I think I coughed. “Wrong?”
“I’d understand if you said no.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was too busy trying to breathe. “Um,” I finally said. “I suppose Gayl might like to see you. I guess Suzie and Carrie would like to see you, too.”
There was a long silence before he said, “I was hoping you might like to see me.”
I felt something huge lift off my heart. Maybe our break-up had just been one of those fights that had gone too far. Now, he was asking if there was anything I might need him to do when he arrived home.
“Hmm,” I said, like I was giving it thought. “Well, there is something I might need you to help with in, um, the bedroom?”
“Don’t tell me the ceiling’s leaking again. Shit, I thought we’d solved that problem.”
“Well, actually the problem I’m thinking about has more to do with our bed.”
“What, the mattress?”
“You’re getting closer. Here’s a clue. Remember that time with the blindfold?”
I guessed from his silence that he was remembering.
“And your bathrobe belt?” he said.
“Yeah. That too.”
“Um,” he said, “then I’ll see you Friday night?”
“Okay.”
After we hung up I went downstairs. I sat out on the back steps and cried so hard it hurt. I kept it up until that hurt stopped feeling so good. Ray was coming home.
I must have looked a nervous wreck that first weekend he came home, the way I kept going to the porch window to see if his truck was heading down the lane. I’d been practicing what to do and say, including a sappy run into his arms, but when he stepped through the door, we both acted like he’d gone no further than the Four Reasons store for a can of beans.
“It’s cold out there,” he said, as he hung his jacket on the hook. He seemed thinner, and there were lines in his cheeks I’d never noticed before.
“It got cold overnight,” I said, as I filled the kettle under the tap. I peeked at my own reflection in the mirror to see if the new wrinkles I’d discovered around my eyes were obvious.
At first we were like strangers, the way we kept sneaking looks at each other over Suzie’s hysterical barking. But then the more we looked, the more we smiled and when he raised his hands like he was asking what’s next, I did the sappy run thing right into his arms.
For supper I made my famous fish chowder and as we sat around the table as a family, I was shocked at how Gayl said, “Please” and “Thank you,” and didn’t tip her chair legs back. In all the time he’d been gone she hadn’t once said she’d missed her father.
Still, Ray and I treated each other like polite strangers all the way to bedtime, but as soon as we started licking and sucking and fucking everything felt right again. Then we were kissing and hugging and stroking and pressing together, even in our sleep, which made it almost worth the shit we’d gone through.
The next day almost felt like normal except for one thing. Gayl was still acting way too helpful and considerate. She cleaned up her room. And, she kept asking Ray geography questions, one of his favourite subjects.
“Dad?” she said, “Where exactly is Mozambique? I have this paper for school.”
“Let’s look it up together.” He opened his atlas on the dining room table and they hovered over it. “Here it is in southeast Africa. Now you know if it ever comes up again in your life.” She was being the child he’d always wanted.
We stayed on our best behaviour and Ray started coming home every weekend. I took to cooking roasts and casseroles to celebrate his Friday night arrivals. He mowed the lawn that was beginning to qualify as hay. He’d given me an antique weathervane three Christmases ago and that first weekend he stuck it up on the peak of the barn. We touched each other a lot, and fell in love again. And when our friends complained about us smooching in front of everyone, we hammed it up, just to prove that Ray’s working down in Newville was the best thing to have ever happened.
We got so used to the routine of Ray coming home on weekends that by the end of last summer, this new way of life felt normal. I actually enjoyed having the entire week to myself, and maybe was even a bit resentful when Ray came home on Friday night. For one thing it meant I had to keep on top of the housework, because if I didn’t Ray would haul out the broom and dustpan and start sweeping not only the floors but the walls and ceiling too. It drives me crazy when he does that because he always finds stuff I missed, even when I’ve gone over it twice.
Gayl went back to being normal too, as did her room with its explosion of clothes. Once again, her answers became grunts. The lawn turned into a field full of timothy straw. Friday night supper meant scrambled eggs.
Sex also became routine and sometimes I wondered if it even mattered if I was awake. Once, after he came, and I wasn’t even close to coming, he whispered, “That was incredible.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, sure he was being sarcastic.
He nudged me. “You didn’t enjoy it?”
“You did?”
“You were amazing,” he sighed.
I almost said, well, I might as well have been in a coma, since I hardly moved a muscle! I didn’t, of course. There are some things in life a man should believe in.
Olive now plunks this month’s book on my kitchen table. While she rummages in her satchel for pencils I look out my window towards Thunder Hill. The snow is coming down so hard I can hardly see the base of the hill, even though it rises straight up from my back yard. On a clear day, smoke from Bear James’ chimney drifts up over the spruces. But today I can barely make out my own barn. And the kitchen is gloomy, in spite of the big new sliding window we’d finally put in, right beside the table.
“I hate days like this,” I say to the window.
“Really? I love stormy days. They’re so dramatic,” says Olive. “We can’t expect every day to be sunny, now can we?”
“No-o-o,” I say slowly, turning to face her. “But we shouldn’t have storms in April either.”
Yesterday, the same snowy yard had been bursting with spring while robins hopped around looking for buried worm treasure. It was so warm that Carrie the cat, who lives for birds and mice, barely lifted her head from her sunny spot on the picnic table.
Yesterday was a hopeful day and not just because of the weather. Three weeks ago, Ray and I had our first big fight since he’d come back to me. He hasn’t been home since, and I’ve been going around telling everybody that the company has given him a lot of overtime. The truth is that one night I had too much to drink and I went a little nuts. Earlier, I’d come across an acorn in one of his pockets and when I asked him about it, he’d said, “Search me,” with this weird guilty smile on his face so, naturally, I got it into my head that he’d had a fling in Newville last year because first of all we don’t have oak trees in Thunder Hill and secondly, if I looked at it hard enough I could make out what looked like a little smiley face drawn on the thing. And Ray’s not the sort of guy who puts things like acorns in his pocket unless someone was to give it to him. He kept saying he had no idea how the acorn had gotten into his pocket. Well, I pushed and pushed until he got mad and the madder he got the harder I pushed. Finally, he threw up his hands and shouted, “What if I told you I did have a hot one, as you say, down in Newville? Would that make you feel better? In fact, I don’t think you’ll be satisfied unless I do tell you that.”
I dropped the subject like a lit match had burned my fingers and went up to bed, slamming the door on the way. He’d ended up sleeping on the couch that night. In the morning he was gone, and I haven’t seen him since. It killed me to swallow my pride and call him at the rooming house last week. I said that I believed his story about the mysterious acorn and apologized for not believing him in the first place. There was a long silence on the other end of the ph
one, as if he was deciding what would be the smartest thing to say. That was when he said he would come home Friday. The relief I felt was almost as keen as it was the first time he came back to me.
Since the Foghorn Pewter Company closes at noon on Fridays, I drove home with yard work on my mind. Just like the robins, I couldn’t wait to expose what was under all that winterkill. The smell of spring reminds me of Ray, so that’s why all day Friday I went around thinking we were back in business. I managed to rake the entire yard before the sun went down behind Thunder Hill.
Olive sits straight in her chair. With her reading glasses and her wiry red hair swept up in a loose bun, she looks like a schoolteacher from pioneer times. My father always denied she was his child, but if she had been his, he would have approved of her posture. My own slouch had always bugged him. As a kid I’d been sent away from many a meal for refusing to sit properly in my chair. Sometimes, to be a brat, I’d sit up straight, but at the same time, tip my chair onto its back legs. It’s odd that tipping chairs is something my own daughter seems to have inherited. I’m glad my father lived long enough to witness how this drives Ray and me crazy.
While Olive arranges her notebook and pencil, I notice that my hairbrush rests next to the honey jar on the table. All I need is for Olive to see that. She’s had three kids, but her house is forever tidy. In her house, hairbrushes would be in the bathroom and not dripping with honey on the kitchen table.
The hairbrush was a gift from Bear James, Ray’s closest friend. And next to Alana, I guess he’s my best friend, too. The gift was for my birthday, but as soon as my family realized how nicely boar bristle rakes through hair, it became the family brush. Bear used to say the colour of my hair reminded him of Kraft caramels. I think that was the nicest thing anyone ever said about my hair. Now, with all the grey, my hair reminds me of dirty sand. Olive thinks I should dye it back to my original colour, but I never much liked the idea of cheating on nature.
Crammed into the bristles are a lot of family hairs like the mess of long blond hairs belonging to Gayl. If the brush hasn’t been cleaned in a while, which is very likely the case, then a few of Ray’s dark strands may also be twined around the bristles.
Last night I shouted at Gayl to come down and take it off the table.
“If you’re down there looking at it, then why don’t you move it?” Gayl shouted back.
“Because it’s your job to clean off the table!”
“Yeah, of dishes, not other junk!”
“You put it there!” I shouted up the stairs.
“Relax, Ma, it’s a freaking hairbrush. I’ll do it after.”
I stood there feeling my back go up, but by the time I went upstairs she was asleep so I decided to go fall into my own flannel sheets. I pulled my quilts up over my head and reminded myself that some battles simply weren’t worth the fight. Like how she calls me Ma when she damn well know knows I don’t like it.
That’s why the hairbrush is still sitting on the table this morning. As I grab it now, I discover yet another surprise. A piece of last night’s roast beef stuck behind the salt shaker.
Can’t hide from me, I think, as I snatch that up too. As I head to the cupboard to put the hairbrush away, I drop the beef on the floor in front of Suzie’s nose. One thing about dogs, they never ask where food falls from; they simply accept what’s offered. When I come back into the kitchen, Suzie’s old jaws are still chomping away. And another thing about dogs? They’re clueless as to who might be watching them with a frown on her face.
“Poor Suzie,” I say, making a big deal of rearranging the salt and pepper shakers. “She’s getting so finicky she’ll only eat table scraps instead of her food. In fact, when Gayl and Biz drive into town, they’re supposed to pick up a bag of that special geriatric food at the vet’s.”
Olive glances out the window. “With the way this day is shaping up, I wonder if they should drive Billy instead of your car.”
Olive insists on calling her SUV “Billy.” And she doesn’t stop there; she makes everybody else call it Billy too. I’m surprised she doesn’t call it William when she corrects them for calling it a “truck.” I refuse to call it anything but a “truck.” As for my own Toyota, I can’t resist saying, “That’s okay. If Tercel can’t make it into town, then they shouldn’t be driving today anyway.”
Olive looks at me like she’s not sure if I’m joking. She holds a pencil over her notebook. “Well, then. Should we start?”
I stare down at the book I’d chosen mostly because the writer used to live around here. “I don’t know. I guess I kind of liked it.”
“Really!” Olive says, as if I’d said I admired Hitler. “What did you like about it?”
“I guess it sort of reminded me of…” What had it reminded me of? Me, I want to say, mostly because the main character grew up in a town like mine. The town had a DDT truck to fight off mosquitoes too. The writer got it right when she wrote that the DDT fog smelled exactly like WD-40. At the sound of that truck, every kid in town ran from the supper table to the street, just to run behind the fog spewing from its back. Once, after the truck passed, I squatted down to watch a bee wiggle its legs just before it died. That was the first time I’d realized that the poison could hurt things other than mosquitoes. But when I asked my father if the spray could hurt me too, he told me that next to a bug I was a giant, which meant I was safe. He said this rule covered just about everything in life; how survival was about being large enough to take on poison.
“I guess I could relate to the small town thing,” I say to Olive.
“But did you learn anything from this book? I have to say, I found it disappointingly simplistic.”
“Because it was easy to read?”
“No, because it didn’t teach me about anything I care to learn.”
Olive goes on about how it’s a writer’s responsibility to raise consciousness, to inspire change. It simply isn’t enough to write without a reason. The same might be said about the importance of getting people to read more: to open their minds, to expand their worlds.
Before I had a chance to say that I thought this writer wanted to write about her own time and place in the world, she suddenly jumped up from her chair.
“I just had a great idea!” she says, her eyes wide. “We should get some of the farmers to join us, and then we’ll have ourselves a real book club!”
“Hmm.”
Olive insists on calling the local women “farmers.” I once tried to explain that calling a woman a “farmer” is almost an insult, since this is the word they were teased with all throughout high school. Besides, some women would rather be called housewives than farmers. But Olive seems to think she knows what’s best for them.
“You don’t think that’s a good idea? Asking the farmers?”
“Sure, why not? I’m just not that optimistic about it.”
Truth be told, I can’t picture sitting around a living room with Midge Hutchins or Jean Bradley, let alone talking to them about books. I’ve also tried to explain to Olive that there are invisible barriers in Thunder Hill. That to the locals, Ray and I will never truly belong.
“But you and Ray are from here!”
“No, Olive, Ray and I are from town.”
“But you spent your childhood in Thunder Hill.”
“Only the summers. It’s not the same, trust me.”
“But our father is buried here.”
I don’t bother to correct her about the fact that Bernie Kyle was my father alone, and that her real father was some veterinarian her mother had had an affair with while she was married to my father. I keep my mouth shut because she seems to have no clue of this fact and has been living her whole life thinking she had an absentee father who sent her mom cheques and sometimes small notes when she was young and that except for him having left her Kyle House for some od
d reason, wanted nothing more to do with her.
“True,” I say. “But that’s because my father was too ornery to be buried with the rest of his clan on the bay side of Thunder Hill.”
“I don’t get it. His grandfather built Kyle House, so doesn’t that make us all locals?” she says. “How far back do you have to go to be considered a local around here?”
“It’s not how far back that counts, it’s where you live most of the year that counts. Other than during the summers, our family didn’t live out here.”
This is just one more thing Olive doesn’t get because she’s from Toronto. That while I’m happy to drop by my neighbours to trade eggs for honey, I wouldn’t dream of stopping in at Christmas.
So about the book club, I say, “I don’t think they’d have the time, you know. They’re so busy.”
“They still manage to find time for quilting clubs and cribbage tournaments. Think how a book club might expand their thinking. You even said yourself that nobody around here talks about anything except each other.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Well, you did. We were sitting right here at this table and you called Thunder Hill ‘Dunderhill.’ Remember?”
A prickly feeling travels up the back of my neck. I guess I must have been drunk one night when I confessed to Olive that I was dying of boredom here in Thunder Hill, because, “Between you and me, Olive, they’re all a bunch of dunderheads.”
Dunderheads? Where had that come from? I could have said, “There are some dunderheads,” but no, I had said all. All would have to include Alana and Danny and Bear and, for all that matters, my own family. And me? My one year in Toronto happened almost two decades ago, yet over a bottle of Olive’s wine she’d insisted that this somehow gave me a certain sophistication that my neighbours lacked. I had laughed at this and said I hardly thought one year away could qualify.
Road to Thunder Hill Page 2
