The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  “You could put them in ice,” Bud shouted over to him. “Ice machine’s fixed.”

  “That’s all right,” Ian called back. “Don’t mind them warm. Want one?”

  “No, Mr. K.,” Bud said, taking aim at another dandelion and winding the hockey stick back for another slap shot. “I’m working, remember?”

  By then, Ian had realized that travellers stayed at the Seashell so they could get up with the sun for an early start on the road. The housekeeping staff often forgot to reset the clock radios after guests checked out, but no one complained. Five-thirty in the morning was always time to go.

  Heavy trucks would overnight in the back lot, their drivers in the bar down the road until closing. There were campers looking for one night with a bathroom and shower before going back to roughing it, and pickup trucks loaded with furniture – almost always on the thirtieth of the month – their owners in the process of moving to new apartments. Those were the standard guests.

  The Seashell was convenient, clean, cheap and on the way – but it was never going to be a holiday destination, despite the pool the owners had installed a few years earlier. The only swimmers in the pool were June bugs and flying ants, doing marathon back-strokes, supported by surface tension until they finally expired.

  Ian’s pool chair was the only one that was set up – a stack of folded chairs sat at the end of the pool nearest to the back of the motel, tied in place with frayed yellow nylon rope. The tops of the chairs were worn to a matte white from the weather. Ian could feel a slick of sweat forming where his body touched the vinyl straps of the chair.

  For Ian, the warm beer held its own alchemy, and it fired its own set of memories, taking him back to the backyard behind his Halifax house. Just sitting on the porch, sipping beer, watching the evening fade away into the steady orange glow of the streetlights. Watching the peonies blossom, big fat buds that opened rich, and then bent face down, embarrassed. You had to be careful with peonies, Ian thought, too much damp early and the buds get fungus and die. He wondered how they were doing there without him.

  It’s only a cab ride away, he thought, but it could just as well be in another country. He walked through the checklist in his head. He’d turned the breakers off for the hot water heater so the electrical bill would be lower. Car cleaned out, locked and left in the driveway. All of the garbage cans were emptied, the litter box cleaned, the big green bag out by the curb before he left. He had left a careful note right where they would find it, on the table inside the back door. He had even thought about bagging up his clothes for the Good Will, but had reconsidered. That seemed almost too carefully planned.

  Better for them to have something to do to work through it all, he had thought at the time. He hoped someone would adopt Tip from the spca. He didn’t like the idea of the cat being put down, but it was that or just leave him outside, and doing that seemed far more cruel. He’d told the workers that he was going into an old age home, that Tip was healthy and well behaved and friendly. He didn’t tell them that Tip loved killing birds, and that Ian had once seen the cat, leaping, pick a robin clean out of the sky. After that, he had kept Tip inside the house for two weeks, feeling complicit.

  Ian was proud of the house, even thinking about it now. He’d done a lot of work to make it just the way he wanted: whoever bought it would obviously do whatever they liked, but he preferred to think some parts – like the wainscoting – would live on, perhaps through a number of owners. He had pieced that wainscoting together carefully, not by any means a carpenter, but having the advantage of time. He’d measure a piece, put it up, and if it didn’t look exactly right, he’d either take it down again, or stop until the next day, to see how the work looked to fresh eyes.

  And that, Ian knew, was at the heart of why he was at the Seashell – at least, that had been the idea. He knew it might take his family a week or more to come and check on him – it was summer, and no matter how wonderful a companion Tip was, Ian had read too many newspaper stories about the nasty things pets did to their former owners. And he knew that part of him might lie there in the heat, ruining everything that he had ever done. At least at the Seashell, he knew someone would find him within a day or so.

  He just hadn’t expected that it would have to be Rosie.

  She was working double shifts now, trying to make more money. He had thought of paying her a day’s wages, and telling her to take her little boy to the beach. She had told him about herself, about her son, John, while making the bed and pulling the bedspread square. A little boy, brown hair, and blue eyes, a little too close to his father’s looks for Rosie’s liking.

  “I guess I thought a youngster would make things better, make us a family, like,” Rosie said. “Guess I was wrong.”

  “There are worse mistakes to make,” Ian said. “At least you’ve got John.”

  Rosie’s eyes agreed: she was using her chin to help fold fresh towels.

  With Rosie working seven days a week, the four-year-old spent most days with his grandmother. Every day, Ian heard a little bit more: about how Rosie was just a few courses short of a college degree; about a house she had looked at renting; about how there was always something falling off her car.

  “Wiper blades flew right off in the rain. First the passenger side, then mine.” Rosie laughed. “Took right off, straight up, like they had wings. Driving down the highway at twenty ’cause I couldn’t see anything.” And as soon as she got new wipers, the wiper motor packed it in. Ian was amazed that she could still seem so cheerful.

  “Find a new daycare?” Ian asked.

  “Yup. Be easier if his father would just pay his share,” she said. He could hear her lining up the toiletries, moving his shaving kit around on the counter. Then a pause.

  “Lotta medicines in here, Mr. K,” Rosie called from the bathroom.

  Ian was flicking through channels on the television he imagined her looking at the big brown bottle, the one where the level of the pills never changed, wondering why.

  “Yeah, well, I’m old. You’ll be old one day too, Rosie.”

  “I’m hoping I will be,” Rosie said. “See ya tomorrow.”

  She closed the door to the room, and he heard the cart make its short trip to the next room, the wheels clattering on the rough pavement. The family from next door was gone – as usual, it had been just one night that they’d probably all soon forget, and it was the full clean, everything off the beds, the bathroom stripped right down to the towel racks. Folding the hide-a-bed back into the couch, all re-made and ready for the next family.

  Ian had heard that there had been a fuss in the States about hotels saving money by not properly cleaning the rooms between guests. There was even a company marketing a sort of sleeping bag of sheets that you could slide into so you never even touched the hotel linen. He’d seen that on cnn and had just shaken his head – hotel linens were one of the best parts of a journey.

  Rosie said there was never any problem changing a room over – that it was easier than cleaning one up where someone was staying an extra night.

  “You just ball up all the sheets and try not to think about what might be on ’em. Better not to look sometimes,” she said. “Towels too. Then you just start fresh and brand new.”

  Fresh and brand new – he had liked the sound of that. Tried it on the next morning, and walked a different way down the highway, strolling down a side road past big, new, expensive houses that got smaller as the road narrowed. Finally, just before the road ended, he came to a small house with a gabled roof, laundry hanging limp on the line. The yard was surrounded by a low fence and peonies stood all along the foundation on the sunny side of the house, the big balls of the buds hanging down slightly. It was the kind of house that he could imagine himself living in, or that might even suit Rosie and John. Anything’s possible, he thought suddenly, why not? Why not all of them together? It wasn’t impossible. Pierre Trudeau had conceived a daughter when he was seventy-two, for God’s sake. Whoa, Ian thought just as
quickly. You’re way ahead of yourself here. Like Don Quixote, he thought. Like some lascivious old Don Quixote, riding to the rescue of a damsel who didn’t really need rescuing, just an honest-to-God streak of good luck.

  Walking back, Ian realized something else; it was the first time in months he had actually thought about some kind of future – the first time he had actually considered even having one. Too long in an empty house. His boys with their own families, his wife dead for ten years now, and Ian realized that he had always expected the little house to fill right back up all by itself. That he had been waiting for years for some different notion of family to appear and take up permanent residence.

  Back in the motel unit, he sat on the end of his bed, thought for a moment about how the nape of Rosie’s neck might feel. Then he shook himself, thinking this is stupid – the girl doesn’t even call me by my first name.

  He turned on the television, flung down the remote control.

  And stopped.

  A newsreader was talking about a missing man, and up in the corner of the television was a picture of himself – it was an old picture, from a family reunion highlighted by the spectacular food poisoning that had hit everyone who had eaten the potato salad. It was a picture that made Ian feel that he looked vaguely like an owl.

  Then, the picture was bigger, filling the entire screen.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Housekeeping,” Rosie called, the master key scraping in the lock as she came in.

  Ian scrambled for the unfamiliar remote control, but succeeding only in turning up the volume.

  Rosie stood in the narrow hall, staring at the television, then staring at Ian, as a police telephone number unspooled across the bottom of the screen. The announcer’s voice again, saying that the police wanted to hear from anyone who might have seen Ian Kinley, that the police felt there was a reason for concern.

  “Well,” she said, before going quiet for a moment.

  Then, she said, “Well. Nobody needs to know that. We don’t have to say anything, and they like you at Mae’s, too. And maybe we can just get your beer delivered to the front desk.”

  Later, at the end of her shift, Rosie came back, without the cart but still dressed in her uniform.

  She sat on the end of Ian’s bed.

  “I can’t help it, this isn’t right,” she said. “I can’t help thinking about your family, out there wondering where you are.”

  Ian tried to explain that he didn’t really think it was like that, and the last thing he expected would be that they would be losing any sleep about him being alive somewhere. Told her about the note, and that, if they knew he was missing, they had to have found the two short pages of lined paper where he had outlined all his reasons. They were calling him missing on television, but truthfully, they had to be expecting that he was dead.

  “They shouldn’t be worried about me,” Ian said. “They’re just looking for the body, really.”

  “That’s horrible too,” Rosie said. “If you left a note for me, I’d want to know what happened to you. And I’m putting those pills down the toilet.”

  Ian rested his chin in his hands – this is all so much more complicated than it was supposed to be, he thought. It was a simple plan with no entanglements, and now it’s all knots and no rope.

  “A few more days, Rosie, that’s all I want,” Ian said finally. “Just a few more. Then you can call them.”

  Rosie wasn’t convinced. “We’ll see.”

  The next afternoon, Ian sat in the long recliner next to the pool, the sun shining on his white, knobby legs. Bud was away from the desk again, tired of waiting for guests who didn’t arrive. He was scooping up the stray grass that had blown across the surface of the water when he mowed the lawn, along with picking out the occasional pool-bound ant struggling feebly.

  Ian smiled. Bud shrugged, scooping another load of grass and bug bits from the blue water of the pool.

  They’d figure it out eventually, figure out that he wasn’t dead after all, and come and get him. They’d figure it out or else they’d just cancel his credit card, thinking someone had stolen it.

  Until then, though, it was the simple wonder of clean sheets and restaurant food. And family. Bud had left the pool deck, and was unrolling a long hose, setting up a sprinkler to water the grass. Ian could hear the clattering wheels of Rosie’s cart moving away down the pavement in front of the units. He imagined her legs, her uniform, the shampoo bottles rattling together on the cart. The look of deep concern that sometimes crossed her face like changing weather.

  Nothing better than family, he thought. Nothing better at all.

  Then he had another thought: some clam chowder perhaps, and later, I might go for a swim.

  Acknowledgements

  First of all, I know l’ll have forgotten to mention many people who made this book possible, and who have my gratitude even if they aren’t named individually. There are also several who deserve special recognition

  In St. John’s, my colleague and friend Pam Frampton read and edited many of the original drafts of these stories. They have been thoroughly edited by Leslie Vryenhoek, whose care, counsel and sheer hard work has made each and every one of these stories much, much better.

  This collection could not have been completed without the good-natured and thorough support of my editor at Coteau, Edna Alford, who read the stories before they were even accepted for publication, and told me straight out to start thinking about how I would want a book cover to look. Her belief in this book has been nothing less than awe-inspiring. Joanne Gerber, who accepted the first story I published at Grain, has been integral to bringing this work to the light of day.

  This collection of stories would not have been possible without the time and dedication of the variety of people who have worked with me under the auspices of the Banff Centre’s writing programs: David Bergen, Moira Farr, Ian Pearson and Rosemary Sullivan are just four of the people who deserve credit there. They, like Joanne and Edna, have always viewed me as a professional, a kind of support that is an essential recognition for any writer.

  Christopher and Mary Pratt, and Barbara Pratt, showed me that art is both constant dedication and hard work.

  I can’t help but mention the unfailing enthusiasm of my sons Philip and Peter, and the cautious but well-meaning trust of my parents, Peter and Eleanor Wangersky.

  As well, this collection could not have been completed without the support of Miller Ayre and the editorial staff at the St. John’s Telegram, who both supported me and picked up the slack while I was away working on this and other writing projects.

  Some versions of the stories have appeared before: “Hot Tub” was published in Prairie Fire, and both “Mapping” and “The Latitude of Walls” appeared in Grain.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RUSSELL WANGERSKY has received several National Newspaper Awards, won Prism International’s Creative Non-Fiction competition two years running, won Prairie Fire’s Creative Non-Fiction competition once, and has been a finalist for many other editorial and writing awards. His short fiction has been published in Prairie Fire and Grain. The Hour of Bad Decisions is his first book publication.

  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Russell Wangersky has lived in Canada since age 3, most of that time in the Maritimes. He currently works as the editor-in-chief of the St. John’s Telegram.