by Darren Hynes
There’s nothing desirable about her now, she thinks, rinsing the soap from her hands. Dark bags under tired eyes, and pasty skin that used to be golden. Sunken cheeks too.
She dries her hands and makes her way to the kitchen. There’s the sound of utensils banging against bowls and plates now, and scattering feet. Jeremy, she notices, is not in his bed when she opens his door. Nor is Lynette. “What are you two up to in there?” she says, quickening her pace.
She isn’t prepared for what she sees when she emerges from the hall: Kent’s at the stove, a spatula in his hand and his back to her; Jeremy’s beside him, standing on a stool and stirring what she thinks are eggs. The shuffling of feet, she realizes, is Lynette, busy setting the breakfast table.
“What’s all this?”
Lynette pulls out a chair. “Sit here, Mommy.”
“You’re not at work.”
Kent turns to her. “The ship will stay afloat a few minutes without me.”
“Mommy, sit,” Lynette says again.
She goes over and sits down.
“I’m making scrambled eggs,” Jeremy says.
“Wow.”
Lynette pours her some orange juice.
“Careful not to spill, baby,” Emily says.
“I won’t.”
“There’s fresh coffee,” Kent says.
“Juice is fine.”
Kent scoops a pancake out of the frying pan and lays it on top of an already piled plate. “I’m ready for the eggs.”
Jeremy lifts the bowl and pours.
“You want to make them?” Kent says.
“Can I?”
“Sure can. Mind not to burn them.”
“Okay.”
He comes over. Bends down and kisses her on the lips. “Good morning.” The bandages she’d put on his cut last night are still there.
“How is it?” she says.
“Needs stitches.”
“You don’t say.”
“I’ll stop at the clinic on my way to work.”
He pulls out a chair and sits beside her.
Lynette fills his glass too.
“Some waitress, you are,” Kent says.
“Daddy fell getting out of the truck.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Emily says. She sips her juice, glancing at him over the lip of the glass. They’re silent for a while after she puts it down. Finally, she says, “You seem happy.”
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“After last night.”
“The bruises’ll heal. So will their tempers.” He takes a sip of his own juice. “If not yesterday, the layoffs would have happened eventually. It’s the same all over the island. Why do you think so many are off in Alberta?” He turns to Jeremy. “How are those eggs?”
“Almost done.”
He looks back at her. “It was a losing battle. I did my best.” He hesitates for a moment, then says, “Thanks for taking care of me.”
She tries to remember the last time he’d thanked her. Or made her breakfast. Her whole life has been about pleasing him, she realizes. Dinner on the table when he walks in the door, his clothes ironed and folded, her parted legs whenever he’s in the mood. It’s all been for him. Everything. Son of a bitch. “You’re welcome.”
“They’re ready,” Jeremy says. He scoops them onto a plate and brings them over, a big smile on his face.
“Wow, honey, they look wonderful,” Emily says. “Sit down now, sweetie,” she says to Lynette who’s in the process of transforming the last of the napkins into a swan.
Everyone, with the exception of Emily, grabs at buttered toast, pancakes and bacon.
In the middle of plopping eggs on his plate, Kent says, “Aren’t you hungry?”
“I’m sorry. You all went to so much trouble.”
“What’s wrong?” Kent returns the spoon to the scrambled eggs.
“Bit of the flu, I think.”
He reaches out and feels her forehead. “A bit! You’re burning up.”
She leans back.
“No work for you today.”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s inventory, and Terry trusts no one else but me to do it.”
“Let him do it himself.”
“He’s got the store to run.”
“I’ll call him and tell him you’re sick – ”
“No – don’t. Look, I’ll get some Tylenol Cold and Flu and some Halls at work. If I’m still feeling bad after that, then I’ll come home.”
Kent stares at her for a minute. “More than I’d do for ten dollars an hour.”
She takes a sip of her juice. Puts the glass back down.
“It’s not like you need the money.”
She thinks of the old Adidas sock stuffed with bills underneath the floor panel in the basement. “It gets me out.”
Kent puts a piece of bacon in his mouth. Chews. “You can go out whenever you want.”
She looks down at her hands. “Perhaps I like making my own money.”
He laughs despite his mouth being full. “Get a paper route. Outside all you want then, and more money at the end of the week too.”
She raises her glass again. Gulps till it’s gone.
“More, Mom?” Lynette asks.
She shakes her head.
His stare stays on her for a long time before he goes back to his food. “You should try and eat something.”
Trapped within the sounds of clicking jaws, slurping, fork prongs scraping along plates, and Lynette’s soft humming accompanying her own chews, Emily manages to swallow a few bites of pancake and egg – her stomach clenching in protest. Jeremy is there to eat what she can’t, dumping what’s on her plate onto his own like a starved orphan.
“I’ll drive you this morning,” Kent says, after having ordered the children to their rooms to get ready for school.
“You should get to work. We can walk.”
“In the rain?”
“It does me good.”
“You want to catch pneumonia too?”
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m driving you and that’s that.”
2
EVEN WITH THE WIPERS ON TOP SPEED it’s still hard to see straight ahead. He’s got the heat on blast to stop the windshield from steaming up. She thinks she’ll suffocate.
The radio’s on low – Willie Nelson’s, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.”
Jeremy and Lynette are in the back seat, both staring out their windows.
“The town’s going to flood,” Jeremy says.
“Will it, Mommy?” Lynette asks.
Emily turns around to face her daughter. “No, sweetheart. It’ll stop before too long.”
“Bet we all drown,” Jeremy says.
“Mom!”
“Ignore him, baby, he’s just teasing.”
Kent reaches across the seat and takes Emily’s hand. “And you wanted to walk in this.”
He puts the truck in park just outside the main doors of the school. A few other vehicles are parked too, wipers and hazard lights going. Little children – raincoats of green and yellow and orange – hop out and start running, water splashing around their rubbers with each step. The girls are screaming, the boys laughing.
Emily makes to open her door, but Kent stops her by squeezing her hand. “I’ll take them,” he says.
She leans over the seat and kisses Lynette. Jeremy doesn’t want one, but Kent makes him. She reaches down and grabs the umbrella between her feet, handing it to her husband.
“On the count of three,” Kent says, popping the umbrella open.
“That’s bad luck,” Jeremy says.
Lynette’s worried now that they’ll all be struck by lightning.
On three, Kent flings open the door like it’s made of paper, and moves to open the back one. He swoops Lynette into his arms, then waits for Jeremy to hop out and join them. He sprints to the entrance, Jeremy running at his thigh, Lynette pressed
against his torso and jiggling like a rag doll. They’re getting soaked despite the umbrella over them. It almost seems to be raining from the ground up. They’re all laughing.
Just inside the glass doors, she watches him put Lynette down and kiss her, then offer Jeremy his hand to shake. Jeremy puts his whole shoulder into it.
How long before Lynette and Jeremy stop hating her for taking them away, she wonders? Or will they ever? She imagines them grown and not answering her phone calls. Holidays spent alone. Dusty pictures in an old photo album.
Mavis Callback, the principal, is standing there directing waterlogged children to their respective lockers and homerooms. Something Kent says makes her throw her head back in laughter and then rest a hand on his shoulder. He laughs too, covering the older woman’s hand with one of his own.
Still the charmer, Emily thinks. The boyish smile and mischievous wink. His way of standing right in front of you, his body slightly forward at the waist, his thumb and forefinger clasped around his chin, his eyes right on you as if nothing in the world were more important than your words. Who else but him to run the union? Who else but him to sway the people? Could turn a mother against her own son, he could. A father against his daughter. The ultimate actor, Kent is. Two selves. The one he presents to the world, and the one he is at home.
The sound of him opening the driver’s door brings her back. His trousers are soaked. “Jeremy might be right,” he says, throwing the umbrella in the back seat, “perhaps we will all drown.” He runs a hand through his damp hair. Turns the ignition and pumps the gas. “You’re sure you want to go into work?”
She nods.
He pulls away from the curb.
Will she forget the cuts and bruises over time, she wonders? The finger marks on her throat hidden beneath turtlenecks; the swollen eyes made less obvious with makeup and wide-rimmed sunglasses; the bald patches where he’d yanked out her hair covered by woolen toques and baseball hats; the limps caused by charley horses made less noticeable by sitting more, calling in sick for work? How about the ruptured kidney from when he’d thrown her down the basement stairs? “I tripped,” she’d said when they asked. “One of the children’s toys, I think. I said, I tripped. Thank God Kent was there.” The whole time him seated next to her hospital bed, his hands covering the one of hers she’d allowed outside the blanket.
* * *
THERE’S A REPRIEVE IN THE RAIN by the time Kent pulls the truck up to the main entrance of Hodder’s Grocery and Convenience. Won’t last long by the look of the sky though, she thinks.
Terry’s squirting Windex on the inside of the door.
Kent presses the horn, letting it go on longer than necessary.
“Stop,” Emily says.
Terry looks up and waves, then goes back to spraying the glass.
“Why does he make you come in so early? You don’t open till nine.”
She doesn’t answer.
Kent looks at his watch, then back through the windshield at Terry. “That’s another forty minutes.”
She feels a tightening in her chest. “There’s stuff to be done.”
“Like washing the door with Windex just to have customers put their grubby fingers all over it the minute he opens?”
She says nothing.
Kent shakes his head. “Should have stayed in Corner Brook where he belongs.”
She reaches for the handle of the door. Pushes it open.
“Hey.” He’s pointing to his lips.
“I’m sick.”
“I don’t care.”
She moves over and presses her mouth to his. He touches the tip of her tongue with his own.
After they pull apart, he says, “If you start to feel worse, call me and I’ll pick you up.”
“I will.”
“Wish me luck,” he says.
“Why?”
“Because we’re negotiating a severance package with those St. John’s bastards today.”
“Okay then, good luck.”
She’s halfway out the door when he says, “Love you.”
“You too,” she says.
3
TERRY’S STANDING IN FRONT OF HER, holding the Windex bottle against his chest, his forefinger on the spray trigger. A roll of paper towels in his other hand. “Odd to see him drop you off.”
“The rain,” she says, coming closer. She holds out her hand for the Windex, “Let me – ”
“No.” He raises the bottle over his head though she’s nearly as tall as he is. “I’ll do it.”
She doesn’t bother reaching for it.
Silence then, both of them just standing there.
The rain starts again, pattering against the roof, against the windows.
He’s done something different with his hair this morning, she thinks. Given it the ‘messy’ look.
Finally, she says, “I hope the wind doesn’t change.”
“What?”
“Or else you’ll end up that way.”
He lowers his hand. Smiles. “The silly stuff that youngsters say.”
In order to clear a path to the cash register, she has to step around him. Once there, she takes off her raincoat and stuffs it underneath. “
“There’s coffee,” Terry says from his spot in front of the door.
“Maybe later.”
“Okay.” He turns around and starts spraying the windows next to the entrance.
She leaves the till and makes her way to the back of the store where the small supply of over-the-counter medication is kept on display: a few bottles of Pepto Bismol, some Vicks Vapour Rub, five or six containers of Absorbine Junior, and one small box of Shield Condoms, caramel flavoured. There’s no Tylenol Extra Strength, so she settles for regular. She hates cherry-flavoured Halls, but that’s all there is. She takes two packs.
Terry’s right behind her when she turns around.
“Oh,” she says, “you scared me.” She thinks that the word in the dictionary would read: Scared: See Emily.
“I just wanted to give you this.” He hands her the inventory list. Looks down at the medicine in her hands. “Sick?”
“Touch of the flu, I think.”
He takes a half step towards her. “Perhaps you ought to lie down. There’s that fold-out in my office.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
She nods. “Let me just pay for this and then I’ll get started.”
“It’s on the house – ”
“Terry – ”
“You’re doing the inventory, it’s the least I can do.”
She notices flecks of dried blood on his neck from where he’d shaved. He’s put on too much aftershave, its sharpness makes it hard to breathe. To escape it, she makes to go. “I’ll start downstairs.”
“Wait.”
She stops.
“You’ll need some water to wash down those pills.”
She watches him walk away – too much weight planted on the outsides of his feet, as if chaffed inner thighs prevent him from keeping his legs together, his hands plunged into trouser pockets where they can fiddle with loose change, his head tilted slightly to the right, as if in a perpetual state of trying to make sense of things. Nothing at all like her husband’s walk, she knows: the lifted chin, expanded chest, confident arms hanging lazily at his sides, and the huge amount of space he covers with each step.
She touches her forehead, feeling the heat in her fingers, thinking that people reveal so much about themselves just by sauntering up the road or down to the store. Not hard, for instance, to notice Terry’s indecisiveness. Or Kent’s boldness. What does she give away, she wonders? Is fear there every time her heels strike the pavement? Worry, in her bowed head? Regret, in the way her eyes stay on the space in front of her feet?
In her mind’s eye, she sees Kent’s other walk. Most people just have the one, but not him. This one is slower, deliberate, like a cat about to pounce. A bend in each elbow and the furrowed brows and the chin pointed downward.
>
“Emily?”
She looks up. Terry’s standing in front of her. “Oh.”
He’s holding out a bottle of Evian. “You okay?”
She nods, embarrassed that she missed hearing his footsteps.
He hands the water over. “Best to keep hydrated if you’re sick.”
As she makes her way through the ‘Employee Only’ door, she hears him say, “
“Take lots of breaks.” And, “There’s a sweater on the chair in my office if you find it chilly.”
She passes through the cluttered back room, narrowly avoids banging her shin against a pail of dirty water sitting in the middle of the floor. Before continuing on, she puts her Evian on the floor between her feet and then searches her pocket for one of the packages of Halls. Rips it open and pops one into her mouth. It tastes like cough syrup. She lets the lozenge slip beneath her tongue before picking up her water and starting down the stairs.
* * *
SHE PICKS UP THE NEARLY FILLED-OUT INVENTORY LIST, bringing it close to her face. Notices that the five she’d marked in the box across from the Carnation Milk looks more like a squiggle. The seven, across from the Chef Boyardee, is even worse, as if a Parkinson’s sufferer wrote it. There are other numbers she can’t make out at all. Is that a nine beside the Kraft Dinner, or a four?
Putting the list aside, she clasps her hands together in order to stop them from trembling. Tries to slow her breathing. Shoots a look towards the stairs, half expecting to see Kent walking down them.
She’s just swallowed the last of her first package of Halls, her throat numb now instead of sore. The three Tylenol she took earlier are making her feel light-headed, like she’s floating a few inches off the floor. The coolness of the basement, she thinks, is keeping her fever in check.
Again her eyes go to the stairs – “Stop it,” she says to herself. “Just stop it.”
She stands up, starts walking towards Terry’s office. He’s left his door wide open, as usual. It’s dark inside, the air a mixture of burnt coffee and black licorice. Near his desk, she fumbles about for the lamp switch. At last she finds it. The light casts an eerie glow against the far wall.
