Suddenly, I’m so busy thinking about coming face to face with Bear any minute now that I can hardly hear what anyone is saying. Gayl is offering to drive back to Kyle House with me, but I say she should go on ahead with the others. “I have groceries yet to pick up and, and … I’m wondering if I should get over to our house to check on the cat and shut the water off before the pipes freeze.”
“Have you talked to Dad lately?” Gayl asks.
“That’s the other thing I have to do while I’m here,” I say. “Go on to Olive’s, I’ll be there soon.”
First, I try sitting on one of Alana’s stools by the counter. I position myself in what I hope is my most attractive pose. In a minute Bear could walk through that door. But when Alana tells me I look all fidgety, I decide to gather up Olive’s supplies. The bell over the door clangs again and when I dare look over it’s to see Danny. Alone. I peer over his shoulder to see if Bear is behind him. “Expecting someone?” says Danny, looking behind himself. So much for being subtle.
“No, no, not at all.”
He drops an armload of birch branches in front of the stove. “What brings you here?”
“I had to pick stuff up for Olive and I thought I should get over to my place to shut off the water.”
“No need for that,” Danny says. “Bear told me he went there yesterday and shut it off for you.”
“Bear shut off my water?” I say, hearing wonder in my own voice. That means Bear came looking for me after he woke up alone on the pool table. I say, “He must have wondered where I was. I mean, when he got to my house.”
Danny is studying me far too closely. “I told him you’d gone over to Kyle House. He also said to tell you he put out more food for Carrie in the barn, so she’s okay.”
“Oh.” I straighten out a row of chocolate bars on the candy rack. “So what’s he up to then?”
“He said something about going into town for TV bingo.”
“That’s right! It’s TV bingo tonight!” I say. “Alana! We have to get to town!”
“Um, Trish?” says Alana. “TV bingo is the last thing on my ‘to do’ list.”
“But we haven’t missed TV bingo in three years!” I say. This is true. If there is one thing that’s sacred it’s the bunch of us driving into town on Monday nights to play bingo via cable TV. Even our kids have joined us there at the tavern table with their very own daubers. Of course, to them, it’s a joke, like we’re a bunch of pathetic old fogeys. TV bingo was something we started going to town for after the collapse of the farm. We called it bingo therapy. It made us feel so normal; something we suddenly felt we needed.
Alana takes hold of my shoulders and turns me away from the window, telling me in a calm voice that everything’s going to be fine. “I think what’s needed here is for things to return to normal,” she says in a slow voice, like she’s read my mind.
“Normal,” I laugh, and as I do, I notice how much I sound like my mother. “What’s normal, Alana? Do you know?”
“No clue. But by the way,” she says. “Ray said to tell you he’s been working double shifts. He wants you to phone him.”
Ray called. TV bingo. Bear James in town at TV bingo. Ray called to say what? I feel like I’m being sanded and salved all at the same time.
“So why don’t you phone Ray right now?” says Alana. “It might help you to put things into perspective.”
22. Hope
HOW QUICKLY SNOW MELTS in an April sun. The road back to Olive’s is almost bare now. Bright green grass pokes up in spots through the fields. Alana’s right. Life will return to normal.
The first thing I’ll do when I finally get home is to make a cup of tea. I’ll steep it in my very own mug. Next, I’ll run a long hot bath in my own tub. That reminds me; I’d better pick up that new piece of stovepipe and get it installed before Ray gets home. Yes, Ray is coming home. He’s not sure when, but he’s going to leave Newville as soon as the road clears. I phoned him from the Four Reasons, and when he said all this I was so surprised I didn’t even stop to think about the toothless wonder I’ve pictured him with too many times. All I know, or care, is that the storm is over and Ray is coming home to me and our old wooden bed with its jumble of quilts and pillows and a few thousand memories. I’ll soon be digging through the mess in the front bedroom to locate the summer sheets. It’s amazing how a person can forget something like where she put her summer things, let alone what they might look like. It’s the same with my clothes. I’ll pull out the box from the back of my closet and be surprised to come across my white muslin skirt, the one I wore way back in the farm days. I bet I can even fit into that old skirt since I’ve lost so much weight this past year. I am feeling positively silly.
I turn off Thunder Hill Road onto Olive’s lane and it is some mucky here alongside the lilac bushes. I roll down my window to feel the sun on my face, and is that honking geese I hear? They are headed in what looks like the completely wrong direction; but no, they are flying to Kincaid Lake, their annual resting stop. I shield my eyes from the glare of the sun. Beyond the bare lilac bushes lies a field dotted with rotted potatoes that the harvester overlooked last fall. The smell hits me fair in the face. All of my surroundings — land, water, sky — seem to ooze with spring.
On the radio, Stevie Wonder sings, and I join him. “You are the apple of my eye, mmm, mmm, forever you’ll stay in my heart.” I was almost surprised when Ray answered the phone at the boarding house. I don’t know what I’d been thinking, that maybe he’d disappeared from Earth? He told me he was working the night shift until the end of the week. He said he was planning on coming home. He said all of this like there was nothing strange about the fact that he hasn’t shown up for the last three weekends.
Then he asked how I’d managed to end up at Olive’s.
“Oh, it’s a long story.”
“So I hear,” he said. “It was a dark and stormy night there on the pool table with Bear James.”
“Who told you that?” I almost swallowed my words.
Apparently, just about everyone Ray has spoken to in the last two days told him about Bear and me being storm stuck at Hog Holler and sleeping together on the pool table. This, I guess, is far bigger news than any old flue fire, because he didn’t even mention the fact that it was the flue fire that led to all this in the first place.
“Have you spoken to Bear since then?” I tried not to squeak.
“No, why?” he said and laughed. “Old Bear try to jump you or something?”
I didn’t know if I should feel defensive or insulted because I wasn’t sure if it was concern or amusement I heard in his voice. “Don’t worry,” I said.
“I wasn’t worried,” Ray said. “Do you want me to be worried?”
I cleared my throat and said, “I think most husbands would wonder, given Bear’s track record.”
“True. He’ll jump anything that moves,” he said, as if he took some pride in Bear for this.
After a little cough I said, “Oh, come on, everybody slows down with age. Even Bear, I bet.”
“Naw. Not Bear.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m his closest friend.”
“He tells you everything?”
“Pretty much. Why? What are you getting at?”
“Oh nothing. Do you ever talk to him about us?”
“Never about us.”
I wanted to say, then who do you talk to him about? Your hot one down in Newville?
He said, “Anyway … we should talk about Gayl.”
He’s been in touch with her these past few days. Has it only been days since the storm began? Gayl talked to him about her plan to move into town with my mother long before she mentioned it to me. This is so typical of Ray, how he avoids sticky issues by switching topics. I was wondering if I should call him on this wh
en he said, “I told her it would be okay with me if it was okay with you.”
When I didn’t answer he said, “From what she tells me, you two are at each other’s throats most of the time so I assumed you’d okay it too.”
I should have felt genuine rage coming on here, thinking, it’s fucking great of you to think you can run my life from Newville, but instead my voice kind of cracked, and I found myself saying, “no matter how much Gayl and I fight, no matter how much I can’t stand her dirt and mess and noise, I’d feel too sad without her here.”
I could have said the same thing about him, but there was no way in hell.
He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “You know, Trish? Sometimes you just have to let things go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He sighed. “Like maybe it’s time for all of us to move our lives forward.”
There it was, confirmation. My heart sank like it had been tied to a stone and tossed off a bridge.
“She’s growing up, Trish. And going to your mother’s might be a logical first step. As soon as I get home I want us all to sit down and discuss what her moving to town would mean. You know, what her responsibilities would be.”
Home? Funny how, just like that, my heart bobbed back up to the surface. And that’s where we left it, with him repeating that he’d be coming home soon. I simply said, “Fine, see you then.” It struck me how completely out of my own control life has become.
23. TV Bingo
I’M STILL REPLAYING THAT conversation with Ray as I drive up the lane to Kyle House. I swing Billy around to the yard in front of the kitchen and just like that, I realize just how nuts I have become. There, parked right next to Uncle Leftie’s police truck is Bear’s Rover, and poof, all thoughts of Ray go flying out the window. How out of control is that?
I park as far out of view of Olive’s kitchen window as possible, which means no one will be able to see me out here in the yard. I plan on sitting here taking deep breaths for as long as possible. Oh hell, there’s no use putting it off anymore. I’ll be face to face with Bear James in a matter of moments.
I slog through the slush until I reach the door to the summer kitchen. What happens next feels like slow motion. I open the door into the main kitchen and the first people I see are Olive and Leftie. They’re standing over by the table, where Olive has spread out some old photos of my parents that she’d found in a bedroom cupboard. It’s amazing how twenty-five years after my parents moved out of Kyle House, little bits of them still remain.
“Hi,” I say.
“Look who finally made it back!” says Olive. She actually winks at me. “Look Bear, it’s Patricia.”
I glance into the pantry and there’s Bear, arranging lemon slices around a large filleted salmon. He looks up quickly and then back down at his task. “Hey, it’s Trish.”
“Hey yourself.” I look down at the salmon whose eye seems fixed upon me.
“That’s all you have to say to each other?” Olive says, swooping towards us, causing me to step into the pantry until I’m standing so close to Bear I can smell his homemade beer shampoo. Then Olive is between us, her arms draped around our shoulders. She calls out to my uncle, “Say, Leftie, did you hear about the adventure these two had the other night?”
“Can’t say that I did,” he grunts, like it’s the last thing he’d be interested in. I know my Uncle Leftie though, and he’s recording every word Olive has said about me so he can tell my Aunt Sybil later.
So Olive goes back out there to the table and tells him all she knows about our night at Hog Holler, about how we’d gotten so cold we’d been forced to cuddle up on the pool table. She’s laughing about it the whole way through, like it was the cutest thing in the world.
I can hear my uncle clear his throat. He is the straightest man in the world and wouldn’t see much humour in my being at the Hog Holler, let alone spending the night with Bear James on a pool table. I can just hear him and my aunt agreeing that it was no wonder Ray took that job down in Newville.
I feel shame colouring my face as I stand here in the pantry, not knowing if I should go out there and defend my actions or if I should run outside to Billy and drive away never to return to Thunder Hill for all time. And then Bear suddenly grabs me by the shoulders and kisses me on the cheek. I freeze, and he laughs.
“Gayl says she saw you over at the store,” he says, turning back to his fish. “I bet Alana was some pissed off when Danny got home.”
“You’ve got that right,” I manage to say.
“Those two,” he shakes his head and looks at me, one eye hidden by that forelock of his. “You’d think after all this time she’d know.”
“Know what?’
“That he’s just being Danny.”
“Oh, I see. And because he’s Danny he gets to get drunk with you while she’s freezing her ass waiting for him to bring some wood?” I drop my voice. “She was starting to burn the furniture.”
“Well, I didn’t force him to start drinking,” Bear says, looking up from his fish. What I see in his eyes is a blend of guilt and humour. And I start thinking that for a man, Bear really is different in how he sees the big picture of what goes on between men and women.
He says, “How’s it going with Gayl? Did you speak to her any more about her moving to town?”
“No. Not really. I think it’s because a part of me thinks it would be good for her, and but another part of me just can’t imagine life without her. Not yet anyway. Not now.” I say this like I’m the only parent.
He rearranges his lemon arrangement for a minute before wiping his hands on a dishcloth and saying, “Ray know about it yet?”
“About?”
I must look really distressed about his question because he quickly adds, “About Gayl wanting to move to town.”
“Oh that. Yeah … He knows. He thinks it’s a good idea. Easy for him to say isn’t it?”
He clears his throat. “So you’ve talked to him? Lately?”
I nod. “Today.”
“Today.”
“Yeah. I guess he’ll be staying in Newville all week.”
“Interesting,” he says. Now it’s his turn to nod. He looks at me and I try to read his face again, but Olive chooses this moment to come barging back into the pantry.
“Oh, look at this salmon!” she says, picking up the platter. “Bear, you are a master at filleting. Among other things, I’m sure.” She has some nerve to wink at me again.
He bows. “At your service.” Then he winks at me too and I feel like melting into the floor.
Here I am, washing up the dishes in the bathtub, again. My wine glass sits next to the kerosene lamp. In front of me, a tower of pots and measuring cups and odd things like lemon squeezers threaten to topple over. Olive refuses to let Rena “lift another finger,” since she’d helped out so much while I was gone. So Rena’s out there at the table sucking back her cranberry juice as fast as Bear and Olive are drinking their wine. If I lean back from my position in front of the tub, I can see them out there at the table. They all look pretty relaxed in their chairs. The talk has turned to my uncle. Olive is asking him about his miniature boat carvings, which have become very popular in the tourist stores around town.
“Not as exciting as police work, but at my age you start looking for ways to calm yourself down instead of trying to rev things up.”
In the candlelight, my uncle looks twenty years younger and so does everyone else. Excepting, of course, the kids, who don’t age in even the harshest of lights. I can’t help but notice how the candlelight magically fades the lines usually etched across Rena’s face, and she looks almost as fresh as she did back when she was busy messing around with practically every man in town.
“Now, where did you catch this salmon?” Leftie had asked Olive awhile b
ack, when we’d all been seated around the table. Biz and Gayl were saying how cool it was that the only light for miles was coming from the candles on the table.
“Actually, we caught it out in the snow!” Olive said, as she poured the wine. “Right Rena?”
Rena nodded. “She had to use a fishing rod to get him out.”
Olive’s eyes sparkled. “He gave us quite a struggle, but we managed to reel him in.”
Then she explained how, yesterday, we’d had to move everything from the freezer, including the salmon, out into the snow. And that’s when she started listing off all the wonderful things Rena had done today. It seems she’d brought in three armloads of wood, made a salad, peeled potatoes, scrubbed out the bathtub, and on top of all that, washed some of the twins’ clothes. All of which were now drying nicely above the stove. Did we think Olive could convince Rena to move into Kyle House permanently? Rena grinned as she piled rice onto her plate, saying that keeping busy helps to keep her mind off her problems.
I excused myself then, saying I wasn’t very hungry and that’s why I’m now looking at this mountain of pots and unwashed dishes from lunch. And I’m thinking I should get Gayl in here to help instead of her sitting out there drinking and eating like being stranded at Kyle House with no running water is such a lark. But then that would mean I’d have to go out and sit at that table instead of being safe in here alone.
There’s a scrape of a chair and I hear Uncle Leftie say, “Well, I’ll be heading back to town right after I have a piece of Olive’s blueberry pie. I can give anybody a lift in if they want.”
“Oh, no,” says Olive. “Stay here tonight. Everybody can stay!”
Is she serious? I look around the corner and see them all sitting there like they’re actually considering it.
Road to Thunder Hill Page 20
