Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “At least you got Rachel home to give you a hand.”

  “Yes, she’s all right,” Audrey admitted. “She can be hard to get along with, but I was myself at that age so I knows what it’s like. She loves her Nanny Ellen, anyway, so she don’t complain when I asks her to do something for Mom. I got it pretty good, I know, I can’t complain much myself. If I only had one wish, I s’pose…”

  “Yes?” Richard leaned toward her a little, and Audrey was startled by the hope in his voice. Was she a fool, to think that just because he never asked for anything more, he was content with the little she could give him? But she couldn’t give him false hope, couldn’t tell him anything more than the bare truth.

  “I wish I was easy in my mind about Henry. I tries not to think about it too much, but it’s always there, at the back of my mind—wondering how he is. Rachel don’t talk about him much, but I know it bothers her. He called on her birthday when she was thirteen and that’s the last call I had from him.” Rachel’s fourteenth birthday, and the Christmas in between, had gone by without a word. The phone number Audrey had for Henry had been out of service for ages, and the last letter she sent had been returned to sender.

  She had tried to find out where he was, mad as she was at him for cutting off contact. There were more of the family up in Toronto area now than there was back home, and all of them—Marilyn, June, Frank, Alf’s boys Doug and Randy and their wives—had had a go at trying to dig up news of Henry. They called people who knew him, asked around that network of Newfoundlanders that seemed to be strung all across Ontario. Someone told Frank that Henry had gone west, out to Vancouver. That was the last news Audrey had heard, nearly a year ago. Little enough to go on, but she clung to the belief that if the worst had happened, word would get back to her.

  “Maybe he’s all right,” Richard suggested. “Maybe he’s met someone, settled down.”

  “If he did that, he’d get in touch. He knows I worries about him. No, the only way Henry is away this long and out of contact is because he knows whatever is going on with him would only make me worry more.” Audrey lit up a smoke and pulled the ashtray closer. She tried so hard not to think about it. Most of the day she could block it out of her thoughts, but late at night she lay awake and imagined every bad thing that might have happened. That last time Henry called, he had sounded drunk, and he wouldn’t answer any of her questions about what he was doing. He didn’t ask her to send money or anything; that was never Henry’s way. So damn determined to sink or swim on his own, and she was sure that he was sinking.

  “I’m sorry, girl, I knows it’s a hard thing to go through,” said Richard, whose family had had its share of missing relatives, people who lost touch for years on end. He called the waitress over and ordered coffee and a piece of cherry pie; apple pie for Audrey.

  “No more about that now,” she said. “What can’t be cured must be endured, like they say.”

  “True enough.” Richard said. He passed her a cigarette and lit it for her, then took one himself, and they smoked, drank their coffee and ate pie as they watched the sunset over Conception Bay.

  AUDREY

  They brought Ellen to St. Luke’s on a pouring-rain April day. Audrey had pictured it in her head so many times this last couple of years, as her mother had grown more and more frail. Ellen had given up doing her few hours alongside Audrey in the shop, even given up going to church. Audrey had imagined that when the day came, she and Alf would be there to guide their mother out of her home for the last time. They would stand on the sidewalk in the sunshine and look back at the house and the shop she had moved into almost fifty years ago. “You had some good times here, you and Dad,” Audrey imagined herself saying, and she thought it might give Ellen some measure of peace. Sometimes she imagined Marilyn and June and Frank were home for it too, to make it more of a big day.

  What really happened was that she had put her mother’s name down for St. Luke’s after Ellen had stopped managing the stairs, but when they called from the home to say there was a room, Audrey had said she could manage, that her mother wasn’t ready to go yet. She had never told Alf and Treese about that phone call, though she told both Marilyn and Richard and neither of them blamed her. About three months later, Ellen slipped in the bathroom and broke her wrist. That day, Audrey and Rachel had managed to get her down over the steps and into the car to the Grace. As they walked her through the shop Audrey thought, I wonder if Mom will ever set foot in this house again?

  An ambulance, now, took her from the hospital to the nursing home, the social worker having decreed she could not go back to a house where Audrey was working down in the shop all day and Rachel was out at school. “Your mother needs twenty-four-hour care, Miss Holloway.” So Audrey and Alf were back at the house taking two suitcases full of Ellen’s clothes and things to bring over to St. Luke’s, to get the room ready for her arrival. Treese was minding the shop till Rachel got off of school.

  Ellen was cranky when the orderlies brought her into the lobby at St. Luke’s. She’d had a bad infection and had been feverish and disoriented much of the time she was in hospital. Audrey had tried to explain about moving to St. Luke’s, why it was necessary. There were times when she thought Ellen had accepted it and other times she was sure her mother didn’t understand at all.

  Now Ellen looked around at the institutional-looking lounge furniture, the drab walls. “It’s pouring out,” she said. “I don’t know why you had to do this to me on such a miserable old day.”

  “The room was ready today, Mom. They got to move people in when a room is ready.” When someone dies, Audrey did not add.

  “I told you I wanted to go back home.”

  Audrey sighed. Alf said, “You can’t manage at home, Mom. You fell down in the bathroom, and most of the day there’s no one around to help you to the bathroom or get things for you….”

  “Don’t even bother, Alf. We been through this all before,” Audrey said. “She knows, she just don’t want to know.”

  “You thinks you knows it all,” Ellen says. “You both thinks you knows what’s best for me, but I’m not helpless. I can shift for myself if neither one of you wants the burden of looking after me.”

  “Now, Mother, that’s not fair—” Alf didn’t know when to quit, Audrey thought. He was right: he and Treese had offered, several times over the years, to take Ellen in. She always said she wanted to stay in her own house, she didn’t want to streel all the way out to Mount Pearl, where their new house was, and she wouldn’t want to be a burden on Treese. They got the doctor to sit down with her and explain that going back to the rooms over the shop wasn’t an option. That day, she had seemed to understand that if she wouldn’t go with Alf and Treese, she would have to go into a home.

  But the reality was another thing. Audrey tried to be patient with her mother as they went up to the room and met the woman she would be sharing it with. They spread an afghan that Ellen had knitted herself out over the bed, and put up the framed pictures of all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren on the dresser. Ellen sat in the wheelchair and looked around at it all and sniffed.

  Her mood changed when a nurse took her around to see the other rooms on the hallway. She stopped complaining, spoke sweetly to the nurse and, eventually, even to her roommate, Mrs. Mackenzie, although she had refused even to make eye contact with the woman at first. “Mom seemed to settle down a bit when we got her in there. I think she’ll be all right,” Alf said as he drove Audrey home later.

  “More fool you. The only reason she changed her tune is she was too polite to complain in front of the nurse. She’s always had lovely manners, that’s not going to change, but mark my words she wasn’t one bit happier about it than when she got there. I don’t like to think of her sitting in that cafeteria trying to eat her dinner with a crowd of strangers. I should have stayed.”

  “Well, you never liked to think of Mom sitting all by herself upst
airs while you were working, either, so I’d say you’re as hard to please as she is. Far as I’m concerned, she’s in a good place with company her own age and qualified staff to look after her. I’m a lot more easy in my mind about her now that she’s in there.”

  And when were you ever not easy in your mind? Audrey wondered. It wasn’t as if Alf spent much of his time on worry or fret. He wasn’t the kind. As long as Mom’s bodily needs were taken care of in St. Luke’s he wouldn’t lie awake wondering if she was happy or lonely or what.

  Rachel was perched on the stool behind the store counter reading a book. “How was everything?” Audrey asked.

  “All right. Aunt Treese left as soon as I came, she had to go pick Melissa and Kristi up from school. Vicky was here with me for a while but she had to go home for supper. There was a bunch of kids in buying stuff after school, oh, and Mrs. Parsons wanted to tell you she came in and to ring her later, tell her how it went with Nanny. How did it go?”

  Audrey peeled off her coat and laid her purse on the counter. She squinted at Rachel, hunched over her book. “You should sit up straight, you don’t want to get a hump on your back. Your Nan is not too bad,” she added. “I’m not going to say she’s pleased with the situation, because she’s not, but she’s always one to put the best face on things so I imagine when you go in to see her she’ll be smiling and telling you how nice it is.”

  “Oh—when do you want me to go in? Can Vicky come too?”

  “Why not? Vicky’s some cheerful little thing, Mom loves her. She must get that from her mother’s people; young Karen’s a Taylor through and through, a real sad sack.” Mention of the Taylors stirred something in the back of Audrey’s mind: what had she heard, now, about that crowd? Oh, that there was trouble between the mister and missus ever since Dan Taylor got laid off from the dockyard. But likely Rachel would already know all about that from Vicky. Anyway, a visit from the two young girls would cheer Mom up, Audrey thought.

  They’d have to sort it out between the family, who would go to visit when, and space it out so Ellen didn’t have everybody in there on a Sunday afternoon and nobody all the rest of the week. If Alf and Treese went in Sundays, that would be best for Audrey. She’d just as soon not give up her Sunday drives with Richard.

  “I’ll bring you in there some evening the week, if I can get someone to watch the shop for an hour,” she told Rachel. “I’m going to need you to work supper-hour tomorrow, because I’m going to go in and have supper with her, try to get her used to taking her meals there.”

  “I don’t really like old folks’ homes and hospitals and stuff.”

  “Nobody likes them places. Bad enough you got to go visit someone there, just pray it’s a long time before you ever got to be in one yourself.” She wasn’t thinking of Rachel, of course, barely hatched like a baby chick. She was thinking: I’m past fifty. More than half a hundred.

  Audrey shook herself. A day like she’d just been through would have anyone thinking morbid thoughts. “I’m going upstairs to put on the kettle,” she told Rachel. “You’ll have to work till close tonight, I needs to put my feet up.”

  ELLEN

  Mrs. Mackenzie would not shut up. Natter, natter, natter all day long, whether she had anything to say or not. After years of living with Audrey, who had plenty to say when she wanted but also knew how to shut up, and Rachel who had grown from a quiet child into a quieter teenager, Ellen felt like her head was going to burst with the nonstop gabbing from her new roommate.

  Roommate. What a word, what an idea. What the young ones called it when they went off to college or something, like when Marilyn’s young one, Sharon, had to share a room in the residence at university with some girl from Rushoon. And that was all right when you were eighteen or nineteen. When you’d lived for years with your husband and then got used to living without him, and you’d worked out a way of getting along with your grown-up daughter—well, it was a sin to have to get used to sharing a space this small with another person.

  It wasn’t just Mrs. Mac, it was the whole lot of them, nurses as well as patients, always going on at her, and when everyone was in the dining room the wave of noise that hit her was like a wall of water breaking over the landwash. She felt soaked in it.

  “You’d hate it here, Wes,” she whispered in bed at night. “You’re some lucky, to die right quick like that and never have to go through all this. Never have to get old.”

  She hadn’t been able to kneel down by the bed for four or five years now. But she kept up the habit of prayers, lying in bed before sleep. First the old bedtime prayer, then the blessings and requests for her family, then the Lord’s Prayer, and then her conversation with Wes, which finally trailed off into her falling asleep. It was better this way, in fact; sometimes she went right into dreaming that Wes was alive and they were sitting down to dinner or doing some little job about the house, just the two of them. Those quiet retirement years they never got to enjoy together, sometimes she had them now in her dreams. It was lovely until she woke up, and had to remember.

  RACHEL

  They walked home together from Booth Memorial, Rachel and Vicky, happy that they could finally leave off jackets and sweatshirts, let the sun pour down on their shoulders and their arms, bare in short-sleeved blouses. Vicky had a blouse with a ruffle down the front, that whole Princess Diana thing all the girls were into this year. Rachel knew she couldn’t pull that off, though she did try her best with feathering her hair. With her dark hair and pale skin she’d really rock the headbanger look, but she felt weird around the metalheads, didn’t like the music and didn’t know any of them well enough to start dressing like they did. Plus, it’s not like Nan would actually let her out of the house wearing a leather jacket, a spiked collar, and black eyeliner.

  The usual route home was over Merrymeeting Road, where they walked with a whole crowd of people past Mary Brown’s until their classmates stopped at the bus stop. Rachel and Vicky continued on, turning down before they got to Chalker’s. This whole strip of Merrymeeting Road, from Mary Brown’s to Chalker’s, smelled of chip fat. If they had pocket money, sometimes the girls would go over and get chips at lunchtime, joining the crowd from Booth and Bishops and a handful of the weird kids from the Seventh-day Adventist school, all converging on their lunch breaks and jostling for places at the counter. After school, a bunch of kids dropped into Coady’s store for Cokes and bars and ice cream, but Vicky and Rachel went on past, because they could get stuff for free when they got to Rachel’s place.

  There were still lots of kids on the street after the girls passed the bus stop, but none of them were friends with Rachel and Vicky, and some were actively unfriendly. A crowd of guys, Shagger Cadwell and Reggie Walsh and that crowd, hung out on the corner by Chalker’s. If both the girls were together they would call out stuff like, “Hey, blondie! You and your friend wanna come over and check out what I got in my pocket? Hey! Hey you! Can I get two for the price of one?” If Rachel was by herself they’d yell something like, “Hey loser!” or “Who smacked you in the face, ya weirdo?” She couldn’t decide which was worse but it was interesting, she thought, that they called different things depending who was there. It wasn’t like the things they yelled at Vicky were compliments. Guys like that, maybe it was better if they did think you were a loser and a weirdo.

  Today the girls were together and one boy shouted, “You make me cream in my jeans!” Vicky said to Rachel, “Ignore them.” It wasn’t like she needed to, because Rachel had never said anything back, not once. But Vicky often did stuff like that, gave Rachel sort of basic life advice that didn’t need to be said.

  Rachel was well aware her life would be much worse if Vicky hadn’t become her friend in Grade Five. Vicky had stayed loyal even after it became obvious that Rachel was a bad choice as a friend, and that dragging her around would prevent Vicky from getting access to any really popular groups. Kind of like how a dog with one of those big
cone collars on couldn’t get through a hole in the fence. Rachel was Vicky’s big cone collar. She kept thinking the magic spell would end sometime, that Vicky would wake up and look around and think, I’m blonde and pretty and more or less normal. I don’t have to be friends with this loser. But it hadn’t happened yet.

  At the corner of Rankin and Calver they stopped into the store. Some days, Rachel had to work; if she didn’t they just dropped in and picked up snacks. Vicky’s Aunt Carolann was in there today, talking to Audrey. “I don’t know what to be sayin’ to her, she’s off the head with worry over him,” she was saying as the door opened. When she saw the girls, she shut that conversation off and said, “Look at the two of you! My Lord, Rachel, it’s been some long time since I seen you, you’re grown right up. Same as our Vicky here, what a pair of lovely young girls.” She looked at Audrey. “Next thing you know they’ll be going around with fellows, what? How time flies, hey?”

  “I hope Rachel got more sense than that,” Nanny Audrey said.

  Vicky went over to the cooler and got a Coke for herself and a Pineapple Crush for Rachel, while Rachel got two bags of chips—salt and vinegar for Vicky, ketchup for herself. They leaned on the glass-topped counter to open their drinks and chip bags. Nanny Audrey asked if Rachel had any homework. She never checked to see if any of it got done, but she felt like she had to ask, especially if anyone was in the store.

  “She’s the spit of Henry though, isn’t she?” Carolann said, sizing up Rachel.

  “She got his eyes and mouth,” Audrey agreed.

  “Who do you think she takes after? Poor Stella? She got no Nolan in her that I can see.”