Practical Jean

by Trevor Cole

  “I’m sure you and Jim have learned a whole lot of things,” said Jean. She had unhitched herself from the seatbelt and now she was wedging herself between the two front seats, trying to stretch to reach the silly map, which was just … almost … she’d thought the seat leather would let her slip through more easily than it did … she felt her stomach lurch as they crested the hill and started almost immediately down … and the map began to slide toward her fingers …

  “Got it!”

  Jean realized now that she was wedged fairly tightly between the seats and her breasts were bunched up to her collarbone. She flailed for a moment with her free right hand searching for a hold to pull herself up, and, in the process, purely by accident, she whacked Fran somewhere on her face. The contact was so brief and sharp it wasn’t clear to Jean where exactly she had hit Fran – it felt like an ear, though it might have been an eye – but she felt terrible and would have said something immediately except that before she could speak, Fran let out the most appalling scream. It was a sudden, explosive kind of scream, a scream of total shock, and Jean’s first reaction was to think, well, that was a bit much; she hadn’t whacked Fran that hard. But then suddenly she felt the whole car moving, swirling, she felt G-forces pushing her body frontways and sideways and she heard squealing tires and Fran making strange huffing sounds as though she was either working very hard or she was in shock, and it seemed to Jean that Fran was losing control and that any second they were going to crash. All because of a little whack on the ear. And the string of thoughts that whooshed through Jean’s mind as she was tumbling forward and hitting her knee on the gearshift and her head on the padded roof of the car was that she was going to die before she’d given Cheryl her beautiful gift and that it was just ridiculous and that she loved Milt and that she did love her brothers and that she should never have let Fran drive.

  And then the car stopped.

  “Oh my God!” yelled Fran. “She just came out of nowhere! Are you all right?”

  It took Jean a moment to realize that she was alive and not hurt, and another to fully grasp that she was sitting in the passenger-side footwell, with her rump on the floor mat, her limbs above her, and her head wedged against the glove compartment, as if she’d been folded up and tucked there like tissue paper into a gift bag.

  “I’m sorry I hit you, Fran,” she said, “but honestly.” She tried to move but she was stuck, and she reached out her hand for Fran to give her a hoist up.

  But Fran didn’t notice. “I can’t believe I missed her!” she exclaimed. And suddenly she was wrenching her head around and looking toward the rear of the car. “There she is!”

  “Fran, help me.”

  But Fran, who seemed charged with some strange crosscurrent of jubilance and outrage, was now busy staring at something or someone outside the car. And then her head began turning – Jean could see all this happening above her at seat level, like a movie – and it seemed that whatever Fran was staring at was coming closer, approaching along the passenger side. Then Fran, giving herself fully to outrage now, jabbed a button in a console to lower the passenger-side window, and when it was down she pointed across Jean’s field of view.

  “You!” she shouted. “Why did you jump in front of us like that? What were you trying to do, get yourself killed?”

  Outside the car someone, a woman, howled a single, mournful word before dissolving into sounds that Jean found incomprehensible. She cried, “Yes!”

  Jammed into the passenger’s footwell, Jean worked her head around to try and see who would say such a crazy thing, and into view came a woman. Bleary-eyed and swaying, obviously drunk, she peered in through the open window, followed the path of tangled limbs down, and squinted as if she were trying to make out some phantom in a fog.

  “Jean?”

  And so, not quite the way she’d imagined it, Jean was finally reunited with Cheryl Nunley.

  Chapter 20

  Some plans turned out to be more difficult to achieve than you imagined.

  Jean had always known that she was taking a chance just showing up at Cheryl Nunley’s door, but she’d always assumed it would be a normal sort of chance – the chance that Cheryl might be extremely busy with house guests, or the chance that she might be away on vacation, or the chance that she might be having an exceedingly bad day, like the one she seemed to be having when her police picture was taken. There was even the chance that after thirty-seven years Cheryl might have forgotten about Jean altogether and wondered what sort of insane person would drive all that way uninvited to see someone who didn’t even remember her. Because she believed her cause to be loving and even noble, Jean felt those were chances she was willing to live with. She’d just never considered the chance that Cheryl might be a complete walking disaster. In a circumstance like that, practicality called for a bit of a rethink.

  For one thing, Jean decided to hold on to her apology to Cheryl for just a bit. Cheryl didn’t seem to be in a state to really appreciate the apology and how heartfelt it was. It was hard for Jean, because she had so much remorse to express. But it seemed best to just get Cheryl to a safe place, such as a couch, and not rush anything.

  She tried to look at the positive: at least Cheryl remembered her after all these years, and even fondly so. In fact there’d been times, Cheryl said (as far as Jean could make out), when she’d seriously thought of calling Jean – at Christmas, for example, when she was really in need of a friend because she was so profoundly depressed. Apparently Cheryl was often depressed, and at Christmas it just got that much more crushing.

  All that despair had certainly left its mark. She looked so old to Jean, as if the last thirty-seven years had used her up, sucked out the true Cheryl and left the loose exoskeleton of an old crab. She was overweight, and it wasn’t a well-carried weight, hidden by fashion and offset by posture, it was sloppy and slouchy, as if she had completely given up. Her eyes were sunken and tired. She had a puffy drinker’s face and her hair was a haphazard, burr-coloured snarl. And her housekeeping! Jean had not yet quite recovered from that first moment when she and Fran had walked in the front door of Cheryl’s house, which had looked so sweet from the outside, and set eyes on the squalor and smelled the stench of piled up dirty dishes and discarded food containers and floors covered in seed husks and feathers and so many bird droppings the banisters seemed to be covered in stucco.

  At that moment, as she was taking in the scene, Jean would not have blamed Fran if she’d turned around, jumped into her SUV, and fled into the Céline Dion–fired night. But Fran didn’t go. She gave Jean a look that suggested the two of them certainly had their work cut out for them, and then she just began cleaning up. She washed the dishes, for starters, while Jean did her best to get Cheryl to make some sense. When that proved a waste of time, Jean steered her upstairs and into the least soiled bed. And the next day when they came back, after spending the night at a bed and breakfast, Fran took it one chore at a time, never complaining, never tsk-tsk-ing as Jean feared she might, until, after a full day, the main floor of the house was almost presentable. There was only one condition that Fran imposed on Cheryl as she undertook all this work, and it was one that Jean fully supported: never, ever, not once, not as long as they were there, was that horrible, kettle-sounding bird to be allowed out of its cage.

  While Fran worked away in the house, Jean gave herself two jobs. One was to keep an eye on Cheryl, because every time she wandered out of sight she came back more drunk. There was also a good chance she might at any moment dash off into the path of another oncoming car; Cheryl herself admitted that her leap in front of Fran’s SUV had been her fourth attempt in two days. She felt she was close to getting the timing just right.

  The other job Jean assigned herself was to try and understand what was happening at the winery, because it was apparently causing Cheryl an awful lot of stress.

  It was such a pretty property. The land was rounded, like a plump woman’s thighs, gradually sloping toward the lake in th
e distance, and over these long, gentle curves stretched rows of tall, fragrant vines dripping with young grapes. Jean strolled for a while between the vines, with miserable, stumbling Cheryl in tow, and she could almost taste the sense of hope and possibility that had drawn her friend here.

  The house itself was a large split-level, probably built in the Sixties, painted the pale yellow of young corn and shaded by big trees – three maples and two oaks, all of them bright green and fluffy with leaves – and Jean could just imagine what it was like in the fall when the colours came, in that joyous October gush. Behind the house stood a tin-roofed barn covered in old, worn wood, and this barn was divided into parts: a work area, with two stainless-steel tanks each about the size of a garden shed; a storage room, containing hundreds of cases of bottled wine; and a kind of showroom, with big windows, a long counter, wood panelling, and Mexican tiles on the floor. This last part was the tasting room, or so Jean was told by a sweet, old, European man named Josef Binderman, who worked in the winery and spoke with a charming accent (Austrian, apparently, not German as Jean had thought), and who had a very wise way about him. It was Josef who took Jean on a tour of the facilities, told her about the vines, let her sample the wine juice that was aging in the steel tanks, and then sat her down at one of the big pine tables in the tasting room and filled her in on all the recent trouble.

  So Jean had a sip or two of a white wine and a red wine, which were not bad at all, and she learned about Cheryl’s second husband, Tam Yoon, leaving three months before and just about cleaning out their joint bank account. She was told that the employees, all except Josef, had left because Cheryl could no longer pay them (or because Cheryl had once or twice been inappropriate while she was drunk). And Josef explained that, as small as it was, the winery was far too much work for one man, that harvest time was only a few months off, and pretty soon the whole thing was just going to grind to a stop. The grapes would rot on the vines, and Cheryl wouldn’t be able to sell the place for anything close to its value. And selling was Cheryl’s only option; Josef was as clear about that as he was about being Austrian.

  Cheryl’s contribution during this meeting was to mutter over and over about Jesus, which surprised Jean because she had not known her friend to be religious. But then she saw that Cheryl was pointing at the light fixture in the ceiling, so she assumed she had misheard.

  That night, after dinner, Jean and Fran relaxed on the balcony of their room in the little Dancing Brook Bed and Breakfast, which sat on a rise overlooking an old, arched iron bridge. What the bridge crossed – an exquisite, narrow gorge, with a waterfall that dropped like a silky tress of hair a hundred feet to the Lueswill Creek below, skirting the dark, jagged remains of this gouge in the rock, a majestic scar made by some vast, unknowable power that seemed to have torn away a hunk of the landscape deliberately, even in anger – could not be seen from Fran and Jean’s room. But they could see part of the bridge, which had been painted black, and they took pleasure in that.

  Jean poured two glasses of Bier Ridge Riesling from a bottle Josef had given her and handed one to Fran. The two women were sitting in wicker armchairs and dressed in their pyjamas and robes, having showered after a long day. Fran had worked particularly hard, Jean knew, which was why she had let her use up most of the hot water.

  Fran took a sip of wine and pursed her lips in appreciation. “Oh, that’s very tasty.”

  “And it’s very well earned,” said Jean. “My goodness, Fran, what you did with that house in one day. I couldn’t be more grateful.”

  “Really?”

  “I’d never have managed all that myself.”

  Immediately Fran looked away, toward the trees that blocked the view of the gorge and most of the bridge, and Jean could see that she was trying not to smile too obviously. There was nothing superior about the smile, or triumphant. It seemed only that Fran wanted to keep some part of her delight private. She wiped the base of her glass against the edge of her robe and, having composed herself, turned back around.

  “Something you probably don’t know about me,” she said. “When I was younger, my family didn’t have much money. So, to help pay for university, I worked on weekends as a hotel maid.”

  “That is a surprise.”

  Fran gave Jean the full weight of her gaze and nodded gravely. “I had to clean a few things worse than bird poop.” She squeezed her eyes tight for a moment, as if to shut out the memories. “Anyway, I’m just happy to be a help to you. That’s what friends are for.”

  Jean heard that and let it pass; she was too relaxed to argue about words, about presumption. She sipped at her wine. And then, strange how the mind worked – a couple of women dressed in bathrobes, the scene toggling a brief memory – she thought of something. “My friend Natalie said that to me recently, that phrase.”

  “You mean … about friends?” said Fran. She shrugged. “I suppose it’s a common expression. Like, ‘God moves in mysterious ways.’ Something we say to explain something that can’t fully be defined. Because no one ever completely knows what friends are for, but – they’re for things like that.”

  “Doing the thankless work,” said Jean. “Out of a sense of duty, and affection.”

  “That’s right,” said Fran. “Except, you thanked me.” She saluted Jean with her glass, and took another sip, and seemed to glow.

  Somewhere on the other side of the house, the sky burned with the setting sun and, for the pleasure of Jean and Fran on the balcony, faint suspicions of pink washed into view. And hundreds of miles away, in Kotemee, thought Jean, a neighbour was undoubtedly beginning to wonder why Natalie’s Monday and Tuesday copies of the Star-Lookout had not been retrieved from her front step, and her customers would be vexed by the appointments she’d missed. And Welland, if he was any sort of policeman, if he had any hope, would be figuring out where Jean had gone. And in a hospital in the city, Adele might be rising out of her unfortunate coma. And even if none of those things came true, it was still very likely that tomorrow, detectives from the city would be knocking on her and Milt’s door. Finding Milt. Events were sure to move very quickly after that.

  Jean said, “I have to decide what’s the best thing to do for Cheryl.”

  Fran gave a quiet sigh. “How to help her,” she said.

  “Make her happy,” said Jean.

  “Because she’s in such terrible pain.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Fran nodded solemnly at this shared understanding of Cheryl, then shook her head in a way that Jean interpreted as only slightly judgmental, which she certainly felt Fran had earned. For a while the two women said nothing, as the sound of the unseen waterway, amplified by the hidden chasm, drifted up to them.

  Chapter 21

  Grape leaves were very relaxing. As subjects, they didn’t hold much interest for Jean – they were just ordinary three-lobed palmates, with scalloped margins where the veins came to tiny points at the edges. They were wide and sloppy, lazy and limp, like floppy hats or old slippers, and would make, she thought, a terrible ceramic. And yet, despite that, or perhaps because of it, she quite enjoyed them. They were leaves that could just be, without her thinking about how she should incorporate them into her work. They placed no obligations upon her. Unlike her friendships.

  It was about nine in the morning; Cheryl wasn’t awake yet, and Fran was working outside the house. She had adopted as her new task the neglected strip of garden that lay beside the driveway, and when Jean had left her she was tearing out weeds with the fervour of an exorcist ridding a damned soul of its demons. So Jean was free to wander the eastern acres of the vineyard, among the Cabernet Franc vines, and let her mind roam without distraction.

  There had been times in the past, as Jean was coming to the end of a very complicated and ambitious ceramic, and she had solved all the problems she had encountered, and her vision was all but achieved, that Jean had felt a sort of wistful, yearnful sadness. Pouring yourself into an effort so completely, the way she did, ma
de finishing it bittersweet. Success could feel like a kind of death. And so that moment – when she closed the kiln door on her final attempt, the one she knew was going to work – was always a little dangerous for Jean, and for her project. It was tempting to change something, to add something, to push the project in an odd direction at the last second so as to give it a new kind of life. Once or twice, she had succumbed to the temptation and it had worked out just fine. More often, it had ruined everything.

  Something like that perilous melancholy was settling on Jean now.

  As she stood in the midst of the tall vines, Josef Binderman appeared in his overalls at the end of the row. He shambled toward her, taking his time. The sun was off to the left and the shadows from the leaves made a pattern of mountains across his face.

  “You like it, yes?” he said. “In the sunshine, with the grapes?”

  “With the leaves,” said Jean. “Yes I do.”

  A little frown of confusion came and went over Josef’s brow. He tapped his nose with a knobby finger and sniffed the air. “Now the grapes are young, you know. But coming close to harvest time, the air is thick with the sweetness.”

  “Have you worked here a long time?”

  His eyes crinkled as he smiled. “Now I am one of the buildings, like the barn. Many owners have come and go, but I stay. That’s why I say to Mrs. Yoon, don’t worry. I am not going to leave you with nobody.”

  Josef lifted a casual hand toward a small bunch of grapes, hidden among the leaves. They were still a milky green, like the Riesling grapes in the western acres, and small, the size of blueberries. He pulled a few of them free, then popped one in his mouth, and Jean heard the crunch as he bit down.

  “Isn’t that sour?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said, grinning. “But still it’s good to me. I said to Mrs. Yoon, ‘Right now your life is like these grapes you know. Very sour. But soon it will come the sweet.’” He worked his jaw for a moment and spat out the seeds.