by Vicki Delany
The sullen clerk was ringing up my purchases when, of all the people I didn’t want to meet, in walked Kimmy Wright, shaking her umbrella to dislodge the raindrops.
“Becky. How nice to see you. Isn’t it a perfectly dreadful day?” She folded the umbrella up neatly and tucked it into her tote.
“Absolutely.”
“How are you and your family managing? My mother wanted to drop by with a casserole the day after the funeral, but I suggested that she wait until you’ve left. Your dad’ll need it more then. Do you agree?”
“Yes. Very thoughtful of you.” I pulled money out of my wallet and slapped it down.
“Don’t you have anything smaller?” the clerk said.
“Eh?” A pink fifty-dollar bill lay on the counter. “Oh, right.” I dug through my wallet and shoved a green twenty into her outstretched hand. She had a bad case of eczema, red and scabby, on the pad of her thumb. She handed me my change and slipped the receipt, makeup, and chocolate bars into a plastic bag.
“Lovely to see you, Kimmy. Do keep in touch. Have a nice day.” I snatched the bag and bolted for the door.
“Excuse me, Miss,” the clerk called. “But don’t you want this back?” She waved the pink bill at me.
With a forced grin that must have looked as bad as it felt, I sheepishly returned, accepted the money, and stuffed it into my pocket.
Kimmy followed me out the door. “That’s a terrible bruise on your face, Becky.”
“It’s nothing, really. I tripped over my dog and fell into the edge of an open door.”
“If you say so. But if you want to talk… I volunteer sometimes at the women’s shelter in…”
“Thank you. That’s kind of you. But I fell into a door. And speaking of the dog, she’s waiting in the car right now. I have to get back, my dad’s also waiting for me.”
Kimmy watched me from behind the big glass windows of the drug store as I drove out of town pretending not to notice her.
“Aren’t you the complete and utter jerk,” I spoke to my reflection in the rear view mirror, once we were back on the highway. The bruise was developing very nicely, thank you. I juggled the thought around in my head for a while. A jerk, an idiot, a fool. It was a foreign feeling. I like to be in control, in my work, my home life. And until Ray’s death, I always was.
And now Kimmy Wright believes that someone in my family is hitting me. Suspicion will almost certainly not fall on my gentle, soft-moving father. The most likely suspect is the former bad-boy, the quick-with-his-fists renegade Jimmy. The news would be all over town by lunchtime.
But perhaps not. If Kimmy really did volunteer at a shelter then she would well know the importance of privacy. Did I care what Kimmy Wright and the citizens of Hope River thought of my family and me? To my considerable surprise I found that I did.
The situation was so absurd I actually laughed out loud. Sampson stuck her cold wet nose between the front seats in an attempt to join in the joke. I rubbed her chin. Before leaving Ontario, I would make sure that Kimmy heard the real story. If only because Jimmy appeared to be having a tough enough time going straight.
I pondered the direction of my own thoughts as I simultaneously drove and scratched an appreciative dog. Did I really think that Jimmy was going straight? Perhaps. He seemed sincere, and Aileen was no bubble-headed bimbo. I decided right there, as I slowed down to allow a tiny brown rabbit with a cotton-ball tail time to scurry safely across the road and disappear into the dense brush, that I would give my brother the benefit of the doubt.
The decision made, I felt a good deal better, and I finished the journey with a touch of a smile on my face.
An old compact, almost as much brown rust as blue paint, sat in the driveway. Shirley’s car.
They were sitting in the kitchen with Mom’s favorite everyday brown teapot and an empty packet of cookies in the center of the table.
Responding to an impulse, doubtless on account of the previous promise to make the most of things with my brother, I planted a kiss on the top of my sister’s head and smiled at my dad.
“Shouldn’t you wash that dog off before she tracks mud all over the house?” was Shirley’s response.
“Tea’s still hot,” Dad said, returning the smile. “Pour yourself a cup why don’t you.”
“In a minute. Did anyone call for me?”
“Yes. I took a message. It’s right here.” He peered through the bottom half of his glasses and read slowly, concentrating. “Some woman named Lynne? Great night. It’s in the bag. Guaranteed.”
“Ling,” I corrected him. That sounded like Ling all right. Everything was always “guaranteed” in her optimistic world. And she was so good at her job that it usually was.
“Mean anything to you?”
“It does, Dad, and it’s good news. Thanks.”
“What’s the matter with your face?” Shirley said.
Amid the turmoil of my thoughts on the drive home and then the pleasure at receiving Ling’s message, I’d completely forgotten the bag of makeup clutched in my right hand, and the bruise it had been purchased to conceal.
Involuntarily my hand rose to touch my cheek. “Nothing. I tripped over Sampson and fell into an open door.”
She snorted, her thin face pinched with righteous justification. “Don’t know why you put up with that dog. It’s nothing but a slobbering mess. You look like you’ve been in a fight or something. Suppose someone sees you. What ever will people think?”
“She’s my late husband’s dog,” I replied, struggling to keep my voice level. “She loved him very much, and now she loves me.”
Shirley had the grace to flush an unbecoming pink and look away. She ran her finger through the crumbs at the bottom of the cookie box.
“It will look worse tomorrow, dear, believe me,” Dad said. “I remember when I was in the army. In a bar in London, it was, not long before I met your mother. A fight broke out. Some fellow had been paying too much attention to someone else’s girl. It had nothing to do with me, I never was one for throwing a punch, but in trying to get out the door I found myself in the way of a wild swing and took a fist straight to the eye. The next day I was fine, although a bit sore with the start of a bruise. But the day after that I was a real fright, got quite the teasing from the other lads.” He chuckled at the memory. My memories aren’t quite so amusing. They are of my father’s black eyes and bruised cheekbones and limping walk in the days that followed one of my grandfather’s temper tantrums.
When I was a child I sometimes wished that my dad would turn into “one for throwing a punch.” Do something to protect himself. But as far as I knew he never so much as raised his voice to his father. And so the abuse went on.
Would striking back have stopped it? Or would my grandfather, bully to the core of his black heart, have turned his fists on someone else? Someone who couldn’t throw a punch if they tried? Like my grandmother.
No wonder my dad had been a drunk.
I escaped to my bedroom to apply a bit of the newly purchased makeup. I looked in the mirror, checking my face from all angles. The makeup did seem to make a bit of a difference. It smoothed the tone out and de-emphasized some of the darker color, if nothing more. Remembering Dad’s wartime story, I shuddered to contemplate what I might look like tomorrow.
“I was in town earlier and I heard that Maggie Kzenic is coming to work for Dad,” Shirley said as I was settling down at the kitchen table with an empty cup for the tea.
“That’s not decided yet. She’s jumping the gun a bit.”
“Work for me?” Dad said. “Doing what? I’ve got no work to offer anybody.”
“You may not think it’s decided, but Maggie told her euchre club, and from there it got all over town, that she’s going to be Dad’s housekeeper. I think you should put her straight, Rebecca.”
“If she wants the job, great.” I poured myself some tea.
“Don’t need a housekeeper,” Dad said. “Any cake left, Becky? Cookies seem to be gon
e.”
I pulled out a tin that I had discovered earlier. It was a fruitcake, and it looked moist, rich, and delicious. I took down side plates and forks and a cake knife and placed the whole lot on the table.
“If Dad needs a housekeeper,” Shirley said, “then I’ll find him one.”
I spluttered in indignation. Did I not try to talk about this with my sister? Was I not very politely shown the door? “We can talk about it,” I said, as I passed Dad a serving of the cake. It was very dark and rich with fruit. I could smell the brandy it had been soaked in. Sampson thumped her tail.
“Nothing to talk about. I’ll handle it.”
“Jimmy and Aileen and I…”
“Jimmy,” Shirley snorted. “I wouldn’t ask Jimmy to find a kennel for that wretched dog.” She tossed her head at Sampson, who was still waiting for cake crumbs to fall. “Never mind someone to come into my father’s house every day. And as for you, Miss Vice President…”
“Is that what all this is about, Shirley?” I asked. “Not about Dad and what’s best for him, but about not wanting me to be in charge? Well let me tell you, I don’t want to be in charge of anything, thank you very much.”
“I’m going to take the dog out for a bit of a walk,” Dad said. “The rain seems to have let up for now, so this would be a good time.”
The emotions raging through the house fascinated Sampson so much that she ignored the beloved word “walk.”
“Come on, there’s a good girl.” Dad took his raincoat down from the hook by the door, and man and dog trudged out into the muddy yard. But first Dad carefully shut the door, not making a sound.
My sister and I faced each other, across the narrow room and the chasm of years. Ten years apart in age, we’d never been playmates. Scarcely even sisters in the sense of girls sharing clothes and toys and dreams. I hadn’t thought of her more than five times in the thirty years since I left. I had escaped, made a good life—a great life—for myself, left it all behind without a backward glance. I wondered what I’d left behind for her.
“Shirley,” I said.
She scraped her chair across the kitchen floor and stood up, her thin chest heaving. “Why don’t you just leave, Becky? You’re not needed, or wanted, here.”
Unlike our father, she slammed the door on her way out.
***
The rain started up again in the night, accompanied by a full orchestra of rolling thunder and a spectacular display of jazzy bolts of lighting that filled my bedroom with light and sound. Sampson hates a thunderstorm; it turns her into a quivering mass of furry jelly. Long before the first blast of thunder shook the house, she had crawled under my bed. And there she remained, all through the night.
The next morning the ferocity of the storm had abated, but the rain continued to fall, a steady, quiet torrent.
True to form, Dad had said not a word about the scene in the kitchen when he and the dog returned from their walk. He brought Sampson in, dried her legs and belly off, and announced that he was off to the Legion. I didn’t see him again until suppertime. I spent the remainder of the dismal day down in the basement, lost in the distant echoes of my mother’s thoughts. Spiders were moving in already, spinning their delicate webs in the dark corners of the cellar, no longer kept at bay by Mom’s fiercely wielded straw broom.
I was in a dreadful quandary about what to do with the diaries. Was it right for a daughter to know so much about her mother? To peer into her secret dreams, her hopes, her fears? Mom had been old when she died: not dreadfully old, not incapacitated by old age, but old enough to be aware that she didn’t have a whole lot of years left to her. She must have known that someone would read the diaries if she left them behind. Did she think it would be me? Or was it more likely that she assumed Shirley would be the one to go through her things? Perhaps it was her way of apologizing to her oldest daughter. Apologizing for taking her away from a warm, adoring family and a comfortable middle-class home in a pleasant English village only to replace it with a hardscrabble life of poverty, strife, and abuse.
Perhaps my imagination was getting the better of me and I was reading too much into it. Maybe Mom didn’t even think about the future. She got pleasure, enormous pleasure as well as strength—it was obvious to me that the diaries kept her going when nothing else could—from keeping a record of her days. So she kept on writing with never a thought of someone finding them after she’d gone.
And what should I do with them, once I finished reading and took Sampson and myself back to the West Coast? If I decided to keep them, would I ship them to Vancouver, all three tea chests full? Eventually all would come to a dead end. There would be no one to cherish them once I was gone.
A sobering thought.
***
The weekend passed in a peaceful blur of leaden skies and liquid air. Aileen and Jimmy came for lunch on Sunday, which appeared to be a bit of a family ritual. Fortunately Dad remembered to tell me in time.
While in the cellar with the diaries, I’d also discovered a treasure trove of frozen food in the freezer. All of it homemade, either wrapped in aluminum foil or freezer bags or packed into sturdy plastic containers. A few of the packages were marked in my mother’s neat handwriting, but the rest were in all sorts of different wrappings and markings. Some were unlabeled. People must have been arriving the entire day after Mom’s death bearing casseroles. And Dad put them carefully away in the freezer and forgot about them.
I dashed downstairs to pull out a large package marked chicken pie. Even I could manage to do mashed potatoes, and there were still plenty of vegetables to throw together to make a good salad. At the last minute I called to invite Jackie and her family. Jason was in a hockey game and his dad was driving, but my niece sounded delighted at the invitation. I might be fighting with her mother, but I liked Jackie a great deal.
Before the guests arrived, I patted makeup onto my face, which was now reaching its full colorful glory, sort of like the woods in autumn. Jimmy noticed; the question darkened his eyes but he said nothing. Hopefully he would blame the dog and a sharp door. Aileen tossed me a thankful smile, and Jackie fussed over her grandfather.
Conversation over the dinner table was mostly about the store. Aileen had enough of Mom’s quilts to see her into the summer, but she needed to find a new supplier. I was not part of the conversation, so it seemed odd to me that they could talk about Mom’s work with so little emotion.
But then my own business life is as far from my emotions as it can get and still occupy the same body.
Jackie sheepishly confessed that she only had two pieces of jewelry ready to offer for sale. Aileen was disappointed, but she hid it behind a bright, encouraging smile. They decided that Jimmy would bring the truck around after lunch and they would load up Dad’s winter collection of rocking horses to take to the shop in the morning.
I cleared the dishes and brought out dessert. Apple pie, another bereavement offering found in the freezer. I served the pie with huge scoops of vanilla ice cream on the side. It didn’t seem proper to serve pastry for the main course and also for dessert, but the alternative was my cooking. No contest.
It was a lovely lunch. After coffee Aileen, Jackie, and I did up the dishes while Dad and Jimmy switched on the TV to see what sports might be on. Wrapped in the warm companionship of the women of my family, the chore didn’t even seem like work.
Aileen excused herself to go to the bathroom. I handed Jackie, in charge of the washing, a burnt pastry-encrusted cookie tray. I’d managed to cook the chicken pie a bit too long. She coughed lightly and scrubbed vigorously at the baked-in crust. Then she dropped her voice. “They’re saying some nasty things about Uncle Jim. In town. I heard it this morning. I forgot to get bread for Dave and Jason’s sandwiches so had to make a quick trip to the grocery store.”
“What sort of things?”
“I was standing beside the bread, debating between the whole wheat at full price or the white on sale. And on the other side of the shelf two women
were gossiping. I couldn’t see them, I could only hear what they were saying.” Her eyes darted about, wary of Aileen’s return. “One of them said that Uncle Jim molested Liz’s daughter Melissa. But that the police wouldn’t prosecute because he paid them off.”
“Do you wonder that I hate this damn town?” I slammed my fist into the countertop, imagining that it was someone’s face.
“I snatched the first loaf of bread that came to hand, and hurried around to the other aisle. They stopped chattering mighty fast, you can imagine, once they saw me. I didn’t know what to do then, Aunt Rebecca. I glared at them and they hurried away. Should I have said something?”
“Probably best not to. Anything you say will only encourage gossip.”
On her way through the living room Aileen asked Dad if he wanted more coffee, and Jackie and I changed the subject. But the quick conversation left me worried. This wasn’t a good time for fabricated rumors to be circulating about Jimmy. Even the gossip in this town was stupid. As if the police weren’t waiting to jump on Jimmy McKenzie if he so much as crossed the street against the light, never mind him paying anyone off to cover up child abuse.
I enjoyed the family Sunday lunch very much, but I spent the rest of the afternoon with a knot in my stomach as if I’d eaten that whole apple pie.
***
Monday morning the cats and dogs continued to fall, but despite the rain my own restless dog needed a walk. I made breakfast for my father and decided to brave the elements early in order to be at my computer by the start of business, Vancouver time.
The police had spent a good part of their weekend poking through the woods behind barriers of yellow tape. But Sunday afternoon the tape came down, and the patrol cars drove away.
We set off through the woods toward the swamp. I soon realized what a huge mistake that was. Sampson was covered, from her belly down, in mud and indeterminate guck.