No, Alana tells me, she’s not worried, she’s pissed. She figures he spent the night getting drunk with Bear, who always has a stash of rum. And, she can’t wait to get her hands on him when he walks through the door.
“I told him not to go in the first place, because I knew that road would be too slippery to come down, but you know Danny….” She slams the stove’s grate shut. “And so I’ve got the Bradleys wondering where the hell their truck is, and here I am burning furniture to keep warm. And I don’t even have any rum!”
I think maybe I should offer to trade places with Alana. She could run Billy back to Kyle House and get warm and drunk while I wait here for Danny. There’s a good chance he’d bring Bear along too. Then what would you do, Trish? I realize I’m shivering now. I wonder if that’s due to the thought of seeing Bear, or simply that it is real fucking cold here in the store.
“Screw Danny. In fact, screw all men!” I say, raising my fist in the air.
“No. One is quite enough,” Alana says, slumping into her chair, her elbows on her knees, her hands dangling towards the floor — Alana’s classic “I give up” pose.
“Hey,” I say. “What happened to ‘it’s okay to have somebody waiting in the wings’?”
She waved her hand at me in disgust. “You haven’t reached the stage where you realize all men are pigs.”
“Oh, come on,” I say. “Danny’s just pissing you off today.”
“Yeah, like Ray always pisses you off too. He called yesterday, by the way.”
“Oh?” I say, surprised that for the first time in a year this news is not making my heart jump. Jiggle maybe, but not jump. “What did he say?”
“Not much. He’s still stuck down there in Newville.”
“Did you tell him about…?” I was going to say the flue fire, but she jumped right in.
“Tell him about what? You and Bear on the pool table? No, I thought I’d let you do that.”
She is enjoying this, I can tell. And here I’d come looking for advice. You’d think she’d be more sympathetic, given that she was the only one who knew what I went through when Ray left me for Newville. I’ve never been much of a crier but for four solid weeks, I could hardly say his name without my eyes misting.
Back then, Alana tried her best to help. I’d stop in every night after work and the second I walked in the door she’d hand me a shot of rum. Anesthesia, she called it, and I have to say, it helped. In between customers we sat in the back by the stove and she’d listen and I’d talk, and talk, and talk. Sometimes I felt so angry with Ray for walking out that I’d spend the whole time trashing him.
“You know how everybody thinks he’s such a nice guy, always ready to help? It’s bullshit. He thinks of kindness as an investment, like how that person is going to help him out some day. Deep down, he only cares about himself.”
“Doesn’t everybody?” she’d said. “I mean the only reason anybody helps anyone else is because there’s something in it for them. Even if it’s just because helping others makes them feel good about themselves.”
A little later, I said, “He could have said something to me, you know. I mean, I was always honest about all the things that bothered me about him, but he’d never say a word about what bothered him. So he’d just let it fester and fester. I don’t think that’s fair. Do you?”
“No, I don’t think it’s one bit fair. But maybe he was afraid to say anything to you because you’d get so defensive. I’ve seen you Trish. You’ve got an awful bad temper.”
“So? So do you.”
“We’re talking about you.”
Somehow Alana wasn’t giving me what I’d grown to expect from her, my best friend — that little thing called “sympathy.”
I took a different approach. “I guess I don’t blame Ray for leaving me,” I sighed. “My hair is practically grey, I wear flannel to bed, and let’s face it, I’m not as pretty as I used to be.”
“So, who is?”
“And I shouted at him a lot.”
“That you did.”
“And I took him for granted.”
“Yep.”
“No wonder he left me.”
“Trish,” she said. “You’re allowed to take your mate for granted, up to a point.”
“And you think I went beyond that point?”
She shrugged. “All I know is that this sort of thing happens to the best of couples.”
“Yeah, well he took me for granted too,” I said. “And I’m beginning to think we just got bored with each other.”
“Tell me about it,” she laughed, and then went on to say that even she and Danny were far from immune and that they had to work hard at keeping it fresh. Sometimes they had to work hard just not to kill each other. This was supposed to make me feel better? How could Alana dismiss my marriage to Ray so easily? We were talking about Trish and Ray here, not just some Jane and Joe Blow. I vowed right then not to allow my marriage to end. I would pour my heart into it.
After that first weekend he came home, I phoned him every night. I kept those calls short, and I drew upon the power every woman has over her man. What did I talk about? Nothing relating to our marriage, or to our child, or to our history together. Instead, I whispered things into the phone that were sure to make him hard. I’d start with a husky voice. I’d say, “Guess what I’m doing right now,” and let him run with it from there. At first I was afraid he might hear the desperation in my voice, but it seems Ray liked to talk about sex over the phone. It was new to me too, and I surprised myself with how worked up I could get.
I kept this up every night for a week or so, until he got good and used to a dose of this sort of talk just before falling asleep at night. Then I stopped the calls cold. I even took to popping Gravol early in the evening so that I’d be sound asleep by telephone time and therefore not tempted to hear his voice. I did this for three nights. On the third night, the ringing phone eventually found its way through to my consciousness. When I picked it up, there was a desperate Ray who wondered if maybe he could come home the next weekend too.
From that moment on, I went around acting as if everything was fine and dandy between Ray and me. If Alana asked me how we were doing, I’d say that what happened on Gayl’s birthday had been a serious blip in our marriage but that we were cool now. There were times when I even managed to convince myself of this.
I look out the window and up the road. “He’ll likely be coming along any minute.”
“Who?” says Alana. “Bear?”
“No, Danny, of course.”
“We weren’t even talking about Danny. We were talking about Bear.”
“We were?” I said. “ Well then, maybe Danny will bring Bear along.”
“You know what? I don’t even want to see Danny. Maybe I should just close up shop and go over to Olive’s with you. How’s it been over there, anyway?”
“You would not believe it.”
“That bad?”
“She cooks all the time and uses up every dish and pot in the house. And guess who does the dishes?”
“After all the canned spaghetti we’ve had lately, I wouldn’t mind having one of Olive’s meals.” Alana sighs again.
I try again. “Guess who’s in charge of cleaning up!”
“I’d gladly do the dishes.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t if you knew who I’ve been washing dishes with.”
“The twins?”
I shake my head.
“Olive?”
“Weirder.”
“Weirder than Olive?”
“Try Rena Dickson.” Now I would have thought that would stop Alana in her tracks. But all she said was, “Oh, really?”
“You don’t seem all that surprised.”
“I knew she was opening the Chase cottage,
” Alana says, sinking into her rocker and biting her lip. “So it’s true then. She’s going ahead with her idea of opening an ice-cream stand.”
I almost choke on my tea. “Ice-cream stand?”
“She came in the day before the storm for a reading. She wanted advice. Don’t look at me like that. What was I supposed to do? Tell her she shouldn’t open an ice-cream stand in our neck of the woods?”
I shake my head. I’m getting that feeling again, like I’ve entered some alternative world like you see in sci-fi movies, where everything has gotten twisted around somehow. Like the fact that I’m suddenly hot for my old friend Bear? Like the fact that Alana likes cats all of a sudden? Like she’s now inviting Rena Dickson back into our lives?
“You actually advised Rena Dickson to move out here and open up an ice-cream stand?”
“Why not? I don’t mind a little competition.”
“Gee. That’s very generous of you,” I say. “Considering how you once vowed to kill her.”
Alana laughs. “I mean competition in the ice-cream business. I somehow don’t think of Rena as a threat in the other department.”
“Why the hell not? Remember the time you caught them in the act and him trying to convince you that blow jobs didn’t count as cheating? And then her having the nerve to take advantage of Ray when he was so drunk he could barely stay seated on the edge of a bath tub?”
“Oh right, like she took advantage of all our poor innocent men.”
“Okay, okay. But what makes you think she’s changed?”
“Because that was a long time ago, Trish. Sometimes you have to let this kind of stuff go.
“Why does everyone keep telling me that?”
Alana is smiling at me like I’m about thirteen.
“Quit looking at me like I’m thirteen,” I say. Since I’m feeling pretty weak in the knees, I sit on the stool next to the stove and stick my chin in my hands. “lately I feel like I’m about thirteen.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“Really. It’s like you said, about the past staring at me in the face.”
“You mean seeing Rena again?”
“No. Not Rena.”
“Well who then?” Her breath catches. Then her eyes narrow and she studies my face until I blush. “It’s Bear! I knew it.”
“You did not,” I say, but I can feel a guilty smirk invading my face. Of course, Alana picks up on this and suddenly her mood perks up.
“I knew something more than sleep happened on that pool table!”
“No, not really, but…” It bursts out of me and I can’t seem to keep everything from gushing out. I tell her about Ray and how I feel we really have come to an end. And that what’s been going on with me these past few weeks is me trying to come to terms with this fact and that maybe what happened on the pool table at Hog Holler happened for a reason.
“But what happened on the pool table?”
“Nothing happened. It’s really what didn’t happen.”
“Tell me!”
So I tell her about Bear rubbing my feet to the point where I was practically jumping out of my skin. And I tell her every detail about the cuddling and even the kissing on the pool table. After all, as Alana once said, what is friendship between women about, besides details?
Then she says, “So? Then what?”
“So nothing. We went to sleep.”
“Really. You fell asleep,” Alana is saying.
I look out the window. The sun is still shining out there. The spots of asphalt on the road are growing larger. I realize that Alana hasn’t said anything in a while, which is quite unlike her, so I turn and see that she is staring at me like I’m holding something back from her, like I’m a total stranger. She’s not the only one who has been looking at me this way lately.
The weekend before Ray and I had the big fight about me finding the acorn in his pocket, we’d had another fight. We’d been drinking all evening at the Four Reasons and when we got home I was pretty much hoping we’d go right to bed since Ray had been in Newville all week. I must have been expecting to have that drinking and smoking weed kind of sex, except Ray said he wanted to watch TV and that he’d be up to bed later. Naturally, I reacted badly. By that, I mean, I started going on about how he’d just made me feel like the ugliest girl in the world.
But when he picked up the TV remote and said, “I just want to be alone for a change,” the booze in me came right back and I got all pathetic then. Lost any sense of dignity. “So what is it, Ray, you gonna watch porn videos after I go to bed? Is that what you do down there in Newville? Jerk off to tits and ass on the tube? Or is it some real live slut you got going down there ? That it, Ray? That why you don’t need these anymore?” I think that’s when I pulled off my shirt, pointed my tits right at him.
“I have a question for you,” he said, as calm as can be, looking past me at the TV screen. “At what point in our marriage do you think you turned so sour?”
I sat down on the footstool then. I looked at the man who I’ve loved for the past twenty years and realized I no longer recognized him. On the television, a lion was pulling down a wildebeest. The sound was off but you could see the poor thing bawling. I grabbed my shirt and went to leave the room, but not without a parting shot.
“Let’s just say I turned pathetic the day you abandonned us to go to Newville.”
He was still ignoring me so I threw something then, a glass bowl that had sat for years on a side table. It hit the footstool and bounced intact across the rug so I picked it up and threw it again, this time against the radiator. There was a satisfying smash that ended in about a million little shards. I know this because I cleaned up the mess the next day, and three weeks later, I’m still finding pieces.
“You’re fucking crazy,” was all he said.
He must have fallen asleep on the couch after I went upstairs. I was sick in the bathroom, I guess from the booze and the rage, and when I woke up the next morning, my head and heart pounding at the same rate, I could tell he’d left for Newville before I even got out of bed. Not a good sign, I thought, if we can’t spend a weekend together without him ending up on the couch and leaving the next day. You’d think I might have learned a lesson from that, but no, the next weekend went pretty much the same way.
A big black police truck now pulls up to the pumps. Alana bunches her fists on her hips. “What do they expect me to do out there with no power? Siphon the gas?”
I say, “I wonder if this means the road to town is finally open.”
Alana goes storming out the door before the driver even turns off the engine. I watch her approach the police vehicle, fully prepared to do battle if anyone so much as dared to ask for gas.
“What the hell?” I say, from where I’m standing at the window, because she is out there hugging whoever has stepped out of the truck. It’s … Uncle Leftie? Now what would he be doing all the way out here? I can’t even remember the last time I saw him, especially since he retired as police chief. The back doors open up and who should jump out but Gayl and Biz. More surprises. More confusion. Just what I need.
I open the door for them and say to Gayl, “What are you doing here without my car?”
“I’m so glad to see you too, Ma,” Gayl says, as she stomps the slush off her feet.
“Sure you are. The girl who can’t wait to leave home,” I say, but she hugs me and I find myself drinking in the smell of her because, after all, she is still my baby. “The road’s open now,” Uncle Leftie is saying to Alana. “But barely.”
“But why are you kids here?” I ask. “What about your grandmother?”
“Olive didn’t tell you she phoned us?” says Gayl. “She said you guys wanted us home. So when Leftie came by, Gran said we should come out with him. I guess you didn’t miss us that much.”
�
�What I miss,” I say, “are the things you left back in town, like a hot bath and running water. And then there’s the matter of my car.”
Now they’re all looking at me like I just said something totally irrational. I feel like asking them just what their problem is, but, instead I say, “Well, seriously. Why would you three leave the comforts of town to come out here?”
“Maybe to make sure you were okay?” says Gayl, sternly adding, “Mother.”
“You all felt you had to come to check on us?”
“Olive said we should all come.”
Olive, of course.
“You could come back to town with me if that’s what you want, Trish,” says Uncle Leftie. “Your mother would appreciate it, I’m sure.”
He says that like all my mother’s family does, as if I neglect her or something.
I mumble something about there being no point now that Gayl’s here, but just how soon is he planning on heading back to town, anyway? In case I decide to go in to see my mother. After he drops the kids off at Kyle House, he tells me, but first he’ll see if Olive happens to have her famous oatcakes on hand.
“Although I guess without power she might not have been able to bake,” he says, looking forlorn.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” I tell him. “She’s got a molasses tub full of them.”
Uncle Leftie is famous for his sweet tooth, and sure enough, he’s licking his lips at the very thought. I’m about to mention the blueberry pie she’s making but I check myself in time. If I want to catch a lift in with Uncle Leftie I’d rather not mention the pie or he’ll never leave Olive’s. I like my Uncle Leftie okay, especially after what he did for us the night the farm collapsed, but to this day he still looks at me like I’m something to be pitied, so it’s not like I want to spend a lot of time with him.
But Olive has said she gets a kick out of his old fashioned manners so I can just see her trying to convince him stay for dinner or even the night.
“Well, it’s about friggin’ time,” Alana says from where she’s standing by the window. I look down the road in time to see the Bradley truck making the corner from Thunder Hill. Before I have a chance to see if maybe there’s more than one person in the cab, it turns down the Bradley’s lane and drives behind the barn.
Road to Thunder Hill Page 19
