Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  Did that mean something crooked? Clary shook her head for even considering it, but she thought Darwin was probably wilder than she knew.

  “A surprise for you?”

  “Maybe,” Lorraine said. “He likes to give presents.”

  “Is it your birthday?”

  “Not till March. That can’t be it.” She got up, pulling the i.v. pole along the bed to gather the tubes in her hand. “They’re coming to set up the chemo drip in a little while. Let me go to the bathroom before you ask any more questions.”

  “Have you seen the doctor today?”

  “Before you ask any more.”

  Clary got up to help her, but Lorraine pushed her gently down and rolled the pole, clinking and squeaking, over to the bathroom.

  The room was getting homey. Piles of magazines, extra blankets, dishes from Mrs. Zenko; she ought to take those back. Another woman had been put in the other bed and had gone, and then another, but Lorraine remained. Clary had a moment of painful dizziness, struck by the recurring awareness that if Lorraine was still here, she was in big trouble—too intimate a secret to know. She hadn’t talked to Darwin out of the children’s hearing for a few days. Maybe he had learned something from the doctor, and was sparing her. Strange to have to be spared anything about Lorraine, when she hardly knew her. But she knew her better than she’d known anyone since her mother died, because she had been paying attention to Lorraine.

  Two nurses came in, a woman and a man. Both small and dark-haired. One rapped on the bathroom door while the other stripped the bed with quick, economical motions. Lorraine answered and the female nurse, satisfied, went to help with the bed-making. Clary got out of the way and stayed by the sink, leaning on the counter, to wait until they were through. Lorraine came out of the washroom and rolled her contraption slowly back to the fresh bed. She looked very tired.

  The two nurses swarmed around her like tiny, intent shadows, the shiny i.v. pole between them. Lorraine let them have her arms, and what they needed of her, but her face turned to the window with an open calm which Clary had not seen before. The window showed the river and the peaceful city, and beyond the city the prairie stretching in all directions. It was like a painting: Lorraine still, translucent; the nurses, dark squiggles doing finicky tasks; and beyond them, the great expanse of the unmoved world—Lorraine connected to that, removed from the machines and the workers.

  Clary was swept with a feeling of despair because she could not overcome her distance from Lorraine to talk to her, could not even listen to her. She was helping, the children and so on, but that was selfishness and didn’t count. But there was Darwin. Clary remembered watching Darwin sitting beside Lorraine, slipping his hand through her hair over and over and over. Sitting on her bed, being with her, hers.

  Opening the door, the children dodged back. Some kind of turmoil in the house—they couldn’t see what was going on past the front hall. But they could certainly hear.

  “Selfishness!” was the first word Dolly could make out, the snakey S’s hissing out of the living room in Mrs. Pell’s dank tenor. More roaring than words.

  Darwin leaned over a pile of lumber and coiled wires to open the door wider for them, and his face broke into a huge smile at the sight of Mrs. Zenko’s face behind the children. “She’s headin’ for the rhubarb,” he said to Trevor and Dolly, nodding his head back toward Mrs. Pell.

  “Oh boy,” Dolly said.

  More choked roaring, and a magazine flew out of the living room and crashed into the hall wall. Lucky there were no pictures right there, Dolly thought. Another magazine flew flapping and fluttering at the wall. The next one was heavier, so it stayed more solidly together, with a whump as it hit. Fern’s In Style.

  Darwin gave them one more crazy look, and dove into the living room. They could hear Mrs. Pell, gasping and wheezing, her hands smacking.

  “Get your—let me go, you friggin’—slime-bucket—”

  “He’ll take care of her,” Trevor said to Mrs. Zenko, who had put her arms around the children and was pulling them back out the front door.

  “It’s just a temper,” Dolly said.

  To her surprise, she saw that Mrs. Zenko had started to cry, a couple of sweet pear-shaped tears. “It’s not that bad,” she told her, to comfort her.

  “It’s not dishes this time,” Trevor said.

  “Oh, my dears,” Mrs. Zenko said, as if this was awful. Really it wasn’t that bad, a magazine wouldn’t seriously hurt anybody even if it landed. Pearce in the stroller was craning his neck to see what all the interesting noise was, fat fists clenched around the bar to pull himself forward. Mrs. Zenko pulled him farther back against the porch railing.

  Darwin came into sight again, with Mrs. Pell, hitching her along by walking close beside her, her arms pinned by her sides. He took her into her room and shut the door. Two more crashes. They could hear Darwin in a steady stream, talking her down.

  Then it was quiet for a minute.

  “She’s probably done for now,” Dolly said.

  “We’ll go to my house for supper, I think, my dears,” Mrs. Zenko said. She was pressing her hand into her chest, just under the bone that goes across the shoulders, and that made Dolly worry about her. Her eyes were still damp and shocked.

  “It’s okay, really,” Dolly said, and Trevor said too, “It’s okay.”

  But they both loved eating at Mrs. Zenko’s, so they shepherded her down the stairs, not wanting to calm her completely in case she changed her mind about supper.

  “You don’t have to call 911, Darwin will fix her. When she’s mad, she goes straight up and turns left,” Dolly said. It would have scared Fern too. She was already kind of weirded out by Gran. Good thing she hadn’t seen this, or Clary!

  Trevor shook his head, the straight, weightless hair floating away from his skull. “She got a crazy temper, boy—”

  He was going to say some more, tell about that time when she chased him around the house with the wooden spoon, going way fast, but Dolly poked him. Maybe Mrs. Zenko would give them perogies. He loved those. But not with sour cream, no, not that.

  Moreland had happened to have a few errands in Saskatoon, and he stopped by to say hello. Quite an amount of lumber clutter in the front hall, and the door was wide open, the screen not even shut to.

  “Hello?” he called gently, stepping over the first pile. Acoustic tiles. Had Clary finally got somebody in to do the basement? Grace’d be glad to hear it.

  Darwin stuck his head around from the bottom half of the basement stairs and said hi.

  Moreland said hi back, and then Darwin came all the way up. “You a friend of Clary’s?”

  “Her cousin,” Moreland said. “Cousin-in-law, I guess.”

  “She should be back already—but it’s a good thing she’s not.”

  Darwin was gathering metal braces, and Moreland automatically helped him.

  “I’ve been telling her she ought to do the basement for a while now,” Moreland said, making conversation as they took a load of lumber down the narrow stairs.

  “Yeah, well, now’s the time,” Darwin said. “You want to help?”

  Moreland was taken aback. What kind of contractor was this? Then he surveyed the surprising scope of the damage in the basement and understood that something else was going on. “I guess I better,” he said. He took off his jacket.

  Loitering by the café in the hospital lobby, in his usual post, Paul waited for an empty pot of coffee to be refilled. Avoiding visits. When Clara Purdy came out of the elevator and headed for the door, Paul found himself dodging in front of her, almost tackling her. “Sorry,” he said, catching himself up. “I haven’t seen you for—I wondered how Lorraine is holding up through this chemo, if I should visit her again?”

  She looked distracted, but not unhappy to see him. “Some days she seems better,” she said. “It was like this for my father, but she’s younger, and stronger-willed, maybe.”

  “Whenever I think illness is all attitude, alo
ng comes someone who gripes and complains and whines and still gets better,” Paul said. “Will you have a quick coffee? It must be ready now. Joe Kane, upstairs, is eighty-seven, still snarling and scratching.”

  “He was in hospital with my father, eighteen years ago,” Clary said. “My mother called him irascible, and that’s how I always think of him.”

  Paul handed her a cup of burnt, caramel-coloured coffee. “He demoralizes me. He’s Candy Vincent’s uncle. She’s been—” He caught himself before mentioning her tale-bearing call to the bishop. “She’s something of a force in the parish.”

  “You should have known her when she was Candy Kane, in Grade 8. She was a wild girl in those days, Elton John glasses and platform shoes. I thought she was amazing.”

  “But you can’t have known her then?”

  “We were in school together. I’m pretty old, you know.”

  He blushed. Clary was fascinated to see him redden from the base of his neck upwards, his ears included, while the polite expression on his face never altered.

  “I’m forty-one,” he said, meaning that he was old too.

  “Forty-three,” she said. “I guess that makes me the boss of you. Sad, really.”

  Then he laughed, the red receding. “It is the blight man was born for,” he said. “It is Margaret you mourn for.”

  “I can never remember poems,” she said. “But I like when you quote Rilke in sermons.”

  He was grateful for that. What beautiful eyebrows she had.

  “Joe Kane used to like to play chess,” she told him. “He played my father in the sunroom at the old City Hospital years ago. See how irascible he’d be if you beat him.”

  “Kind of you to suggest I might be able to,” he said. He took the cup she had finished, and she hurried away through the lobby, already gone from him, trying to remember where she had parked this time.

  Clary walked in the front door and almost fell over a pile of metal struts. A man she’d never seen before was crouched down gathering the struts together, and he scrambled up to catch her; she caught herself, instead.

  “Hello?” she said.

  Darwin came running up from the basement. “Hey, Clary! Good!”

  He edged past the large man and helped him manoeuvre his load past the woodwork. She could see no place to put her grocery bags that wasn’t covered with hardware.

  “Give them to me,” he said. “You’re pretty heavy-laden.”

  He side-stepped back through the kitchen doorway. Moreland was sitting at the kitchen table working something out on paper with a ruler and his trusty space pen.

  “Moreland!” Clary said, surprised. “Is this your doing? You’ve met Darwin—Lorraine’s brother?”

  Moreland hadn’t figured the exact relationship but had gathered something along those lines. He covered the paper with his arm, and then uncovered it, thinking maybe better she didn’t go down to the basement. He didn’t want her to see the big black lines he’d drawn on the wall downstairs, where they could put in a bigger window, if they dug four feet and lined the well…

  “Where are the children?” Clary asked, refusing to ask about the rubble.

  “That nice Mrs. Zenko of yours came over and said she had ’em,” Moreland said. “Said she was feeding them supper and if we’d like to come along later she’d feed us, too.”

  Clary squeezed her eyes shut. She was putting too much strain on Mrs. Zenko, she had to find a better way of doing this. She could not bear to think what all this new chaos was about, the piles of stuff, Moreland roped in somehow here, and all these strange friends of Darwin’s—what disreputable people did he hang around with, normally? Petty criminals, carnies, drug dealers. But Moreland was here. And if they were making a better place for Darwin to sleep, that would be good.

  Darwin said, “Mrs. Zenko is glad to have something worthwhile to do.”

  That was true.

  “She’s getting all those perogies cleaned out of her freezer,” he said.

  “Perogies? That what’s for supper?” Moreland asked.

  “According to Trevor,” Darwin said. “Might have been wishful thinking. Whatever she makes is good. Do you care what we do down in the basement?” he asked Clary. “Thought I could pay you back a bit, in kind.”

  “I don’t care about anything,” she said. What a pleasure to say that! Moth-eaten mink coats, old lamps, what was down there? An affliction of stuff in mouldy boxes. “It’s all junk I haven’t shovelled out. If you’ll deal with it I’ll be grateful. Oh, Grace wants the jam jars. But I don’t need any of it.”

  Moreland gave her a wink. “Good to let go once in a while, eh?”

  She laughed, and headed next door, where she could hear the children yodelling in the garden.

  When Darwin stepped into the darkened room, Lorraine opened her eyes.

  “You’re late,” she said, in a slow voice, stupid with drugs. He looked tired too. “Working too hard?”

  “Hardly working,” he said, and sat on the edge of the bed. He held her foot, forming its shape under the sheet. His hand felt safe.

  “How’s everything?” She meant at home, the children.

  “Mrs. Zenko next door took them over for supper. Mom Pell blew a fuse.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “She’s settled down now, off sulking somewhere. She’s a crazy woman.”

  “What set her off?”

  “I got some guys helping me do a few things down in Clary’s basement, fix it up for her a bit. Mom Pell wants a room down there when it’s done, but I told her no.”

  Lorraine wanted to think about Mrs. Pell’s everlasting selfishness and about Clary’s house turned upside down in the usual chaos of Darwin’s projects, but she felt herself sliding backwards. A pleasant/unpleasant sensation, beginning to whirl. Like being drunk, only none of the giddy tickle. It was uncomfortably like dying. She could hear Darwin talking, she could feel his foot, no, his hand, on her foot…There was something…Darwin carried on telling her all about it, about Moreland coming and the little refinements they’d decided on, the new window Moreland was going to bring in the morning, so they’d have to dig the window well deeper; how the kids had comforted Mrs. Zenko when Mom Pell went round the bend.

  Lorraine didn’t have to talk. In between sentences he would hum, hum, one of Rose’s tuneless, wordless songs from Avenue H, Rose sitting with them while they drifted off to sleep. Lorraine was unable to be afraid, half-listening. Freed from the long bead-string of things she had to finger over and over: money, the children, Clayton, the cancer, the bad feeling just there on the left side, hum, hum. Can’t even remember the list, she thought.

  At five in the morning, staring out the window while she waited for Pearce’s bottle to warm, Clary saw Darwin roaming around in the garden. She went out onto the concrete patio to say hello. Pearce joggled along with her, wakeful but not grumpy this pale blue early morning, watching the sparkle on the grass where light was beginning to glance.

  “Hey, Pearcey,” Darwin said, looking back.

  He had been staring at the back garage, Clary’s father’s workshop. Wide as a single car garage, but twice as long, opening onto the alley—it had become invisible to Clary, as familiar things do. Overgrown lilac bushes almost hid it from the house. She should trim those back.

  “Mom Pell,” Darwin said. “She’s sleeping in a chair out there, an old recliner.”

  Clary hoped that the words would translate into English if she waited.

  “She’s mad at me,” Darwin told her. Birds were singing their crazy morning alarms. “No need waking her up now. Wait till she comes out on her own, eh?”

  “Okay,” Clary said. Thinking, like Fern, whatever…

  “You keep anything in there?”

  “Oh, my father’s old tools, and a table saw. It was his hideout. He was tidy, there’s not much clutter. There’s a furnace, he worked in there all year round. It’s insulated, too—probably with asbestos.”

  Darwin smiled at her. A
very personable, loopy smile, she thought. “Be a nice little house.”

  Pearce twisted around in her arms to stare at the windows of the shop, shining with reflected early sky. He pointed strongly toward it, meaning Take me there! but she said, “No, no, not now, Pearce,” and turned to go into the house instead.

  “Whatever,” she said to Darwin. “Whatever you like.”

  Darwin just hummed. Clary left him to it. She went back to make Pearce’s bottle, and maybe, with any luck, get a little more sleep.

  17. Service

  Time to introduce the children to church, Clary thought, with the house a little more orderly and breakfast over by nine. Banging reverberated in the basement, and Dolly and Trevor kept slipping down to check on things and being sent back upstairs with urgent messages like Tell Clary we need a three-pronged grommet by Thursday, go tell her right now. Before Clary got the joke, she had started making a list on the fridge. 3-pronged–? it read. Electric hat-saw w. grinder, and 6 gross button-head hybrid bingo-nails(?).

  Church would get them out of Darwin’s hair for a while. And that overbearing chin-wagging redound woman last week had made her determined to take them. She re-dressed Pearce and collared Dolly and Trevor to put on clean shorts the next time they came up to tell her what Darwin needed. (A dark balance umbrella, if she’s got one.) She washed all their faces and combed their hair. They made a little crowd in the pale green bathroom, filling the big mirror when she glanced up. She brushed Dolly’s bangs back from her face again and rummaged in the top drawer for a pretty bobby pin, the one with a butterfly on it.

  Dolly stared at Trevor’s fine hair flying up off the back of his head from static, at Pearce perched on Clary’s hip. Clary’s smooth head was bent in the top half of the mirror, checking to see if they looked good enough for church. This was their life now: to be with Clary. Dolly stopped. No thinking about anybody else, white as a sheet on yellow hospital sheets.

  In the porch of the church Clary thanked Frank Rich and took a second bulletin for Trevor to share with Dolly, since he could not yet read. But he looked heartbroken, so she gave hers to Dolly and smiled at Trevor.