Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  On Christmas Eve, Audrey closed the shop at four. Nanny Ellen cooked fish and brewis. It was almost the only time, now, that she did cook, and she stood at the stove pushing the smelly mixture around in the pan and saying, “Oh, sweet adorable, my legs are killing me.” She made raisin bread earlier in the day: Wesleyan bread, she called it. Christmas Eve supper was always fish and brewis with raisin bread, the shop closing early and the four of them around the table. This was the last Christmas Eve they would all do this, but since none of them knew it, there was no heaviness to the evening, only the mingled pleasure and annoyance of family.

  The next day they went to Uncle Alf and Aunt Treese’s for Christmas dinner. Treese had a turkey cooked, and everyone brought something—a cake, a casserole, a salad. The table was so crowded with food it was hard to fit in the plates. Nanny Audrey brought a bottle of wine and a box of Pot of Gold. “I don’t have time to be in the kitchen,” she announced, laying her offerings on Treese’s coffee table.

  Rachel’s cousins Nancy and Judy were both there with their husbands and, in Nancy’s case, her two toddlers, Melissa and Kristi. There was another cousin too—Aunt Marilyn’s daughter Sharon, who came home to study at MUN a few years ago and got married in St. John’s. She, like Nancy, had a pair of small loud children everybody seemed to admire. The old people were there, Aunt Susan and Uncle Marv and an even older couple from out around the bay. As always, Rachel had to go kiss the old people on their very wrinkly cheeks, which she hated.

  Wedged between the boring conversations of the older relatives and the squalling of the babies, Rachel was bored. She thought back over the day, wondering did you always get worse presents when you were older, or was that just her family that did that. Tomorrow she would go over to Vicky Taylor’s place; she was pretty much Vicky’s best friend since Linda Ivany moved away. Rachel was willing to bet Vicky still got nice stuff for Christmas even if she was twelve. Nanny Audrey got Rachel a pair of jeans and two velour tops, and Nanny Ellen knitted her a hat and mitts. Her present from Uncle Alf and Aunt Treese was still under the tree, to be opened after supper, but she knew that Aunt Treese, like Nanny Audrey, favoured practical gifts like clothes, so she didn’t get her hopes up.

  Henry had handed her nothing when she opened her stocking and her few packages under the little artificial tree at home this morning, and he carried nothing with him when they came into Alf’s house. But when everyone started opening gifts after supper Henry said, “Rachel, this is for you,” and handed it across to her, over the heads of the small cousins.

  An audible gasp of admiration went up: it wasn’t as if anyone had to guess what Rachel’s gift was. It was a brown guitar case, looking a little battered and worn around the edges. In the middle Henry had stuck a red bow.

  “Dad!”

  “It comes with lessons,” Henry said. “I mean, I’ll show you a few chords to get you started, anyway. I bet you’ll catch on real quick.”

  Later, he sat beside her on Alf’s couch, enclosing both her and the guitar in his arms, showing her how to stretch her fingers to make G, C, and D. The strings cut into her fingertips but Rachel wouldn’t admit it hurt. Henry knew, though. “It hurts a little bit at first. But your fingertips toughen up after a while. The more you play, the easier it gets.”

  Later, she ceded the guitar to Henry and he began to play, finger-picking gently, using not just G, C, and D but all the chords he hadn’t shown Rachel yet. He stayed close to her, letting her snuggle up against his left arm as he picked. He played Christmas carols first, and Treese made a faint-hearted attempt to get a sing-song going. But the only ones interested were the parents of the littlest kids, who belted out “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” like they were trying to make their cranky children laugh. Then Henry shifted into other music, and Nancy said, “Get out the accordion, Dad.”

  There was a whole ritual to this, which Rachel half- remembered from other Christmases: Alf had to say no, no, a few times, until three or four people said, “Oh go on, it’s not Christmas without a few tunes,” and finally he went and got the little button accordion and said, “I don’t say I’ve had this out since last Christmas.” He squeezed a few mournful chords, and Sharon and Judy, who both had really nice voices, began to sing.

  She’s graceful and she’s charming like the lilies in the pond

  Time is flowing swiftly by, of her I am so fond

  The roses and the daisies are blooming round the spot

  Where we parted when she whispered, you’ll forget me not.

  Henry joined in, and a few others came in on the chorus, and then they were on to “Now I’m Sixty-Four.” Aunt Susan pulled Uncle Marv to his feet and the two of them waltzed in the tiny bit of floor space that wasn’t cluttered with gifts and wrapping paper and kids.

  “Remember Dad with the accordion?” Nanny Audrey said. “My, how he loved that old thing.”

  “He used to play it all the time,” Nanny Ellen added. “There didn’t have to be a crowd over or anything special on the go.”

  “Sundays. He played hymns all Sunday afternoon. ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,’ ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ all them old ones.”

  As if Audrey’s voice was the string pulling Alf’s accordion, he moved through a few chords from the end of “Now I’m Sixty-Four” into “Amazing Grace” like it was the one song, and Henry followed. Most of the adults were singing now. Rachel leaned into Henry’s arm, wishing she could soak up how to play the guitar through his skin that way, without having to dig little grooves into her fingertips learning.

  Henry left in the middle of January. By that time Rachel knew six chords, and her fingertips were starting to get calluses. One day school was closed for a snowstorm, and when Rachel got up late and stumbled into the kitchen, Henry had bacon frying in the pan while he sat at the table playing his guitar.

  “What’s that song?” Rachel asked.

  Henry laughed: not at any joke he was going to tell her, though. Rachel knew that laugh; something funny inside his own head. “One of your nan’s favourites,” he said.

  “Nanny Audrey or Nanny Ellen?”

  “All Nanny Ellen’s favourite songs are hymns. Nanny Audrey likes this one. Do you want any bacon?” He nodded toward the pan. It was nice, getting up like this and him having something cooked already, like waking up at Vicky’s house on a Saturday when Rachel slept over. Vicky’s mom cooked supper every night but on weekend mornings her dad took over the kitchen and made eggs, bacon, pancakes, or toutons.

  No pancakes or anything like that here, but at least her dad had made bacon. She could hear the voices of her grandmother and great-grandmother drifting upstairs from the shop. Rachel put a slice of bread in the toaster and picked up her own guitar. “Can you teach it to me?”

  “I guess so. It’s only the four chords. Let me put it in C for you.” His fingers shifted the key so the music sounded the same but different, which was still a little bit like magic for Rachel, but she knew she’d be able to do it sometime.

  Hear…the lone…some whip…poor will

  He sounds…too blue

  he played, then changed the chord a little bit—from C to C7—for to fly. He sang slowly through the verse so Rachel could follow. It ended on a long, mournful note like a howl.

  Later in the afternoon they ran through it again. “Will we play it for Nan tonight? Will she like that?” Rachel asked.

  Henry rubbed his hand across his nose. “Mmm, maybe not tonight. Why don’t you wait and play it for her by yourself? She’ll like that better.”

  “But you can sing better than me, and you know all the words. Won’t she like hearing you sing it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Or maybe she’d like it too much.” Rachel wanted to ask him what he meant, but she could tell by his face that he wouldn’t answer her. “Anyway, she has it on a record. She
’s got them all on records. You can learn the words off that.”

  “Or you can teach me.”

  “Right, if I get the chance.” And then she knew he was going to leave again. She didn’t know it would be that night, after she went to bed, after an argument with Nanny Audrey, before the snowploughs had finished clearing the streets. She didn’t know that he would go without saying goodbye, or that he wouldn’t be there next Christmas. Rachel learned more chords and more songs, and she got good at the lonesome song, but she never played it for Nanny Audrey.

  AUDREY

  A tall, good-looking man came into the store twice a week to buy two packs of Export A and a package of lunch meat. They were the only two items he ever purchased. He came on Mondays and Thursdays, about five-thirty in the evening. From that and from the way he dressed, Audrey took him to be a careful, steady man of regular habits. He looked about her age—fifty, although it still shocked Audrey to think of herself as that old. He had been coming for a few weeks now, and though he looked familiar, Audrey couldn’t place him, which was strange. She still knew most of her regulars by face or by name, if not both, and customers who didn’t live in the neighbourhood were rare.

  “Lovely day out there,” he said, laying his salami on the counter. Audrey thought those words—He laid his salami on the counter—as if she were telling it to Doris, which she would not do, and it made her smirk because it sounded filthy.

  “Something funny?”

  “What? Oh, no, just what you said—smiling because we got a bit of nice weather finally. You want your smokes?” She reached for them on the shelf.

  “Just the one pack today. Trying to cut down. They tell me it’s bad for me.”

  “Oh, if you listens to everything you hears, everything is bad for you. Salt meat and smokes and even sugar in your tea. You can’t go listening to that. Give it all up and you’d be like the Seven Day Adventists, sure. You might live forever, but where’d be the fun in that?”

  The man laughed. “You might be onto something there. My cousin’s crowd are Seven Days and it’s not only the sugar in the tea—sure they won’t even drink the tea itself. You’re right, girl, you can’t be believing every little thing you hear about what’s bad for you. You got to live a little, cause we’re all going to go sometime, isn’t that right?”

  “So, just the one pack of Export A’s, then, or two?”

  He smiled. “No, I’ll stick with the one—I got to go sometime, but I don’t want it to be too soon, and the doctor’s after giving me a tongue-lashing about my smoker’s cough.”

  “Times are hard, running a corner shop,” she said. “People cutting back on their smokes cuts into my profits, you know.”

  “Ah, well, throw in a bag of chips then,” he said. “I’m not much for snacks, but sometimes when my sister’s young ones are in the house, it’s nice to have a few things around.”

  “Oh, your sister got a young family, have she?”

  “Yes, the youngest one is eight, I think, and the oldest twelve. They drop in from time to time, they’re a bit of company. Well, you know what it’s like, you got a young one of your own running around the place, don’t you?”

  “My granddaughter,” Audrey said. “She’s nearly thirteen.”

  “Right, of course. I seen her around outside the odd time. About the same age as my niece Lisa.”

  “That’s a dollar ninety-eight.” He handed her a five-dollar bill, and she took her time giving him back his change, hoping he’d stay and chat a little longer.

  He got more chatty in the weeks that followed, though he didn’t deviate from his twice-weekly schedule or his routine of smokes and lunch meat. He was back to two packs in a couple of weeks. “Couldn’t give it up,” he told Audrey. “I ’low I’m what they calls hooked.” Over the course of conversation he revealed that he got his groceries at Dominion on Wednesday so the only thing he really needed to buy at the shop was cigarettes, but he liked buying salami and baloney for his sandwiches there too. “Something about it,” he said. “Buying stuff from the corner shop—just habit, I guess. I know it’s cheaper at Dominion.”

  “Everything is. I can’t afford to undercut them—I’d be in the red even more than I am.”

  “Ah, there’ll always be a corner store. I got a lot of memories of this place from when I was a youngster— nobody wants to see places like this shut down.”

  This place? Audrey bit back the question that rose to her lips. That meant he was someone from the neighbourhood, then—likely someone who’d moved away and come back home. It irritated her that she couldn’t place his face.

  Of course it was Lorraine Penney, who knew everybody’s business, who finally solved the mystery for her. A week later he was leaving the shop after the usual friendly chat when Lorraine, on her way in, passed him in the doorway. “Some shocking to see old Scabs Cadwell looking as good as that, ain’t it?” she said to Audrey.

  “That’s Scabs Cadwell? Go away with you.”

  “You didn’t know him? Sure I’d know a Cadwell anywhere, no matter how nice he’s dressed up—something in the eyes. They say he’s done all right for himself—he was an accountant or something up on the mainland, only moved home after his wife up and left him for another man. Of course he goes by Richard now.”

  Richard Cadwell! Audrey wanted him to come back in so she could compare the handsome stranger with the boy who was a grade ahead of her in school—when he bothered to go to school. The next time he was in, she could see it plain as day, but she never would have made the connection on her own.

  Three or four families of Cadwells still lived in the neighbourhood. The sister with the young children must be Rose or Soose: one of them lived over on Hamel Street. All the Cadwells Audrey knew of were poor, and most of the boys had been in trouble with the police. Now that Audrey thought of it, she did recall hearing there was one brother who had gone away and done well for himself, but it was a shock all the same, this nice-looking fellow with the shirt and tie turning out to be a Cadwell.

  One of Butch Cadwell’s grandsons, she didn’t know his name, came into the shop next time Richard was there. Him and two other youngsters, younger than Rachel, skylarking around and cursing to beat the band. Audrey was about to turf them out when Richard turned to the Cadwell boy and said, in a voice quite unlike the tone he usually took in chatting with Audrey, “Vernon, you shut up with that now or I’m calling your mother as soon as I goes home and telling her what you were getting on like, here in Mrs. Holloway’s shop.”

  The boy dropped his head, shuffled his feet for a moment, then said to Audrey, “I only wants a bag of Cheezies.”

  “That’s twenty-five cents, now ye crowd get out of here,” Audrey said, taking his quarter. She met Richard Cadwell’s eyes as the boys left the shop.

  “Sorry,” he said. “My nephew’s young fellow. They’re a bunch of hard tickets. I suppose we all were when we were that age, but some of us got a bit of sense knocked into us.”

  “Thanks for putting the fear of God into him. I didn’t know you when you first started coming in here,” she added.

  “No, I could tell you didn’t. Lotta water under the bridge since those days.”

  Those days—when the little Cadwells were all being raised by a harried mother and a father who appeared only briefly to father new ones in between his stints away or in jail. When Scabs and his brothers Butch and Flea-Bag stole gum and jawbreakers from the bins on the counter, and heaved rocks through the neighbours’ windows, and were saucy to old ladies.

  He kept coming into the shop, and Audrey started to give him a hard time about buying only baloney and smokes. “People like you are part of the problem,” she told him. “Everyone got cars now, so everyone drives to Dominion or Sobeys and loads up on a pile of groceries, so they don’t need to be dropping into the store for stuff everyday.”

  Richard laughed. “There’s
a lot a store like this can’t carry. Fresh meat, fresh produce...”

  “We used to carry more of that, but there’s not enough call for it nowadays. People will always need canned stuff, smokes and junk food, thank God.”

  “Even that’s going to change, though.” And he told her how the construction company he was doing the books for was building a new store down where Duff’s used to be on the corner of Freshwater and Empire Avenue. Another chain store—something called a Shopper’s Drug Mart.

  “A drugstore? Sure a pharmacy will be no competition to us,” Audrey said, relieved. But Richard shook his head.

  “This Shopper’s isn’t just a drugstore. They got cigarettes and candy and pop and all kinds of other gear too.”

  Audrey snorted. “I’m not going to worry about any old drugstore going up on Freshwater Road.”

  But she did worry about it, of course. She hashed it all over with her mother in the evening over tea and toast, once Rachel was off to bed. Ellen, like Audrey, said a drugstore would be no competition. “They’re surely not going to be selling beans and Campbell’s soup at a pharmacy?”

  “No, but how many people comes in here for the groceries anymore? It’s youngsters buying bars and chips and pop, smokers buying smokes, that kind of thing. And they’ll be able to get most of that down at that new drugstore.”

  “Ah, that store’s not even open yet. There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip. What about Richard Cadwell, anyway? You talks about him some lot.”

  “Be quiet, Mother, and don’t be foolish. You know I got no time for men and no interest in them.”

  “No? About to turn Catholic and join the convent, are you?”

  Audrey laughed. She had been nearly as celibate as a nun these last few years. She certainly was never going to tell her mother about Nelson Spracklin. Any other little mistakes she might have made, whatever fun they were, hadn’t lasted even as long as the thing with Nelson.