by Vicki Delany
She shrugged and wrote something down.
“The meatloaf is always great here. I’ll have that. Thank you.” Dad smiled and handed her his menu.
She smiled back and patted her over-colored, permed, and sprayed hair. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “Back in a jiff.”
We looked at the paper place mats and twiddled with our cutlery. My dad and I have never had much to say to each other.
Maggie brought glasses of ice water. Faint remains of a smudge of red lipstick marked the rim of mine. I pushed it to one side. At least my knife and fork were sparkling clean.
I cleared my throat. “We were thinking, Dad, that it would be a good idea to get a housekeeper for you. Someone to look after the house, get your breakfast, that sort of thing. What do you think of that?”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Jimmy, Aileen, and I.”
“Can’t you do it?”
“I won’t be staying much longer. Another week and I have to go back to Vancouver.”
He looked genuinely surprised. Had he actually thought that I’d come home for good?
“Here we are.” Maggie carefully placed two brimming plates in front of us. Mine didn’t have the requested salad, just a limp slice of half-green tomato nestled beside an enormous pile of fries. The potatoes were thick and brown, singed until crispy around the edges. In any restaurant in Vancouver I would have protested, vigorously. Here, I sighed and picked up my fork. Dad’s meatloaf was bathed in rich brown gravy, and his potatoes were fluffy and running yellow with melting butter. Maggie carried a squeeze bottle of ketchup under her arm, and when her hands were free she plopped it in front of me.
“Now what’s this housekeeper you folks talking about?” Divested of her burden she placed her hands on her ample apron-wrapped hips, settling in for a chat. “You looking for a housekeeper, Bob?”
“No,” Dad grunted.
“Yes,” I said. “Do you know someone who might be interested?”
“Depends on the hours. And the money. But I’ve been thinking about getting out of this place. I been here too long. You know how it is, honey? Gets to the point where you don’t even know why you stay on, you just do.”
A shout from the counter interrupted her. “Maggie, more coffee.”
“Hold your horses. I’ll be there.” She scribbled on her pad, ripped off a sheet of paper and held it out to me. “That’s my number. Call me. I’ll be happy to talk to you.”
I took it. “We’ll talk.”
She scurried away to get the coffee.
“She seems nice.”
Dad snorted and dug into his meatloaf.
I drenched the fries in ketchup, picked up my hamburger, laden with pickles, tomato, thick red onions, and lettuce, and looked around before biting down. Most of the patrons had gone back to their own meals, and their own business. But a few were watching us. I stared at one old bag until she had the grace to flush and look away.
We finished our meal in silence.
I pulled out my wallet and was checking the bill when a middle-aged couple stopped by our table. I’d seen them at the church and later at Jackie’s house. “I hear the cops found something mighty interesting up around your place earlier, Bob,” the man said.
Dad continued pouring cream into his coffee. “Norm. Audrey. That’s what they say.”
“Some folks in town are wondering if that son of yours has anything to do with it.”
“No,” said Dad. “It was my daughter, Rebecca here, who found it and called the police.” I looked at him in surprise. No one could possibly have misunderstood what these people were implying. Could they?
The couple looked at each other and walked away without another a word.
Dad put down his cup with a world-weary sigh. “Time to go home, Becky.”
I tossed a few notes on the table rather than taking the trouble to scrutinize the check and calculate the gratuity.
All conversation stopped as we walked through the restaurant, heading toward the door. Maggie waved cheerfully and one old man said, “See you around, Bob.” Everyone else simply watched us go. I’d bet good money the place hadn’t been so quiet since the day it served its first slice of meatloaf.
We stepped out onto the cracked and broken sidewalk and the chill night air. The street was deserted, not so much as a piece of garbage moved in the wind. Dad wrapped his scarf around his neck. Sorrow lined his old face, his cheeks were sunken, his eyes small and dark, full of pain.
I took his arm. “It’ll be okay, Dad. I’ll make sure it is.”
He patted my hand. “I know you will, Janet. You always do. What would I do without you?”
Chapter 28
“Sorry, Aileen. I am absolutely all in. All I want to do tonight is crawl into bed with a good book and a warm dog. Do you forgive me?”
She giggled. “Of course I do. Absolutely. I often feel like that myself. But at least I have a fiery man rather than a warm dog.”
Her tone was so friendly that I laughed. A week ago I would have taken that comment as an insult.
“Do you know anything about what was going on down there today?” Aileen asked. “I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and the clerk said something about the police finding something to do with Jennifer.”
“They found her scarf, that’s all. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. By the way, I have a lead on a housekeeper.”
“You work fast, Ms. McKenzie.”
“That’s what my husband tells me.” The laughter died in my throat as I realized what I’d said.
“Why don’t you come to work with me tomorrow?” Aileen said, her voice quick and high-pitched, trying to cover up the silence that fell between us like one of Sampson’s particularly smelly indiscretions. “We can make plans about this housekeeper, you can tell me all the police gossip, and I can show you the shop.”
“I’d like that.”
***
I was down by the lake with Sampson when Aileen drove up in her little car. She tooted the horn and started when I tapped the window from the passenger side.
“Come and join us, if you have a minute.”
The thin, tender skin at the edges of her eyes crinkled as she smiled at the invitation, making me wonder how old she was. Jimmy was well over fifty, and I had assumed Aileen to be much younger. But the light of the harsh morning sun danced off the hair on her head, revealing more gray than black, and cast deep shadows around the lines drawn under her eyes and in the corners of her mouth.
“What a lovely morning,” she said. “The weather channel says storms will be moving in this afternoon.”
“I’ve found that it never pays to listen to the weather reports. They’re wrong as often as they’re right.”
“So true.” She wore a different sweater today, one perfectly suited to this fresh spring morning in shades of yellow and green with a dash of cobalt blue. As before, long silver and glass earrings framed her face, and a colorful skirt flowed around slim ankles. Her sandals were thick and practical.
We stood in silence, watching Sampson chase the tiny lapping waves. A large black bird flew overhead carrying a length of straw in its beak. A cardinal called from the branches of the maple at the front of the house.
***
“This is quite the mystery trip.” Sampson had been stowed in the house with Dad, and Aileen’s foreign compact had pulled onto the highway, heading south. “No one has told me a thing about this store of yours. I don’t even know where it is.”
Aileen laughed. She rolled down her window and loose tendrils of long hair fluttered in the breeze. “Huntsville,” she said. “It’s quite a drive, but there’s a market there for the sort of things we sell, something that there isn’t much of here. Yet. We have a shop in Port Carling also, but it’s closed for the winter. I’ll be opening it up May long weekend.”
“Who’s ‘we’? Do you have a partner?”
“It’s a family thing. Your family, Rebecca. Jim and I own the stor
es, but Janet and Bob contribute a good portion of our stock.” She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “You look surprised.”
“I am rather.”
“You’ll see when we get there. I’m hoping to be able to open a store in Hope River one day. If the cottages keep moving north the way they are, we’ll be right in the middle of cottage country before too much longer.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“For Jim and my finances, great! For the dying town of Hope River, wonderful! For the enjoyment of our home, and the peace we get sitting out on our deck or working in our garden, I’m not so sure.”
All around us the woods were starting to shrug off their winter garb of stark tree limbs and dry, brown undergrowth. The beginnings of new life blanketed the forest floor, soft and clean. I shuddered at the memory of blackflies, the scourge of the North. I hoped to be long gone from Hope River before they made their voracious, but fortunately short-lived, appearance.
“I was sorry to hear about your husband, about Ray,” Aileen said, in her typically blunt way. “When was it, about a year ago that he died?”
“After the New Year before last.”
“How did it happen? Do you mind my asking?”
“No, I don’t mind. A car accident. A stupid car accident. Late night, heavy rain, the road slippery with wet leaves, a car skidding out of control on the steep hillside, straight into Ray.”
“How awful for you.”
“How awful for Ray.” I wiped at my eyes. “He was a truly good man. In a world of not-very-nice people, Ray was a genuinely good man. He hung on for three days.” Days full of over-brewed coffee, gnawed and ripped Styrofoam cups, snatches of tormented sleep, ancient magazines, too-bright lights, the patient hum of machinery, and whispered conversations. A broken body in a room of coldly efficient equipment. Outside the ICU, a waiting room full of fresh-faced students, good friends, faculty, family, all whispering their prayers, offering their hopes and crying their fears. Ray’s mother, so tiny and frail you wouldn’t think anything else could diminish her. But those three days did.
“The doctors fought so hard to save him. As if they knew his was a life worth saving. But there was no hope.” No hope. I sobbed and turned my face to the window.
We drove in silence for a long time. The clouds moved closer.
“How did you meet my brother?” I asked when at last I thought that I could speak without my voice breaking.
“In prison.”
“Uh, right.”
“I don’t tell most people that, believe me. I know perfectly well how it sounds. But it’s not quite that bad.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I’m a psychologist. My area of specialty is, was, anger management. I worked in the prison system for over twenty years. Let me tell you, I’ve met some men and a few women that I would be more than happy to condemn straight to hell if I believed in such a place.”
“Why’d you give it up?” Time to change the subject. I didn’t want to hear about her infatuation with the handsome, charming, “misunderstood” inmate.
“A long story, as most stories worth telling are. But I didn’t fall in love with Jimmy when he was my client, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Aileen looked straight ahead, watching the road. A bug hit the windshield and splattered its guts across the glass. She kept her voice under control, strong and steady, but her hands, resting on the steering wheel in the proper ten-and-two position, were clenched, the knuckles white.
“When then?”
“As I said, it’s a long story. I quit the prison service. Burnt out doesn’t begin to describe it. The job destroyed my first marriage. And eventually it came close to destroying me. I received a small inheritance from a childless aunt, so I decided to take some time off, try to find my way through the rest of my life.”
“And…”
“And I ran into Jim, quite by accident, in Huntsville one fine day in the height of summer, years after we’d first met. He’d been out of jail for some time, had gone back to live in Hope River, and started up his own carpentry business. He came into town for some shopping and was standing on the bridge watching the river and a family of ducks swimming below. I jumped out of the path of a kid on a bicycle and bumped right into Jim. We recognized each other, talked and went to lunch. And here I am today.”
“Happy?” I asked.
“Completely.”
The green highway sign announced our turnoff, and Aileen concentrated on crossing into the right lane.
In early May the town of Huntsville is small-town quiet. But that’s the lull before the storm. The rush comes over the long weekend at the end of the month, when people arrive to open up their cottages. But even on this day there were plenty of enterprising people around, getting in supplies, searching for hardware, electrical, and plumbing equipment, getting a start on the season. It gave the town a nice, bustling mid-week air.
Aileen pulled into an alley to park behind a row of stores. Then we headed down the main street to Cottage Art and Design. The front door was propped open and a young woman stood guard over the counter. She tossed a huge smile of welcome for Aileen and, incidentally, me.
“My sister-in-law, Rebecca,” Aileen introduced us. “My dream of an assistant, the best in the whole-wide-world, Chrissie.”
Chrissie beamed at me and shook my hand with much enthusiasm. Taken piece-by-piece her face would be considered plain—heavy features, nose and lips overly prominent, thick eyebrows, chin too chiseled for a woman. But all together it coalesced into a stunning whole, accented by a river of lush chestnut hair falling past her shoulders. Close to six feet tall, maybe more, she dwarfed not only my tiny sister-in-law but also me, something I am not used to in a woman. Her style of dress was similar to Aileen’s: hand-knitted sweater, long skirt, exquisite jewelry.
“I thought Rebecca’d like to have a look at some of her mother’s work,” Aileen said.
Chrissie took both of my hands in hers. I almost jerked them back, but conscious of the offence that would give, I stoically endured her touch. She smelled of fresh laundry, herbal shampoo and (before lunch?) pot. “Janet was a true artist,” she breathed. “That rarest of all people. A true artist. I am so sorry to have missed her funeral. But it fell on one of my days to work at the coffee shop, my other job, and they wouldn’t give me the time off. Uncultured swine.”
“There isn’t enough business in the off season to keep Chrissie on full time,” Aileen explained. “As much as I would like to. She opens up for me and looks after the store when I’m on shopping trips as well as on Saturdays, but that’s about it until summer.”
Chrissie pressed my hands together once more and then released them. I tried not to wipe them on the seat of my jeans. “Such is the fortune of commerce,” she whispered. “But please, Rebecca. You’re here to look around.” She waved one hand expansively, swept her long skirt aside, and returned to the stack of papers she had been examining behind the counter.
Aileen grinned at me, her eyes sparking like a mischievous elf. “A great saleswoman,” she whispered. “The summer people absolutely adore her.”
The bell over the door tinkled and a woman entered the store. Aileen fixed her smile in place and moved to greet the potential customer.
The store was small, but filled to bursting with goods for sale. Handcrafted items, most of them, everything perfectly suited for lodges, holiday cabins, cottages, and vacation homes. I spotted a rocking horse, a twin to those currently residing in my father’s workshop, and nicely arranged groups of plain wooden benches and tables, which on a first glance might appear to be plain but were made out of the finest wood, carved as delicately as if composed out of clouds of lumber. There was a collection of wide-limbed Muskoka chairs, ubiquitous in this part of the country, but these were special, perfect, the wood glowing with light from within. I ran my fingers lightly across the arm of a chair as soft and smooth as good leather. I flicked a price tag: priced to match their qual
ity.
Wooden shelves piled high with quilts lined the back of the shop. Bed-sized quilts and artistic wall hangings draped the walls in waterfalls of vibrant color. More quilts accented the wooden chairs and tables, the fabric warm against the grain of good wood. Leaning close, I checked out another price tag. And almost choked. But it was a beautiful piece—a king-sized quilt in almost every shade of blue imaginable, each hue fading gently into the next. It was the twin of the one on my parents’ bed.
“Lovely, isn’t it? That’s one of Janet’s.”
“It’s amazing. Stunning. I had no idea she was doing this sort of work. She quilted when I lived at home, and she occasionally mentioned it in her letters. But they were things for the annual church Christmas craft sale, presents for friends, for our beds.”
“I miss her dreadfully, I do,” Aileen said. “But the business-woman in me is simply frantic wondering where I will ever find another artist. Your mother did most of the fabric art here.
“Janet sewed all her dreams into scraps of fabric. See that one there, the tiny one? It might be you, when you were little. Or some other girl from her past. What do you see in it?”
“A girl. Afraid of the touch of cold water.”
“Afraid. Yes. But she will touch it, won’t she? Don’t you see it? She’s frozen in time, but when she’s released, when time gives way, as it must, the girl will put one toe in, only one big toe, and that only for a second. But the sensation of cold water on that one toe will liberate her to explore the world.”
“You see more than I do.”
“Perhaps.”
“That rocking horse over there looks the same as the ones in Dad’s workshop,” I said. “Did he make it?”
“He certainly did. We had quite a rush on them before Christmas. Sold every single one. The people who come up here for the holidays love to have locally crafted items for their children and grandchildren. And bless them, so they should. Most of the woodwork here is your father’s.”
“Is everything in this lovely store made by someone in my family?”
“No, although it would be wonderful if it were. The wood carvings and the bowls? A Muskoka man makes those. Bob does wonderful work with larger pieces but he has no eye, or patience, for details. The pottery is from an assortment of potters near and far. Some of the jewelry is mine.” She waved her long-fingered hand toward the display cases. Chrissie waved back at us.