One Year in Coal Harbor

by Polly Horvath

  Other books by Polly Horvath

  My One Hundred Adventures

  Northward to the Moon

  Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire!

  Everything on a Waffle

  Author’s Note

  Although a real Coal Harbour exists, the town in this book and Everything on a Waffle is fictitious.

  Canadians call their one-dollar coin a loonie and their two-dollar coin a toonie.

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, most commonly referred to in speech as the RCMP, is the Canadian national police service.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2012 by Polly Horvath

  Jacket art copyright © 2012 by Aimee Sicuro

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Schwartz & Wade Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Horvath, Polly.

  One year in Coal Harbor/Polly Horvath.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In a small fishing village in British Columbia, twelve-year-old Primrose tries to be a matchmaker for her Uncle Jack, befriends Ked, a new foster child, tries to decide if she is willing to go to jail for her convictions, and together with Ked, publishes a cookbook to raise money for the Fisherman’s Aid. Includes recipes.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98536-2

  [1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.

  3. Foster home care—Fiction. 4. Family problems—Fiction. 5. Self-reliance—Fiction.

  6. British Columbia—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H79224On 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011023591

  Random House Children’s Books supports the

  First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  For Keena and my father

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  What Happened to Quincehead

  What Happened at Dinner

  What Happened to Miss Bowzer When She Was Young

  What Happened at The Girl on the Red Swing

  What Happened on Jackson Road

  What Didn’t Happen at Miss Lark’s

  What Happened at the Meeting

  What Happened at Uncle Jack’s Office

  What Happened to Ked

  What Happened in the End

  But Then Something Else Happened

  What Happened to Quincehead

  I WAS SITTING WITH Bert and Evie. Evie had their cockapoo, Quincehead, on her lap and was staring into space. Bert was absently patting Quincehead on the head and rhythmically stroking his back while he told me what had happened.

  “This morning when we woke up Quincehead’s stomach was huge. Bloated.”

  “Too big,” said Evie.

  “Not normal big,” said Bert.

  “Because sometimes when they eat too much, it gets big,” said Evie.

  “You can tell easier with little dogs like Quincehead.”

  “It shows more.”

  “The big dogs don’t show so much.”

  “Not that we ever had a big dog.”

  “ ’Cause we haven’t.”

  “I prefer a dog that can sit in my lap.”

  “We always get Evie lapdogs.”

  “So,” they said together as if this were a logical pausing place in their narrative.

  I waited patiently. They were looking out the window at the storm with unseeing eyes. The rain poured down and the wind howled. It was probably the last real winter blow.

  The storm had started that morning. We had been able to hear the surf even in our classes at school, pounding the shore, flinging spray.

  I had been sitting in class thinking that when the earth shakes like this, what you need is some solid ground beneath your feet, such as the bedrock of multiplication, where if you multiply correctly, you always get the same sum. But one look outside tells you how it is all just an invention in the end. What do we really know? Everything we know is just something someone made up. I like to cook, and you would think one of cooking’s reassuring aspects would be that if you make the same recipe the same way, it always comes out the same. This would be a nice antidote to random events if what you always wanted was a peach melba. But anyone who cooks a lot can tell you that it is hogwash. You can make the same recipe the same way a dozen times and each time it comes out differently. There are whole days when everything you cook comes out terribly and others when you can do no wrong. So many factors you will never be aware of are involved. Anyone who thinks they’ve got it all scoped out is in for a few surprises.

  I’d nudged Eleanor, who sits next to me, and continued this thought out loud. “So if you’re going to make something up, you might as well make sure it is something good. Just like if you don’t know what is going to happen and have to assume, you might as well assume something good.”

  She’d looked at me blankly. She hates it when I nudge and whisper during class, even though our teacher, Miss Connon, is extremely tolerant. Miss Connon doesn’t mind the odd communication while she’s talking, and she reads us essays by people like Walt Whitman and Mary Oliver because she credits us all with at least as much intelligence as we have. I could see Eleanor turning to look out the window and her brow furrowing again as she thought about what I’d said. I know mine is just one way of seeing things. That this was what I saw in the storm. I’d been hoping, as always, for a meeting of the minds but she just whispered, “Oh, great, indoor gym again.”

  I’d turned back to watch the ocean. It looked like the sea was flinging bedsheets over a bed that refused to stay made. It could not make the sheets lie flat and neat and tidy. Waves bunched up and wrinkled and lifted high into the air to be flung across their sea beds once more. Order and disorder, order and disorder, I’d thought, staring out the window until Miss Connon called on me. That snapped me to, and looking down at my textbook to answer her question, I’d realized that the last time I had looked at my book we were still on math but it turned out they had moved on to Canadian history and the settling of the plains. Miss Connon turned tactfully to someone else while I switched books and caught up. We were now apparently talking about the Doukhobors, who walked naked across Saskatchewan. “We all live in uncertainty, and people will do amazing things in their need to get a grip, even, it would seem, naked protest parades,” said Miss Connon.

  I’d drifted back to the window and wondered if my father, who is a fisherman, had docked his boat yet or had come in early before the storm started. I was a little concerned because the previous year he and my mother had been lost at sea during a bad winter storm. So I’d been relieved when after school I met up with my father, still dressed in his fishing gear and carrying a salmon home for us. I had waved, called out I was going to Bert and Evie’s and trotted on. I don’t tell him that I still worry every time his fishing boat goes out. I don’t want him to worry that I worry. After all, what can he do? This is how he makes a living.

  Bert and Evie had been my foster parents for a short time when my parents were lost at sea. By the time my parents returned, B
ert and Evie and I were like a small family unit, so it was very unsettling for them to find me leaving for another family, even if that family was my own. The previous night they had called to say I should drop by after school. They might have some good news. But now, here I was, and instead they told me about Quincehead.

  “So we took him to the vet,” said Bert. “We told the vet we thought he had eaten something bad. You know how he eats anything.”

  “He’s like a shark. Anything in his path. Once he ate a whole tableful of bread dough I had left to rise.” Evie said this while looking dully out into a world that would soon contain no such feats of appetite.

  “That’s how we found out he could get up on chairs.”

  “So this morning the vet examined him. But …”

  “It wasn’t something he ate. It was cancer,” said Bert.

  “I didn’t know dogs could get cancer,” I said. I have a dog named Mallomar who my uncle Jack bought for me last year to help take my mind off the fact that everyone thought my parents were dead. But Mallomar is young and healthy so I had had no run-ins with dog diseases yet.

  “You don’t ever anticipate all the bad things that can happen,” said Evie. “If we did we would never get through a day. Not a single day.”

  “Yep, there’s diseases both dogs and people can have,” said Bert.

  “But not colds. Dogs can’t catch your colds, so you don’t have to worry about sneezing on them.”

  “But they do get some of the same diseases,” said Bert. “Cancer, for one,” said Evie.

  “It’s his spleen. That’s why he’s so blown up like that. The vet said he didn’t have much time left.”

  “I asked how much time. I was thinking, like months or years even.”

  “But it was hours. The vet said the kind thing would be to put him down immediately right there in the office. Right that minute. But Evie couldn’t do that.”

  “I wasn’t expecting it! I had no preparation! I thought we were going in for a tummyache!” said Evie.

  “It was the terrible unexpectedness,” said Bert. “So Evie said couldn’t we wait.”

  “And the doctor said, well, we could.”

  “A little.”

  “But not too long. Because Quincehead don’t have too long,” said Evie, and a sob burst out of her. She put her head down and buried her face in Quincehead’s fur.

  “A few hours,” said Bert. “Because his spleen is going to explode otherwise.”

  “It just didn’t seem right, him dying there in a place he don’t like to begin with,” said Evie.

  “He don’t like the vet’s,” said Bert.

  “Even though he’s always been good at the vet’s.”

  “He never makes a fuss.”

  “The first time we brought him in, the vet said he was the best-behaved dog he’d ever seen.”

  “The vet was pretty upset himself, Evie. He teared right up when he said Quincehead would have to be put down.”

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “You were distraught,” said Bert. “You weren’t seeing much of anything.” And then he ran his hand through his hair, even though he didn’t have much hair left. “Anyhow, Primrose, the vet said he’d come at the end of his day and his receptionist called right before you got here and said he’s just finishing up now. So it won’t be long. You might not want to stay.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said. It never occurred to me to just walk out, although to stay made me feel complicit. It seemed terrible, all of us except Quincehead knowing what was going to happen.

  “I just don’t want him to be scared,” said Evie. “I didn’t want him to see me cry or get the idea I’m too upset neither, because that might upset him more. Or make him nervous something bad is going to happen.”

  But she couldn’t stop crying and Quincehead, to be honest, looked too out of it to care. He just lay there, bloated and breathing shallowly.

  Evie, without looking up, put one hand on my forearm, then quickly put her hand back on Quincehead. As if she wanted to keep him company as long as possible.

  “I think it gives Quincehead some comfort you’re here too,” said Evie.

  “Now he’s got his whole family here,” said Bert.

  Quincehead was breathing less now, more slowly and shallowly as if already the breath was leaving him, the way the waves crash in at high tide and then lessen, becoming quieter and quieter until the sea is still.

  “We had no way of knowing he was so ill. His stomach don’t look no different from the way it did the time he ate Evie’s salade Niçoise with mini marshmallows,” said Bert. “Does it, Evie?” But Evie just nodded. She couldn’t talk any more; that much was clear. But Bert seemed to need to.

  “We couldn’t figure out what had happened to it. Evie left it on the counter in the bowl while she hung up clothes on the line.”

  No one said anything.

  “When she got in, it was gone.”

  I felt like I should say something to keep Bert company but I couldn’t think of anything. I was busy watching Evie. And I thought it must be especially hard for her to let Quincehead go anywhere by himself when she had always been there to take care of him.

  “That’s how we found out Quincehead could climb stepladders,” said Bert. “Because that’s how he got up on the table to eat the salad.”

  It was only Bert and pauses now. It gave the time waiting a kind of strange staccato effect. It had the same rhythm as a sports announcer doing a play-by-play.

  “He’s always been a smart dog. That’s why he could figure out that stepladder.”

  “We’ve had Quincehead a long time. Fourteen years.”

  “I think he had a good life.”

  “But it’s not long enough. No dog’s life is long enough.”

  “Not long enough with us. It couldn’t be long enough with us. But it was a good life, Evie.”

  She nodded.

  “He certainly had some good meals.”

  “He liked the salade Niçoise with mini marshmallows, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s how we found out Quincehead liked marshmallows.”

  “But marshmallows didn’t like him.”

  In the next pause we heard a car pull into the gravel drive of the trailer park.

  “I don’t know if I can stand it,” said Bert, “when it comes down to it. Do you mind if I go to the bedroom now?”

  “You go, Bert,” said Evie. “There isn’t any other place I could be.”

  “You’re awful brave, Evie. You always were.”

  “No, people is different, is all,” said Evie. “What we can stand is different. I couldn’t stand not being here.”

  Bert didn’t say anything else but we watched his slow shuffle into the bedroom. He didn’t even turn around to close the door.

  “It can be a cruel world for the gentle creatures. Sometimes there ain’t nothing you can do. Not even for the things you love best. Not even for the things that trust you to care for them,” said Evie.

  And then the vet came.

  Evie’s Salade Niçoise with Mini Marshmallows

  Line a salad bowl with lettuce leaves. Evie is a very relaxed cook and she doesn’t stress too much about what kind of lettuce or how much. She says you’ll know it when you see it. She takes a can of green beans and sprinkles them about, and some chopped green onion. She slices three tomatoes or so and throws those on. Then she peels and boils three potatoes and slices and adds them after they are cooled. She says if you have time or are serving the salad to people who care about such things, you can arrange it in a pretty manner. Open two cans of tuna and spread that around too. Add four to six chopped hard-boiled eggs. If you have a hard-boiled egg slicer it makes it look very professional. But you don’t always want it to. Sometimes homey is a nice look too. Finally, if you are serving it to anchovy people you can add a can of those spread about, but you’d better know if you have anchovy eaters or not. Then a third of a cup of chopped black olives and, if you wa
nt to run up quite the grocery bill, some capers. But it’s not crucial. Finally, put some vinaigrette on it. Not too much. No one likes a sloppy salad. Right before serving toss a handful or so of mini marshmallows about. The colored ones look the most artistic.

  What Happened at Dinner

  I DIDN’T GO TO Evie and Bert’s for a while after that because I knew they needed breathing room to grieve. It seems sometimes that if you worry about something enough or are upset enough, it should change the outcome. All your worry should be able to be traded in for a good result. I know that’s superstitious but somehow I can’t help thinking I can save the things I love with the force of my feelings. But none of us had saved Quincehead. And I knew Evie felt this was a great betrayal. That the unspoken promise she had made and believed in was that she would keep him safe forever. That nothing bad would happen to him as long as she was there. But something had.

  Now I was a little worried about Bert and Evie because I was no longer living with them and neither was Quincehead and they had no little creature on whom to exert their generous natures.

  I hoped they were doing okay but when I ran into Bert in town he told me that Evie was just flattened with loss and not up to visitors. He looked pretty flattened himself but still he took Mallomar for a walk down the beach with me and smiled as he watched Mallomar chase seagulls and then come to us for praise over and over. After that, Mallomar and I walked Bert back to the trailer park. He invited me in but at that second Mallomar had to pee, so I walked her around the corner of the trailer just as Evie came racing to the door and pulled Bert inside.

  “Guess who was on the phone?” she asked. “Come get some freeziolla and I’ll tell you.”

  The door closed behind them. I waited a couple of minutes outside but Bert didn’t come out so I guessed he forgot me in whatever excitement was going on, and I started to leave. I was glad that Evie sounded so excited again about something. As I got to the entrance to the trailer park, I heard their door open and Evie yelled from the top step, “Primrose, come in and have some freeziolla! Bert just remembered you were out here!”