Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  The counter was piled with Styrofoam trays and foil tins. Men walked in, stamping snow off their boots, and left again with armfuls of paper packages and pizza boxes. The diner was busier with deliveries than with the few clients at the tables. A bald man sagged on his wall bench, sipping coffee from a thick china mug. A middle-aged woman with blue-caked eyelids hadn’t taken off her coat with its fur collar, which she patted now and then as she devoured a large poutine.

  The pea soup wasn’t as thick as Maman’s, but it warmed Rose. She was happy to be sitting with Leo in a diner where anyone who wanted could see them.

  “Is Kenny still going up to your cabin in this snow?”

  “All the time.”

  “He’s one tough guy. You wouldn’t catch me hiking into any woods with snow and bears all around.”

  Rose shook her head. “I’ve told you before. It’s not that far north. There aren’t any bears. And snow doesn’t matter. The cabin’s got a door and a wood stove.” Leo had been far more exposed to the elements sleeping in his open-air tower.

  For the fourth or fifth time he sprinkled more black pepper on his soup. “Kenny’s the friend, isn’t he? That day I met you when you were sitting by the canal. You said you thought you’d lost a friend. You didn’t even want to talk to me, you were so upset.”

  She didn’t look up from her bowl. “Everything’s fine now.”

  “He seems like an easygoing guy. I can’t figure out what happened to make you feel so bad.”

  “It was nothing he did.” She crumbled a package of crackers into her soup, dunked the pieces with her spoon. She was too embarrassed to tell Leo what had happened that night in the cabin. Maybe one day she would, but not now, over soup in a diner.

  The woman with the fur collar had finished her poutine in record time and lifted her hand to flag the waitress, her clasp purse already open to pay.

  “He didn’t make a pass at you.” Leo scraped the last of his soup from the bowl.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t think he’s interested in girls.”

  “How do you know?”

  Leo shrugged.

  Rose considered what she knew of Kenny. How happy he always sounded about seeing Jerome. And did Jerome … like Kenny, too? There was a new thought.

  Leo had finished his soup and sat back, clasping his hands behind his head. From where she sat, she could see the large clock over the cash. She would have to leave for the hospital soon. She wanted to talk to Leo about Yushi but felt nervous about how he would respond and what that would mean for them. She watched his face. “Yushi’s thinking of moving out.”

  He pulled his hands from behind his head and set his elbows on the table. “What happens to you?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say all the options Maddy had rattled off.

  “Can you live there alone?”

  “It’s too big. I can’t afford it.” And she didn’t want to live alone.

  He stared before him, thinking. Then crept his hand across the table to touch hers. “You can move out, too.”

  Did he mean move to somewhere smaller? Or that they could move in together? She heard the phone ringing and the man at the cash calling orders. Two men with baseball caps over shaved, grizzled heads joked with the waitress.

  Leo’s fingertips stroked the back of her hand. “I can’t …”

  Sadness sifted through her as she felt him back away from what she’d hoped — all the while she’d known he didn’t want to live closed up in a box of walls. Still, she’d hoped.

  “I can’t,” he began again, “live up in the city where you do. But what if you moved down here to St-Henri or the Pointe?”

  The waitress suddenly loomed at their table. “Vous avez finis?” She snatched their bowls, not waiting for an answer. “Café?”

  Leo shook his head so she would leave.

  Rose needed to be sure she understood. “You mean, rent a place by myself or get a place together?”

  “Well …” Leo looked at her. “How about we try together?” He said the word carefully, as if trying out the sound. “But somewhere small, okay? Nothing fancy. I can pay half the rent, but I can’t afford much.”

  Rose’s heart beat with such excitement she could feel it in her neck.

  He grasped her fingers more tightly. “I’ll be with you, but I don’t want anyone to find me. Will you sign the lease?”

  She nodded.

  Leo’s face was still sober. “And you know, when the weather’s nice again, I might want to go sleep —” He lifted his chin in the direction of the canal.

  Rose remembered the lovely stir of cool wind in the summer, so high up with the city below.

  Leo cupped his hand over hers. “You can come, too.”

  Fara

  “Hey, Fara.” Valerie wheeled a chair out of Fara’s path as she walked to her desk. Zeery stroked her arm as she passed. “You look pale.” Claudette’s voice squeaked even higher with concern.

  “I’m okay,” Fara assured them.

  “Was it strep?”

  Fara shook her head. She’d only had a sore throat and flu, but she’d told the doctor about the shock of the break-in and he’d given her a week off work.

  Everyone was solicitous, but her desk was the usual tornado wreckage of paper and the phone was ringing. With a grimace she answered. “Twelve surgery.” An unidentified person wanted to borrow an IV pump. “Who’s calling?” she asked. Lending equipment was an exclusively you-scratch-my-back arrangement. Departments that never lent anything didn’t get anything. Not on her watch.

  Nahi tapped his finger on the counter as he walked passed. “You tell me if you need help today.”

  The people at work only knew she’d been sick. She hadn’t even told Zeery about the break-in. She would have had to explain about Ben, the suicide in the house, maybe even her own family suicide. It would all sound crazy.

  She and Frédéric had decided not to report Ben to the police. She couldn’t help it, she felt for him — another casualty of a dysfunctional family gone bust. She remembered how he’d leaped off the deck and bolted. He’d had a fright, too. She was pretty sure he wasn’t going to come back. Frédéric wasn’t as positive, but for lack of concrete proof that it was Ben, he finally agreed. Eric had already said that next spring he would replace their weathered plank fence with a proper one. It would be another practical and handsome Eric accomplishment, though Frédéric would have to spend a couple of days playing lackey.

  The phone rang again. “Wait,” she said when she heard Lynn’s voice. She had to root through requisitions, manila folders, and consultations to find her agenda. “Okay, tell me now.” She wrote 22B Wanderbeer 13:00 Dialysis on today’s date.

  On the other side of the counter, a man said, “Madame!”

  So early in the morning and already the greater public surged before her. “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for a Greek.”

  “Does this Greek have a name?”

  “A lady.”

  “I need a name.” Fara had poked her finger into a rubber tip to begin the triage of paper on her desk.

  “A Greek,” he insisted. “A lady.”

  She didn’t begrudge the Greek lady a visit, but if he didn’t know her name, should he even be visiting her? She wasn’t letting him wander down the hallway into rooms to look at patients in their beds. “Can you tell me what street she lives on? Or how old she is?”

  “Old,” he barked.

  People should stay home if it was so hard for them to be civil.

  Fara answered the phone. “Okay.” She scratched Guang’s name on her notepad to remind herself to tell Brie there was a sick call for nights.

  “Madame!” The man clenched an impatient fist on the counter.

  “Listen.” Fara made a fist with her voice. “I can’t help yo
u if you don’t know this lady’s name, her age, or her address.”

  “A Greek,” he insisted.

  A Radiology porter dangled an arm across the counter to show her a slip of paper. In her test book she jotted 40A Johnston CT chest. The porter had overheard the man badgering her. He spoke to him in Greek and told Fara, “He’s looking for a Greek lady.”

  Fara smirked. “We’ve been through this. He doesn’t know her name.”

  “Come on. How many Greek patients you got?”

  “We don’t identify patients by ethnicity. We use their names. Why is he visiting someone whose name he doesn’t know?”

  “She’s the wife of a guy he plays cards with.”

  “You know he can’t just go looking in rooms.”

  The porter pushed away from the counter and motioned with his head for the man to follow him back to the elevator.

  Fara didn’t trust the porter but didn’t have the time to watch him. The intercom was buzzing. Claudette needed someone to bring her a Toomey syringe in an isolation room. Fara twisted off her chair. It was easier to get it herself than find an orderly or a nurse who wasn’t busy. In the hallway she walked past a huddle of surgical residents standing outside a patient’s room discussing her liver mets. If the patient or anyone in the room — or in the hallway — didn’t already know she had cancer, they knew it now. Choice of treatment, prognosis, chance of recovery. In a hospital, privacy was a concept thinner than the curtains between the beds.

  Back in the nursing station Fara saw that the Radiology porter had stepped behind the counter and was scanning the names on the patient list. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  He waved his slip of paper. “I forgot the room number you told me.”

  “The room number is stamped on your slip — the way it always is.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He walked away.

  Fara knew he’d taken note of the rooms with Greek names. She wanted to follow him — or maybe just report him to his supervisor for still hanging around when he was supposed to be transporting patients to CT — but she had to find Brie to tell her there was a sick call, her phone was ringing, and a new patient, looking wary and lost, stood before her desk with a package from Admitting.

  A week away from work and nothing had changed. Same old, same old. Maybe she and Frédéric should start a pastry business. Or something.

  Anouk grabbed the remote for the TV and turned up the volume. She sat with her knees tucked up against Ben’s legs. They were watching a comedy show that he didn’t find all that funny, but she sniggered and looked at him with a bright face, so he pretended to laugh.

  The man on TV brayed, “Kid says, But Mommy, why do you always wet the bed?”

  Yeah, Ben nodded at Anouk. Good joke. Though what was the joke in laughing at what a kid couldn’t understand? He sometimes thought that was his problem. He could remember too well what it was like being a kid.

  He’d been damn lucky about what had happened at the house — that the new people hadn’t called the police. The hippie lady had probably figured out it was him, but the more time went by, the more he felt safe. The police weren’t interested in stories that were already a week old. This was the Pointe, too. Nobody came around doing DNA testing. He’d already ditched the key to the back gate.

  “Don’t you want to go to one of these shows?” Anouk leaned against him. “We could get tickets. It would be fun.”

  “Maybe.” He wondered how much they would cost.

  He shifted on the sofa, which he had to admit was comfortable, if monstrous in their small apartment. He’d been shocked when he’d walked in last week and seen the sofa with its overstuffed cushions crammed against the wall. He’d even taken a step back to check the number on the door. Surprise! Anouk cried. Isn’t it perfect?

  She still hadn’t told him how much it cost. As she said, they were married now. Married people should have a proper sofa. Next, if he expected her to keep the place clean, she wanted a vacuum cleaner.

  He liked that she was so serious about doing the married part right. He could always do a few overtime shifts to pay for the extras.

  Dusk was grey with flakes drifting down lazily. Before Fara even saw the rink that had been flooded in the park, she heard the thwack of hockey sticks, the skitter and crack of pucks against boards. She had her scarf wound up to her cheeks, her cloche hat pulled low, but the kids on skates gyrated and wheeled with their jackets open. The scrape of their blades sliced the cold air.

  She strode past the rink, under the railway overpass, around the corner. Up ahead, against the sky, the R that was missing from the Five Roses sign last week — FIVE OSES — had been replaced. The powers-that-be shone on the Pointe again. She smirked, not sure if she meant whoever had fixed the sign or the sign itself.

  By the parked taxis on Wellington, two hookers in tight boots and leather jackets paced and circled. A taxi driver got a call, knocked hard on his window, and the closest one flung her cigarette to the ground and stepped in. He eased out from the curb and drove off. Taxis did delivery service? Huh.

  The kitchen chair outside the dépanneur had disappeared. The man who usually sat there had gotten himself a second-hand parka several sizes too large for his bony frame. The red toque on his head wobbled like a garnish as he patrolled the sidewalk, the tilt of his spine slanting the enormous bell of his parka.

  In front of Fara’s house, a woman in a coat stretched over her broad behind rummaged in the back of a car. She tugged out a box and two bags she struggled to carry all at once. Fara recognized Maddy and called, “Wait! I’ll help you.”

  “Thanks.” Maddy’s cheeks were red, her curls bristling out from under her hat, which was knocked askew. She handed Fara the bags and shoved the car door closed with her hip.

  “You bought a car.”

  “Leased it. That’s what my brother said to do. Mr. Business Head.” She propped her box on the steps as she dug in her coat pocket for her keys. “Come see what we did in the kitchen.”

  For the last few weeks there had been trucks and vans parked outside Maddy’s house. Construction M&M, Bérubé Électrique, Global Sinks.

  Fara followed Maddy through what had been the living room but was now a large space lined with steel counters and shelves. In the kitchen the wood cupboards had been ripped out to make way for a large white refrigerator with double doors, a six-burner gas stove, counters topped with more steel shelves. Plastic binders ranged along the counter like a card trick.

  Maddy spread her arms. “We’ve got fifteen restaurants committed and another three who want a look-see. They’re sampling a couple of cakes to start, but you just wait. Quality desserts made with butter, free-range eggs, Dutch chocolate, and local fruit? This is going to take off.”

  “But how did you —” Fara stopped. The question was indiscreet.

  “How did I what?” Maddy grinned. “Get the idea? I’m a genius.”

  “This must have cost a lot.”

  “My brother said to get a line of credit. Would you believe it? I bought this house for twenty thousand and it’s now evaluated at three hundred.” Maddy ogled the room in disbelief. “It’s still the same house. It makes no sense to me — but I don’t care. I can spend a hundred thousand and still come out ahead.” She poured filtered water from a jug into the kettle. “Staying for tea?”

  Fara draped her coat over the back of a stool pushed up near the counter. “Are you going to bake too — or just your friend?”

  “Only if she wants me to make Polish poppyseed roll, which I doubt. She’s the whiz with the cakes. I’m the cheerleader.”

  “You make a good cheerleader. You’ve got pom-poms in your voice.”

  Maddy held up a box of Earl Grey. “This okay?”

  Fara nodded.

  Maddy dropped two bags into a teapot and set mugs on the counter. “I needed a change. It’s
been years I’ve been working at the market. Sometimes I thought I’d die there. One day I’d be bagging a baguette and I’d keel over on the breads — those holy loaves we weren’t supposed to touch with anything but gloves on.”

  She raked a hand through her hair. “This big old house, too. It needed a makeover. It was getting tired of me waiting for that crazy woman with the braid to come back.”

  Fara couldn’t recall Maddy ever telling her about a crazy woman with a braid. “Is that one of the neighbours?”

  “She was living in this house when I got here — in seventy-eight. Just after I had my baby.”

  Fara, who’d been tucking a tissue away, stopped with her fingers still in her pocket. “I didn’t know you had a baby.”

  “Like you said with your sister, it’s a complicated story. I don’t usually tell people.”

  Fara started to form a question, but she saw how briskly Maddy grabbed milk from the refrigerator and opened the drawer for spoons. Better to wait and let Maddy speak at her own speed.

  “No one knew where she came from, the woman with the braid. She just showed up one day.” Maddy stopped and stared at the teapot. “I don’t usually tell people,” she repeated. “It’s pretty awful.” She paused. “She kidnapped my baby.”

  “How …?”

  “How? It was easy. We were stoned, asleep, drugged, wacko, you name it. And I was so stupid! I didn’t even get that a stolen baby was more important than hiding a couple of bags of pot. That’s how clueless I was. We didn’t even call the police.”

  Fara remembered being a teenager — how all-knowing she thought she was, how naive in retrospect. Big with her own stupidity.

  “Yeah … I was only sixteen, and at first I thought it was for the best I didn’t have a baby anymore. I had no idea what to do with her. My parents didn’t help. They more or less told me to get lost, go find the father, whatever.”

  “The father didn’t —”

  “Forget the father. He didn’t even know.” She made a shoving-away gesture with her arm. “I didn’t know until my teacher saw I had a big belly. Can you believe being so ignorant?”