Best Canadian Stories 2018

by Russel Smith

  He said, You look pale.

  Your father did this, I said. I flung my arm out at the bank as if everything we had just experienced in there proved I was the injured party.

  Please, he said. Really?

  What should I do? I said. You tell me.

  It’s so easy, he said. He was rolling the skateboard back and forth under his green and blue suede sneaker.

  My husband had given me the funds to refinance the convenience store and I celebrated by taking Kevin out for dinner at the Keg. Kevin said there had been a fight between my husband—my ex-husband—and his new girlfriend. She didn’t think he should bail me out; hadn’t things been squared up in the divorce? She said it wasn’t his fault if I wanted to throw all that money away. They had both raised their voices. She’d started to cry, according to Kevin, and she’d asked if my husband really loved her.

  What did he say? I asked. But Kevin, who was eating a steak, just looked at me with surprise and pity. He put down his fork and knife and with his elbows on the table, held his face in his hands. He stayed like that as he drew in two long, deep breaths and sighed. Then he picked up the knife and fork again and devoured the food on his plate and took the napkin off his lap and tossed it on the plate and said, I’ve had enough.

  It had begun to rain that night, on the drive back to the cabin; the wind was so high I had to grip the steering wheel tight to keep the car from swerving across the line. Water shivered down the glass. A transport truck passed, covering my car in a hard wave of slush, and I could see absolutely nothing except the writhing tail of black rubber, still detached from the passenger wiper, squiggling so hard it looked as though it was trying to bore its way through the window to suction itself to my face.

  Marion Sullivan wore linen in earth tones, drapey things. Not the gabardine navy suit jackets with brass buttons, the tight all-weather Reitmans skirts stretched across thighs gone to fat, worn by most of the real estate agents I’d encountered.

  Marion didn’t say anything about my husband’s betrayal; there was nothing cloying in her approach to selling real estate.

  She was offering a deal. Not a great deal, but a credible deal.

  When I said that my husband was seeing someone else she touched my hand with her fingertips. My hand on the table and she’d stroked it; I felt her long false nails graze the skin on the back of my hand. An erotic charge that radiated from between my legs all through me.

  She leaned in over the table, her high cheekbone resting on the heel of her other hand, and talked without drawing breath about the man she was seeing.

  He’s not much to look at but I’m telling you, the arms on him, the muscles he got, she said. Works in a camp outside Fort Mac, up on that scaffold, and you have to haul things up with rope, a hundred feet sometimes. There’s some that complain about the food, but you don’t hear him complain, she told me. They has steak once a week, they has chicken. Six weeks on and two home, and I give it to him. I make it worth his while. What he lavishes me with. You see this pin. That’s a diamond chip.

  But you can’t go walking in the woods up there, the wolves will get you. They can be aggressive. And the bears. Coyotes are shy, but they get together in packs on the periphery of what do you call society, they attack. The money is good but you’re a hundred feet up and dangerous? If somebody up there gets word, or say somebody passes it around, that you used to have trouble with your back, that’s it, you’re gone. You’re done. They don’t invite you back. There was them that had to go further north and by the time they drove back they were two hours in the bus and starved then and missed supper. And some of them complained and they were let go, complaining does not go over.

  Marion Sullivan touched me for the second time then. This time pressing one knee between mine under the table.

  Do you hear me, she asked. I said I had heard her. Complaining gets you nowhere, she said. This is a man, we sleep together when he’s in town. Not a looker, but the arms on him. She was gathering our napkins and the empty Styrofoam soup bowls, the plastic spoons. Squishing it all together.

  You have to make people do what you want, Marion Sullivan said. People love to be guided. You’re doing them a favour. The hardest thing is deciding. Decisions are exhausting. You ease them toward what you want. Jimmy, that’s his name, he does what I want. She was standing up and she blew a breath up over her top lip to get a wisp of hair off her forehead. You decide for people they will follow you. Doesn’t matter what you decide, they follow.

  Let’s go see this condo, she said. Two walls of glass. View of the harbour. I think you’ll be excited.

  You would not believe the money I make on a bucket of salt beef. They buy it by the piece. The stuff turns me; the brine watery, a dark-wine colour, smelling mineral. Thick clots of fat floating on the top, thick as candle wax, and the way the chunks of meat roil up from the bottom when people dig around with the ladle for a choice piece—so I make them do it themselves. There’s a box of surgical gloves next to the tub. They are powdery inside, an invisible talc, and the tongs are attached by a string to the bucket.

  Everybody coming into the store in August was talking about the fire in Bay de Verde. The fire meant the plant had shut down before everyone had earned enough stamps to get them through the year. They wouldn’t be eligible for EI. There had been a promise; the plant owners were committed to providing work. But there was the question of how many hours. Everybody needed hours. They needed the overtime for their stamps if they wanted to get through the winter.

  I went with her to view the condo. The two walls of glass were covered in plaster dust. The milky light. High ceilings, and noises reverberated without the furniture to absorb sounds. Plaster dust on the hardwood, floating in the air like smoke. A man on a ladder with a mask and goggles turned off the sander and twisted to look at us.

  In the sudden quiet, without the sound of the sander, his breathing in the mask was loud, like a death rattle—a sound I knew because my mother had died earlier that summer and I had been present when it happened, a rasping, ragged breath, strangled and wilful. Even Marion Sullivan shut up for a minute or two as the dust whorled; cloudbursts of silt, billowing in the draft that had come in with us. The dust looked like two figures waltzing, twisting around each other. There was a white film on my jacket when I stepped outside again.

  It turned out that Marion Sullivan—a lively, but not manic, former social worker—was borrowing from investors at eighty percent interest. She had borrowed from a city councillor. She had borrowed large sums from all the real estate agents in her office, who were devoted to her. She had not paid them anything in months.

  Soon there were delays with the renovations. That hap- pens. With renos there are always delays. Then one of the condo buyers wanted his down payment back. Next people were phoning the radio call-in shows. They were reporting that Ms. Sullivan was not returning their calls. I left a message on her cell. Then several messages.

  At first, I will admit, I could not accept she had lied to anyone. I felt indignation on her behalf, a fierce but ultimately shallow loyalty. Then, though I understood she had lied to most of her customers, I could not believe she lied to me.

  Finally I understood. Everything I had taken from the divorce was lost.

  Jocelyn Strong, my neighbour in the back, Percy’s daughter, has five children: the eldest, Libby, is seventeen, the first to move out, gone to live in St. John’s. I’d heard, while I was working behind the counter at the store, that she had shacked up with an abusive boyfriend and I’d heard drugs and maybe sex work.

  People will say anything. Then I saw her in town, while I was shopping at the Dollarama. I needed plastic platters to put out baked goods at a fundraiser we were having for the people who lost their homes in Bay de Verde. I knew they had silver-looking platters that weren’t bad for what I needed. There was a woman in the line-up ahead of me with a dozen coffee mugs. Libby Strong wa
s serving behind the counter, wrapping the mugs in individual sheets of paper. My sister, who was with me, had struck up a conversation with the woman about Lysol wipes.

  You just keep them under the bathroom sink, my sister said. Toothpaste or whatever, you can just pull one out and wipe things down. It’s very convenient. Everything is sterilized.

  The woman stepped out of the line to pick up the Lysol wipes, and she was standing there, reading the instructions. My sister said she didn’t know how she had got on without them.

  You have three sons, you want something you can clean up after them with, she said.

  When I got to the counter I said hello to Libby. She had the white, white skin of her mother, of all the Strongs along the shore, with the same freckles, the orange-blonde hair, pale eyebrows, blonde eyelashes. Three studs in her plump lower lip, a lot of concealer around her left eye.

  Libby Strong’s eyes like her grandfather’s, pale blue with a black rim around the iris. The girl spent a long time with Percy when she was little. She has his composure. Wiry like him, stalky. Comfortable with prolonged silences in conversation. The kind of quiet talk that occurs in people who live in rural areas. The sense that insight forms long before the utterance. Not a need to drag things out, but no impatience. As if speaking were a minor sacrament or a cost.

  Libby, I said. Look at you.

  I like town, she said with instant defiance.

  I suppose you got your high school?

  I got all As, she said. She was checking in the woman’s Lysol wipes, but the scan wouldn’t read the bar code so she was passing it vigorously in front of the scanner, over and over, and each time it dinged to let her know it hadn’t registered. Finally it went through.

  All A-pluses, actually, she said. They told me I was going to win two prizes, and one of them was for perfect attendance, and the next day I told Mom, I’m staying home. I wasn’t walking across no stage for perfect attendance. But the scholarship I got, that’s what let me move to town.

  Your mother was in, showing me the pictures from the prom, I said. I don’t know where you got that dress. I know it wasn’t from around here.

  Online, and I’m after selling it on Kijiji and making fifty bucks off it.

  I hope you never had a stranger come to your home, I said. We met at a Tim Hortons downtown, she never had a car, Libby said.

  Your mother mustn’t be very happy with you gone. Even up in Cowan Heights I can see Cabot Tower, she said. I can see all the way downtown because in Cowan Heights, you can see. You can see everything up there.

  Are you going to university? I asked. All you Strongs are so smart. You could do anything you want.

  No, I got this job, she said.

  Your mother must miss you, I said. She was counting my plastic platters. I knew there was a rift between Libby and her mother. They weren’t talking.

  You got six here, she said.

  Six, is it?

  She held up a single platter to the pricing gun and the red laser flickered and the tone rang six times.

  Mom is too controlling, Libby said.

  My sister put the Lysol wipes on the counter. Ring them in, she said.

  I’ll pay for them, I said.

  She’ll pay for them, my sister said. I’m going to give them to her. Make a convert. She’s a skeptical one, but I can break her spirit. I mean if you have them in easy reach. The toilet bowl. You live with men you have to be wiping the toilet all the time, they don’t do it.

  Libby Strong met my eyes when my sister said about living with men. So Libby knew that my husband and I had separated. Maybe she even knew the divorce had gone through. That meant the whole shore knew. Of course she did. Even out here in Cowan Heights, with a new life ahead of her. Even at the age of seventeen she would know everything. She had also figured out that my sister didn’t know most of it. She had weighed my failure to communicate this against her leaving her mother’s house. She had weighed my humiliation against what she was doing to her mother. She saw she had the upper hand. She wouldn’t give me away, but I’d have to stop trying to make her feel guilty. I glanced at my sister and felt a shooting pain, brief, near my temple, and I could see the floaters again. I tried to determine if I felt weak, or if my heart was beating faster, or slower. If there were any accompanying symptoms. A splotch in my vision obliterated a row of BIC lighters in a cardboard display box near the cash. When I looked up at Libby one of the floaters trailed down her cheek and onto the nametag pinned over her chest.

  Lysol’s antibacterial, Libby Strong said.

  That’s no way to talk about your mother, I said. Saying she’s hard to live with. Your mother is up there with four youngsters underfoot. She’s on her own. She works like a dog.

  I like it here, Libby said. She put the platters in a bag.

  Looks like you got a shiner, I said.

  Dad’s living with somebody else now, she said. Had me over for Sunday dinner to meet her. Real nice lady.

  It was meant to sting me, refer to my own situation. Jocelyn Strong’s husband did a three-week rotation on the White Rose but they’d shut her down. Their house in Low Point was a two-bedroom and when all the men on the White Rose were laid off the marriage went sour and he’d moved into St. John’s.

  Listen, I said. I wrote my cellphone number on a scrap of paper. If you ever need to talk to somebody.

  The door of the Dollarama swung open and a man came in and fought with one of the stacks of mesh-wire shopping baskets, trying to free the top one. But it was hitched to the others. The stack of baskets was up to his chest, and it swayed and shook as he struggled to free one. All the baskets lifted up and slumped and he was cursing. Then he got the basket free and kicked the stack and it fell over. He turned toward us and it was the man I had seen on Low Point beach. He didn’t recognize me. But he knew Libby.

  You have a break coming up? he asked her. She flushed.

  I’m not getting no breaks for a while, she said.

  I have something for you, he said. Out in the truck.

  Go out there, and I’ll come out, she said. I’ll come out in a minute? Just as soon as the other girl comes in from her break. She just went out, she has a smoke. She’s been gone long enough. She’ll come back now the once. There’s two of them gone on break, actually, smoke break? They’ll come back together? They’re gone this good while now.

  Libby was scared of him, the way I had been scared at the beach. She was talking fast and soft, placating, the ends of her sentences rising in a question the way the kids in town talk, the girls Kevin hangs out with. She didn’t sound like Libby. The man walked over to the counter and wedged himself in front of the line. Everyone else in the line-up had fallen quiet. My sister flicked the lid on Lysol wipes and pulled the first tissue out and the waft of ammonia mingled with the stink of the man made my eyes water.

  I’m not sitting out there in the cab by myself, he said. Fuck that.

  I’ll get one of the girls to cover for me, Libby said. You go on, you’re going to get me in trouble.

  This is bullshit, he said. He put the basket down on the counter in front of me. I’ll tell you what, he said. But he reached out a finger and touched the thin gold chain on her wrist. Libby had rested one hand on the counter in front of her. And the chain on her wrist was very thin and gold, and he moved his index finger over it, where it rested on the back of her hand. He stuck his finger under the chain, and turned it so the chain was very tight, twisted around the top of his finger, making it very red, and the rest of the chain bit into the skin of her wrist, and then it broke.

  That was cheap, he said. That was no good. It’s okay, Libby said. Look, the girls are back.

  That was a cheap piece of jewellery, he said. That’s from Walmart, is it? Piece of fucking garbage. You see how easy that broke? I hardly fucking touched it.

  I’m coming out now, Libby said.
The man turned and left the store, got into a truck in the parking lot and started it. Let it idle. Revved the engine.

  Libby looked at the scrap of paper with my number on it. She had been holding it in her other fist. She knew what I had been implying, when I gave it to her. That she wasn’t okay. She should go home. And she was afraid I would tell her mother about the bruise around her eye. But she let the paper with my number on it drop in the garbage bucket behind her.

  I have a place, she said, in Cowan Heights.

  I hope it’s not with him, I said. She turned to glance out at the parking lot, which was packed. Then she held out my bag of plastic platters and, taking the Lysol wipes back from my sister, dropped them in the bag too.

  Thank you for shopping at Dollarama, she said. I have to go on my break.

  When my sister and I got outside it was raining and the truck was gone.

  One evening at the end of August, the man appeared at the foot of my bed. He was as solid and present as the bedpost. Though I was fully awake, or felt I was, my body was paralyzed. I could not move. He picked up the corner of the eiderdown from the foot of the bed and pulled it off my body. I was wearing my pyjamas with the panda bears, but my skin was covered in goose bumps. I was full of terror but my heart was beating very slowly, like a drum at a memorial service, a deep, hard muffled beat that may have been the ocean. Still, I could not move. The cellphone was on the bedside table and with tremendous effort I flung an arm out and slapped my hand around and got the cell, but there weren’t any bars.

  The kids who robbed the store abandoned the stolen van they were driving and took off into the bog and got so far and gave up. It had been November and the bog was partially frozen and they’d run over a long flat white surface and the ice cracked and they were up to their waists. Of course there are sinkholes and you can disappear; a few cows have been lost that way, all the community out with a rope around the cow’s neck pulling with all their might and the eye rolled back, until they give up and shoot the terrified animal between the eyes before it sinks all the way under.