Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “No, no, none of the Nolans. She got the Holloway nose, though—Henry never had it, he was like his father that way, but Rachel got it,” Audrey said. She was quick to dismiss any suggestion that Rachel took after her mother in any way, and everyone skirted the topic of Poor Stella. Rachel met a couple of the Nolan kids—they went to Catholic school of course, but they were around the neighbourhood, and it was weird to think they were her cousins, that she had this whole other set of grandparents and aunts and uncles she didn’t even know. Like anyone needed more relatives; the Holloways were more than enough. Audrey alone was more than enough, most days.

  Rachel rolled her eyes at Vicky, and Vicky grinned in a way that took the sting out of the older women sizing up Rachel’s face and body like cuts of beef. “Mom says I looks like her grandmother born again,” Vicky offered, and both the older women nodded.

  “Oh yeah, I can see that, old Mrs. Hynes, with her fair colouring—she was some looker in her day,” Aunt Carolann said. “Long before our time, of course, but you could see it even when she was an older woman—good bones, you know. You got good bones, Vicky, you’re one of the lucky ones. Hair goes grey, you gets wrinkles, you puts on a bit of weight—but good bones lasts forever.”

  “Get some Lune Moons to take over to my place,” Vicky said, and Rachel reached for the Vachon box. They were really called Half Moons, each one a cakey semicircle the size of her palm with a sweet cream filling sandwiched in the middle. When one of the girls was little—Rachel couldn’t remember anymore if it was herself or Vicky—she misread the bilingual box label and they had been calling them Lune Moons ever since.

  The door pinged and Vern Cadwell, Shagger’s little brother, poked his head inside. Audrey broke off midsentence. “You get out of here you little tartar! I told you last week I don’t want to see your face in here no more! That’s it, get out, and tell that crowd out on the step they can’t come in either, not one of them!” As Vern made his hasty exit, she said to Carolann, “I caught him with two bars in his pocket last week—it don’t seem like no time since I was chasing his father out of the store for the same thing.”

  “Them Cadwells,” said Carolann, shaking her head. “Of course they’re not all bad,” she added quickly. Most people in the neighbourhood knew Audrey had some kind of an understanding with Richard Cadwell. What did you call it, anyway, when people were that old? Rachel wondered. Surely not dating. Nanny Audrey and Richard Cadwell were not exactly dating, but all the same, people made a point of mentioning that the Cadwells weren’t all bad when they were talking to Audrey.

  Rachel and Vicky took advantage of the Cadwell interruption to leave the store. If Rachel didn’t have to work, Vicky’s house was where they liked to hang out; it would always be warmer and more welcoming than her own home, Rachel thought.

  In fact, this was not true. After today, the store and the rooms above it would seem like a haven compared to Vicky’s house. Rachel did not tell the story of this day to anyone for a very long time, and then only to one person. By the time she told it she wondered which of the details she had made up, or stitched together from other afternoons. They had walked from the school, to the shop, to Vicky’s house so many times. The routine was well-worn and smooth as a beach rock, and little things like Vicky’s Aunt Carolann being in the shop might have happened on any one of a dozen days. Rachel remembered the conversation Carolann and Audrey had been having before the girls came in and other conversations like it, the little hints of something wrong that teenagers would never have noticed. Later, maybe, she pieced them into the narrative of that afternoon.

  From the end of the street they could see the car, a beaten-down Olds 88, in the driveway. “Dad’s home,” said Vicky.

  Growing up, Rachel used to think Vicky had the perfect family. Now that they were older, she couldn’t decide whether Vicky’s family was falling apart a little bit or whether she was just better able to see the cracks in the perfect surface. Barry and Karen had moved out, so it was just Vicky at home now, although Karen moved back in whenever she had a fight with her boyfriend. Vicky’s dad got laid off a couple of years ago and while he kept getting new jobs they never seemed to last for long. Vicky’s mom got a job at Woolco in the Mall; she worked odd hours and wasn’t always home to cook, and meals at Vicky’s house were now almost as unpredictable as meals at Rachel’s. But Rachel figured life at Vicky’s house was still a lot better than living over a store with a cranky old nan, a dead mother, and a father who had disappeared up in Toronto.

  “Hey Dad,” Vicky called out as she opened the screen door. She kicked off her shoes. “He’s probably out in the shed,” she said, dropping her bookbag next to the shoes. The girls trailed through the house, threw their pop bottles in the garbage, headed upstairs. Vicky had to go to the bathroom, so Rachel went straight to Vicky’s room and had just laid her stuff down on the bed when she heard Vicky scream.

  That was Tuesday. On Thursday, Nan took Rachel to the funeral home “where they’re waking poor Dan Taylor,” she told Aunt Treese, who came in to cover the shop.

  “That’s right,” Treese said, “Rachel’s right good friends with the little one, Karen, is it?”

  “Vicky,” Rachel said. She hadn’t seen Vicky since the afternoon it happened. She had stayed with her, Vicky screaming and incoherent, till Rachel finally thought to go get Mrs. Kelly from next door, who called the police. When the house was full of neighbours and police and family, she had said to Vicky, “Do you want me to stay?” and Vicky had shaken her head, looking at Rachel like she wasn’t even seeing her.

  “Anyway, we got to pay our respects,” Nan said to Treese. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “I might want to stay,” Rachel said. “With Vicky. She might need me.”

  “If she needs you that bad, one of her crowd can give you a run home. Come on now.”

  “Shouldn’t I have something black on?”

  “Go ’way, that’s foolishness. It’s old-fashioned, nobody expects youngsters to be wearin’ black to funerals nowadays. And this is not a funeral, it’s only the wake.”

  Rachel had heard the word “wake” because Nan and Nanny Ellen had been going out to them as long as she could remember. When she was really small, five or six, she had asked what a wake was and Nan told her it was where you went to see dead people. Rachel worried about this for a long time, especially after she got up late one night and couldn’t get back to sleep and her father let her watch Night of the Living Dead on the late late show with him.

  Eventually she got old enough to figure out that her grandmother and great-grandmother were not going to Barrett’s or Carnell’s (or, occasionally, Caul’s for Catholic neighbours) to watch reanimated corpses stagger around and moan. It was Vicky’s mother, when Rachel’s Aunt Susan died, who explained a wake was something that happened at a funeral home for a few days before the actual funeral, when the dead person was laid out in the coffin for people to look at and “pay their respects,” and you could bring flowers and comfort the bereaved. “It’s in funeral homes now, but people used to have the wake at their house,” Mrs. Taylor had added.

  “In their house? People had a coffin with a dead body in it lying in the house?” Vicky had echoed.

  “Oh yes, seems strange now, don’t it? But at the time nobody thought it was odd at all. I remember when my grandmother died, the wake was in the living room and they lifted me up to the coffin to make me kiss her on the cheek, and I didn’t want to. It was cold as a stone. Thank God nobody makes children do that anymore.”

  Mrs. Taylor had seemed so sensible, so calm and all- knowing then, sitting down at the table to explain things to children instead of dropping cryptic comments here and there, leaving a child to piece things together, which had been Nan’s way of teaching Rachel about the world. Now Mrs. Taylor was what Nan called “a basket case,” sitting in a chair at the funeral home surrounded by her sisters and sisters-in-la
w, red-faced and bawling. Vicky’s sister Karen was on the couch crying into her boyfriend’s shoulder. Lesser relatives, various aunts, and cousins circled around the room shaking hands and talking to people. Despite what she’d feared, Rachel noticed with relief that there was no dead body to look at, only the long, shiny wooden box covered in flowers. She had seen Mr. Taylor’s dead body swaying from the rope in the bathroom, his face unrecognizable. She had no desire to see it again.

  “Closed casket,” Nan said. “Makes sense, under the circumstances. Carolann, my love, how are you holding up? Some shocking thing, isn’t it?” She sailed toward Carolann, and Rachel went to look for Vicky.

  “She’s outside,” a cousin said, and Rachel stepped out into the cool air of the parking lot. There was a little patch of grass at the far end, and Rachel saw three or four people there, leaning on the hood of someone’s car. She heard Vicky’s voice, a sharp harsh note of laughter. She had imagined she was coming here because Vicky needed her, because she couldn’t go through this awful thing without her best friend. For the first time in years of friendship, Rachel felt she had something to offer Vicky, and she had come here tonight ready to give it.

  Instead, Vicky was out here in the parking lot with, Rachel now saw, her brother Barry and his girlfriend Angela, and Angela’s younger brother who was in their class but who Rachel had never spoken to. All four of them talking and laughing like it was a party instead of a funeral, Vicky’s blonde head bent next to theirs as they all looked down at something in their hands, making a little circle that looked so complete that Rachel stopped walking halfway across the parking lot.

  But Vicky had seen her already, and waved her over, though she didn’t raise her voice to call. When she got in close Rachel saw that Barry was rolling a smoke, like Aunt Treese’s roll- your-owns, except the smell was different, and then she realized he was rolling a joint. Hard to believe she hadn’t watched anyone do this before, but Rachel had lived a careful life so far. Nan, who chain-smoked like a factory chimney, says she would beat the living daylights out of Rachel if she caught her smoking or drinking, never mind doing the weed, as Nan called it. Vicky didn’t smoke—not anything at all, as far as Rachel knew up till this moment—and the girls’ experiments with beer had been few and cautious. Both their fathers drank too much; maybe that’s why they were careful.

  Now the joint was getting passed around, and Vicky took it like she knew what she was doing, but when she hesitated Barry showed her how. What a great big brother, teaching his sister how to smoke a draw outside their father’s wake, Rachel thought. Vicky coughed and sputtered, then passed it on to Rachel. Rachel took it and felt like something was broken, like the window of the shop when Nan had finished laying stuff out in it and writing the specials up on the glass. Making it look nice, but somebody came along with a baseball bat and shattered the window.

  All those years going to Vicky’s house, borrowing Vicky’s perfect family, fitting herself into the edges of it. Her own family came pre-broken. Rachel, too, coughed when she inhaled, and didn’t feel anything but sick, but she smiled. There was something right about it. This was who she was after all, not a part of Vicky’s family but her own Holloway thing, daughter of Henry and Stella, both doomed and damned. Granddaughter of Audrey, who would kill her if she got in the car reeking of the weed.

  musical interlude

  HENRY HOLLOWAY

  Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied …

  Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” is not a hard song, but I’m giving it all I got, lacing into the guitar like if I play it hard enough I can grab them by the throat, make them all listen. But the friggers never listen. Not in a place like this. They love the country music though, keep it coming, that’s the stuff they come out to hear. Might as well just be playing a tape over the sound system for all the attention they’re giving it, bunch of truckers, two or three guys in suits on business trips, and a few middle-aged couples out for the evening. A down-at-heels crowd because nobody would consider The Dewdrop Inn on Highway 2 much of a place for a night out.

  What a laugh. If Audrey heard me sing this song, she’d probably say every word of it’s true, except the part about turning twenty-one in prison. Mama tried. Hell yeah she did.

  Fingers slip on the last chord, it gets away from me. Play a G chord instead of a D and then slide back to the right one. Not like anyone here is going to notice. Most of them are more drunk than I am, and that’s saying something.

  After Merle Haggard it’s—where the hell is that set list? I wrote something down, back of a store receipt or something, where is it? Noodle around on the strings for a minute while I try to figure out what to do next. The bartender—stern looking woman, what’s her name? Georgina, Geraldine, something like that. Her and her husband own the place, the motel and the bar. She’s tough as nails, that one. Giving me a look from the bar, face on her like a pig’s arse.

  “Now I gotta song here I bet some of ya know….” I shouldn’t be at this, trying to talk between songs. Words get away from me, singing’s easier than talking. And nobody listens anyway. They’re all talking and the only time they look up is if there’s feedback on the mic.

  I remember what I was going to do next—“El Paso.” Marty Robbins. Crowd-pleaser at these kinds of places. All that shooting and heartbreak and the Mexican girl, Fellina, dancing around. Fellina. Hell of a name.

  Not the best song for a night like this. Too many words. Started the verse about Fellina’s eyes, blacker than night, in the wrong place. Already sang that verse. Can’t skip ahead or it won’t make sense. Georgina or Geraldine at the bar is eyeing me again, and a couple at a table near the front looks up. Dammit, they noticed. Somebody was listening after all. What the hell, it’s just background music to their night out at the saddest bar in the West. All these fools with their cowboy hats, looking like something out of a B western, who the hell do they think they are?

  Woke up this morning in a boarding house in Calgary with no clue how to pay this week’s rent. Then I remembered this gig. Davy Sullivan’s a decent fellow, always looking out for Newfoundlanders up here, he lined it up for me, even got me a ride out.

  —They don’t want nothing fancy. Country music and maybe a few old rock ‘n’ roll classics. Do the job and they’ll have you back. They just want reliable.

  Not like I got anything fancy to offer.

  Shit, I just missed a whole verse. What the hell am I gonna do with five mounted cowboys now, halfway through the song? Oh who gives a shit? I gotta make it to Rosa’s back door, and to the end of this set. I’m going to be sick any minute now.

  Made it to the end – Fellina, goodbye! – with a bunch of the words still intact. Some guy yells something.

  —What? Wha’d you say there? Is that…a request?

  A little laugh from the couple up front. They’re on my side, aren’t they? The missus is, anyway.

  —I said siddown, you’re half-cut!

  —Every musician you ever saw was half-cut!

  —Are you a Newfie? Genevieve said you were a Newfie!

  Genevieve. That’s her behind the bar, the owner, the manager, missus with that look on her face. Words tumble out before I can stop them.

  —I haven’t been back there in years…you know there’s more Newfoundlanders up here in Alberta than there is Newfoundland? That’s the truth, I’m tellin’ you. Everybody says they wanna go back home but nobody ever goes.

  —Sing us a Newfie song!

  He is not, no way, a Newfoundlander, nothing of home in his accent. He wants a Newfie song and dance, now, something I’m not giving this crowd, no way.

  —I don’t do no Newfie songs.

  Try to lean forward into the mic and slip off the stool a little, stumbling. Guitar crashes to the floor and somebody else yells something. What can I sing, what am I going to sing to get this crowd back? Like I ever had them in the fir
st place.

  The bartender, Georgina or—what was it? She’s there now, standing by the stage. She comes up, grabs the mic before I can get back to it.

  —Ladies and gentlemen, that’s Henry Holloway, big round of applause please.

  She takes my arm, drags me more than leads me off the stage to no applause at all. When we’re out of the spotlight and she’s got canned music on the speakers again she gets right up in my face. She’s the one with the accent—why didn’t I hear it before? Pure bayman, though she’s probably been up here thirty years.

  —I only took you on as a favour to Dave Sullivan, and I’ll be tellin’ Davy not to send me no more drunks and losers. I hope you knows I’m not paying you for this. I’m going to pay your cab fare home and that’s it, and you can tell Davy he won’t be sending you back to the Dewdrop Inn.

  —Missus, you don’t have to be a bitch about it.

  —I’m not. Believe me, this is not me being a bitch.

  She keeps her voice low but I guess I don’t. People who weren’t looking at me when I sang are looking over here now. A young guy, big, with huge muscles, stands up and moves quietly nearer.

  —It’s assholes like you that killed Hank Williams, you know that! They fired him from the Grand Ole Opry, did you know that? Greatest country singer of all time, and they kicked him out of the Grand Ole Opry.

  Geraldine stands there with her arms crossed, pink glossy lips all pursed up.

  —I did know that as a matter of fact. They fired him for going on stage drunk. I would have done the same, and you, my love, are no Hank Williams. Now I’m calling you a cab, and you’re going home out of it.

  —If you don’t pay me...I gotta pay my rent tonight. If you don’t…

  —I’m running a motel and bar, not a homeless shelter.

  Over the speakers, a song echoes my set list, the original artist mocking me with his talent, his success. Old Merle leaving only me to blame, cause my mama sure as hell tried.