The Wife's Tale

by Lori Lansens

  Buttoning her bloodstained nightgown, Mary set out through the front door, limping on her swollen heel in her big winter boots, trudging through the snow covering the long, sloped driveway. There was a single set of recent vehicle tracks on the road, and in the gully the snow-frosted newspaper. She bent to retrieve the paper but couldn’t. She kicked at the snow with her boot and in doing so revealed another newspaper, and another, and another and another. She moved between the papers in their thin plastic bags, reading the dates, incredulous. Except for those dreamlike trips to pee or drink, she had left her body to itself, like a quarrelling couple who needed time apart, and had slept a full week.

  Noticing that the mailbox was stuffed with correspondence, she gathered the detritus of letters and advertising pamphlets into her arms and moved up toward the house. She passed through the front door and hobbled to the kitchen, caught by the draft from the broken back window. She found the broom near the trash can and brushed the glass into a neat pile in the corner. Then, with what Gooch called crazy tape and a piece of cardboard from her recycling efforts, she attended to the draft.

  Energized by the exercise and carrying the broom like a pole vault, she limped outdoors once again, with the tape and cardboard and several large green trash bags, to construct a cover for the truck’s jammed-open roof. She brushed the snow from the interior, where it had piled on the seat and drifted to the floor, opened a trash bag and swept the chocolate into it; flinching, she remembered the crow.

  As her broom caught the debris from beneath the front seat, a few small, shiny cards fluttered to the ground. She felt her flesh quivering as she worked the broom deeper under the seat, dislodging more of the cards—gold and silver foil strips. Losing instant lottery tickets. Dozens and dozens of them. Along with crumpled wrappers from a hundred mini chocolate bars. The couple’s secrets were that pitifully concealed. She climbed inside the truck and began her work on the sunroof.

  Tramping wet snow, she returned to the house and found the sink, running the tap and drinking several long glasses of water before moving toward the table, where she collapsed into her red vinyl chair. She looked across the cold tile floor to the silent refrigerator. Not a morsel of food had she ingested in a full week and still hunger’s chord was distant, a realization that pleased and alarmed Mary in equal measure.

  At the table she sat with the mail—a foreign task, since in their unspoken assignment of chores the mail, which really meant the bills, fell on Gooch, or he’d insisted on being responsible, she couldn’t remember. She separated the pamphlets and coupons, setting the bills aside in a neat stack for Gooch to deal with later. She opened an overdue sympathy card from a distant relation and read the sentiments about Orin twice, all the while ignoring the small square envelope she’d spotted right off, addressed to Mrs. Mary Gooch in Gooch’s scratchy writing. She paused to look at the Kenmore again but, like a spurned lover, it wouldn’t meet her eye.

  Finally she picked up the envelope. Opening it, she found the note, the one she’d always expected, the one she’d stopped expecting, delivered unexpectedly through the Leaford post. Forgoing the cliché of trembling hand, she read Gooch’s scrawl on the square silvery paper:

  Dear Mary,

  I’m sorry. I wish I knew what else to say. There’s money in the account. Twenty-five thousand dollars. It’s yours. I won it on the scratch game. Nothing nefarious. Trust me and don’t be afraid to spend it. I didn’t plan this, Mary. I need some time to think. I hate myself for being such a coward—if that means anything. I promise I’ll be in touch.

  He had signed the note Yours, a term he’d never used before, leaving her with the impression that she’d been mistaken for someone else. She folded the piece of paper and put it back inside the envelope. Nefarious. What kind of person used a word like that? And Yours. Why would he write Yours when the very fact of the note suggested he was decisively not hers?

  There was nothing, no thing, in which Mary could confidently believe. It seemed impossible, or at least unlikely, that her husband had won a colossal amount of money in the scratch-and-win lottery and had left her on their twenty-fifth anniversary, to think, and would be in touch, but there it was, in ballpoint ink on drugstore stationery which he’d likely bought for the purpose. She rose and, stepping on the can to pop the lid, pitched his note into the trash.

  She could hear the sound of her husband’s words like a movie voice-over as she carried herself to the bathroom—I didn’t plan this, Mary. I need some time to think. With the shower roaring to drown him out, she slipped off her robe and kicked free of the winter boots. Stripped bare and holding the support rail Gooch had installed for her years ago, she stepped over the tub and found her balance on the rubber bath mat, where her foot leaked bands of blood.

  Finding the costly bath products Gooch had given her last Christmas, Mary poured them over herself all at once. Cheeks scrubbed pink, she dried her skin with a clean towel, noticing that there was somewhat less of herself than in previous days. Her bloodstained nightgown too foul to put back on, she stood naked before the bathroom mirror, rifling through a drawer full of hair products, finally finding a large comb. She drew it through her hair, pulling strands from her face until she could see only her grey roots, startled for the first time in her life by her resemblance to her mother. But it was not a curve of bone that Mary recognized, not a similar nose or pattern of aging. It was the look in her eyes, of frozen confusion. The look Irma wore when her existence had become inconceivable.

  Gooch had been gone for a week. The letter said he needed time to think. But where had he gone? And how much time was enough? And what if he never came back? Had he really won the lottery? Frozen confusion. But even seeing her mother’s expression mirrored in her eyes, Mary didn’t worry that she might have Irma’s disease. She was convinced that her doom would be more poetic. A massive coronary was what she’d envisioned, and she felt on the verge of it with the absence of Gooch. She reached for the hair dryer, noticing the box of red hair colour from that day of Orin’s funeral.

  Time passed with no tick from the clock. Mary stood before the bathroom mirror, unwrapping a towel from her head. She shook out her mane, more auburn than red, thinking how her mother would have advised against such a brazen look, deciding it was marginally better than those awful grey roots.

  In the bedroom she searched her drawers and found a clean pair of navy scrubs, no longer snug at the waistband but loose enough that she had to draw the string. She opened the closet and, after some searching, found her second clean set of navy scrubs, which she folded and placed in a large brown vinyl purse, along with a never-used overnight kit containing dental needs and hair care and her charged cellphone and the cord that had come with it.

  In the junk drawer in the kitchen she found a pen and paper, and sat down in one of the red vinyl chairs. She wrote, Gooch, I’m out looking for—but didn’t finish. For what? In that moment, she wasn’t sure.

  THE LEAVING AND THE LEFT

  There would be no purple lilacs, it being October and the bushes bare on the path to St. John’s, but Mary wanted to bring Irma flowers. The flowers spoke of ritual, and this one was important. She eased the red Ford into the snow-carpeted parking lot at the grocery store, pleased to see that her makeshift roof was bearing up under the strain. The climbing sun, appearing briefly from behind the grey clouds, warmed her face as she limped across the lot, wondering why she could barely grasp the scent of fry grease from the burger joint nearby. She entered the grocery store but did not take a cart.

  The pretty cashier, whose name tag read, SHARLA, glanced at the plastic customer card Mary offered and said without looking up, “Hello, Mrs. Gooch.” It was a habit of retail that Mary found irksome. She didn’t care if it was churlish, she wanted to be anonymous while shopping.

  There was hardly any use in pretending, though. The cashier saw her nearly every day. “Hello, Sharla.” Mary put the bouquet of sunflowers on the conveyor.

  “That’s it, Mrs. Goo
ch? No groceries?”

  “Sorry.”

  Sharla looked up, blurting, “Ohmygod your hair is red.”

  “Yes,” Mary said, cheeks burning scarlet to match.

  “Nice.” Sharla waved the saffron flowers over the scanner. Annoyed, she pressed a button beside her register. “The machine’s not scanning. I have to get my manager.”

  Mary felt the heat of her blame, If you weren’t so fat the flowers would scan. “I was thinking I should get something smaller anyway,” she said.

  The girl tapped the microphone on her cash register. “Dick at register three, please. Dick.” She turned to Mary, sharing—“That’s actually his name.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Sharla leaned on the button, straining on her toes, flexing her sculpted legs as she searched the aisles. The bass notes of “Proud Mary” suddenly began to blare. Mary let out a shriek, startling Sharla, who helped her find the cellular phone beneath the other travel items in her huge brown purse. The phone was so clearly alien to Mary that Sharla had to take it from her hands and open it and press it to Mary’s ear.

  “Hello,” Mary offered, breathless. It was a message from her service provider, but it took Mary some moments before she understood that it was pre-recorded.

  Sharla smiled. “You just close it now. Close it. Just … yeah … close it.”

  Mary folded the phone in half.

  “You might want to dial down that ringtone,” Sharla said, before pressing the buzzer again. “God, I hate my manager.”

  Mary nodded. “Me too.”

  “A dick?”

  “A Ray. But yes.”

  Pressing the flowers into Mary’s arms, Sharla gestured toward the door and told her, “I’ll put them on my employee discount and you can pay me back whenever.”

  “But I have money.”

  “Just take them, Mrs. Gooch,” Sharla insisted, waving her off. “You’re in here every day, so.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just say thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said, hugging the large bouquet. Leaving the store, she wondered if anyone in Leaford knew that Gooch had parked the truck at Chung’s and disappeared. Maybe Sharla knew. Maybe her gesture had been made out of pity. Or solidarity.

  She entered the front door at St. John’s, wiping her boots on the damp sections of cardboard spread over the carpet as requested by the handwritten sign. The young man at reception, a recent hire, looked annoyed at the size of the bouquet in her arms. She did not apologize when she handed him the flowers, particularly as she was also bringing postdated cheques for the next six months of her mother’s care. She asked the young man to please take down her new contact number, in case there was an emergency. “My cellphone number,” she said blithely, then read it off the card.

  She stopped to greet a threesome of elderly women near the door to the common room, proud that she’d had the reputation, at Raymond Russell’s, of being “good with the geezers.” Nearby, two whittled Williams and a pitted Paul were playing poker for a pot of pennies. She had forgotten about her flaming hair until the eldest of the Williams let out a long, low whistle. “Well, hello Ann-Margret,” he cheered.

  Old Joe DaSilva, who had been a favourite customer at the drugstore, said, “Hey Red. You like my new robe, Red?”

  “You look like Hugh Hefner, Joe,” she said, running her hand over the silky fabric of his shoulders, making the old men laugh.

  She blushed when the older William patted her breast, which he’d mistaken for her arm, and said, “Stay for this hand. You can be my Lady Luck.”

  “Your colour looks better,” she observed.

  “They changed my medication.”

  “That explains a lot. Stay away from my mother,” she joked, leaving the men to their cards.

  In the common room Mary found her mother parked alongside the new patient, another frail white woman, Roberta, a stranger from Kitchener who never had visitors. Side by side, snoring in wheelchairs with blankets tucked up to their chins, they reminded Mary of toddlers in strollers at the park, and she understood why mothers said they looked like angels when they were asleep. She found a seat between her mother and Roberta and set her hand on Irma’s terminally bony shoulder. “Mum?”

  But it was Roberta, afflicted with some mysterious misfortune of aging, who opened her eyes. “Yes?” Mary was too startled to respond. “Yes?” Roberta repeated, catching her gaze so that Mary couldn’t turn away. “What is it?”

  Mary faltered. “I came to say goodbye.”

  The old woman shrugged.

  Mary clasped Irma’s cool fingers, addressing her mother in a whisper, hoping Roberta couldn’t hear. “I came to say goodbye.”

  “You want my forgiveness? Now that I’m dying? Is that why you’ve come?” Roberta demanded.

  Mary paused, seeing the old woman’s longing, and answered, “Yes.”

  Roberta nodded slowly. “I suppose I’ve waited a long time for that.”

  “Okay.”

  “So much time wasted.”

  “Yes,” Mary agreed.

  “Wasted.”

  “Wasted.”

  “How will you remember me?” the old woman asked, searching Mary’s eyes. “What will you think of?”

  “The way you brushed my hair,” Mary told her, all the while squeezing Irma’s hand. “I’ll think of the way you brushed my hair.”

  “What else?”

  Mary paused. “And I’ll think about … how I always admired your strength.”

  “I’ve always said what I thought and thought what I said.”

  “I know you loved me.” Mary kissed her mother’s parchment temple and joined the two women in gazing at the distance.

  Unaware of how long she’d been sitting there—for since the death of the clock, time had ceased to be sequenced, at once here and now and then and before—Mary finally squeezed her mother’s bony fingers, the ritual of farewell sadder and more natural than she’d imagined.

  On her way out she stopped to say goodbye to the table of men playing cards, and reminded the young man at reception that it was her cellphone number they should try if she needed to be reached.

  The path tilted before her. She heard a distant cry for nourishment—not a pain in her gut but a cerebral reminder to eat. The Oakwood Bakery was two blocks from St. John’s.

  The Oakwood was the only independent bakery left in Baldoon County, the Tim Hortons coffee chain having annihilated the competition years ago, but Mary remained a loyal customer, particularly since they had added the drive-through window and she no longer had to expend the energy of leaving her car, or suffer the reproving looks from the other customers, even if she had to concede their point. What did a woman her size need with a box of honey crullers?

  Opening the door, she remembered her frequent visits to the Oakwood with her mother as a child. Before groceries on Fridays, because Irma never shopped on an empty stomach, it had been their habit to stop at the bakery, where they would find a stool at the large U-shaped counter, and where her mother would remind her, “Don’t swivel,” a thousand times before she’d have to smack Mary’s knee. Irma would order the raisin bran muffin and strong black coffee in those squat white cups, which always came with saucers. “I like the light in here at this time of day,” Irma would say. Or “I love how this place never changes.”

  Mary would have her choice of donut from the dizzying array, a decision that caused more agony than rapture as she often regretted the choice of jam-filled, wishing she’d gone for the custard, the fritter instead of the fancy. Irma would tear off tiny sections of muffin that she popped into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, and though they rarely breathed a word, Mary felt connected to her in their sensual enjoyment of the place.

  On the morning before Christopher Klik’s funeral, the Brody family stopped in at the Oakwood for breakfast. Not in the mood to swivel in her snug black skirt and tight white blouse, Mary sat still on the stool between
her parents at the counter near the door. The waitress grinned tightly as she dithered between the rainbow sprinkles and the lemon puff, finally deciding on the double chocolate glaze. She asked for a taste of her mother’s muffin and a try of her father’s cinnamon bun before tucking into the unusually small chocolate donut, which would not remotely satisfy the obeast. She attempted to tear her donut into small pieces as her mother did, but only made a mess of her fingers. “Eat that properly, Mary,” Irma said.

  She saw that her parents had no appetite, and was relieved to think that they wouldn’t notice if she ate their breakfast too, lost as they both were in the mortal struggle of the day. She shoved the remainder of her donut into her mouth and turned just as the door opened on the silhouette of stunning Karen Klik, sheathed in black for her younger brother’s funeral, long, blonde hair blown bone-straight, lashes coated with waterproof mascara, car keys dangling in her long fingers, no doubt running some errand for the wake. Their eyes locked.

  “You have chocolate on your blouse,” Karen said.

  Panicked, Mary reached up with her hands, smearing more of the chocolate on her starchy cotton shoulder.

  “Oh, Mary,” Irma cried, diving into action, dunking a napkin into a water glass, yanking at Mary’s shirt. “Oh, Mary.”

  When Mary finally had the courage to look up, Karen Klik was still watching. Mary didn’t know the word for what she saw in the grieving sister’s eyes. Heightening her humiliation, there had later been a heated discussion among the ladies at the wake about what would best remove the chocolate stain, until Mrs. Klik’s sister-in-law pointed out, “She’s bursting out of it anyway. Send it to the ragbag.”

  Shaking off the shame of that day, Mary pulled open the door to the Oakwood and stepped inside. The clerk behind the counter looked up, surprised. “Hi Mrs. Gooch,” she said, recognizing her from the drive-through. The conversation across the counter ceased abruptly and all eyes fell upon her. She saw instantly how foolish she’d been to wonder if anyone knew. Everyone knew about Jimmy Gooch winning the lottery and leaving his fat wife to go on some middle-aged vision quest.