Don’t cry.
Just walk down the stairs.
Don’t think about the severity of the breakage, the horror of crutches on public transit, improper stairwell maintenance, or invoice day on Thursday. Don’t think about the drawers in your dresser that are empty because he took all his socks and underwear, but don’t think about the time he called you a waste of space in front of your brother, either.
The short-term disability, drug-plan reimbursement, gift baskets will all come through to you, just like the forms you filled out so carefully back at the beginning promised. You will wind up with six-weeks of full pay before you must return to your overdue-invoice encrusted desk. As the fragments of your tibia slowly knit back into place, so will a lot of things, or at least begin to. In the meantime you have only to hop down the stairs, straighten your blouse, cry if you must but delicately and without snot. Be the person Steve-o expects to see when he brings the car around.
Breathe.
Keep going forward.
You have a job to do.
SWEET
SYL HAD PUT UP PICTURES of Brian in every room in the house – she had the ones Evan and Angie emailed printed at Black’s because she wanted the baby around all the time, as if he lived in their house instead of so far away. The snapshot in the kitchen was from the boy’s first moments on earth, flushed and scrunched, pink and blue, wailing and naked. Even Laurence could admit he smiled at the little striver whenever he opened the fridge.
Under the gaze of the magneted picture, Syl had been cooking all day. Margarine tubs of stew, lasagna, and taco casserole, labeled in ballpoint on masking tape, were bricked in the freezer, fortifications against her husband’s ruin.
When Laurence finally, slowly came downstairs from the office, Syl was at the counter, chopping vegetables. The room smelled of unseen fruit and sugar. “Get everything done?” She began plopping celery sticks into an orange Tupperware half-full of water.
He sat awkwardly at the kitchen table: left hip canted up, weight on the cane, watching her. “Mainly. Muellers’ dog barked for a while. Got a couple emails to write up tonight.”
“I hate that damn dog. Those boys take advantage of you; you retired so you wouldn’t have to write emails in the evenings.”
Laurence grunted.
Syl sighed. “So there’s celery in the orange and carrots in the blue one, and I’ll do just one salad because that will wilt after the second day . . . .”
“The travel agent got back to you?”
“It’s booked.” She hacked sharply through the flared part of a celery stalk. “Direct to Seoul. The lady said I got a good deal for $1,200.”
Laurence whistled. “If you say so. I still don’t see – ”
“It’s not like we can’t afford it.” Syl waved her hand, seemingly dismissing the whole abundant house, thick drapes and satellite radio and all. “Angie called me in tears, Laurence, and Evan could barely form a sentence, he was so tired. Brian cried nearly the whole night. Again. At least I can sit up with him.”
“Evan and Angie are almost 30. They’ll survive.”
“Well, of course. But we could help them do a little better than that.”
Laurence watched her snap the lid onto the orange container. “We?”
“There’s still room on the flight . . . ?”
He pictured his webmail homepage, all those bold-faced unread messages, the nuclear-bright streets of Korea.
“I’m still healing.” He gestured down at the knob of swell and bandages bulging through the knee of his trousers. “And the boys at the office, you know . . .”
“It’s been healing a while now. And Ev is your own boy.”
“Sanjeet and Mark ask for my help. Ev, thus far, has not.”
The oven timer dinged, turning her towards it.
“You’re really going to go, just cross the world? Do you even know about the lunatic in the north and his missiles? How are you going to get to Evan’s place? You can’t just expect everyone to understand English.” He imagined Seoul ominous and vague, narrow streets, shouted strangeness, labyrinthine confusion.
She gripped the oven door. Blue veins showed in her thin white skin, but it was still smooth. She was three years younger than Laurence; if she’d worked, she wouldn’t have been retired yet. “Ev will meet me at the airport.” She opened the oven, bent her round bottom towards him. “Well, at least the pie turned out.”
“You know I’ve never cared for sweets.” For some reason, this had always been a lie he enjoyed telling. “And if I needed something, I’m sure I could make it myself.” That one was new.
“Well.” Syl straightened with the pie and hipped the oven shut, hard. “This one cherry pie is for Mr. Carbone. Not sweets, just sweet.”
“Corey Carbone?”
“You can take it over tomorrow. I saw him go out this morning, and with the Muellers’ cats around, I hate to leave it on the step.”
Laurence leaned back in the chair and a gentle pain swabbed at his knee. “Those cats are a menace – should be able to leave a pie for a few hours without fear. I’m gonna plant some marigolds next year.”
“It’s bugs that hate marigolds. You’ll take the pie to Mr. Carbone?”
“Fine. But what do cats hate, then?”
“You, I’d imagine. We have to leave in three hours.”
The afternoon was cool and bright, deep sunny fall. He couldn’t drive her with the knee still weak, but he went along in the taxi, through baggage check and all the way to customs. When they came to the “Passengers with boarding passes only” sign, Syl had a crisis of conscience. Laurence sighed and fiddled with her carry-on. Always when things were paid for, she regretted.
“You know you can’t put the margarine tubs in the microwave, right? You have to dump them out on a plate, and then drape a paper towel over so it doesn’t splatter.”
“I live in the house, Sylvia. I know how things work.”
“Are you sure you’ll manage? I mean – ” she held up a hand “ – with your knee and all.”
He was bent over, one hand raised above his head to grip the cane, the other tugging her bag’s zipper tight. He gazed up innocently. “And if I wouldn’t?”
She relaxed at this, rolled her eyes. Then he straightened and hugged her with his hands tight at her shoulder blades. When she walked away down the long blue-carpeted hallway, he felt as if the plane had crashed into the sea.
The evening was much the same as any. He showered and checked his email in his bathrobe (his brother updating his birding life list; lawyer-joke forward from former colleague; thanks from the young turks at the office for projections he’d sent). Then he watched The National while sitting on the foot of the bed, until there was a story about Kim Jong Il’s plutonium stores. Laurence shivered, and flipped off the set before the human-interest story about llamas, which weren’t human anyway, and slept quietly on his side of the bed. He dreamt of kimchi, a food he had never eaten but was surely vile.
It was the next morning that things really started to go to hell.
He did seven crossword clues waiting for toast before recalling that Syl kept the toaster unplugged for fear of electrical fires. Straight from the fridge, the butter was hard and punctured the bread. He forgot to make the tea until he wanted to drink it, and then the first bag he found turned out to be utterly not Earl Grey but something gingery that promised, upon inspection of the packet, to ease gas pains with natural effectiveness. He didn’t know what that meant or what this product was doing in his home.
Laurence slopped tea down the sink and was half-way to the door and a steeped Tim Hortons’ tea before he recalled he’d had his right knee replaced six weeks ago and couldn’t press the gas or brake. He was, as usual, devastated.
After the newly found and brewed Earl Grey (in the back of the cupboard, behind the celery salt – why?) and torn-up cold toast, the day clenched before him, thick and dense as rainforest. He did ten across – “megaton” – read a few lin
es of a movie review – “compelling fluff.” Finally Laurence hauled himself up, nodded at enraged and distant Brian (in actual fact, he spoke to the baby, as he often did when alone. This time it was, “Why you gotta cause us all such heartache, huh?”) and went to the kitchen window.
On both sides of the street, neighbours were departing on their days of useful employment. He could only see a few driveways through the oak leaves, but with the dual-income trend, he got to witness seven individuals striding down their driveways with purpose, energy, briefcases.
Then it was 9:30, on a weekday morning in Indian summer. His inbox had no new messages and he couldn’t walk even as far as Tim Hortons and everyone he loved was in Korea, where it was the middle of the night. Laurence Brunswick was a 66-year-old man with all of his mental faculties, and most of his physical ones, who was only four crossword clues away from utter redundancy.
Corey Carbone lived four houses down from the Brunswicks. He was in his eighties, though Laurence couldn’t fathom who in the 1920s would have named a boy-child Corey. The Carbone mailbox, with an orange cardinal painted on it, seemed to have always been a fixture of the street, but in decades of four-houses-downness, the two men had only exchanged half-waves over car roofs and muttered apologies over windblown recycle bins. Syl took the neighbours all their misdirected mail, did all the chatting about tulip bulbs, all the neighbourly surveillance from the veranda. She had always been more than equal to all the block parties and yard sales and, until retirement, Laurence’s work had been so richly complex and demanding that his own four walls were as much beyond it as he could handle.
One summer morning about eight years prior, Syl had been watering the Freesia when she realized that Corey Carbone had not come out to check his hummingbird feeder by 11:30, an event that traditionally marked the end point in her gardening mornings. Syl had noted over the past several years that the gentleman four houses down had become, if not infirm, then perhaps “less active.” But he always minded the bird feeders – hummingbird syrup in summer, finch seeds in winter – once before noon and once after. Until the day that he didn’t.
Syl had sat on a lawn chair with a glass of lemonade (Laurence was imagining now; he didn’t know this part of the story) waiting for Corey Carbone to emerge. And he hadn’t and he hadn’t and that afternoon Sylvia Brunswick chopped extra apples and kneaded extra pastry and baked an extra pie for Corey Carbone. And extended her lunch break long enough to bring it over to him, and discovered him lying behind the azaleas, having suffered a stroke on the way to the bird feeder. His clothes were covered with sticky red syrup.
Laurence came to know of this only because that night at dinner, their own pie seemed less full of apples than usual. Syl replied that the doubled recipe had not quite worked out, and that she had spent three hours in the emergency room with the man four houses down because he’d had a medium-severity stroke. This, in addition to causing Laurence to doubt his wife’s arithmetic skills, had given him some confusion. The other pie, it turned out, had been left at the nurses’ station.
Laurence accepted a tiny piece of pie, to calm her. He could not imagine his wife at the bedside of a stranger – would she be teary, or as firmly practical as she was on family vacations? He pictured the same sort of chaos, uncertainty, with gurneys instead of roller coasters.
When Laurence had been wheeled down the hall with a cartilage knee and returned with a plastic one, he learned how Syl behaved in a hospital – just as he’d suspected, as she did at Disneyworld – but he still could not picture her with this stranger, Corey Carbone. But this was not a comment on Corey Carbone; Laurence had difficulty seeing Syl anywhere he himself was not present.
Now, Laurence was accountable to this stranger for one pie. He peered into the fridge at slightly fogged saran over the pink-and-white lattice. Syl’s handiwork was solid and elegant, both saran and pastry. The kitchen still smelled of ginger. At Disneyworld she clutched the purple-shaded map and grinned at Evan’s excitement and refused to go on any of the rides herself. He missed her.
He shut the fridge and did a limping lap of the house, observing the dead hang of curtains, mounds of molted shoes in the bottoms of closets. Syl’s white handbag, the summer one, was on top of the hamper in the guest bathroom, like hidden treasure. He sat down on the toilet lid to open it, but it was only full of bobby pins.
One more lap and back to the kitchen window to gaze at Syl’s dead fall flower bed, of all the years past, until he was good and depressed. Back at the fridge, Brian silently shrieked at the injustice of his exile from his homeland, his people, his grandfather. Laurence balanced the pie on his free palm, and, leaning heavily on his cane, shuffled to the door.
Corey Carbone’s lawn was smooth as a tucked-in bedsheet, but the flower beds were all woodchipped over, the bird feeder empty, and the cement of the third stairs had cracked. By the time Laurence reached the porch, Corey Carbone was standing behind his screen door, leaning leftwards on something out of view, watching him.
“Hello, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone was short, jowly and bald; it was hard to make out finer details through the screen. The hem of his fawn-coloured bowling shirt hung several inches in front of his fly, suspended by a stiff spherical gut. His voice was nervous, high-pitched, and slightly slurred; like a drunk waiting to get hit. “What brings you by?”
“Well, I don’t mean to bother you, Mr. Carbone.”
“Oh, oh, no.” He still did not open the door.
“You know how Syl loves to bake.” Laurence gestured with the pie, but the head beyond the screen remained impassive. Suddenly furious for Syl’s wasted effort, his own wasted painful walk, Laurence bent awkwardly to set the pie on a Muskoka chair. “She baked you this pie, asked me to drop it off. The pie is from Syl. Hope you enjoy.”
“Thank you,” said Corey Carbone, voice even squeakier than before.
Laurence nodded sharply, pivoted on the cane-tip, and called, “You’re welcome. It’s cherry,” as he staggered down the steps. For all he knew, Corey Carbone watched him stump all the way to the sidewalk. So what if he did?
Once the pie was gone, that and his family became all that Laurence craved. He regretted letting Syl’s beautiful pastry go to that ingrate with the silly name, and he regretted Brian’s unseen colic across the ocean, and his son and daughter-in-law’s stress and distress. He regretted the boys at the office, Mark and Sanjeet, their nervous idiocy driving the company closer and closer to ordinary. He supposed his own life had been ordinary, in some ways. Many ways. It hadn’t seemed so at the time.
He thought about all the cakes and pies Syl had baked for Evan. There was so much less after the boy moved out, because of Laurence’s insistence on not liking sweets. Now he pictured sloppy swirls of blue icing on a birthday cupcake, imagined the cool grit of coconut cream. He remembered Evan sticky and greedy, reaching for more while Laurence nibbled unnoticed on a “sliver.”
To Brian’s snapshot, he revealed his years of sugar dishonesty. “Chocolate-chip cake, gingersnaps, black-bottom pie, peach coffee cake . . . they’re all sublime, when she makes them. Every birthday, she made herself a lemon pie, shaved little bits of the rind onto the meringue.” The microwave pinged, interrupting Laurence’s chat with the fridge door and embarrassing him somehow. He silently took his reheated lasagna to the table. Throughout the meal, Laurence mourned the pie he could not eat for dessert. There was nothing suitably sweet in the pantry, not even boxed cookies or a tin of pears – he’d already checked.
When Syl called – he had just closed his still-empty inbox – he was spellbound at his desk for forty-five minutes, listening to her tales of flight delays, kimchi, baby wipes. He could hear Brian rioting in the background, a fierce soprano siren. She described this fat angry grandson, then her emaciated son and his 80-hour workweeks, exhausted Angie’s obsession with Dr. Spock.
Despite knowing the per-minute costs, Laurence asked about the city, the luggage, her health (but not the ginger tea), their meals. The
n he asked, casually, chattily, almost academically, about pie. It was only when she said the baby was spitting up that Laurence consented to let her go.
The next morning, he dug through the basement deep freeze, frost beading his cheeks, until he found the cottage-cheese container marked “Pie cherr. 09” in Syl’s tight cursive. The pastry recipe on the back of the lard box took most of the morning, but it finally cohered into something resembling a pie shell. It was early afternoon before Laurence finally put the fruit into a saucepan. After twenty minutes of ardent stirring, medium heat, and a half-pound of sugar, the cherries showed no evidence of a will to be pie. There was a tap at the back door.
Once again, Laurence saw Corey Carbone’s big baby face through a screen door. This time, though, his arm was draped around a small Filipina woman.
It was Laurence’s turn to say, “Yeesss?”
The woman beamed blankly until Corey Carbone said, “Came to thank you. For the pie.”
“It was from Syl.” Laurence waved his wooden spoon absently.
The woman took this as invitation to open the door wide and gracefully pilot the big man through. She looked like a nymph dancing with a tree. Laurence let his irritation go as soon as he saw the sweat glistening on the side of Corey Carbone’s neck.
Laurence set the spoon in the spoon rest, and padded (still barefoot at two p.m., with company!) over to the woman who was manipulating Corey Carbone into the kitchen chair closest to the stove. It was not Laurence’s dinner seat, but it was the one he sat in when Syl was cooking and he was watching her. His guest looked so thankful to finally be safely seated that Laurence could not begrudge him the spot. The woman began backing away.
“I come later?”
“Yes, Ciara, thanks.” Corey Carbone leaned back cautiously. Without the screen door intervening, Laurence could see that Corey Carbone’s face was smooth-shaven, with the right side mannequin-still. If there were such things as old-man mannequins.
The Big Dream Page 10