One Year in Coal Harbor

by Polly Horvath

  “Guess who is—”

  “EVIE!” I heard Bert say in the background. “You’re gonna give it away.”

  “You’re right, Bert. Never mind,” said Evie, and hung up.

  Croque Monsieur

  I had to decide between a recipe for boeuf bourguignon and croque monsieur but frankly, I think a lot of people in Coal Harbor, if faced with a boeuf bourguignon recipe, and all the time and fussing it takes, are going to abbreviate it and take liberties until it becomes beef stew. There is nothing wrong with beef stew but you shouldn’t really pretend it is anything else. I therefore leave the boeuf bourguignons to people like Miss Bowzer who have been to France and know what’s what.

  Miss Bowzer says a croque monsieur is really a direct order because croquer means “to crunch.” I think Miss Bowzer likes the French and their predilection for giving orders, even slipping them sneakily into the names of dishes. Miss Bowzer would like to give orders this way too.

  Put two tablespoons of butter in a saucepan and melt it. Add three tablespoons of flour and stir for a couple of minutes. Slowly add two cups of hot milk so you get a thick sauce. Take it off the stove and melt some grated Gruyère cheese in there. Maybe about a cup. Add a sprinkle of nutmeg and a chopped basil leaf if you like and some salt and pepper to taste. Toast a dozen pieces of bread. Spread some Dijon mustard on each piece and then put a piece of cheese on half the slices (again, Gruyère, if you can get it, but if you are living someplace really small and the cheese selection is also small—small population, small cheese selection, as we say in Coal Harbor—then use Swiss). Put a piece of ham on half the slices. Then cover with the other piece of toast. Now you should have six complete ham and cheese sandwiches. Put them in a baking dish and pour the cheese sauce over all and bake the sandwiches at 400 degrees for about ten minutes. Then broil briefly. Serve. Then Croque, Monsieur, Croque!!

  What Happened at The Girl on the Red Swing

  I WAS VERY EXCITED the next day and couldn’t wait for school to let out. I wondered if the surprise was a new dog, although it seemed a little soon. I had to go home and walk Mallomar and feed and water her and do homework and I threw together a casserole and put it in the oven for my mom as a surprise. Miss Clarice gives my mother all the jobs that involve heavy grunt work and she gets home pretty tired. Then finally, done with everything, I more or less ran all the way to Bert and Evie’s.

  I knocked on their door and as it opened I instinctively looked down, searching for a cockapoo. Instead I saw a pair of enormous tennis shoes. When my eyes traveled back up I found they belonged to a huge teenage boy. Bert and Evie’d gotten a new foster child! I was so pleased for them. I knew they had worried they wouldn’t be given any, living all the way out in the sticks.

  He was about twice as tall as Bert and Evie and had a strange face. It was too flat and his eyes were a bit too wide apart and the bridge of his nose, like the planes of his face, was a little too flat. It gave him the look of someone who had been hit head-on by a frying pan. He also looked like he was about to cry and at first I thought I’d come at a bad time, but later, when he kept looking exactly the same, I realized it was just the configuration of his features. I thought this was unfortunate for him until I realized it might work in his favor among people who are quick to pity. I wondered if a kindly universe had taken this into consideration upon his birth and declared, He will have a childhood that sucks, but he will be given a face that inspires pity even among foster parents not given to feeling it often. By now I knew that I had lucked out, having Bert and Evie as foster parents. That not all foster parents were kind and generous. Sometimes people took kids in for the money the government gave them for doing so and the kids suffered for it, being the unwanted houseguests attached to the monthly check. Bert and Evie had explained this to me and that they had to be especially careful and sensitive when they took someone in because some kids had not only had a harrowing home life with their real families but subsequently with foster families and had become like feral dogs that feel they must be wary and protective of their space at all times. It made Bert and Evie twice as nurturing. Although Evie had told me once that “you don’t want to burden a kid with this, neither. Because not all of them can handle more than they got served up on their plate already. You just got to keep your expansive feelings in check and see what you can do for them that don’t require them having to respond more than they want. And sometimes you don’t get them but for a few weeks anyhow, so you don’t want to burden them with attachments they won’t be allowed or even want to keep. Some have learned to look only forward because looking back hasn’t been real productive for them. It’s a fine line between nurturing and burdening. Like overwatering a houseplant. You don’t want to do that or let it dry up, either.”

  I was looking blankly at this boy now, wondering what category he would fall into, the nurtured or burdened by our attention. Then Evie burst into the room, running with her short little wobbly steps on her ever-present high heels.

  “Is that Primrose?” she squealed. “Oh, Primrose, look who arrived this afternoon!”

  “Hi,” I said finally, because this boy and I had been staring at each other as if we were on opposite sides of a window without benefit of sound.

  “Hi,” he said back.

  “IT’S KED!” screamed Evie.

  “Don’t scream, Evie, you’re going to frighten him,” said Bert, shuffling in from the den.

  “I’m just so excited,” said Evie. “Primrose, this is Ked Schneider.”

  And Ked looked down and gave her the kindliest possible smile. It’s amazing, I thought, how some people come through such things with their kindliness intact. He didn’t look like you might expect, sullen or snappish or feral.

  “Now let’s go sit and have some iced tea,” said Evie. “I’ve told Ked all about you.”

  “Mostly you’re what she’s talked about since I got here,” said Ked shyly. “You were in foster care too.”

  “Yep,” I said, but I was thinking, Well, I was in Evie’s and Bert’s care. It was almost impossible to think of them generically.

  We all sat down but we couldn’t think of anything to say next. Bert rescued the situation by hauling me to the bathroom and showing me how he’d started to recaulk the bathtub. I could see he was doing a very good job of it and keeping a straight line, which, he explained, is hard to do. There was a small bedroom that was Ked’s now and I noticed that the door was closed and I was betting that Bert or Evie had closed it to give him the dignity of a private room that people didn’t go barging into uninvited. They had done the same for me when I’d lived with them in Nanaimo.

  After I’d complimented Bert on the caulking we went back to the living room with our iced tea. Everyone’s glasses were sweating because Evie kept the heat up pretty high in the double-wide. The glasses were dripping a bit and I had to keep putting mine down on the napkin provided. I could tell that Ked was worrying about leaving rings on the coffee table because he kept picking his up and surreptitiously wiping where it had been with his napkin. It showed he had been with somebody who had taken the trouble to teach him not to leave wet rings on other people’s furniture. Finally his napkin was all wet and he took the corner of his hoodie and wiped the table, making it look like he was just reaching his hand to his glass and the hoodie happened to follow. I wanted to put him out of his misery by letting him know the table wasn’t real wood but I couldn’t think how to say anything without calling attention to the whole thing and making it worse and Evie was in a state of high excitement and didn’t notice and Bert had gone to the kitchen to get some pretzels.

  When he got back we all reached for one and Ked and I bumped hands.

  “Sorry,” we said at the same time, and dropped our pretzels. We didn’t even bother retrieving them for fear of another collision and no one went for the pretzels after that. The whole thing was getting painful.

  Ked had bangs that fell over his eyes so even though we were both shy he had a place
to hide. I kept putting my iced tea glass up against my forehead and in front of my face as if my face needed cooling. I slipped surreptitious looks at him from behind it. When the silence began to stretch on a little too long Bert said, “Well, if we’ve all had all the pretzels we want, shall we go off to dinner?”

  Everyone stood up so quickly it was like we had springs in our rear ends. We wasted a little time shuffling awkwardly to the door and such while Evie looked for her cardigan and then her purse and then her keys and then her raincoat because it had started to rain. Ked had a light Windbreaker, which was clearly going to be useless in Coal Harbor. We don’t get a smattering of rain; it pours down like the deluge and penetrates all but the most professional-type rain gear. We looked awkwardly at his thin little jacket and then Bert decided we should drive over even though it was only a shortish walk and we never normally would have. But Evie and I cottoned to the plan right away and got in the car like it was the most natural thing to drive six blocks while I wondered what type of parents bought you a thin little Windbreaker to get through a West Coast winter. Or maybe he hadn’t had parents in a long time, just a series of foster homes where no one wanted to spend money on his outerwear. Evie had told me they never quizzed the foster kids. If they wanted to volunteer information they would. Most of them came with so little they could call their own, starting with any say about where they got placed, the least you could do was allow them their privacy and dignity.

  “ ’Cause none of them have very pretty stories to tell or they wouldn’t be here and sometimes I think even to themselves they like to tell it different than it was. Or believe it will turn out different than it probably will,” she’d explained to me.

  When we got to The Girl on the Red Swing it was only four-thirty. Even Evie and Bert usually waited until five to eat. We all sat in a booth and stared mutely and intensely at the menu as if the secret of the universe were contained on those plasticized pages. Bert and Evie weren’t usually shy but if you asked me it was the sheer size of Ked that was striking them dumb. I think they had looked forward to having a cockapoo in human form and patting him on the head like a lapdog, but they’d need a ladder to reach the top of Ked’s head.

  “So,” said Miss Bowzer once we’d introduced her to Ked. “What will you have?”

  “Whatever you have, it comes on a waffle,” I explained to Ked, because nowhere on the menu does it announce this, and some things, while appealing on their own, gross people out when they come waffleated. Even though you can drag the waffle out and pretend it’s not there. But Ked just said, “Cool.”

  While we waited for dinner we didn’t talk much. Evie and Bert sat as they always did, side by side in the booth so they could sample things off each other’s plates without reaching. That meant Ked and I shared the other side, which felt vaguely too intimate for having just met. We had to work to keep our legs and arms from accidentally brushing.

  By the time our dinners came, Evie had recovered her sangfroid and kept us entertained with her endlessly sprightly chatter, full of gossip about everyone in town. I finished my French fries (which I always regard as more of a first course) and dug into my Welsh rarebit, which, by the way, goes excellently on a waffle—all that cheese just oozes into those waffle pockets. Figuring out what works particularly well on a waffle is part of the art of ordering at The Girl on the Red Swing. It had taken me a year of staring at Welsh rarebit on the menu before I finally ordered it, because Miss Bowzer wrote it as Welsh Rabbit. I don’t know if it was a misprint or if that’s how she thought it was spelled. It wasn’t until I started helping her in the kitchen that I saw it being made and realized there was no actual rabbit in it; it was basically melted cheese and beer and now it’s a favorite. It always makes me feel vaguely rakish too, because of the beer, and even though I know the alcohol cooks out, still, you are ingesting it.

  As I was glorying in its cheesy goodness and beery daring, the restaurant door opened and a big man with black slicked-back hair and a big black Fu Manchu mustache that hung down both sides of his face came bursting in. Everyone turned to look at him, partly because he was so big and partly because he wasn’t from Coal Harbor. Occasionally we get people coming into town who don’t live here. We even have a motel. But usually they come in the summer. And the ones who are dressed as well as this guy don’t stay at the motel and eat at The Girl on the Red Swing, they stay at Miss Clarice’s expensive B and B out on Jackson Road and we don’t see them because they’re there for some peace and quiet and expensive buffalo-mozzarella-saturated meals. So we all gaped except Ked, who didn’t know the difference between townsfolk and strangers and just kept scarfing down his cheeseburger, unaware there was a floor show.

  It might have been an uncomfortable moment for the stranger, coming in to get a bite and having everyone stop breathing at the sight of him, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was broad-shouldered and red-faced from the icy rain that had started and he dripped all over the floor by the front cash as he looked for the hostess to come seat him. He stood like an actor who has come onstage, exuding some kind of natural charisma and stage presence, and I thought any second he would break into a thrilling soliloquy. It was certainly an attention-getting way to be. We had lots of time to study it because Miss Bowzer was in the kitchen. She cooked, waited tables and hostessed. Actually the latter wasn’t much of a job as most people came in and just sat where they always did. But this stranger didn’t know that so he took the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign seriously and just stood there. I suppose somebody should have told him he could sit down but he seemed so totally in command of the situation that I think we all felt it would be an impertinence.

  Eventually Miss Bowzer came from the back with a tray full of people’s orders, and didn’t seem to notice him until he said, “Kate!”

  Miss Bowzer looked up, saw him and dropped her tray. Salads and waffles flew everywhere.

  I’m sure all of us wanted to break into applause, although naturally we didn’t. We should have gone back to eating our dinners but we didn’t do that, either. Miss Bowzer, paying no attention to the broken plates and salad dressing underfoot, but treading unheeding over it all, walked up to him, and did a very peculiar thing. She poked him with one finger. One quick poke as if to make sure he was real.

  “You came back,” she said finally.

  “Yes, I did,” he said. “Or so it seems.”

  And then, because I realized who he must be, with his villain’s look and slicked-back hair, I let out a little gulping sound. Ked studied me for a second and then studied Miss Bowzer and the man, who were now walking to the kitchen like they’d been planning this rendezvous for years.

  We didn’t see either of them again. Ked gave me another look and I knew he knew I knew something. But though he looked interested and curious, he didn’t say anything.

  Then again, no one in the whole restaurant was saying anything. Anything at all. It was like a restaurant of mutes. The people whose salads had been ruined looked ruefully at them and a man finally broke the silence and said, “You don’t think she expects us to pay for those, do you?”

  It echoed through the restaurant. I felt for the woman whose husband it was. She was probably always shushing him at Christmas parties and stuff.

  “Oh, Bernard,” said his wife. “You’re such a man.”

  “And at such a moment!” added another woman sitting with them.

  “What moment?” asked Bernard, looking completely flummoxed.

  But the woman just sighed and a lot of other women, as if holding it in until someone got it started, also expelled long breaths and Ked looked at me and we laughed. Then before the laugh could become too companionable, he cut it off and returned to his dinner as though someone were going to come and yell at him for laughing. He was attacking his cheeseburger with such voracity and guilty intensity that I wanted to say, For God’s sake, all you did was laugh. But instead I went back to my dinner with equal companionable voracity. I hoped he realized that this wa
s for his benefit and didn’t think I chowed down like this all the time.

  Everyone else went back to eating too, but there was a hushed quality now and if you asked me, people were keeping it down because they were straining to hear any snippets of conversation from the kitchen. When Miss Bowzer still didn’t come back out, people started getting quietly up and leaving money for their bills on their tables. One woman needed change and asked her friends to make it, and when they couldn’t, they went back to the kitchen and never came out either.

  I knew there was a door from the kitchen onto the street but Ked didn’t. “Bermuda Triangle,” he muttered to no one in particular, and I laughed and he looked all wary again.

  “My goodness, I guess they plan to stay back there forever,” said Evie, who was still cutting and chewing but whose eyes had never left the kitchen door. “I wonder who he is.”

  “I think I know,” I said.

  So I told the story and she and Bert thought it was very romantic until they pulled themselves together and realized that this made Dan Sneild my uncle’s rival and how I might feel about it. Then they frowned and tsk-tsked but I could see their hearts weren’t in it. Everyone enjoys a good love story and this certainly stepped things up a notch in the saga of Miss Bowzer.

  Ked just politely kept chewing. He had dragged his waffle out from under his cheeseburger when it arrived and now, done with the burger, he was pouring syrup all over his waffle and eating it as a second course, which showed he understood the concept perfectly.

  “Well, it’s too bad about Miss Bowzer and this, uh, visitor,” said Evie, never taking her eyes off the kitchen door. “Because she makes great pies, don’t she, Bert?”

  “Nobody makes a pie like Miss Bowzer except perhaps Evie,” agreed Bert.