Every Time We Say Goodbye

by Jamie Zeppa

  “Maybe it’s because of Mrs. Vanderburgh that you want him so badly,” Ruth said. “Maybe if you could have him, you wouldn’t want him.”

  “No,” Theresa said. “If she dropped dead, I would marry him in an instant. But she’s as healthy as an ox, and he won’t leave her. Even though she does nothing but complain. He leaves his socks lying around. He chews too loudly. He forgets things and slumps in his chair at dinner.”

  “All complaints you might have if you had to live with him,” Ruth said.

  Theresa hunched forward, squeezing her freckled hands. “When I’m away from him, I know it’s all wrong and I should end it, but when I’m with him, I’m convinced of the exact opposite. It’s so hard to know what’s true.”

  Ruth turned to Grace. “What do you think, Grace?”

  Grace said, “I don’t know. I only love my baby.”

  Theresa said, “That’s not being in love, though. That’s instinct.”

  Ruth said, “That’s the best kind of love. It doesn’t have to question itself.”

  Grace’s head throbbed. “I left him!” she cried out. “He didn’t even know I was going. He doesn’t know where I am!” Ruth’s arm was around her and Theresa pressed a handkerchief into her hand. “It’s okay, Gracie,” Theresa was saying. “We’re going to help you get him back.”

  LAUNDRY

  Mrs. Barr was furious. “You can’t leave,” she said. “You have to give notice.”

  “She just did,” Theresa said.

  “Advance notice! Six weeks!”

  “Six weeks? Are you insane?” Theresa shook her head. “Let’s get your things, Grace.”

  Mrs. Barr followed them up the stairs, talking to Theresa all the way. “I’ll take her to court,” she said. “I’ll sue.”

  Theresa slammed the door of Grace’s room and said, “Hurry, Gracie.” Grace pulled her clothes off hangers and stuffed them into her suitcase on top of the photo of Danny. Her heart was a wild bird trapped in a cage. Mrs. Barr was hammering on the door, threatening to call the police, Clockworks, Grace’s family. Grace froze at that. “Don’t listen to her, Grace. She won’t call anyone.”

  “I’ll call her supervisor at work,” Mrs. Barr yelled, and Theresa jerked open the door. “I am her supervisor at work,” she said.

  “I’ll go to the manager. I’ll have the money taken out of her paycheque.”

  “Have it taken out of your ass,” Theresa said and closed the door. “Got everything, Grace?” Grace didn’t know what she had; she only knew they had to get out. Theresa picked up the suitcase, and they pushed past Mrs. Barr and hurried down the stairs and out the door, which Mrs. Barr slammed behind them, yelling, “And don’t darken my doorway again!”

  “Gladly,” Theresa called back.

  “Will she go to court against me?” Grace asked. Her veins were full of syrup, and she could hardly move her legs. If Mrs. Barr went to court, they would take all her money.

  “Of course not.” Theresa opened the front gate for them.

  Grace’s heart was still trying to escape from her chest. Then it stopped beating altogether. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  “What is it, Grace?”

  “My money,” she managed to say.

  “You left your money?”

  Grace covered her face with her hands. Now she would have to start all over. It was hopeless. She didn’t know why she kept trying. Except that her other option was to tie a stone around her neck and walk into the river, and she couldn’t do that, because she couldn’t leave Danny twice.

  Theresa pulled her hands away from her face. “Grace. Where did you leave it? In your room?”

  “Under the mattress.”

  Theresa looked at the house. Her eyes moved up and down, back and forth. “Here,” she said, handing Grace the suitcase. “Go knock on the front door and tell her you feel bad about leaving without notice and ask how much would she accept in lieu of six weeks.”

  “But she already has all my money upstairs!”

  “You’re not actually going to pay her. Just keep her talking.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’ll be around. Go on, Grace. Look contrite and keep her talking until I come back.”

  Grace walked back up the steps and knocked on the door. She looked for Theresa, but Theresa was gone.

  “Mrs. Barr?” she called. “Mrs. Barr? It’s me, Grace Turner. I’m very sorry. Please don’t take me to court.”

  The door opened, and there was Mrs. Barr, smiling nastily. “Oh, so now you want to make amends.”

  “I just don’t want to go to court.”

  “Well, it’s too late for that. I just got off the phone with the judge.” She peered through the screen. “Where’s your friend with the mouth on her?”

  “She went home. Please, Mrs. Barr. I don’t want to go to court.”

  “It’s too late. I’ve already booked a date and I’ll have to pay to cancel it.”

  “How much does that cost?”

  “Fifteen dollars,” Mrs. Barr said. “So you’d owe that on top of the six weeks.”

  “All right,” Grace said. They had reached the end of this conversation, and there was no sign of Theresa. “All right, but—”

  “All right but what?”

  “All right, but can we make it four weeks’ notice? It’s only I don’t have enough for six weeks.”

  “Fine, but only because I’ll be glad to see the last of you. Plus fifteen dollars. And I want it right now.”

  “All right,” said Grace. “But … but I was just wondering, can we make it two weeks’ notice?”

  Mrs. Barr’s face reddened. “Get the hell off my property,” she hissed, “before I call the police.”

  Grace fled, banging the suitcase against her leg. Out on the road, she leaned against a tree and tried to catch her breath.

  Theresa appeared from around the corner.

  “Where were you?” Grace demanded. “I made everything worse. Now she’s calling the police.”

  Theresa shook her head. “She’s not calling the police, Grace. You have to stop being so afraid of people. Mrs. Barr has no power over you.”

  “She has my money,” Grace said.

  Theresa pulled an envelope from the waistband of her pants. “No, she doesn’t.”

  Grace clutched Theresa’s arm. “How did you get it?”

  “Well, my idea was to go up the drainpipe—”

  “You climbed up the drainpipe to the second floor?” Grace was aghast.

  “No. The back door was open. Thank Christ.”

  Ruth and Theresa had already set everything up. Theresa had pushed her bed against the wall to make room for the cot and emptied out two drawers in the dresser, which turned out to be one and a half drawers too many for Grace’s things. Grace put the photo of Danny on the windowsill beside a pot of geraniums.

  “Let me see him.” Theresa reached for the picture. “He looks like you, Grace.”

  “Do you think so?” A warmth went through Grace.

  “Where is his father?”

  “I don’t know. He signed up and I didn’t hear anything after that.”

  Theresa handed back the photo. “Were you in love with him?”

  Grace thought for a moment. She remembered how John had squeezed her fingers and the heat of his breath. She remembered the sound he made when he pushed into her, like a small cat that wanted something. She liked that little sound. Was that “in love”?

  “No,” she told Theresa. “I didn’t really know him.”

  “Did your brother and sister-in-law know him?”

  “They don’t know he’s the father.”

  Grace touched Danny’s face through the glass.

  “Gracie.”

  Grace looked up.

  “Do they know you’re coming back for him?”

  “My brother knows.”

  “I meant her.”

  Grace saw what Theresa was thinking. It was the thing that kept her aw
ake and woke her when she did finally fall into sleep. One of the things. “She thinks I’ll stay down here and forget all about Danny,” Grace said. “She thinks she’ll never see me again.”

  Ruth Ellis said she needed a plan. Moving out of Mrs. Barr’s and sharing Theresa’s room was only the first step. Theresa had asked Mike Vanderburgh to give Grace extra split-shifts, but when Danny was here, she wouldn’t be able to work such long hours. “You need to think about how you are going to provide for Danny in the long term,” Ruth said.

  “Can’t we stay here?” Grace asked. She loved Ruth Ellis’s house. She and Theresa and Lucy were free to do exactly as they pleased: eat whenever they felt like it, read at the breakfast table, talk or not talk at dinner, try on all the outfits Ruth Ellis had brought back from her travels and then fall asleep in them on the sofa in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Lucy was a pretty, dark-haired teacher from Saskatchewan who had ten younger brothers and sisters back home; she sent back money every month and knew about things like colic and croup. She and Theresa said Danny was the loveliest baby and asked Grace to read out Frank’s letters. They would never say, “Put the baby down, for heaven’s sake, you’ll spoil him.” In fact, Ruth Ellis said that in India and China, women carried their babies in slings all day. When she thought about bringing Danny to Peterborough, she thought about him here, in this house.

  But it seemed Ruth Ellis did not. “Yes, of course you can stay, but that’s a temporary fix. Danny’s going to need his own room someday, and you need to know that you can stand on your own.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Grace said.

  “If you can’t, you have no right bringing Danny down here. That’s your job as his mother.”

  Grace closed her eyes.

  “You need a plan, Grace. You need a place of your own, and you need a way to make more money. You also need a story for when people ask where Danny’s father is.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Grace said. “What people think doesn’t affect me.”

  “Thoughts give birth to actions, and actions do affect you.”

  Grace pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. It was hard, talking to Ruth. She took your arm and started you in a certain direction, and she didn’t let you step down until you both got to the destination. It would have made her head hurt if she let it, but she wouldn’t let it. She could see that Ruth was right. Finally, she dropped her hands. “All right. Danny’s father and I got married down at City Hall in Sault Ste. Marie,” she said. “Two weeks after, he—John—shipped out. Two months later, I got the telegram.” She looked at Ruth. Ruth nodded, waiting. “I didn’t even know I was going to have a baby,” Grace said, but still, Ruth was not satisfied. “My brother and sister-in-law said they would look after the baby until I got settled down here.”

  “What else?”

  “And I came down here and … I don’t know what else,” Grace said.

  “You lost your husband,” Ruth said. “How do you feel?”

  “Oh!” Grace brightened. “I’m sad. Very, very sad.”

  Ruth Ellis laughed. “That’s good, Grace. But try not to look so happy when you say it.”

  The other part of the plan came to her in the courtyard at work, listening to the other girls; they reminded her of Vera in the way they listed everything they had to do before they did it. Unlike Vera, though, they could only do one thing at a time. They had to set their hair, so they couldn’t iron their skirts; they had to iron their skirts, so they couldn’t wash out their sweaters or mend their blouses, and they were simply exhausted. As a trial, she did Theresa’s laundry, then Lucy’s, and finally Ruth’s. They proclaimed themselves satisfied. “Now, you have to advertise,” Ruth said, and Theresa said, “You need to start going to the cafeteria, Grace. You need to be a little friendlier.”

  “But I can’t spend money in the cafeteria,” Grace said.

  “You have to spend money to make money,” Theresa said. “A couple of cups of that coffee might turn your stomach, but it won’t break the bank. And you need to let Lucy do something about your hair.”

  “My hair?” Grace reached for the back of her neck, where her hair was tied in a clump with a shoelace. She hadn’t had it cut since she’d left home, and it was too thick and wiry to be loose. “What does my hair have to do with laundry?”

  “The less you look like my crazy Aunt Betty, the more people will want to trust you with their things,” Theresa said.

  So Lucy cut bangs into Grace’s hair and curled the ends under, and Grace went to the cafeteria, and Theresa waved her over and introduced her to Myrna and Kathleen. “Grace is a whiz with laundry,” she told them. “She does ours. She charges, of course, but I can’t tell you all how much more time I have now.”

  Myrna said, “My mother does mine for free,” but Kathleen said, “How are you with mysterious stains, Grace?” Kathleen had bought a new skirt, she explained, in the most beautiful cream-coloured Irish linen, and when she got it home, she found a brown stain right at the hemline. She took it right back to the shop, but the saleswoman refused to give her a refund. “She said she couldn’t take back soiled merchandise. I said, ‘No, you only sell it.’ It’s a beautiful skirt, but I can’t wear it.” She lowered her voice. “It looks like blood.”

  Grace said, “I don’t know. That—”

  “—won’t be a problem,” Theresa finished for her.

  It was a narrow, rusty brown stain right at the bottom of the skirt. Grace tried a mixture of things: salt, cold water, warm water, laundry soap, hand soap, vinegar. She dabbed and wiped and squirted. Theresa yawned. “I’m going to bed, Grace. You’ll just have to say you don’t do mystery stains.” Grace sat at the wooden table in Ruth Ellis’s basement. Her fingers ached from the scrubbing and her feet were cold. This afternoon, when Kathleen had given her the skirt, she’d been elated. News would spread, customers would come, and soon she would be able to go home and get Danny. Now a stain on a skirt was ending her new life before it even began.

  The furnace rumbled off, and in the stillness, Grace could hear the wind outside and the drip of the faucet and an insect chewing on something in a corner. She sat very still and what came over her was not the bliss but something akin to it. It was the bliss with eyes. She pushed back her chair and ran up the stairs.

  In the morning, Theresa grabbed the skirt from the kitchen table. “Grace, I don’t believe it. You got it out?” She inspected the cloth. “Amazing! It’s completely gone. What did you use on it?”

  Grace smiled. “Scissors.”

  Theresa’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t.”

  Grace held up a thin strip of cream cloth. Theresa grabbed the skirt again and studied the hem. “Nice stitching. But what if she notices that it’s shorter?”

  “She only tried it on once in the store,” Grace said.

  Kathleen looked up from the skirt. “Beautiful,” she said. She held it against her waist and swished it around her knees. “Just beautiful.”

  Grace collected the clothes on Tuesday and Friday in the courtyard. She worked briskly, thoroughly, braiding one task neatly into the next, just like Vera. In the evening, she sorted the clothes. While some soaked in whitener or hot water, she examined the others for holes and tears. She washed them at night, laying them over the backs of chairs and a clothesline strung between poles in the basement. In the morning, if the sky was clear, she put them out on the line. At lunch, she borrowed Theresa’s bicycle and raced home to bring them in. In the evening, she ironed and folded. It was Lucy’s idea to make everything into little packets. “And you need to wrap them in something to return them. Tissue paper,” Lucy said.

  “It costs,” Grace said.

  “But the girls will love it. You’ll be returning all their old, worn-out things wrapped in nice paper, like brand new.”

  Grace bought the tissue paper and began finding little things to tuck inside: a crisp red leaf, a sprig of monkshood. In the winter, she could use a sprig of pine. I
n the spring, she would use wildflowers. She would have Danny by then, and he could help her pick them. On impulse, she bought some red satin ribbon to put around the packets of laundry, and after that, there was a lineup in the courtyard on Fridays.

  MOMMY

  Everything happened in February. Grace was collecting laundry from the cereal factory, the bank and Clockworks, and because she wasn’t paying for her room at Ruth Ellis’s, only board, she had to ask Ruth for a second envelope. When she asked for a third, Ruth made her go to the bank. Now she had a savings account and a wagon she pulled to collect. It was all done discreetly, at lunch and after work. Everyone had her own pillowcase with her initials or name written in ink (mostly) or embroidered (a few at the bank). She still used tissue paper when she returned the clothes, but the pillowcases kept things separate and didn’t look unsightly in the wagon. She did more than wash and iron and fix loose buttons: she let out waistbands and sewed linings into skirts and replaced velvet trim with lace. “Give it to Grace to freshen up,” Kathleen told Myrna, who had nothing new to wear to the White Pines dance, and Grace took Myrna’s pale green dress home and recut the collar. Then she added a flounce with dark green satin that Marta at the bank had asked her to remove from a skirt. “Can you freshen this, Grace?” the women began to ask, and if nothing came to Grace when she sat at her work table in the basement, she would look through Lucy’s movie magazines or Ruth’s photo albums for ideas.

  Theresa came home in tears because Mike Vanderburgh said he couldn’t see her anymore and they had to pretend nothing had happened, or ever would. “As if we have to pretend that part,” Theresa told Grace. He claimed his wife was suspicious, but he refused to provide details. Theresa said he was just trying to get rid of her. She couldn’t stand to see him every day. She was going to go over to the motor factory and ask for a job. The next day, Mr. Vanderburgh fired her for coming in late, but she had only come in to get her things. She was due to start at the motor factory that afternoon.