while and then handed back a couple of wrapped parcels.

  “For you,” Lorraine said, handing one to Trevor and one to Dolly.

  Dolly’s was long and narrow. Inside was a Barbie doll, lying flat in the long box, eyes wide open. But she was almost ten! You don’t play with Barbies when you are a preteen. It was wearing a nurse’s uniform, not even a doctor’s coat. Trevor had a baby-aged red plastic doctor’s set. They’d seen both of those things on sale in the gift shop at the hospital.

  Tight in his car seat, Pearce tilted his lower jaw up ferociously to grind at his gums, where more new teeth, coming in, were sending fountains of saliva drooling from his glistening mouth. Lorraine felt her breasts responding, after all these weeks, with the cascading tingle of milk letting down, even though there was none left to let. This had been taken from her too, as well as everything else. Looking past the children’s heads out the dark-shaded van windows, Lorraine could see roads spread out around them. Possible routes. At the end of the horizon diagonals of light streamed down from the sky, like God marking the map—where they should strive for. But there was no heaven in those places, just more country. The children were quiet, she must have shocked them. Even Trevor, not one for noticing. She could hear Pearce telling Darwin some long list of interesting things, in his new babbling frog language. Her bones inside her felt too fragile for this trip. They should have stayed home.

  Clary drove, looking ahead for some possible point of interest to distract the children with. Bad idea, a drive, and she knew it was because the van rental had seemed like too much money, and she’d needed to find a use for it right away—she was going to have to get a grip with the money thing. If she was left completely penniless after this, then what?

  From the very back,
Darwin sang out, “Hey, Clary! Turn right at this next gravel road, you can take us up to our cousin Rose’s old farmhouse!”

  So what, Clary thought, her spirits lifting. She would go back to work, that’s all, and they’d be fine. She was hardly unemployable, just because she was unemployed. She turned and drove up a slight rise before the road slid down into a valley between two low folds of prairie. The gravel ran out, and then the dirt road curved around one end of the fold and they found a small abandoned farm, brown-grey outbuildings left to lean gradually back into the earth. The house had empty black windows and a bashed-in front door. Carragana bushes hugged one side.

  “That’s it,” Darwin said, leaning forward, his breath warm on Lorraine’s neck.

  He put his hand on the back of her head and ruffled up the sparse strands of hair. She flinched a little, knowing that would make more fall out, and not wanting the children to see.

  Clary had stopped the van and rolled down the windows. They could hear the sound of the prairie: a differentiation of tiny noises, and the wind. That almost-heard continuing hum was bees, an ominous, monotonous hubbub.

  “Strange to think of her way out here with her sisters when she was young,” Lorraine said. She could hear her own voice, cracked and strange. Keep quiet, she thought.

  Darwin slid an arm past Trevor and opened the side door.

  “Let’s take a look around, man,” he said. Trevor gladly hopped free and headed for the busted farmhouse door.

  “Wait,” Clary called after Trevor. “It won’t be safe in there…” She ran after him.

  Darwin kissed Lorraine on the cheek and climbed out with Pearce, and opened Mrs. Pell’s door. “You come too,” he said. “Do you good to trundle around out here.”

  It was like Hanna, Mrs. Pell had to admit. Not that she ever wanted to go back there. She creaked down from the high step and looked around for a place to pee.

  Dolly and Lorraine were left in the car.