by Dawn Dumont
“Should I call him?”
“He broke up with you. He should call you.”
“He’s never going to call me. If we get back together it’s going to be all on me. It’s always on me . . . ”
Julie walked through the bar. The bartender was turning off the lights.
“What am I going to do? I don’t think I can do this again.”
Julie looked through the hotel doors. Nobody on the streets. She liked that.
I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m tired.
“Are you still there?”
“Still here.” Julie opened the door, threw her hood up and walked into the rain.
The Aunts
THEY WERE IN THE front yard when she showed up. One was still in the driver’s seat, the other was carrying in groceries, plastic bags making dents in her fingers. She walked up the incline and put her bag down before saying hi. One said hi, the other watched her from dark eyes and Julie knew that she hadn’t been forgiven. Not after all these years. She walked in without invitation and sat on the couch that was hard and worn. They had a big screen TV. Even poor people found a way, it seemed. To the left of it was a fake fireplace. On the mantel was a meagre collection of photos. She recognized those eyes straight off and blinked.
They told her she had to buy her own food and pay them some rent, “We aren’t here to help out freeloaders.” They added. “You behave yourself.”
The room wasn’t a room; it was a pantry. There was a big bag of potatoes in the corner and neither of them offered to move them. She put down a sleeping bag and her backpack next to it. The room was so small that she couldn’t sleep with her legs stretched out; she curled them up beneath her. Before she went to bed, she took three Advils and hoped this would be the last time.
When she woke up, one of them gave her the name of a construction company that was hiring. Julie poured herself a cup of coffee and drank it black. The construction company was nearly outside of town but a young guy saw her walking by the side of the road and gave her a ride. He was about seventeen with red hair. They didn’t say anything to each other, other than, “Where to” and “Thanks.” She’d never had that ability to strike up conversations and there was something about her that discouraged people from talking to her.
She found the foreman quickly enough. One of the crew pointed to a guy standing near a nice truck, “That’s Nick.”
Nick was a Native guy about thirty-five with thick unruly hair that was past due for a haircut. He didn’t waste time. “Our flag-girl Chelsea left to go back to school. You ever done that?”
Julie shook her head.
He showed her a sign with “stop” written on one side and “slow” on the other. “I think you can figure it out,” he said.
“I fucking hope so,” Julie grinned.
He handed it to her and it swayed backwards in her hand. She straightened it. “After a while it gets heavy.”
She got dropped off about half a kilometer from the worksite. There were big trucks coming in and out all day and at the end of it, Julie had a cough from the dust. It also got cold out there even though summer hadn’t kicked it yet. She was shivering when Nick stopped by. “We’re done for the day.” Julie nodded and looked around her.
“You need a ride home?”
Julie jumped into the truck. She blew on her hands.
“It gets cold out there. Especially since you’re just standing there. Chelsea used to wear a lot of layers.”
“Okay.”
He had a picture of two laughing kids on the dash.
“Cute boys.”
When he smiled, his eyes crinkled at the sides and a dimple appeared. “They’re wild as hell.”
They rode in silence for a few blocks before he asked, “You got kids?”
“No.”
She had him drop her off a few blocks from her aunts’ place. Before she got out he said: “I can give you a ride home most days. But only after most of the guys have left, otherwise they’ll talk.”
Julie nodded, her eye on the gold band on his finger.
Julie told her aunts that she had a job. One of them asked for money but she explained that she wouldn’t be paid for at least a week. She sat on the edge of the couch while they watched, “Wheel of Fortune.” After they went to bed, she ate two slices of bread with nothing on it.
One time, she and Taz went to a fancy steak place. A second after their food arrived, they got into a fight because Taz said she was flirting with the waiter. The fight got so bad that they actually walked out without eating a bite of their food. Julie shook her head, they sure had been fools.
Julie doubled up on jeans and socks the next morning. She put two sweaters under her jean jacket. She caught the bus as close to the site as possible and then walked the last bit. When she picked up her sign, a few of the guys introduced themselves. They were grizzled veterans, their bodies slim and strong from a lifetime of lifting and carrying. They offered her some coffee and she gratefully accepted. She drank it quickly and then walked out to her road.
There was less traffic and the day passed slowly. Julie sang every country song she remembered under her breath and thought about what the writer must have been thinking of when they wrote it. She liked Dolly Parton who she thought was one of the smartest women ever born. Towards the end of the afternoon, the sun grew faint and it got cold. Julie did deep knee bends and squats and then finally push-ups to keep warm.
Nick picked her up around the same time. He told her about how one of the guys hurt his back because he tried to lift some wood by himself. “It causes a chain reaction,” he told her. “I’ll have two more hurt by the end of the week. Damn guys are superstitious as hell.”
“I’ll watch myself,” Julie replied.
That night she went for a walk after her aunts had settled themselves down in front of the TV. “Don’t talk to anyone,” one of them said.
Julie closed the door behind her. She walked past a lot of homes like her aunts’: televisions blaring, curtains closed.
There was a house with a group of young guys sitting on the steps. Two of them were holding skateboards, which seemed weird this far up north. They called out to her but she ignored them.
A few streets away, she found the library. She signed out a few books and then lingered near the magazines. She noticed a few native women walking towards a door and before she left she glanced inside. They were sitting around a large table, a collection of beads and cloth in the centre of it.
At work Julie had to work closer to the crew. A few of them walked out to where she stood to shoot the shit. Talk turned to the foreman. They were surprised at how well he was holding up. His wife was dying pretty fast from some kind of woman’s cancer. “How long does she have?” Julie asked.
The general consensus was that she would be gone before Christmas. “Christ,” one of them said and spit into the ground. “And him with two little kids. Can you imagine?”
Julie saw him across the field, deep in conversation with one of the sub-contractors. He said they always gave him trouble, always wanting more for a job than they asked for.
One of the crew lingered near her longer than the others. He was the youngest, just shy of thirty. He mentioned that there was a band playing at the bar. “Heard they were pretty good . . . ” Julie declined gently.
On payday, Julie handed her aunts the money they’d asked for. Then she bought a warmer jacket, a pair of long-johns and some gloves. She also bought some groceries, which she put in a small corner of the fridge. She heard the aunts talking in the living room about how she’d be getting wild now because she had money. She didn’t bother to tell them that she’d already spent all her money. Instead she crawled onto the mattress in her tiny room with a bag of chips and book and fell asleep before either was done.
She went back to the library on her day off. When she walked past the resource room, she saw that it was empty. She read the schedule on the wall: “Native Crafts Night” was every Thursday at eight.
Kids were welcome.
Nick wasn’t at work the next day. A few guys said that meant his wife probably died. But he was back next morning, sure of himself as always. At the end of the day, he told Julie that she should get herself a bus pass and she nodded.
“If you paid me more, I could buy a car,” she said with a smile.
“I’m sure if you asked one of those old guys, they’d buy you one,” he joked back.
“It wouldn’t matter, I don’t know how to drive.”
He nodded. “I thought you seemed like that type.”
“What type?”
“Kind of spoiled.”
Julie laughed. “I wish.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Every woman should be.”
Julie had to breathe through a tightness in her chest.
That night she dreamed of Nellie. They were climbing some hill and Nellie kept telling her that something good was at the top. But every time Julie took a step, it crumbled beneath her.
Her aunts asked her where she was going one night. “To the library,” she replied.
“Yeah, right.”
Julie almost didn’t go into the room. It was full when she got there and the talk was loud. It was probably the laughing that finally grabbed her.
The room went quiet when she opened the door. Then an older woman with long grey braids took control. “Hello, I’m Anita, you here for crafts?”
“Yeah.”
Anita placed some hide, beads and a needle in front of her. She assumed that Julie didn’t know what she was doing. She was right.
The conversation started to pick up after Julie got settled in. They were talking about some guy at the bar who always used the same line, “I hear Native women are the best kissers.”
Apparently a couple of the women had fallen for it. But probably not anymore.
The mood was broken when a woman with thin hair that curled around her ears explained in halting words that her ex had refused to return the kids the week before. “He’s all the way in Hobbema. He knows I don’t have enough money to go get them.” She was thinking of calling the cops but was afraid of social services stepping in. There was a lot of head nodding at this.
That had never been a worry of Julie’s. Taz could be mean but he knew kids belonged with their mother. Whenever someone brought a baby around them, Taz would stare at the tiny round faces like they were aliens.
Julie stabbed the needle through the hide and found her finger on the other side. It hurt like hell but she didn’t make a sound and nobody noticed.
Anita told the woman that she’d go down to the station with her. “Nothing else you can do. Otherwise you’re stuck waiting for him to stop being a cocksucker.”
The woman nodded but Julie could see she wasn’t ready to get the police involved.
When it was time to go, Julie had beaded a small circle from some shiny yellow beads.
The days turned cold. From morning to afternoon, Julie shivered, no matter how much she breathed into her hands or stamped her feet or did squats, she was cold. At night she coughed herself to sleep, the cold having found its way into her lungs. Around the site, guys were talking about their plans for the winter. One guy was heading up north to do some hunting, another guy was heading down to his place in Arizona. Julie could see what a luxury a good job was and wished she’d maybe thought about that sooner.
She was walking to the bus stop one night when Nick pulled up. She got in. Country music, Waylon Jennings, was blaring and he turned it down.
“Lucille,” Julie said.
“Yeah.”
“She was a real bitch.”
Nick laughed. “I’m sure she had her reasons.”
The lyrics danced through the vehicle, and Julie thought about that sad man asking his wife to come home.
“She probably went home,” Julie said.
“She needed a break,” he replied. “Kids are hard.”
Julie looked out the window and saw her reflection nodding.
She reached for the heat at the same time as him and their hands met there. His hand strong and calloused on top of hers. Her breath got took. And then he pulled away.
“We’re shutting down soon.”
“I heard.”
“I know the casino down the road is hiring. Dealers, waitresses, everything.”
“Thanks.”
Julie was distracted so she forgot to tell him to stop a few streets away. Instead he parked right in front and she could feel those eyes blazing through the drapes.
She left the truck with one last glance at those little boys.
By the time she got inside, the battle had already begun. They were both on their feet.
“That’s a married man!”
“Knew she’d be at it in no time!”
“How long has this been going on?”
The larger aunt planted herself in front of Julie. She pushed her with big meaty arms and Julie swayed backwards. But she was pretty solid herself. She pushed back; her aunt surprised, stumbled and fell onto the couch. Julie kept walking.
“You get the fuck out!”
Julie packed her stuff quickly. It didn’t fit in her backpack and so she had to walk into the kitchen to grab a garbage bag. They kept yelling but Julie had heard most of it before.
She came out of the pantry with both bags behind her.
“Once a slut, always a slut!” Her aunt pushed her again. Julie ignored it and kept walking.
When she was little, they told her that it was her fault that her mom went away. Because Julie was too hard to take care of and her mom got tired. Julie knew now that was grief talking.
She stopped in the living room and grabbed the picture off the mantle. They both attacked her then. But Julie wouldn’t let go. She bit a hand that went in front of her face, she kicked at a leg with varicose veins sticking out of it and heard a sharp cry. The arms dropped away and Julie was suddenly out the door.
It was cold but her jacket was warm.
The Meeting is Cancelled
May 2004
IT CAME AS A text message as she sat at the airport. Her feet rested on her carry-on bag, her computer was on her lap. She was checking her online dating profile, “HotTamale11” when the message came through.
“Meeting is cancelled.”
“I’m already at the airport” she texted back.
“Have a good trip?”
Lindsey, her assistant, was a twenty-seven-year-old redhead, married with three freckled children and had a laugh that made you want to be friends with her. If their roles were reversed, Lindsey would have laughed her way all the way to Toronto and dared the government to fire her when she got back.
As if. There was no way Nellie was going to Toronto by herself. If the message had come an hour later while she was on the plane then yes, she’d go set up meetings for herself and make herself busy. She’d head down to the hotel bar and have a drink every night and feel like a baller having twenty-dollar martinis until she picked up a dude. Usually only cost her about sixty.
But they sent the text in time and she stupidly replied to it. And now, they would cancel the trip, get the credit for the ticket (because they had a huge account and could pull shit like that). Reschedule the meeting and Nellie would go another time.
She got up, drained her coffee and hefted her computer bag over her shoulder. She pulled her suitcase behind her, admiring it as she did every time. It went forward, backwards, and spun in place. It could dance the merengue if she wanted it to.
“Nellie? Nellie!”
The voice came from the Chili’s to her right.
She pulled her suitcase to the fence surrounding the Chili’s as if their patrons needed protection from the hoi polloi. She glanced inside and saw annoyed people staring out at her. Then she saw him, his smile lighting up the darkness.
“Taz? What are you doing here?”
“Having breakfast. Where you coming from?”
“I had a meeting in Toronto.”
“It went fine.” Nellie was too tired to explain everything and she was shouting over the heads of hungover-looking business people.
“Keep me company.”
“I should get back to work.”
“C’mon on, Loser. How often do we see each other? Like once every four years?”
Nellie flicked her wrist to the right and her suitcase obeyed.
She sat down across from him at a skinny booth. Why was everything in airports so small and cheap and plastic?
“Where you working these days?”
“Province. Ministry of Labour.”
“What the fuck for? ”
“I do good work.”
“You do but the rest of them are a bunch of fucking assholes.”
Nellie silently agreed. “Where are you working?”
“Indian Affairs.”
“Oh for fuck’s sakes, that’s a thousand times worse.”
“Land claims. I’m a hired gun. I come in and bury the Natives in paperwork.”
“Gross.”
“Pays well.”
“Enjoy that blood money.”
Taz lifted his drink and sucked it back. Nellie caught a whiff of it as he put it down.
“Jesus, Taz it’s 10:00 AM.”
“It’s happy hour somewhere in the world. Let’s fly there.”
She had the air miles to do it. She had a suitcase full of freshly laundered, neatly folded business casual outfits. And one very sedate suit. And a little black dress that had never been worn, no matter how many times she packed it.
“I have to work tomorrow. And today, actually.”
“Yeah, me too.” He waved the waitress over.
The waitress was a slim blonde who made Nellie immediately regret everything she’d eaten in the last ten years.
Blondie smiled sweetly at Taz (far sweeter than Taz deserved, Nellie thought. But she’d always thought waitresses had a special kind of patience for bullshit).
“Deux. Of whatever this was.”
She giggled, “Whiskey.”
