Love on the Rocks: A Heartswell Harbour Romance

by Mavis Williams

  “A bad spell does not make you a drunk.” Ruby wouldn’t look her in the eye. Her gaze kept sliding off, like bare feet on a greased pole. Ruby had been her friend for more than twenty years, but even friendships can get bent around the edges, worn flat and faded. Lucy couldn’t blame her, she didn’t want to look at herself most days either.

  “I wonder if that’s what the parents at my last school thought?” Lucy said. “Oh, the drunk English teacher is just going through a bad spell. She’ll be fine soon. Or maybe they thought, that lady is a drunk. Fire her.” Lucy drummed her fingers on the coffee cup. She could feel how the whiskey would burn warmly down her throat, erasing the choking feeling welling up from her soul. She had to just keep pouring one on top of the other to maintain balance. “Yup. Pretty sure that’s what they thought.”

  There was a sudden commotion in the back of the coffee shop, through a big open doorway that lead into the Feed store. The sound of tumbling boxes punctuated by frustrated grunts was enough to pull Ruby away from the table. Enough for Lucy to grab her purse and slosh a healthy glug of scotch into her cup. Enough to divert her from rocky ground. Getting fired for being drunk at school was rocky ground, indeed.

  “It’s all right, Rob. No harm. Just pick them up and restack.” Ruby came back to the table, shaking her head. She leaned close, whispering. “It’s Rob, from the Community Service program. Clumsy as a moose on a dance floor.”

  “Why did you hire him?” She sipped her coffee, smiling. Who cared why she hired him. Scotch, good. Who cared about anything?

  “I didn’t. He’s here working off his community service hours… he got caught lighting fires in the garbage bins behind the post office in town.”

  “Nice. You’re surrounded by criminals and drunks. Lucky Ruby.”

  “Dorian asked if I would sponsor him, try to set him on his feet again.”

  “Dorian of the Lazy Eye?” Lucy lifted her head, wiping a dribble of doctored coffee off her chin.

  “Dorian of the Nice Guy Who Helps People,” Ruby chided. “I know you’re not a fan of cops, but he’s a good one.”

  “I like cops,” Lucy said, lowering her voice like a petulant child. “I just happen to think it’s important for them to have 20/20 vision, that’s all.”

  “I’ll bet that our Dorian is in fine physical shape, Lu,” Ruby said. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed. He’s also a hopeless romantic. And single.”

  Lucy blinked at her friend, a cold chill running down her spine directly to the bottle waiting for her in her purse.

  “Nope,” she mumbled. “Not after… just nope.”

  Ruby frowned. It was the only time she had wrinkles, and even then, they didn’t qualify as wrinkles. Ripples, maybe.

  “It’s been two years, Lucy,” she said gently, covering Lucy’s hand with her own.

  “It’s been a lifetime.” Lucy’s voice came from six feet under her shame and her guilt. It was a long climb to put the words together. “Jeff’s.”

  “Not your fault, honey. You know that.”

  Lucy stood up and tripped over her bag as she moved to the counter, putting distance between herself and the conversation.

  “Can we not do this, please?” she asked.

  Ruby stood up and rubbed Lucy’s back for a silent moment. Ruby was always good with spaces and silences and support. Lucy didn’t deserve her.

  Lucy didn’t deserve anyone.

  “I’ll call you when the chicks come in.” Ruby tugged her back to the present. Ruby was also good at not letting Lucy wallow. “Between now and then, you’re going to need to build a chicken coop and a place for the goat.” She held up her hand, her gentle smile deepening. “Don’t even. I’ve heard all about the goat, and you cannot keep it in the Music Room.”

  “Can.”

  Her cup was empty. The bottle in her purse was not.

  Ruby turned just as another crashing tumble echoed through the doorway. “Lucy, I love you and I’m here for you, but it’s time to get over yourself and grow up.”

  “Yeah. I’ve heard that.” Lucy wasn’t hurt by the comment. No point being hurt when she was right. Everyone was right. Get over it, grow up, move on.

  Ruby disappeared into the back of the store and Lucy poured another slug of whiskey into her cup. She didn’t bother with the coffee.

  Seven

  Morning arrived long before she was ready for it, as did most things in her life. Unexpected, unwanted, unwelcome.

  She shifted her weight away from the goat that seemed to be spooning her and rolled nose to nose with Dog.

  “Hello, Dog,” she whiffled. “You smell like a rotting animal. Why are you in my bed?”

  Dog licked her face.

  The sunlight rippled across the floor and crawled into her eyes before she had the good sense to close them and go back to her happy place: asleep.

  Asleep is the new awake, she decided.

  When she was asleep, she wasn’t a failure, a drunk, a lost soul sleeping with a goat and a rancid canine. Asleep, she was a success. Everything was in color when she was sleeping.

  Awake, it was all grey.

  Dog wanted to pee and it seemed that Goat wanted to dance the macarena on her spinal cord. Who knew that goats were like five-year-olds on crack first thing in the morning?

  Goat leapt gracefully over her shoulder and over Dog who lifted his head laconically as if to comment on the unprecedented prevalence of airborne goats this morning. Goat landed gently on all four wee hoofs before launching itself skyward again and again, until it seemed that no one was going to get any more sleep this fine morning.

  Lucy sighed.

  Gotta pee the dog.

  Gotta feed the goat.

  Is a woman’s work never done?

  She shrugged out of the twisted sheets, barely registering the rattle of goat turds that tumbled to the floor like lost marbles from the folds of her comforter.

  Marbles, lost.

  Definitely.

  There was coffee.

  There was whiskey for the coffee.

  She opened the front door. Both of them. Doors. And latched them with the little hooks attached to the banister so they would stay open and the fresh scent of May could breeze in and refresh every crack and cranny of her goat-infested home.

  Goat and Dog bolted out the door, one chasing the other, and vice versa, and she could hear the chickens causing a commotion… wait.

  Wait.

  Chickens?

  Lucy took a hefty slug of alcohol-laced coffee and pondered the significance of the clucking emanating from somewhere nearby. She didn’t have chickens. She was going to have chickens, because apparently, as Ruby had reminded her, part of selling her soul for lodging included yoga, gardens and poultry… but the poultry hadn’t hatched yet.

  “So, why-for whence behooves yon clucking?” Lucy asked Dog as he rocketed past the front step, determined to either slay or outrun Goat. She hoped there would be no slaying. She tried on her Shakespearean vocabulary one more time, enjoying the frolic of her words in the sunshine and the smooth pungency of coffee liqueur before noon.

  She hoped it was before noon.

  “Whither thou comest, oh wee cuckold of the dawn?” She descended several steps into the morning, raising her mug as she went. “Show thyself, thy poopscallion of eggonomic deliciousness.”

  The clucking continued.

  Lucy descended.

  Somewhere behind the school, Goat gave a bleat and Dog suddenly reappeared, tail between his legs, looking sheepish. Goatish.

  “Serves you right, you wee fucker.” Lucy drained her mug and wondered how she had arrived in the parking lot, when the kitchen was so very far away. Empty mug was a problem. She sighed.

  “Avast,” she sighed. “Alack. Anon. Al-Anon. Hello, my name is Lucy, and I am an…”

  The child appeared as if out of nowhere, but she was definitely there, edging quietly around the building. She was perhaps four. Or six. Skinny. Sweet little girl skinny, like a pupp
y not yet grow into its paws.

  “Hi.” Lucy offered, pleased with herself for remembering the basic social graces. Lucy felt she should know her name, because she recognized the pink tutu. Girl had been here before.

  “Hi,” said Girl.

  Girl was holding a chicken.

  “You’re holding a chicken,” Lucy said.

  Girl blinked and stroked the feathered head, being rewarded by a contented clucking.

  “Are you a chicken whisperer?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t whisper to her. I just talk. She likes it, see?” Girl lifted the hen in both hands, holding it out as proof of conversational success. It clucked at Lucy malevolently.

  “I don’t think it likes me.”

  Somehow Lucy and the Girl had closed the gap between them and Lucy was now crouched on the ground, looking up into the beady eyes of what was rapidly becoming her poultry nemesis. “Look how angry she looks? He always look that angry?”

  “She’s just tired.” Girl tucked the glowering chicken under her arm. “You have muffins?”

  “Muffins?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Um.”

  “They said you was making stuff here and doing stuff and they used to have muffins when this was a school.” Girl paused, squinting at Lucy as if trying to decide if she were real. “Muffins? Toast?” She sounded like she was speaking to a foreigner with a hearing impairment.

  Lucy thought about muffins. She thought about coffee liqueur. She thought about where she had seen Girl before.

  Oh.

  With Dorian. The cop.

  “No muffins.” She rose to her feet and walked away, straight up the stairs, unhooking the little hooks that held the doors open to the breeze, and to the spring-ness of the world and to the intrusion of poultry-bearing urchins demanding fibre and vitamins and a wholesome start to their day.

  She pulled closed one door, then turned to close the other… only to discover that Girl had followed her and was now standing as threatening as a spring shower inside the hallway while Dog sat grinning beside her.

  Lucy closed the door.

  Girl put her hand on Dog’s head.

  Chicken clucked moodily.

  “I’m Ida,” Girl said. “But it’s not like EYE-dah… it’s EEE-dah.”

  “Thanks, that’s very helpful.” Lucy reopened the door, gesturing to the great outdoors and the fantastic freedom that awaited young EEE-dah and her chicken friend if she would only seize the day and get the Hell out.

  “I like raisins,” Ida blinked. Her eyelashes were long enough to hang laundry on. “In my muffins.”

  “You think I’m going to make muffins? Don’t you have, like, a mother?”

  “She don’t mind.”

  “Oh, great. She don’t mind.” Lucy pondered Shakespeare again. “Mine eyes smell onion, I shall weep anon...”

  “This is Kentucky,” Ida raised the chicken once again.

  “Kentucky? As in, fried?”

  “She’s a present,” Ida said. She had the grace to look apologetic, as if she knew that giving a moulting chicken to a new neighbor was verging on socially unacceptable, but at just that moment Dog decided to make friends with the new school member and there was a squawking and a flurry of feathers and Kentucky exploded from Ida’s arms, launching herself like a missile toward Lucy’s head. Lucy dropped to her knees amid a drift of chicken feathers and smears of white chicken poo that was warm and sticky on her hands.

  Ida giggled… maniacally, Lucy thought… and chased after the wayward chicken as it careened down the hall toward the Art room with Dog barking merrily in its wake.

  Lucy watched them go.

  Not bothering to wonder what to do about the gift of a chicken into her chicken-hutch-less life, Lucy put both hands firmly on the floor and crawled toward the kitchen.

  She had to learn how to make muffins. It was the least she could do.

  Eight

  “I’m going to hell,” Lucy moaned. She knew that moaning should be reserved for moments of imminent death, dismemberment or disease. Moaning was for those suffering from unbearable pain.

  Lucy as just sober and sad.

  “You’re not going to hell.” Ruby was sober also, but the only sadness in her life, Lucy felt certain, was the fact that her wayward friend Lucy was moaning on her doorstep about burnt muffins. “Burning muffins isn’t sinful.”

  “You don’t understand,” Lucy had sent Ida home after coating the school kitchen in a flurry of flour and raisins and made her way to Ruby’s kitchen where there was coffee, and non-burnt muffins, and Sven.

  Sven was Ruby’s lover.

  “Hi, lover.” Lucy waved before ducking her head under the spout of the coffee maker and inhaling deeply.

  “Hello, Lucy.” Sven sounded like a friendly Arnold Schwarzenegger. He always seemed to be poised to make something with eggs or build some kind of rustic structure with rough hewn timbers and one of those saws that it took two people to use, but you could just tell he could do it all by himself. “I hear you have a stripper pole in zee schoolhaus?”

  “I don’t actually have a stripper pole.” Lucy wiped a dribble of coffee off her chin. “But you can come take your clothes off any time you like.”

  Ruby shook her head.

  Lucy giggled.

  Sven shrugged and hauled a dozen eggs out of the fridge, wrapped his arm around Ruby’s waist and kissed her all the way from her forehead to her navel and in one athletic ballet movement, lifted Lucy from the counter onto a chair and had a steaming mug of coffee and a streusel in front of her before you could say “please get naked” twice in Swedish.

  “It’s Vänligen bli naken,” Sven said when she asked him to translate. He chuckled. It sounded like the sound her ovaries would make if they could give him a standing ovation.

  “Please stop hitting on my boyfriend.” Ruby patted her on the head like a puppy and pinched Sven on his muscular buttock. “You’re here, you’re drinking my coffee and speaking really bad Swedish in my kitchen… why are you going to Hell, exactly?”

  “The Girl.” Lucy wilted toward the table, hoping a plate of eggs would save her. “The Girl with the Chicken, and the unreasonable breakfast demands. What is wrong with parents these days, anyway? Don’t they have their own raisins?”

  “You is a strange lady,” Sven made the eggs materialize under Lucy’s nose. She sighed, blissfully. “But, Ruby loves you, and so Sven loves you also.” He patted her on the head.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Lucy sighed.

  “That’s all you get, honey.” Ruby helped Lucy replace her jaw which had dropped to an undignified location on her chest. “Eggs. I get the sausage, you get the eggs.”

  “Hahahahah!” Sven’s laugh was so manly that Lucy was certain that somewhere some lucky woman was having an orgasm just from the sound waves. She buried her nose in the eggs. “Funny vomen. Canada is full of zee funny vomen!”

  Sven washed the dishes, plucked six chickens and froze them, made bratwurst and seven kegs of German beer, kissed Ruby and patted Lucy on the head once again before thrusting his manly feet into enormous work boots and striding out the door like he was about to slay a dozen virgins and vanquish the heathen horde wearing only a kilt…

  “He’s Swedish, Lucy, not Scottish…”

  “Right. Sorry. No kilt.”

  “Drink your coffee.”

  “Right. Coffee.” Lucy slurped. Erased kilts from her mild. “I burned the muffins and I kicked the Girl out of the school, and I don’t want the chicken, and I don’t know how to do yoga.”

  “Um.”

  “Yeah. Um, alright! Hell, Ruby! I’m lusting after your massive lover and kicking orphans into the ditch and there was Goat poo in my bed this morning,” Lucy wailed, forking eggs into her mouth like manna from heaven.

  “OK,” Ruby said. She placed both hands on the table and took a deep breath. “I’m guessing you met Ida.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And she brought you a chicken?�
��

  “Yeah.”

  “And you know about her mother, right?”

  Lucy frowned. “This is going to be one of those stories, right? The ones where some poor kid is neglected and abused and that’s why she has an unhealthy addiction to poultry, and somewhere in the telling of this tragic tale I am suddenly going to feel responsible for this kid and I’ll go to sleep at night burdened by guilt because of my failure to be an upstanding citizen of the world. It won’t work, you know. I will never be an upstanding citizen of the world, no matter how many orphans are thrown at me.”

  “Uh… no.” Ruby waited patiently. Lucy glowered and plucked a wayward chicken feather out of her hair. “That was pretty good though. You want to keep going, Madame Martyr?”

  “No. I’m good.”

  “Ida’s parents were very young…”

  “Are they cousins?”

  “Are you going to stop?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were very young, and the father ran off when Connie got pregnant with Ida…”

  “There should be violins. Why are there no violins?” Lucy rested her chin on the table, her arms spread out straight in front of her. She had seen Dog take this position, and it always made her smile. Ruby wasn’t smiling.

  “You should stop.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry, Ruby.” She sighed and sat up, folding her hands in her lap. “Please continue with the story which will make me cast away my own insignificant personal woes and become a beacon of hope to both poultry and children alike…”

  Ruby stood up suddenly and snatched her still-steaming coffee mug off the table. She stomped out of the room without looking back, leaving Lucy with the remains of breakfast, a headache and a growing sense that she was an idiot of epic proportion.

  ✽✽✽

  Lucy sheepishly cleaned Ruby’s kitchen, even picking the burnt cheese off the frying pan before scrubbing it feverishly in the elbows-deep canyon that passed for a sink. She was putting the dry dishes away when Sven returned smelling of cedar and salty air.

  “Sven, do you know what the greatest sadness of my life is?” Lucy leaned against the counter, pondering her many sadnesses.