Going Out With a Bang

by Joan Boswell

  “But I’d have to resign.”

  “Please spare me the hypocrisy. You are no priest. You’re an actor who’s good with words. I know who you are. I’ll take you as you are. But I won’t hide any more.”

  I hated it when people tried to analyze me, even someone whose skin I’d tasted with my own tongue. No one knows anyone completely. “I am a good priest. And I like the job.”

  “No you don’t. You like parts of the job, and you loathe parts of it. Why not like parts of your life with me? Join me in the light, babe. Let the truth set us both free.”

  “The truth? You mean now that you’ve inherited your husband’s wealth? Where was all this integrity while you were working at the board office making forty thousand dollars a year? Didn’t want to come clean then? You waited him out. You won. You know very well that Harold would have divorced you if he’d found out about us.”

  “Who says I waited?”

  “What?”

  “You said I waited him out, and I said—”

  “I know what you said. What do you mean?”

  “You think you know me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. But I’m going to tell you more than you want to know, because I did what I did for you.”

  I felt like running very fast into the cold water, putting my hands over my ears and singing while I submerged.

  “Harold had just been given a clean bill of health, you know, apart from the high blood pressure. I was so pissed off. His father died of heart failure; his mother died two years ago of a stroke. But Harold got a reprieve. So he decided to quit smoking and cut back on red meat. He said he felt like he’d been given a second chance—no more taking his health for granted. He’d always been so sure that he’d die young. It was one of the things I loved about him.”

  The smile she smiled at that point made me feel sick. There was no moral centre here, and the high ground for me was fast disappearing. “Why do I have to know this?”

  “I played it your way for all this time. If you’re going to love me now, you’re going to love the person I really am, even if I’m only beginning to know who that is myself.”

  “You think I can possibly love you after this?”

  “I don’t know if I care, because from now on, I am who I am for better or worse.”

  “But you’ll keep me out of it, right?”

  “Not necessarily. It would be for your own good, of course, but I can blaze the trail that sets us both free.”

  “Or maybe you’ll be in jail?”

  “Why do you like your secrets so much?”

  “Why can’t you keep any?”

  “You’ll be my partner in crime...one more horrible sin for the parson to bear.”

  “Do not tell me anything. What if I go to the police, Lydia? I may not believe in God any more, but I still believe in law and order.”

  “What if I tell the world about us?

  “Then I would hate you.” I turned away, so she couldn’t see the tears of blind frustration. She moved to the railings and pressed herself into my back. Her body was warm, so warm. This woman was so much more than I’d expected, and so much less. But my hands had a mind of their own, and they still wanted her. She whispered against my ear, her tongue flicking the lobe. “I showed him pictures of us.”

  I wrenched my body around to face her. “Why?”

  “I couldn’t wait any longer. I’m not young; I don’t have all the time in the world. I’ve only got a few good years left in this skin you love so much.”

  “And that killed him?”

  “He trusted you.”

  “People don’t die of betrayal, Lydia. You cannot make this my doing.”

  “Well, I did exchange his medication with Meridia, my diet pills—not good for people with high blood pressure. It was probably a combination. But he looked at the pictures, screamed a lot of obscenities at me, pulled out a cell phone to call you, and bam. He was on the floor sputtering and gasping for air. I just had to wait it out. I called the ambulance as soon as he stopped breathing.”

  Lydia’s hair was red and gold, and her eyes were blue. I stared at her face, reconfiguring the elements into someone I recognized and had feelings for. She kissed me, and I kissed her back, once again letting my body speak for me. “You can still love me, can’t you?”

  “I don’t know what I’m feeling,” I replied.

  She threw her head back and laughed. “You clearly know what you’re feeling,” she said as she redid the buttons on her pale shirt. She kissed the inside of my hand and each finger. “Let’s have dinner. I’m starving.”

  I didn’t move. “Lydia, can I just get this clear. You’re blackmailing me into an open relationship. Have I got that straight?”

  “You wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  “And I’m an accessory to murder.”

  “Oh, what a tangled web we weave.”

  “And this is the truth that is setting me free?”

  “Okay. Here’s the truth. You’re a shallow, materialistic agnostic with illusions of grandeur because you’re the rector of a backwater parish, and a few unimportant people care what you say once a week. But I happen to find you endlessly amusing, and sexually thrilling. I know I can make you happy for a long time, because I have lots of cash and lots of yummy dreams to share with you. I feel no guilt at all, not for Harold, and not for you. Now pull yourself together and let’s get on with getting on. Light the candles and put on some dinner music while I make you a meal you will never forget.”

  I could walk away now and phone the police. But, I wouldn’t have my lover, and I wouldn’t be able to live in this parish wondering how much everyone knew, my precious privacy breached. The real choice was a swim that never ended or life sentence in the jail of Lydia.

  I never did forget that meal. While she was sautéing and chopping, I sat on the porch with my laptop and reread my sermon for Sunday. I guessed it would be my last. I’d called it “The Illusion of Choice”. Appropriately ironic, I thought. I made a few amendments, tweaked a sentence or two, but overall the sermon was ready. Maybe there was choice after all. I closed the laptop.

  The waters of Georgian Bay were aquamarine blue. The sun was low in the sky, and clouds promised a brilliant sunset. It would be a glorious backdrop for my final act.

  The smell of garlic and butter floated across the porch. Lydia was working in a pale pink camisole now, her thin blouse tossed over a wooden chair. I was hungry. I felt lazy. Could I live with evening after evening like this? Would granite countertops, and gardens and a pool of our own compensate for the stigma and a permanently guilty conscience? Would Lydia get on my nerves the way my husband had?

  The tinny sound of the “Hallelujah Chorus” broke my reverie.

  “Mary, your phone’s ringing.”

  I ran to my briefcase and checked the call display. Madeleine Parker. It must be church business. Maybe not my business any more. I didn’t answer. I joined Lydia at the counter and slipped my arms around her. She froze.

  “What choice is there really?” I answered. “I love you.”

  “Can we do this?”

  “Did you really watch him die?”

  Lydia put a lid on the vegetables and measured rice into a cup. “I’ll answer that question if you answer mine.”

  “Okay.”

  “Does it make any difference now?”

  Would it make any difference? Could I live with a cold-blooded killer? What would she do to me when the passion waned? “Yes, it matters.”

  She laughed. “Oh, Mary. Look at your face. Of course I didn’t kill him. He died of a heart attack, and I had nothing to do with it. You know me better than that. “She lifted a platter of gruyère and stuffed olives toward me.

  I took one olive and placed it on her lips. She chewed slowly, her eyes locked on mine. I backed away to light the candles and fumbled with my iPod till Norah Jones broke the silence. “I’m thinking Niagara-on-the Lake, a small perfect house close to the wate
r. We’ve had such wonderful times there.”

  “That’s my girl,” she said, and blew out the candles I had just lit. She pulled the pale camisole over her head and reached for my hand. “Now, for kisses.”

  There, in the orange glow of a Georgian Bay sunset, we made our vows. I told her that I loved her many times. I told her I had been a fool to doubt her. My words were all bloated and adoring. She wanted to believe them, I’m sure, and I wanted them to be true.

  Sandy Conrad lives near Paisley, Ontario with her husband Ian and numerous pets. She teaches high school English. Her short story, “The Eulogy”, won first prize in the Scene of the Crime contest on Wolfe Island in 2005, and her Christmas story, “How Silently, How Silently”, was published in Blood on the Holly in 2007.

  Going Out With a Bank

  Mary Jane Maffini

  As banks go, it’s nothing special, Harry. Small potatoes. Not like the good old days when we were the toast of London. Not like Lloyds job. Or Midland. Couldn’t hold a candle to the romp at Barclays.”

  “Stay in the moment, Nev. Have you learned nothing from our yoga for geezers class?”

  “Ah, but the past has its appeal. We were the best. I’ll never forget the split-second timing, the sweet smell of explosives, and all that lovely lolly afterwards. It’s hard to think that’s gone forever.”

  “In the moment. Otherwise, I’ll never get that knee replaced. Twenty-six weeks is a roundabout way of saying ‘get used to your pain for six months more if you’re lucky’. How many six monthses do you think I have left, Nev? Now watch this.”

  Harry was right. I knew that nothing lasts forever, especially geezers and their bodies. And that was as true for the proceeds from internationally renowned bank jobs as it was for handsome Harry’s knee. The dwindling pile left after a life full of wine, women and song was being sucked into the coffers of Laurel Woods Retirement Home. That’s the trouble with a life on the lam: not much by way of pensions and supplementary health benefits. All to say, just when we should have been settled to enjoy our nicely anonymous life in Canada and be learning to love lawn bowling, we had two good reasons to sharpen old skills and reconsider options.

  Harry was at his most professional. He checked me over. “Try to look a bit sicker, will you? Hunch your shoulders. Maybe you should moan a bit more. Work on your green complexion. Try to drool.”

  “Easy for you to be funny. You’re not the patsy waiting for the johnny shirt.”

  “Put a cork in it, my lad. Here’s our chance.”

  Harry had shaved before we left Laurel Woods in the official van. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, tailor-made jacket and a cloud of pricy aftershave. He’d had his splendid wavy white hair trimmed the day before and had seen the dentist to perk up the pearly whites. He was as splendid a geezer as you could ever imagine. The wheelchair just added to the mystique. I was in my ratty silk dressing gown and well-worn slippers and working hard to look like it was my last day on earth due to intestinal unreliability.

  His hand brushed the arm of a plump, frazzled nurse as she whizzed by with a squeak of white shoes. She glanced down at him, irritation flitting across her face and vaporizing at the sight of Handsome Harry in his wheelchair. He pointed to me and moderated his baritone boom to a whisper. “We can’t reach our own doctor, probably marooned on the fifteenth hole, but he’s already told poor old Nev here he’s not long for this world.”

  He turned his head to gaze at me sorrowfully. I did my best to look terminal.

  Harry swivelled back to the nurse and sighed. “Nev’ll never complain, but if you ask me, it’s a terrible terrible time we live in when a World War II hero gets to spend what may be his last day in the world without a place to lie down.”

  ‘I’m sorry,” she said, “I know it’s awful, but there’s nothing I can do. The emergency room is always blocked right up on Mondays for some reason. People procrastinate on the weekends, and they all show up at once. Now it’s like three days trouble in one. We just don’t have the beds. Did you speak to staff at the desk?”

  “I can see that you’re under duress here, my dear. And I understand you’re doing your best. I’ve been back and forth to the triage nurse pleading the case, but for old folks, it’s hard to get attention. It’s just that Neville here gets godawful diarrhea.”

  Harry raised his voiced at “godawful” and continued it through “diarrhea”, putting emphasis on each syllable and rolling his r’s—as if anything needed emphasis. Wouldn’t want anyone in the waiting room to miss out on that scrap of information. Heads snapped up around the room. The pregnant woman next to me heaved herself out of the plastic chair and waddled to a seat at the furthest end of the room.

  Harry’s mouth was still working. “And with his condition, that could be the end of him, not that he gets any sympathy from the dragon at the desk. Diarrhea, that’s an awful way for a hero to leave this world.”

  Thanks a lot, Harry.

  Her mouth tightened, and she shot a look of sympathy my way. Oh, that Harry can pick them. She was exhausted looking, pushing fifty with dark-circles under her eyes, but she was still drop dead gorgeous in her rumbled purple scrubs.

  I glanced around at the motley crowd of sneezers, coughers, bleeders, ranters, moaners and sleepers, mouth-breathing and otherwise. Most of them were staring back at me with unconcealed disdain. Harry and the nurse had eyes only for each other. I tried not to roll mine.

  Harry added for good measure in a voice that sounded magnified by a megaphone, “You wonder what’s happened to our country when a vet can’t get a simple bedpan for hours.”

  He’d played the vet card first. No time to waste. You never know what will do the trick. But Harry never hits a wrong note.

  She hesitated and stopped before she could repeat the party line drilled into them by the administration. She bit her plump pink lower lip and gave me a long look. I clutched my bulging overnight bag in gratitude. She swivelled and delivered a luminous smile to Harry.

  “And you?” she said, with an eye on the wheelchair as well as the handsome ham sitting in it.

  “Me? Nothing wrong with me, my lovely. Just waiting for the new knee. No trampolines until then, I’m afraid. And you know how long the waiting lists are for that. At this rate, I guess I’ll just have to soldier on without poor Nev here.”

  Harry has a way with nurses, even when they’re thirty years younger. He’s like a nurse whisperer. They’re fascinated by him, calmed, ready to follow him anywhere. He gave her a wink—jaunty, wicked—a wink that said she was the best thing about this entire hospital, maybe the whole town, and he recognized that.

  I raised my hand weakly in a salute. I smiled bravely, considering I was supposed to be dying and that diarrhea bit was a low blow and there wasn’t a soul in this purgatory of a waiting room who hadn’t heard about it. They wouldn’t be likely to forget that either, which was good.

  Harry said, “He’s putting up a good front. You learn that in the war. He has some terrible heart condition. Don’t ask me what it’s called, lot of Latin mumbo jumbo. Valves snapping shut or something. On top of that tragic reality and this other intestinal situation, a long wait will kill him for sure. But we’ve all got to go sometime.”

  I like plump blonde nurses too, as my gal Pearl can tell you, and it was hard not to sympathize with this kind and beautiful creature. Was it her fault that half the town had arrived by ambulance on a Monday and stayed for the duration? Now she had fallen into Harry’s clutches.

  “I’m sorry,” she said sympathizing. “We are trying to deal with the influx as best we can. It’s...”

  “Overwhelming,” I said, bouncing back from death’s door.

  “And getting close to a shift change.”

  As if we didn’t know.

  Harry broke up the rapport. “Be that as it may, old Neville here’s sick and he’s tired, and this could be the end of him. He’s gotten so scrawny, I fear he’ll never make it out alive at this rate. What’s this country c
oming to, that’s what I want to know. There’s never a reporter around when you really need one.”

  Well, that gave her an idea as it was intended to.

  A small smile played around the nurse’s pink lips. “I’ll see if I can get him on a gurney. We’ll find an alcove behind a curtain somewhere. He won’t see the doctor one minute faster. We’re overwhelmed here, but it will be more...”

  “Dignified,” Harry offered, adjusting the old school tie he’d borrowed from some unsuspecting chap years ago.

  “That went well,” I said, as I hopped onto the bed. “I hope she’s not going to hang around after she goes off shift. In case she didn’t believe you about that trampoline possibility being out of the question.”

  Just as I dropped the duffle bag, the curtain was swept open with a crisp grasp, and our nurse saviour beamed at us. “You’ll be more comfortable here, Mr.—”

  Harry said, “Colonel. Neville was a Colonel, although you’d never know it now, the shape his poor old body’s in. Because of his condition, he has to have access to the bathroom quite often, it goes without saying. There should be some dignity.”

  You’d think.

  She smiled, rosy and sympathetic. “You’re in a good spot here. There’s a toilet right across the hall and another one right down the hall.”

  “If you are looking for us, we’ll be in one or the other. Can you let the staff know for us, there’s a love? I won’t let him hobble off on his own, even if he did have the strength,” Harry said. “Even so he’s a proud and private man, so I hope...”

  “Of course,” she said. “Privacy. Never easy to get in a hospital. I’m going off shift now, but I hope everything goes all right for the Colonel. And you too, with your knee. Take care.”

  “What can I say? Six months minimum. I’d head south if I could, but that takes...”

  I gave Harry a quick kick and hoped our lovely lady didn’t notice. I squeezed her hand in gratitude. Harry stopped blabbing and gave a courtly bow of his leonine head.