A Handful of Time

by Kit Pearson

  After she’d put the stuffed chicken into the oven, Rosemary woke up. Patricia fed her while she told Kelly how to make the pudding. “… And now just stir until it thickens,” she finished.

  “How do you know all this?” asked her cousin. “Why didn’t you tell us you could cook?”

  “My … father taught me. I did try to tell you once.” That time in the canoe seemed ages ago.

  “He’s a great teacher. You’re as good as Mum!”

  Patricia glowed. She lifted Rosemary to her shoulder and burped her, feeling as peaceful as the baby.

  A FEW HOURS LATER the two aunts walked into the kitchen supporting Bruce between them. His foot was bandaged neatly and his T-shirt was smeared with ice cream.

  Christie rushed at Aunt Karen. “Everything’s fine,” she laughed.

  “Bruce had to have a few stitches, but we think he’ll live,” said Aunt Ginnie, taking the baby in her arms. “What’s that fantastic smell? Karen, look what they’ve done!”

  “Come and sit down, please,” said Maggie gravely. She led them to their places, each one marked with a place card she’d decorated. Bruce had the seat of honour, his chair covered in ribbons and flowers.

  Kelly, Christie and Trevor carried in the vegetables that had been kept warm in the oven. Patricia set the chicken in front of her aunt, its skin crisp and glistening.

  “You’ll have to carve it,” she said shyly. “I don’t know how.” She placed a pitcher of gravy beside it.

  “You wonderful children!” cried Aunt Karen. “How did you manage to do all this?”

  “Patricia did it,” they chorused. “And she got the Piglet to stop crying,” added Kelly. “She’s wonderful.”

  Patricia gazed at the circle of faces around the table as they drank her a toast with ginger ale.

  This is my family, she thought. This is a place where I belong.

  THAT WEEKEND was Uncle Doug’s birthday and both families had a barbecue on the beach to celebrate. The meal, planned by Aunt Ginnie and Patricia, was a huge success.

  “Thank you all for a wonderful feast,” said Uncle Doug. He strummed softly on his guitar while the children lay on their backs, patting their full stomachs. They were watching for falling stars.

  “This is the best time of year for them,” said Bruce. “The Perseid meteor shower, is that right, Dad?”

  His father looked embarrassed. “I’m not sure, son. Your Uncle Gordon should be here—he’s the one who knows about stars. We used to have a telescope, but he took it to Victoria with him.”

  “There’s Scorpius,” pointed out Patricia. “See its tail?”

  Uncle Rod glanced at her with surprise. “You’re a mysterious one. Where did you learn that?”

  Patricia shrugged and dared to return his curious look.

  Maggie lay with her head in her mother’s lap, chanting:

  Star light, star bright

  First star I see tonight

  Wish I may wish I might

  Have the wish I wish tonight.

  I wish that …

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  Patricia decided to wish too. It took her a few minutes to decide on one. She could wish that her parents wouldn’t separate; but she knew that they would, and even that they should. What she wanted the most would never come true, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

  I wish I could see Ruth again, she thought.

  “There’s a moving one!” cried Bruce. Patricia opened her eyes and saw a speck of light slide across the darkness. Soon the night sky was alive with darting silver streaks.

  “Star light, star bright, twelfth star I see tonight!” crowed Maggie. Everyone groaned.

  “Can’t you stop now, Maggie?” asked Uncle Doug. “It’s only the first star that counts.”

  “How do you know?” demanded Maggie. Her father had to admit he didn’t.

  “She’s probably wishing for money,” said Trevor. Maggie glared at him, so they knew he was right.

  Patricia stuck another marshmallow on her stick. Kelly and Christie were burning theirs, having a contest to see how many gooey layers they could get under each black skin. But Patricia liked trying to toast hers an even brown, the way she’d once watched Ruth do it.

  “Thirtieth star I see tonight …” Maggie’s voice murmured to a stop and her eyes stayed closed.

  “What are all you young ones going to be when you grow up?” Uncle Rod asked them.

  “A lawyer like Grandfather Reid,” Kelly said promptly.

  “A horse trainer,” said Christie just as fast.

  Bruce examined his foot and said maybe he’d be a doctor. Trevor yawned placidly. “Who knows?”

  “Maggie will be rich, of course,” Uncle Rod chuckled.

  “What about our little Easterner?”

  Patricia tried not to mumble. “Maybe I could run a restaurant.”

  “Yum!” said Kelly “You’d be good at it?”

  “Or maybe …” Patricia stopped, flushing.

  “Go on, dear,” encouraged Aunt Ginnie.

  “Maybe I’ll be a mother,” she said softly. She thought of being in on a baby like Rosemary right from the beginning.

  Kelly hooted. “But you can be more than just a mother, silly. You can have a career, too. Look at your mum. She’s really successful and she had you.”

  “I guess so …” Patricia remembered one day when she and her mother had both been home with the flu. How they’d read aloud to each other and watched TV in the big bed … how relaxing it had been to have a whole day loosened from its usual tight schedule.

  “We come on the sloop John B.,” crooned Uncle Doug. The family joined in. Patricia sang the chorus quietly as she leaned against Aunt Ginnie.

  Let me go home

  Let me go home

  I feel so broke up

  I want to go home.

  But I don’t want to go home, she thought. There were only two weeks left to the summer. She wanted to freeze it, to stay at the lake forever—on this beach where her mother, too, had once sat.

  Trevor and Christie had fallen asleep now. Their fathers picked them up and everyone climbed the steps to the cottage.

  “Patricia, dear, will you wait up a minute?” Aunt Ginnie asked her. She carried Maggie to her bed, then thanked Mrs. Donaldson, who had come over with her knitting to listen for Rosemary.

  Patricia sat dreamily on the verandah, listening to the loon’s lonely call. Everyone else went to bed, then Aunt Ginnie joined her.

  “I had an exciting message this afternoon and I wanted to tell you first.” Her aunt’s eyes sparkled. “Can you guess?”

  Patricia shook her head, puzzled.

  “It’s your mother—she’s coming for a visit! She says she has something important to discuss with you. She’s flying to Edmonton on Sunday and you and Uncle Doug can go in and pick her up. What a treat it will be to have her here after all these years!”

  Aunt Ginnie babbled on while Patricia sat in a stunned silence, unable to say a word.

  16

  “Is your mother a movie star?” asked Maggie. Trevor caught a plate she was about to drop. “Dummie! She’s on TV, not the movies. We keep telling you that, Maggie. But she’s famous, isn’t she, Patricia?”

  They were doing the lunch dishes and listening for the car containing Uncle Doug and Patricia’s mother to arrive. Patricia had backed out of going to the airport.

  “I understand,” Aunt Ginnie reassured her. “Airports are so impersonal … you’d rather meet her here.” She seemed to think Patricia was as easygoing with her mother as Kelly was with her.

  Guiltily, Patricia tried to suppress the resentment she felt about her mother’s visit. It was spoiling everything. Her coming meant the end of the short period when she had almost been content. It also meant the end of the summer.

  She wondered how her mother had managed to find time off from her busy schedule. What was she going to discuss? Her parents had probably reached some decisions now about some of the
unpleasant things, like visiting rights, that Kelly’s friends had to cope with. It would be so embarrassing, talking about it.

  They heard Peggy’s joyful bark, the one that meant, “My car’s here!”

  “Leave the dishes,” smiled Aunt Ginnie, hurrying through the kitchen with Rosemary. “They’ve arrived!”

  Patricia lagged behind. She watched a tall, elegant figure, impeccably dressed in a beige linen suit, step out of the car and kiss Aunt Ginnie on the cheek.

  “Here are your nieces and your nephew!” cried Aunt Ginnie. Her voice was unnaturally high and nervous. “And here’s Patricia!”

  They all stepped aside to let Patricia through. “Hi, Mum,” she said in a low voice. She waited to be kissed.

  “Hello, darling.” Her mother leaned forward and pecked her daughter. Then she examined her for a moment, and Patricia had to steady herself with the shock. She was looking into the younger Ruth’s grey eyes. These eyes, though, were skilfully made up and self-assured, filled with controlled impatience.

  The other Ruth’s vulnerable, restless personality, continually squashed by her family, had evoked Patricia’s deepest sympathies. Nobody squashed this Ruth. Her manicured confidence cancelled out her younger self. In the instant of confronting her mother, the past crumbled away. It was as if Patricia had never known the younger Ruth; the grown-up one, with whom she had lived all her life, was so much more powerful.

  Now she felt cheated and angry. And to make things worse, she heard with dismay that Aunt Ginnie was moving her into La Petite “so the two of you can have some privacy.” She sat on the edge of one of the beds with Kelly and Maggie and watched her mother unpack. With a smirk of superiority, Patricia wondered if all she had brought were linen suits.

  But her mother always knew how to dress. She changed into cotton walking shorts and a short-sleeved flowered blouse. Her clothes still looked much too well-pressed and clean for the lake. There was a big difference between her appearance and theirs.

  “Look at you three!” she said crisply. “You’re little savages. What on earth are you wearing, Patricia? Where are all the new shorts I bought for you? And you need a haircut badly.”

  Patricia glanced down at the pair of Kelly’s cut-offs she was wearing. She flicked her bangs off her forehead sullenly Kelly was in a holey bathing suit and all Maggie had on were Trevor’s shorts, back to front.

  “It’s all right, Aunt Ruth,” said Kelly cheerfully. “We never bother about clothes in the summer.”

  “You won’t be able to go on TV when you’re here,” Maggie told her earnestly, “because we haven’t got one.”

  Patricia’s mother laughed. “I guess I won’t, Maggie. Well, I need a holiday.”

  “Do you make a lot of money?” the little girl asked her.

  “Can you pick the people you interview?” Kelly wanted to know.

  Their aunt chatted easily with them. Patricia wasn’t surprised; her mother was always charming. The day she had come and spoken to Patricia’s school, everyone had raved about her. Patricia knew they wondered why her daughter was so different.

  She supposed her mother was charming to her, too, the way she always called her “darling.” Nan had used the term too. Patricia realized that she had always hated that word. Whatever she was, she wasn’t darling. Saying it all the time meant her mother couldn’t see what she was really like underneath.

  “Your mum’s nice,” whispered Kelly as they all walked up the driveway. “Kind of proper, but she’s okay.”

  Patricia watched her mother closely as she peered around the cottage. She wondered how much she remembered, especially since the place had not altered much.

  Kelly pointed out her bedroom.

  “This was my room!” said Patricia’s mother. “What a long time has passed…. I think I last slept in here when I was seventeen.”

  “What happened then?” asked Kelly.

  “I left home to go East to university.”

  “But didn’t you come back for the holidays?”

  Patricia was surprised to see her mother flush. “It was too expensive, so I worked in Toronto every summer.”

  After the tour of the cottage, Uncle Doug and his children went for a ride in Mr. Donaldson’s motorboat. Aunt Ginnie took her sister for a walk, Patricia pushing the baby in her carriage.

  “I can paddle a canoe,” she said casually, as they watched a red one on the water below them. “And I caught two fish.”

  Her mother looked surprised. “Really, darling? I didn’t think you liked that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, we’ve turned Patricia into a real little tomboy,” chuckled Aunt Ginnie. “Kelly’s influence, I’m afraid, but it’s been good for her.”

  Patricia stomped her hard, bare feet along the path haughtily. In two months she’d accomplished as much as Rosemary, who could now turn over both ways and almost sit up.

  “I used to be able to paddle a canoe,” mused Patricia’s mother. “I’m sure I’ve forgotten now.”

  “Later you and Patricia can take out the Loon,” suggested Aunt Ginnie.

  “The Loon?” Patricia’s mother looked puzzled until her sister explained.

  How could she forget? Patricia thought angrily. She used to love the canoe; now she was speaking about her summers here as if they had happened to another person.

  They had set out for the Main Beach, but Patricia’s mother wanted to go back for her hat. “The sun’s so bad for your skin,” she explained, “and I don’t like the look of that peeling nose, Patricia. You need some sunscreen on it.”

  Aunt Ginnie looked guilty. “Oh dear, it is burnt. I have such a hard time keeping them all protected.”

  They changed direction. “You haven’t lost any weight, darling,” Patricia’s mother remarked.

  “She takes after her aunt,” laughed Aunt Ginnie. “We both appreciate good food, don’t we? I’ll miss having a gourmet cook to teach me.”

  After they had fetched the hat and some sunscreen from the cottage, they decided to walk the other way, to Uncle Rod’s. “He’s very eager to see you again,” said Aunt Ginnie.

  “I wonder why,” said her sister dryly. “Rodney and I were never that close, you know.”

  Uncle Rod was as overbearing as usual, but today it didn’t work. “Ruth! My long-lost sister!” He kissed her with a smack, but she stepped back and appraised him calmly.

  “How are you, Rodney? You’ve lost a lot of hair, haven’t you? And this must be Karen … and the children.”

  Aunt Karen seemed awed by her Eastern glamour. “Don’t sit on that chair,” she warned, “it’s not very clean. Christie, go inside and get your Aunt Ruth a cushion.”

  Uncle Rod’s family came back for dinner and Patricia’s mother entertained everyone with witty stories about CBC personalities. She never mentioned Patricia’s father and no one asked about him.

  “Time for bed,” said Aunt Ginnie at ten. “Will you be all right in La Petite by yourself, Patricia?”

  “I’ll be out soon, darling,” promised her mother. All the adults seemed to want to discuss something private.

  Patricia tried to fall asleep before her mother came. She knew they had to talk about her father sometime, but she wanted to delay it as long as possible. She tossed in the narrow cot and missed Kelly. She decided to go out to her cousin’s window.

  Slipping a sweater over her nightgown, Patricia crept up the dark driveway. “Kelly!” she hissed outside the bedroom. There was no answer. Kelly must have fallen asleep and Patricia didn’t want to call any louder.

  Standing outside the cottage made her feel as much of an outsider as she had at the beginning of the summer. She wandered around to the front, where the voices came in a low murmur from the verandah. Maybe she would go in and say she couldn’t sleep. Then she heard her name and couldn’t resist crouching under the steps to listen.

  “But she’s only twelve!” That was Aunt Ginnie. “She’s much too young to make that kind of decision!”

  �
��We’ve always believed in letting Patricia think for herself,” said her mother’s cool voice. “You won’t remember, but I was never allowed to. I’ll go out and ask her now.”

  Patricia dashed back to La Petite and jumped into bed. When her mother came into the cabin she pretended to be sound asleep. She held the blanket over her head as a shield against whatever she was going to be asked to decide.

  SHE FOUND OUT the next afternoon. “Let’s have a talk, darling,” said her mother after lunch. As Patricia followed her to La Petite she remembered Nan and her awful talk. Nan had been eager, however; her mother seemed as reluctant as she was.

  Patricia sat on one bed and curled her arms around her knees. Her mother sat on the other and the space between them seemed appropriately wide.

  “Everything has been settled, darling,” she began. In a rush she explained that Patricia could see her father whenever she wanted to. “You realize that, even though it’s only a separation at this stage, eventually we’ll get a divorce. Johanna wants to marry him. I’m telling you this so you don’t get your hopes up. It’s final.”

  “I know,” said Patricia flatly. “I always have. They love each other.”

  Her mother looked at her curiously as if surprised she had thought about things so much. Then she became very serious. “There’s a change now, darling, and I came West so I could tell you in person. I’m taking a leave of absence, beginning in October. Another job has come up, with the BBC in London. It’s for a year—possibly more—and it’s a wonderful opportunity I also think it would be a good idea for me to be away until the gossip has died down.”

  She stood up and began walking around the room. “Now, the question is, darling, whether you want to come with me. You can, of course. We’ll find you a good school and I already have a flat lined up. But your father and Johanna have offered to take you for a year. You could stay at the same school then and still be in Toronto. That would be more stable for you—we want to disrupt you as little as possible.” She stopped pacing and looked at her daughter directly. “We’re leaving it up to you, whether you want to live with me or your father.”

  Patricia clutched the bed as if she were going to float off. She had never felt so insubstantial.