Love on the Rocks: A Heartswell Harbour Romance

by Mavis Williams

  “It’s Dorian and yeah, Lu, you were yelling. A lot.”

  “Is it, like, allowed… for you to be a cop with a… you know…?” She shoved herself off his chest and gestured vaguely toward his face, waggling her fingers in front of his eye and fixing him with a steely glare. She was especially good at steely glares, especially with sneaky cops who accused her of howling at the moon.

  “Let’s get you inside.” He guided her by the elbow, turning her toward the school and laughing. He thought she was funny. How nice. “Before we get any more complaints from your neighbors.”

  “My neighbors?” She stopped, pulling away from him and almost falling. “You got complaint from… neighbors?”

  “Noise complaint, yup. Called the station, asked us to come get you back into your house.”

  He led her up the stairs, opening the big doors almost magically before her. Amazing depth perception he seemed to have, even with his visual disability.

  “Not my house… is a school,” she said. “Watch out for the goat.”

  He chuckled again. She was, apparently, hilarious. So why did she want to cry? Oh wait, she was crying. All over his nice badgey, buttony uniform.

  “There, now… it’s alright, my dear.” He patted her shoulder, offered her a tissue, led her down the hall to the grade three classroom with the alphabet and the parquet floor and the poster admonishing proper handwashing techniques. Home. Goat didn’t bother to get off the bed when he plopped her rather unceremoniously onto it. “Sleep it off, Lucy. I’ll stay for a while, to make sure you’re all right.”

  She watched him through swollen eyelids as he dragged the rocking chair closer to her bed and sat down. A giant Lazy Eye Troll watching the stolen treasure. Or something like that.

  “My name is Dorian, Lucy. Not Lazy Eye.”

  “Whatever,” she mumbled, a drunken petulant child. “Lazy Eye.”

  He chuckled, the rumble of which blended with the scrape of the rocking chair on the dusty floor and the gurgle of her nose as she sniffled.

  Noise complaint, she sniffed. Neighbors, she muffled.

  Wait.

  Lucy didn’t have any neighbors, except for… “Mumsy,” she gurgled.

  Mumsy had called the cops.

  Twelve

  She woke up and knew that today had to be different.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the smell of goat that had to go or the absence of curtains on the wide educational windows. The sun poured in the curtainless windows, waking her well before the reasonable and rational hour of noon. Perhaps it was something deeper within herself that had to change.

  She had, for example, to convince her very cells to stop begging her to ply them with liquor the moment she opened her eyes.

  “Something,” she muttered, her words rasping over barren desert sand. “Something has to change.”

  “Ye could start with yer sheets,” a voice intoned inside her head. “Sheets shouldna shed goat shit such as yours do.”

  Mumsy.

  And the wee Irish matriarch wasn’t inside Lucy’s head at all. She was rocking dismally about six feet away from her bed, knitting.

  “Why are you knitting?”

  “I’m not knitting, ye ninny.”

  Mumsy wasn’t the knitting kind. She was the dismally rocking kind. The kind that sat uninvited by your bedside as you woke, your cells in turmoil, your head pounding, your determination to change your life dwindling with each mournful scrape of the rocking chair on the parquet of the grade three classroom in which you had collapsed the night before.

  “Please tell me you have coffee Mums. Just… tell me there is coffee secretly hiding over there underneath your Cloak of Oppression.”

  Lucy’s voice hurt.

  “I’m no wearing me Cloak of Oppression,” Mumsy gurgled. It was how she laughed, like the sound of a drain plugged with a hamster. “I’ve opted for me Jumper of Judgement instead.”

  “You made a joke,” Lucy rolled over, hoping she wasn’t naked and relieved to find she was still wearing the clothes from yesterday. Including her boots. And the mud from the holes she had decided to dig somewhere between ten pm and the fifth glass of whiskey. “I am a joke. I wore my boots to bed.”

  “Yer a mess, ‘tis a truth, that.”

  “You’re judging me.”

  “’Tis the Jumper.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Aye.”

  “That’s not an answer, Mums. I really wish you would just go knit something… maybe in your own home… like, any time now.”

  Mumsy didn’t move, but at least the rocking stopped. Lucy untangled herself from the sheets, finding Dog wrapped like a smelly Christmas gift beside her. She peeled the sheets off him and he gazed at her mournfully like she had just stolen his dignity. He flopped back onto the bed, a paragon of the exhaustion of living.

  “Look.” Lucy squinted at her mother. “Even Dog can’t get up without coffee.”

  “Today is Tuesday, and ye’re tardy.”

  “You’re not going to make coffee, are you?”

  “I’ve come to…”

  “Show me my future, yes I know,” Lucy interrupted, forcing herself to her feet. “You’re going to point to my gravestone and I’m going to have an epiphany and go buy a huge turkey for some gimped kid. Can we skip the whole redemption bit and just hit the elation at the end?”

  Mumsy frowned. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if Mums was frowning, or if she was facing a howling hurricane only she could feel.

  “That wee copper sat with ye all night.”

  Lucy swayed, her legs weak, her back sore, her head fuzzy. She lowered herself back onto the bed.

  “Wee copper?” She took a moment to translate Mumsy’s vernacular. Dorian. She groaned. “Dorian. He’s not wee, Mums, and he was here because you called the cops!”

  “Ye were after diggin’ holes with yer bare hands, lass. ‘Tis a mother’s boon to call for backup when her bairn’s gone beserk.”

  “It was The Day, Mums.” Lucy put her head in her hands. She remembered Dorian’s arms around her and wondered if he’d ever do it again.

  “’Tis Tuesday.”

  “Right, Tuesday.” Lucy hated it when she cried in front of Mumsy. It was like pouring salt into the ocean. She wiped her face on Dog, speaking into his fur so it muffled her seven-year-old’s voice. “We’re not going to talk about it. Don’t talk about dead fiancé. I forgot.”

  The room was quiet. Dog’s fur smelled like mud and grass and mould. Like home. Lucy listened to his stomach gurgle menacingly. There was something in there that wanted to come out. Life goes on. That was Mumsy’s entire philosophy. That, and don’t talk about it.

  Lucy heard the scrape of the rocking chair, followed by the thump of wee Irish feet trampling over her peaceful hangover.

  Something had to change.

  “It’s Tuesday.” Mumsy spoke from the door of the classroom without turning around. Lucy was surprised by how small she was, her head barely brushing past the big number four on the measuring tape that still hung on the door frame. It once measured the growth of little people, life, change, progress. “Ye need to prepare for Thursday. Thursday means T’ai Chi people.”

  Mumsy was speaking in riddles.

  “You’re speaking in riddles, Mums.”

  Lucy sniffed. There was no point in arguing with Mumsy.

  “T’ai Chi. People. They’ll be coming and carrying on.”

  Thursday.

  T’ai Chi.

  Carrying on.

  Oh Christ!

  “Not today,” Lucy moaned. “Oh, right. Thursday. Ugh, Mums… coffee… I need…”

  But Mumsy was gone, the sound of her sensible shoes diminishing down the hall like a memory of the unpleasant taste of cough medicine you know is going to burn all the way down.

  Something… something had to change.

  Thirteen

  She cringed when she saw Dorian pull into the parking lot of the school on Wednesday morning. She hadn’
t seen him since the night with the holes and the whiskey and the crying. She hated that she wanted to explain it all to him. That she wanted to curl up in his lap and wrap his big hands around her shoulders until she had told him every single last horrible word of her horrible story. Mumsy would disapprove. Don’t talk about it. Don’t cry about. And don’t drink about it.

  She moved toward the door armed with shame and indignation like shields against the sunlight.

  Dorian stood in the doorway with a hammer, a smile threatening to consume the universe, and Rob looking sheepish in the foggy morning sunshine. Young men on probation understood the inappropriateness of early mornings, even when dimpled law enforcers didn’t.

  She did not hesitate to express her displeasure.

  “It’s not that bad, Lucy.” Dorian took her arm and eased her out onto the front steps of the school, squinting and grimacing. “It’s only morning. You need more morning in your life.”

  The sun was barely brushing the horizon, burning valiantly through a veil of fog that drifted off the river, lacing through the trees like steam from a hot cup of coffee.

  Coffee.

  Yes.

  “Did you bring coffee?” Lucy frowned. Rob continued with the sheepishness. Dorian continued with the beaming good humor. Neither one would make eye contact. “No? You drag me out of my warm and comfy lair of sleepiness, wave hammers in my face, and have no coffee?”

  Dorian shrugged.

  “There are rules at this school, oh ye harbinger of hammers… and rule number one is Never Show Up at Lucy’s School at the Crack of Dawn Without Coffee.” She shrugged her arm out of Dorian’s grip, backed up into the school with her hands held up in front of her like a criminal facing a firing squad, and closed the door.

  She could hear Dorian laughing on the other side.

  She could hear Rob say, “I told you, man. That chick doesn’t do early.”

  She could hear more laughter from Dorian and then the satisfying sound of their footsteps retreating down the school steps. Ah bliss. Back to bed. That’ll teach them, she thought. Next time I wake up, she thought, there will be coffee.

  She wondered if she should have included croissants in the early morning rule.

  Lucy shuffled back to the grade three classroom when she heard a truck motor and then saw a truck through the window, driving past the basketball net and around to the back of the school. The truck was oppressively loaded with lumber.

  Lumber plus hammers plus men meant impending noise. She flung herself on her bed, picked up her cell phone and called Ruby.

  “I thought I’d be hearing from you.” Ruby smelled like cinnamon. Even through the phone. “The boys are there?”

  “Coffee. Why is there no coffee?”

  “It’s chicken coop building day, remember?” Ruby seemed to be handily ignoring the issue at hand.

  “Not without coffee, it ain’t,” Lucy grumbled. She could hear the nefarious banging of large pieces of wood being unloaded onto a playground by vigorous men. “Why do I get vigorous men, but no coffee?”

  Ruby sighed into the phone. Lucy felt a surge of hope. Whenever Ruby sighed, it was usually followed by flaky pastry and a tall latte.

  “Get dressed,” Ruby said.

  “Am dressed,” Lucy lied, casting about for a pair of shorts tangled in her bedsheets.

  “Go outside and help the boys unload. They have to come back for a second load…”

  “A second load?” Lucy cringed. The thought of hefting lumber making her woozy. “What are they building, a chicken skyscraper?”

  “… and you will come with them and then you can have a coffee.” It sounded like Ruby was talking to a three-year old.

  A three-year old alcoholic with a caffeine addiction.

  “I don’t think you’re three years old, Lucy,” Ruby continued with the sighing. The promise of coffee lingered. “You just need a bit of nudging and this is the nudging. Get out there and help the boys. I’m making chocolate croissants.”

  “I knew it! I win! I’ll take two!” Lucy crowed. Ruby had hung up on her, but the gentle aroma of chocolate drifted into Lucy’s slowly awakening mind and she tugged on her shorts. “Chicken coop building day. We’d better find Ida…”

  Lucy paused, looking out the window. Ida was sitting on the top of the slide, Kentucky perched beside her. They were surveying the unloading of the truck and looking distinctly like this was going to be The. Best. Day. Ever.

  ✽✽✽

  Lucy opened the door, heading out to join the construction team, only to be startled by a woman standing on her front step. She looked like she had fallen out of a Tolkien novel, rolled around through several decades of the Spanish Inquisition, then dusted herself off and decided to shave her head in protest over something that had apparently made her very angry.

  She seemed angry now.

  Lucy squinted at the woman, trying to place her on the docket of new acquaintances that might want her to do something. Lucy definitely did not want to do something, and this dusty, mousey, angry woman was definitely not one of the HAWC women.

  “Where is she?”

  The woman’s voice sounded like Tolkien would sound if he were an angry bald woman.

  “I’m Lucy,” said Lucy, deciding to try the Ruby Method of Dealing with the Public. Disarm them with politeness. Encourage them to love you with impeccable manners. Act as though they already love you.

  “I don’t give a fuck who you are. Where is she?” the woman was neither disarmed nor encouraged. “Ida. Fucking Ida, she’s here, ain’t she?”

  Oh.

  Oh dear.

  Lucy took a deep breath.

  “You must be Ida’s mother.”

  Sweet Jesus, she thought. Sweet Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Joseph’s uncle Bob.

  “Look,” the woman, who was probably even shorter than Mumsy, raised herself up so she could peer past Lucy into the hallway of the school. “I don’t give a fuck what she’s doing, but I need her. The social services is coming by and she’s gotta be with me. Got it? So, where is she?”

  Lucy heard voices and the thump of hammers coming from the playground and she wondered briefly what the jail time was for kidnapping.

  “She’s not here.”

  “They told me she’s been hanging out here,” the woman sniffed, wiping her sleeve under her nose. Upon closer inspection, Lucy realized she was actually quite young. The severe haircut and the dark circles under her eyes made her appear frail, elderly, like a little old lady who had misplaced her wig.

  “I’m Lucy,” Lucy tried again. “And you must be Connie. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Connie ignored Lucy’s outstretched hand.

  “I heard you like the drink.”

  Lucy recoiled. Connie’s eyes darted hungrily over her, searching for the tell-tale bulge of a bottle in a pocket.

  “I heard the same of you,” Lucy replied. The pleasantries, obviously, were over.

  Connie laughed. It was a hollow sound that ended in a cough and a rattle and a spray of spittle that speckled Lucy’s t-shirt. She squinted at Lucy, then shook her head, as though measuring her usefulness and finding her wanting. “You’ll hear more’n that if ya stick around long enough. Peoples love to talk, ain’t it? Like they got nothing better to do.”

  Connie turned suddenly and dropped to sit on the edge of the stairs, pulling out a cigarette and hunching her shoulders against the storm she carried around inside her. Lucy could tell there was a storm… it was a hunch she recognized in her own shoulders. Sighing, and with a glance to the corner of the building where she expected Ida to appear at any moment, Lucy sat beside Connie. A puff of smoke filled the silence between them.

  “Ya got this place fer a buck, I hear.” Connie gestured at the school.

  “Yup.”

  “Pretty sweet deal, I’d say.”

  “That’s what they tell me.” Lucy rested her elbows on her knees, wondering if the smell that tickled her nostrils was coming from Connie or i
f there was something rotting under the steps. “Why are social services coming to see you?”

  Connie grunted. Dog appeared around the side of the building and leapt up the steps, pushing his face into Connie’s chest as if they were long lost soul mates. His tail wagged, slapping Lucy’s knees. Connie rubbed his head, cigarette secured between her teeth. She laughed and Dog lounged against her in abject adoration. He turned a judgemental eye on Lucy as if to say, give her a chance.

  “They come once or twice a month…check out the house, check out the kid, invade my privacy like they’ve never taken a drink in their lives. Fuckers.”

  “Are you… on probation?” Lucy wasn’t sure that was the word she was looking for. Connie’s glare convinced her it wasn’t.

  “You think I’m a criminal? I ain’t no criminal!”

  “No, no, I mean… are you on a program, or an intervention or something…?” Lucy let her question hang like week old laundry no one had remembered to bring in off the line.

  “Fuck that… intervention,” Connie snorted. Interventions were apparently not worthy of consideration. “I gotta let them come see Ida, so I can keep the kid. I gotta keep the kid to keep the cheques coming. No kid, no cheques, no home… how’s that for an intervention?”

  “Have they taken her away from you… before?” Lucy was almost whispering. Her fingers were tightly wound in Dog’s fur, ready to yank him to safety at a moments’ notice. She looked at Connie, holding her gaze for a frightening moment where she wasn’t sure if she was about to be punched in the face or not. Connie glared, looked away, then stubbed out her cigarette, shoved Dog off her side and rose to her feet.

  “Yeah. They have.” She looked around; the school, the basketball court, the steps, anywhere but at Lucy. “Big deal. Where is she?”

  “Right now… don’t know,” Lucy lied. Like a cheap rug.

  “Send her home when you find her.” It wasn’t a question, but Lucy wasn’t overly fond of following orders.

  Without another word, Connie shuffled across the parking lot to her car. It was a rust colored hatch-back with a pom-pom perched on the antennae. It definitely had no muffler, and several loose belts as it squealed its way out of the drive and down the road toward Grim’s.