“And on a personal note,” said Mr. Willis, “I hear congratulations are in order. We wish you all the best on your engagement.”
“Engagement?” Estella said. “Excuse me?”
There was silence, and then Mr. Willis recovered and said, “I’m sorry, perhaps we were misinformed.”
“Is that the reason you’re not offering me the job?” Estella asked. “Because you thought I was getting married? It’s 1965, in case you hadn’t noticed. And I’m too old to be popping out babies.”
It took him a few seconds to recover his voice, but he managed to say, “That would never enter into the decision. As I said . . .”
She didn’t wait for a repeat of the official reason.
Estella had been back in charge of her students for just minutes when one of the other women teachers knocked on her door and called her out to the hall. She told Estella she’d seen one of the older boys with a set of brass knuckles and she wasn’t sure what to do, since the neither the principal nor the vice was in the school.
Estella didn’t know why it was up to her to handle it, especially given that she was apparently not fit for school administration, but she went looking for the boy. She found him with a younger student, whom he’d backed up against a locker and was jabbing in the chin with the brass knuckles. Estella grabbed him from behind, pulled him away from the younger boy, and told him that if she ever caught him in any act of torture again, she would beat him senseless.
“Give me that weapon right now,” she said.
He handed over the brass knuckles.
“Now get out. And don’t come back. I don’t care what your parents say. You aren’t welcome here next year. Find yourself a job. Do something useful the world might eventually thank you for.”
The boy started to say that she couldn’t talk to him that way.
“No sense telling me that,” she said. “I don’t care. Now get out.”
He left.
Later, when the principal was back in his office, she handed him her letter of resignation in a sealed envelope and informed him that he might have to deal with the boy’s parents if they cared enough to call and complain. In fact, he might want to call them now and get ahead of it.
“The year’s almost over, Estella,” the principal said. “Let’s just forget about it.”
She pointed at the envelope and said, “I’m resigning, in case you’re interested,” and left the office before he could talk her out of it.
“I hope you’ve been keeping an eye on your car in the lot,” he called after her.
Her car.
She went to check, and of course all four tires were flat, and the driver’s side window was broken.
She made the obligatory report to the police, and then called a tow truck and had them haul the car to the Ford dealership. It was a five-year-old Falcon and she’d been planning to replace it anyway.
As she waited for a salesman, she looked around the showroom at the new cars and a shiny white one caught her eye. She’d never seen a car like it. There was a horse in mid-flight on the grill, and an emblem on the passenger side identified the car as a Mustang. A mounted poster propped on the hood showed a picture of a woman in a bride’s dress, looking as though she was on the run, like the horse, apparently making her break from married life. Was that her? Estella wondered. By the time a salesman was available, she had already convinced herself to buy the car. It was a stupid thing to do considering that she had just quit her job, but she bought it anyway.
She felt something akin to freedom as she pulled off the lot, even though she knew she was not likely to be driving into the sunset anytime soon.
EVERY YEAR SINCE he’d discovered Lake Claire, Oliver had travelled there in his own car, always a roomy Oldsmobile sedan. He hadn’t driven anything else since the Depression, and his current Oldsmobile had never been farther than the brick plant without him behind the wheel. When he’d given up his driver’s licence, Estella had promised him that they would continue to travel in his car, even to the lake, and he could issue orders from the passenger seat. When she announced that she had changed her mind and they were going to the lake in her new Mustang—which Oliver called her “toy car”—he said that had not been the agreement and he refused to travel with her.
“What does it matter which car you’re in?” Estella said. “I’m the one driving.”
“I want to get there alive,” he said.
Then he decided he was taking his new La-Z-Boy armchair, and he argued that it would only fit in the trunk of the Oldsmobile. If there was no one to drive it, he’d drive it himself, with or without a licence. Estella normally bent over backwards to avoid fighting with him, but this time she refused to change her mind. She had a new car and she wanted to take it. Oliver told her she had become stubborn in middle age, and she replied that she had got it from someone and it wasn’t her mother.
In the end, Mathew and Fay said they would drive Oliver in the Oldsmobile. They agreed he was being difficult, but Estella was getting as bad as he was, could she not see that? Why couldn’t she have driven his car to keep the peace?
“Why is keeping the peace my job?” she asked, even as she wondered why she didn’t just placate her father and go in his car.
On the Friday of the July holiday weekend, Mathew and Fay came for Oliver and then collected a woman named Lorette whom they’d hired for the two weeks they were to be at the lake. Lorette had been Gladys’s idea. She was thinking ahead to Estella getting married and moving out, because Estella had still not told them she was done with Clarence. Gladys knew that nothing would ever convince Oliver to leave his home when Estella wasn’t there to look after him, so she proposed a trial run with a private nurse.
Estella agreed. She was curious to know what her father would think of hired help.
Once Oliver was away with Mathew and Fay, she locked the house and headed out in her new car. Besides the car, she had in her suitcase one other post-Clarence item of vanity: a two-piece bathing suit with a bright geometric pattern resembling a Mondrian painting. She’d never before worn a two-piece. In spite of Clarence Angell calling her a whore, she was modest when it came to public displays of her body. She was the only one of the Diamond women—with the exception of her mother and the significantly older Gladys—who had never displayed her midriff on the beach.
As she drove, she cranked up the radio and sang along. She was hardly out of the city when she was stopped for speeding. “What’s New Pussycat?” was blasting and the young officer had to ask her to turn the radio down. She told him that she was a teacher and she was so relieved school was over for the year that she’d forgotten herself. He didn’t give her a ticket. When she got to Prince Albert, she stopped at the A&W and ordered a burger and root beer, which were delivered on a window tray by a carhop. Her new car was a bit of a sensation in the drive-in lot.
Once she was back on the highway again, she realized the sedan in front of her was her father’s Oldsmobile. The trunk lid was tied down with ropes because of the armchair, and she could see Oliver and Lorette’s heads through the back window. She considered passing but Mathew was driving exactly the speed limit, so she settled in behind them and avoided the temptation to step on the gas.
When they finally turned off the access road into the village, they found it packed with people, there for the long weekend. The drive along the main street happened in starts and stops as families and groups of teenagers crossed back and forth between the beach and the shops. Estella followed Mathew and ignored the gawkers—mostly young men, not wives on the run—who took an interest in her car. She noted all the changes that had taken place over the fifteen years since she’d first seen Lake Claire. There had been no Dot’s Beach Hut then, no motel next to The Travellers, no Beach Café, no tackle shop or bicycle rental kiosk, no concession stand at the marina, where a dozen people were now lined up to order hot dogs or onion rings. Something new at the marina caught her eye, a party boat of some kind with an awning that
covered the upper deck. She wondered what that was about.
When they finally negotiated their way through the crowds and past the three-way stop that marked the end of the village, they made their way to Fosters and parked in front of the office. Estella and Mathew went inside for their keys, and found Allen Foster behind the counter, waiting for them. He too was now a middle-aged man with grey in his hair. He showed them the list of the cottages they’d booked, and which Diamonds had already checked in. When Estella looked at the names, she realized they’d forgotten to cancel the cottage for Harold and Astrid, Theo’s son and daughter-in-law, who had stayed behind with their newborn premature baby. She wondered if she might take it for herself, but she knew she shouldn’t leave her father alone with Lorette. She and Mathew discussed whether they ought to keep the key, just in case Astrid and Harold were able to come with the baby for a few days, and they decided they should. Everyone was hoping they would make it so they could set a new record for the most Diamonds at the lake. They’d planned for forty-three, but then Astrid had gone into early labour. Estella didn’t understand the fuss over the number and thought forty-one Diamonds was probably plenty.
Before they left the office, Allen told them all about the new paddlewheeler. The owner of the marina had purchased it from a man who had previously toured it up and down the Missouri River in Montana. It had been renamed the Claire de la Lune and could hold up to fifty passengers on deck or below, depending on the weather. You could book the whole boat for a lake cruise, or purchase a ticket for the sunset tour every evening. Estella knew the marina owner practically lived at the golf clubhouse and she said it was hard to picture him touring cottagers around the lake.
“He’s hired someone,” Allen said. “Peter Boone, remember him? He was in a bad accident in the spring but he seems to be alright.”
Estella didn’t tell Allen that she knew exactly how bad the accident had been. Telling him she’d witnessed it would have meant telling him more, all the details of what she’d been doing in front of a boxing club, so instead, she said simply that she’d heard about the accident, and was glad to learn Peter had been able to go back to work. As she and Mathew left the office with their keys, she thought that Peter must have recovered a lot faster than Jack had. Noise still sent Jack to a dark room with an ice bag for his head.
“Tell Oliver I’ll drop by after supper,” Allen called after them. “We’ve got a year’s worth of breeze to shoot.”
Estella parked next to Emily Carr, as usual, and Mathew pulled up behind her to unload Oliver’s chair and his suitcase. By now, Oliver had figured out why Lorette was there and he wasn’t happy. She was a woman in her fifties who looked like she’d seen it all before, and she was unfazed when Oliver brushed her away and refused any help as he made his way up the steps. Because he insisted he was going to sleep in his armchair in the living room, Estella took the big bedroom and gave Lorette the one that had always been hers. They unpacked the bags while Oliver sat on the deck and watched his sons appropriate the picnic tables, as they did every year.
Later, they all gathered outside for a barbecue. At sunset, the new paddlewheeler made its way across the bay with patio lanterns glowing orange and yellow under the awning. Music played through the sound system, Roy Orbison singing “Only the Lonely.” The Diamonds all went down to the beach with their Dixie cups to watch the boat pass, even Oliver.
At bedtime, Estella had to negotiate with her father over what Lorette was allowed to do. He had to let her help him in the shower, she said. There were no bars to hang on to and they didn’t want him to have a fall. She reminded him that he’d had a close call the year before when he’d slipped on the tiles stepping out of the shower. She tried to lighten the fact of his new need for assistance by saying, “You and Allen should have thought about your old ages when you designed the bathrooms.”
Lorette tried to help by telling him she understood his issues about privacy, and that she was a professional and he didn’t have anything she hadn’t seen before, but that only made it worse. In the end, he refused to have a shower.
After Oliver was finally settled for the night in his armchair, Estella put on her new bathing suit and went for a swim in the dark. The surface of the water was black and she couldn’t see the lake bottom, but after so many years she could have walked in with her eyes closed. The water was warmer than usual because the weather in June had been so hot. Still, the air was cool, and when she got out she dried herself quickly and went back to the cottage for a hot shower.
She found her father still asleep in his chair, and Lorette browsing through a magazine with a tiny reading light clipped onto it. Lorette had come prepared, Estella thought. Probably more prepared than she would ever be for this new version of Oliver Diamond.
THE NEXT MORNING Estella walked to The Travellers for breakfast, hoping to run into Peter so she could see for herself how he was doing. She expected his mother to be waiting tables in the restaurant but she wasn’t there. Estella asked the teenaged girl who took her order if Peter was around, and she said, “He sometimes goes fishing in the morning. Or he might be at the marina working on the boat.”
On her way out, she saw Shirley Boone at the hotel registration desk. She waved at her when she went by but she wasn’t sure that Shirley recognized her. She was busy with guests so Estella didn’t hang around.
She went down to the marina to see if Peter was there, but it was deserted except for some teenaged boys fishing off the pier. She walked out to where the paddlewheeler was moored and had a look at it. It was perhaps thirty feet long, and Claire de la Lune was newly painted on the side. A pair of foam fenders protected the boat from the pier as it bobbed up against it. A sandwich board propped on the pier gave the sunset cruise details.
She returned to Fosters along the old trail through the trees and sat with her father on the deck. Her teenaged nephew Paul—Andrew’s youngest—was sitting by himself on a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a black leather jacket even though it was too hot for it.
“What’s wrong with him, anyway?” Oliver said. “He looks like a hooligan.”
“He’s a teenager,” Estella said. “It’s the style.” She was thinking about the incident at school with the brass knuckles and hoped Paul wasn’t turning into one of those boys.
“His father was overseas when he was not much older,” Oliver said. “I don’t imagine he was thinking about style when he was fighting the Germans.”
“I know, Dad,” she said, “you’re right.” She agreed with everything he said, trying her best to leave the arguing to Lorette.
That evening they watched the paddlewheeler cross the bay, Roy Orbison once again playing on the sound system, “Crying” this time, and then “Running Scared” on the way back to the marina.
“Surely they’re planning to change the music,” Fay said. “Or is the entire village going to be subjected to Roy Orbison every night?”
Later, Estella swam alone in the dark again. This time she struck out across the water toward the point at the far end of the bay, even though she knew she ought to swim parallel to the shore.
The next night she went farther still before turning back.
The night after that she made it all the way to the point.
On the way back she grew aware of a sound in the water. She stopped swimming and tried to see in the darkness where the sound was coming from, and she saw someone paddling behind her in a canoe. It was Peter Boone. When he saw that she had stopped swimming, he laid his paddle across the gunwales and let the canoe drift alongside her. He said he’d been at the point and had seen someone approach in the water and worried about a swimmer alone in the darkness.
She said she didn’t think daylight or dark made any difference, if you got into trouble alone you were likely going to drown.
He said, “I meant a motorboat could come along and run over you.”
Something she hadn’t thought of.
She was still treading water and
starting to feel the cold, but she said, “I hear that’s you playing Roy Orbison on the paddlewheeler every night. Don’t be too offended if my family suggests you change the music.”
Then she said she was too cold to talk and she began to swim again. Peter followed her all the way, into the shallow water in front of Fosters. He beached the bow of the canoe in the sand while Estella got out shivering and wrapped herself up in her beach towel. Peter seemed to be waiting in the canoe for her to head up to the cottages. She searched in the dark for her plastic beach sandals, and shoved her feet into them.
Then she said, her teeth chattering, “Thanks for the warning about the motorboats. I should have thought of that.”
He stuck his paddle into the sand and pushed himself off, and she watched the canoe disappear in the darkness. Then she practically ran up the embankment and across the grass.
When she got back to the cottage her father was smoking a cigar on the deck in his pyjamas and Lorette was inside, sitting on the couch. Estella could see the back of her head through the window.
“I thought you’d be asleep,” she said.
“I don’t like that woman,” Oliver said.
“You don’t have to like her,” Estella said. “Just let her help.”
She dropped her wet towel and hung it over the deck railing and was about to step inside the cottage and get into a hot shower when her father said, “Always thinking about yourself, aren’t you.”
“Dad,” she said, turning back to him. She was now in her wet bathing suit without her towel, and her teeth were chattering so hard she could barely talk. “It wasn’t my idea. The others thought we could use an extra hand.”
“I don’t see you doing much,” he said. “You don’t have children to put to bed, do you?”
She never snapped at her father but she did now. “It’s been a long year, Dad,” she said. “I need a break once in a while, and that includes from you. Anyway, I can’t argue. I’m freezing.”
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