by Trevor Cole
In Jean’s view, certain old people, and Josef seemed to be one, fostered an absurd and rather tragic optimism about the future. Perhaps it was denial, working its evil spell. She adjusted the strap of her shoulder bag and held her hand out for a grape, and after a second of uncertainty the old man dropped one into her palm. “Josef,” she said. “What if Cheryl’s life doesn’t ever become sweet?” She squeezed the hard little grape between her finger and thumb. “What if you knew it would stay as hard and sour as this?” While she waited for Josef to answer, she put the grape between her teeth and bit down. The juice was tarter than lemon, and her face contorted so much that one eye closed. It seemed to sum up Cheryl’s situation nicely.
Josef rubbed his bristly face and gripped his nose as Jean flicked the sour grape into the dust. “Some years, that happens, you know,” he said. “Maybe the weather is not too good, the sun doesn’t come. The grapes don’t get ripe.”
“What do you do then?”
Josef pressed his lips together in a way that looked school-marmish to Jean. “Then is a good year for compost.”
Her other friends had been more or less contented. Looking back over what she had accomplished, Jean had to admit that it had been easy to work with contentment. She’d simply had to find a way to bring that essential happiness to a final, poetic peak before trimming off the last unwanted part of life like some ugly porcelain fettling. But Cheryl’s experience was entirely different. She was living a sour-grape life. It didn’t require much sunny-vineyard reflection for Jean to decide that here she needed a different approach.
There were no children in Cheryl’s life; even if it was impossible for Cheryl to articulate much of anything about her situation, that was obvious from the lack of pictures on the wall. There was clearly no longer any husband, either, and no friends near her other than Mr. Binderman, who didn’t really count. For a woman in Cheryl’s situation, needing real understanding and support, a fussy elderly man was as useful as a ringing bird. Jean thought that of all the emotions Cheryl must be trying to wash away with her desperate drinking, loneliness was probably the strongest. Jean had so much to make up for in her past with Cheryl, and the loneliness of her friend loomed very large indeed.
As they walked back toward the barn, with Fran visible in the mid-distance, on her knees, clawing at the earth, Jean’s phone rang. She took it out of her bag expecting to see Welland’s picture, but saw instead that it was Milt. Her face went cold and her hand trembled a little as she brought the phone to her ear.
“Hello, Milt?”
“Jean, where are you?”
She smiled at Josef Binderman and moved slightly away. “How are you doing, Milt? I’m so sorry about what happened at Natalie’s. I’ve been thinking of you just about every hour since then and I –”
“Jean,” Milt interrupted, “I’m not calling about that.” He was using his stern voice, which he reserved for moments when he felt his concerns outweighed those of anyone else. But Jean didn’t mind because it swept her instantly back to a time when the two of them were planning their wedding and Milt would be takecharge about something, like wanting to invite his slouchy cousin Hendrick from Lethbridge or refusing to pay for a proper professional DJ, and he would brook no resistance. It reminded her of an era when neither she nor Milt had even heard of Louise Draper, and Marjorie was so far from death that she was still a forbidding presence in their lives and her opinions of Milt and his career and Jean and her art lay like a shadow upon them. And this was what they had thought of as hardship.
“What, then?” said Jean.
“There are two police officers here wanting to speak to you.”
“Oh.” She wondered whether, for Milt’s sake, she should sound surprised. Would that be less worrying for him, or more? “Well, right now I’m visiting a friend.”
“Who? What friend?”
She hesitated.
“Is it a man?”
“Milt, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well why won’t you tell me?”
Jean smiled again at Josef Binderman, who was hovering as if he had something to say. “I just don’t think I should have to share everything with you all the time,” she said. “I think I should be allowed that privilege for once. Let’s remember the months and months of you neglecting to tell me some very important things.”
“But the police –”
“Milt,” she said. “Just hold on.” Her phone had beeped and, taking it away from her ear, she saw Welland’s handsome picture. She pressed a button. “Hello, Welland?”
Her brother’s voice boomed into her ear with all his earnestness. “Jean, I wanted to let you know that those city detectives are heading to your house to see you.”
“Thank you, Welland. I already know that.”
“How? I just saw it in the system.”
She looked to the cloudless sky. “Obviously, Welland, that system is not the end-all and be-all. If you want to do police work you should probably do your own finding out of things also.”
“Well, you should get back here or it’s going to look like you’re hiding something. And, oh, by the way, you should tell Natalie the same thing because they want to see her, too. I assume she’s with you because she’s not at work and she’s not answering her door. And guess what, Jeanie? I found that out all on my own.”
“You … went to Natalie’s?”
“Yes, I did. Looking for you. First her grooming place, all locked up, and then her house. Stood knocking at her door for twenty minutes in case she was in the shower or something. Nothing. Zippo.”
Zippo. He was trying to sound like Andrew Jr. “Well, Natalie is not with me.”
“Then where is she?”
“Welland,” said Jean, “I have to go. Thank you for being so sweet and worrying about me. I love you, and goodbye.” She punched a button and gave a little wave to Josef Binderman, who was still not going away. “Milt,” she said, “are you still there?”
“Jean Horemarsh?” said a strange voice. “This is Detective Rinneard speaking. Your husband –”
Jean snapped her phone shut. It was probably a silly thing to do but it was the surprise – she couldn’t stop herself. She squeezed the phone in her hand and tried to picture what Detective Rinneard might look like, and the image came to her of a burly man in a dark suit and a fedora. Was that too old-fashioned? There weren’t any detectives on the Kotemee force so she didn’t know what to expect. Maybe these days all of them looked like Serpico. She imagined someone who looked like Serpico grabbing the phone out of Milt’s hand, and her heart started thumping. Maybe he’d hit Milt.
Josef Binderman began to approach and Jean did her best to smile. As she did her phone began to ring again, and when she looked down she saw Milt’s picture, which meant it was not Milt at all. The phone kept ringing and getting louder, so she just dropped the phone into her bag and chose to ignore it. Clamped the top of the bag shut with her hand.
“Josef,” she said over the ringing, “did you want to tell me something?”
And Josef Binderman, looking very perplexed, told Jean his idea.
Cheryl was not nearly as big as Natalie, but she was remarkably leaden. The dead weight of the drunk, Jean thought as she hauled on Cheryl’s clammy arm in her bedroom, and it reminded her so much of trying to move Natalie over the kitchen tiles that she half expected Cheryl’s head to flop backward like a lid.
“You know what we should do?” said Fran. “We should put our shoulders under her armpits and use our legs to lift.”
You wouldn’t have thought Fran would have any insight into moving an unconscious body, but then there was no telling what she’d had to deal with in those hotel rooms. Together they slid Cheryl off the mattress in her underwear until her heels thud-thudded on the carpet, and then they carried her like a snipered soldier out of the bedroom and into the shower. Cheryl was not cheerful about it when she came to, and she flailed a bit, ripping down the shower curtain and giving Jean a nice smack on
the forehead. But eventually she seemed to accept that it was two against one.
Josef’s idea had been simple, but really very inspired (it was almost as if Austrian common sense was a higher calibre of common sense). He’d come to his idea, he told Jean, when he’d spotted Cheryl’s truck in the parking lot. He explained how Cheryl had crashed her truck into the “Welcome to Bier Ridge” sign, not once but twice. And after the second time, the regional police had suspended her licence and confiscated her keys. And so she had no way to leave. She was trapped at the winery. His idea was for Jean to take Cheryl somewhere, anywhere, and give her a different view out her window.
“A change of scenes can do some wonders,” he said.
Such a simple idea, yet Jean knew that he was right. She’d learned first-hand, after all, just how trying it is not having access to a car. And she could see also how it was the winery that was amplifying Cheryl’s pain. It was an ever-present reminder of her disastrous marriage. It surrounded her with her own failure, like a cage built with bars of mistakes. Somehow this just made sense to Jean, because she had thought herself, a few times, about what life might have been like had she married a different man, or given birth to children, or even moved away from Kotemee. Gone to someplace where she was brand new and alone, a smooth pebble on a wide, wet shore. Someplace without any ties, without any friendships or family, no one who could remind her of how young she’d been once, how gorgeous and alive and full of promise. How eager she’d been to greet every morning. How long ago it had been.
After Jean and Fran had hauled Cheryl out of bed, after they’d scrubbed her and dried her and put her in clothes (Fran had been quite impressive in the way she’d held Cheryl’s wrists and stuffed them down the sleeves of her blouse – “Like forcing stuffing into a chicken,” she’d said), they fed her some coffee and porridge which, the porridge, they thought would be good for her stomach. Then they sat down with her at the dining room table, one woman on either side of Cheryl in case she should bolt or topple, and presented their plan. Jean talked about taking a long drive somewhere. To give her a change. To get her away from the winery, and the memories, and the incessant buzzing of that horrible, horrible bird; wouldn’t that be nice?
As she spoke, Jean could see past Cheryl, through the window. A lovely breeze ruffled the trees that guarded the house, shaking the leaves like the pompoms of cheerleaders, urging her on. But she found that keeping a smile on her face was a little more difficult than she’d expected. Because she was trying to fill Cheryl with a sense of hope that she herself could not really claim. A trip could change Cheryl’s immediate surroundings; it could even lift her mood. But Jean knew that it wouldn’t change any of the awful realities of her life. No drive through the countryside could repeal the sentence of old age. No afternoon on the beach could grant her the companionship and love of friends that gave shape and breath to each remaining day. Cheryl was still a prisoner of the hard truths, no matter where Fran’s SUV might ferry her. And Jean knew that she was now, herself, a fellow captive. This had been her sacrifice for her friends.
But as her gaze wandered while she made her case – Cheryl wasn’t looking at her anyway – Jean could tell that Fran was quite convinced a trip would do Cheryl some good. She looked as firm and certain as a coconut. There was something sweetly naive about that. So, almost for Fran’s sake, Jean kept on, kept talking, selling the plan to Cheryl the way she might sell a ceramic that was slightly cracked.
“So, Cheryl,” she concluded, “what do you say? Let’s go on a nice drive. We can go for a couple of days if you like.”
“It’ll be fun!” exclaimed Fran.
“All you need to do is tell us where you’d like to go.”
Sitting between them, her face still shiny pink from the washcloth, her hair neatly brushed, and dressed in clothes without any trace of vomit, Cheryl stared forward in silence. She blinked a few times and waved a hand in front of her face, as if she were trying to clear away fog. And when she opened her mouth, she said just about the last thing Jean expected.
“I want to go home.”
Jean glanced over toward Fran and back again. “What do you mean, home?” she said.
“To Kotemee.”
“Well, that’s easy!” exclaimed Fran.
“No, no,” said Jean. She put two firm hands on Cheryl’s arm. “I meant go for a nice day trip somewhere. Isn’t there a lake you’d like to swim in, or a museum you’d like to see?”
“I want to go home,” shouted Cheryl. She ripped her arm from Jean’s grip and would have fallen out of her chair with the momentum if Fran hadn’t been there to block her.
“I think she really wants to go home,” said Fran.
“But Cheryl,” said Jean, “it’s been thirty-seven years. Do you even know anybody there any more?”
Cheryl’s thick, dopy eyelids blinked at Jean. Her lower lip was quivering.
“I know you,” she said.
It took about an hour for Cheryl, with Fran’s help, to pack a suitcase. Fran, describing later how it went, alluded to a lot of Cheryl throwing things toward the suitcase from her closet, a lot of Fran doing her best to scrape together a few ensembles from the heaps, and a lot of Cheryl lying down on the heaps that Fran was trying to sort through. She spent a further twenty minutes saying goodbye to her bird, which, in Fran’s account, involved Cheryl muttering incomprehensibly and passing slices of peach through the wires of his cage, while the bird whistled like a football referee.
Jean spent that time making arrangements with Josef Binderman, who seemed almost giddy at not having Mrs. Yoon to worry about for a while (though he was rather less thrilled about adopting the bird). He said that while she was gone he would talk to other winery owners in the area and see if he couldn’t line up a buyer, and Jean had no doubt that he could. When she said goodbye, Josef reached out for her hand, brought it toward his white-stubbled chin, and kissed it. It was an old-man sort of thing to do, Jean thought. Possibly Austrian. And quite pleasant.
They hadn’t been in Fran’s SUV for two minutes before Cheryl was asleep in the back seat, and she stayed there, snoring, while Fran and Jean paid for their room at the Dancing Brook Bed and Breakfast, and had a quick look at the gorge. When they got back on the road, Fran reached toward the glove compartment and began to take out a Céline Dion CD.
“Fran,” said Jean, “I know you love Céline. But would it be okay if we took a break from her very impressive voice for a while?”
“Of course,” chirped Fran. She dropped the CD into the glove compartment and snapped the door closed. “Actually, I’m glad you said something. I think we know each other well enough now to be honest about things like that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Jean. “I do.”
“That’s part of being friends, isn’t it?”
Saying this, Fran seemed to watch the road even more intently than usual. Jean heard the yearning hum of Fran’s tires against the pavement, saw her fists tight around the wheel, and felt her own inner resistance crumbling. “I guess it is,” she said finally. And Fran, eyes on the road, lit the Cadillac’s interior with her grin.
A few minutes later, as they merged with the highway traffic and Fran secured her position in the fast lane, Jean’s phone began to ring. She reached into her purse as if it were a mousetrap, and pulled it out gingerly. Welland.
“You’re at Cheryl Nunley’s!” he crowed when she answered. “And no, I didn’t get that from the system. I just noodled it out.”
“Very good, Welland. But we’re not there any more. We’re on our way home.”
In the driver’s seat, Fran gave Jean a cheery thumbs-up.
“But, Jean, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” Welland’s voice became dark and hushed, and as he spoke a picture came to Jean’s mind of her brother crouching down behind his desk, beyond the view of Tucker’s Car Wash outside his window, like a small boy hiding from his parents behind the living room couch. “Jean, I’m sorry to tell you, Adele
died this morning.”
“Did she?” Jean allowed herself a small smile, even as her vision misted over a little.
“Yes, and there’s city detectives all over the place here. There’s some at your house, and some over at Natalie’s, and there’s even two of them in Andrew Jr.’s office.”
“I see.”
“There’s all this crazy talk, Jean. You won’t believe what they’re saying. I don’t even want to tell you it’s so crazy. But just – maybe don’t come home right away. Get a lawyer.”
“Welland,” said Jean, “do you think you should be telling me this? You might get in trouble.”
“I’m scared for you, Jeanie.”
He didn’t have to tell her; she could hear the fear in his voice. She told him not to be scared, that everything was going to be okay. She said this not because she thought it was true, but because she was his big sister. She was the matriarch of the family now and it was her responsibility. And it worked; when Welland spoke again, she could tell he was a little calmer.
“I keep thinking about what Mom said. Remember what I told you at the funeral?”
“I remember,” said Jean.
“You’re strong, Jeanie. You’re a strong woman. That’s what she said.”
“I know.”
“I’m not making it up.”
“I know you’re not, Welland.”
After she said goodbye, she held the phone in her lap for a while and watched the Buicks and the Toyotas and the Fords passing them on the right, rushing by in the slow lane like chosen people, and it didn’t bother her because she had much bigger concerns. She turned and looked back at Cheryl, still asleep on the soft leather of the Cadillac.
She had so little time.
“Is everything all right?” asked Fran.
Jean straightened in her seat again and set the seatbelt like a sash against her chest. She stared out the windshield at the diminishing road and breathed in the Cadillac air. “Fran,” she said, “do you ever think about getting old?”