—It’s such a haunting song. Sharla, sounding dreamy.
Logan is staring at me, and he’s never paid me any real attention before but I know I could slip away with him tonight, sleep with him no trouble at all. It’s not me, it’s the song. Music does that, to men as well as to women. I might do it too. It’s been awhile and I’m lonely. But if I slept with him, then I’d have to slip out of his life and lose this whole group of friends, this circle where he’s at the hub and I’m just circling the outer rim.
I don’t want to lose these people, but if I stay, they’re going to want me to sing again, ask about the cassette, about Larry, about my quote-unquote music career. Maybe it would be better to have one night with Logan and then disappear. Alone again. Now I’ll go a-roaming, I can no longer stay.
eight
COME AGAIN THEY NEVER WILL
1992–1993
AUDREY
“What it comes down to is, the place is losing money and you can’t afford to keep going on like this.”
“What it comes down to is, Mom and I got two shares in it, Alf only got one, and you got neither one. So it’s not your problem and it’s not your decision.”
They were sat on the four sides of Audrey’s kitchen table: Audrey, Alf, Frank, and young Frankie, and it was her against the three of them. Not for the first time, Audrey wished there was one person in the world whose full-time job was to be on her side.
“It’s a bad time, that’s all,” she added now.
“You been saying that for nearly ten years, since Mom went in the home,” Alf said.
“It’s not just a bad time, it’s the end of time for shops like this one,” Frank added. “Look around you, girl. You got a Shopper’s not half a mile away from here, and every gas station got a little shop in it. Those shops belong to big chains, Needs and the like, they can weather out storms. And who used to be around you? Brewer’s, Coady’s, Butler’s, Tulk’s…all closed down. Holloway’s can’t stand against the storm.”
“Somebody has to. There’ll always be corner stores.”
“Sure, there’ll always be some kind of a chain store,” Alf said. “Stores like this? I’m not so sure. You said yourself there’s three shares in this business: you, me, and Mom. And we all know Mom’s getting more forgetful and confused every year.”
“She’s pretty sharp for eighty-seven.”
“Yes, she’s sharp for talking to visitors and remembering the names of her nurses, but she’s not running-a-business sharp and she haven’t been for years. When she passes on, her share gets split, and the business is fifty-fifty between us. But for now, you basically got her vote and yours, because she goes along with whatever you say.”
“Since I’m the one lives here and does all the work of running the store, it only makes sense I should have more say than you.”
“My name is on them papers too,” Alf pointed out. “And now you’re going looking for another loan, and none of us thinks it makes sense.”
“And I guarantee you the bank is not going to think that either,” put in Frank. Frank, who had no share in the store, who had been working plumbing jobs for Alf’s contracting business ever since he moved home three years ago. What say did Frank have in it? They had cooked something up between them, the men, and sat her down to tell her about it.
Audrey looked from one of her brothers to the other. “So, what, after fifty-five years you think we should just—we should close up shop, is that it? Or do you want me to try to sell it?” She was surprised by how difficult the words were to say. Tried to imagine sitting by her mother in St. Luke’s Home, telling her, “Mom, we’re selling the shop.”
“None of us is getting any younger, Audrey,” said Frank. “And times are changing.”
“We been talking it over,” said Frankie Junior, and Audrey looked at him as if the stove had spoken. If it was a mystery why Frank was here, young Frankie’s presence was a complete enigma. Frankie Junior worked in the store, it was true, but he was an annoying little prick and he hung around with a hard crowd. Audrey was always afraid Frankie’s buddies were stealing stuff, though she’d never caught one of them at it.
“Young Frankie got a good idea there,” Alf said, and it took a good ten minutes of the men nodding their heads and repeating themselves before they finally came out with what it was.
“Pizza? You wants to turn the store into a pizza parlour?” Audrey said, when she had finally grasped the concept.
“We got to do something,” said Alf. “Stuff like pizza shops, fast food, video stores, you know—now there’s a growing market. People don’t want to pick up groceries at the corner store on their way home and make supper anymore, they wants to pick up a pizza and bring it home.”
“It would still be a shop too,” said Frank. “We’d open up that storage space in back, put the pizza ovens and stuff in there. You’d have the counter up front for the cash, and you could still carry pop and chips, smokes and beer and lottery tickets. People will want to pick up something to take home with their pizza.”
“The way things are now, you got to be willing to move with the times or lose the business,” Alf said. “Look around—what do you see where all the corner stores used to be?”
Audrey wouldn’t have admitted out loud that Alf was right about anything at this point, but she knew it was true. There was a Chinese take-out a few blocks over where Tulk’s used to be, and Mrs. Bennett’s old shop on Freshwater Road had been a hairdresser’s this ten years. And the video rentals, of course. “What if we rented videos?” Surely that would be less upheaval than pizza.
“Everybody’s renting videos,” Frankie Junior said. “A couple of racks of videos is not going to save the business when people can go over to Jumbo and choose from all the videos in the world.”
“You’ve all given this a lot of thought,” Audrey said. “Been talking it over behind my back, I can see.”
“We’re not working against you, Audrey.” Alf sounded like someone trying to explain things to a cranky youngster. “Frank wants to come into the business too, to buy out Mom’s share. We think we can put it to the bank to get a loan for the renovations, with the business plan for the pizza shop. You can keep on managing the convenience store side of it, and Frankie Junior will manage the pizza shop.”
Audrey had to stop the meeting at that point. Told them all she’d have to take time to think about it, and then let off steam to Richard later when he came over for a game of cards. “What do young Frankie know about making pizza, much less about managing a business?” she said. “I’d be surprised if that one knew how to put butter on a slice of bread. And do I want to be living over a pizza shop, with the smell of it, and people coming and going all hours?”
“You don’t have to live here,” Richard reminded her.
He had been making the offer a long time now, even more since Rachel moved up to Halifax. Audrey could come live with him—get married or don’t get married, he wasn’t particular either way—and rent out the rooms over the shop. Audrey always said she’d think about it. She needed more time. And Richard, to give him credit, never pointed out how much time she’d already taken. They were none of them, as Frank said, getting any younger. Like that maudlin old song Alf played on the accordion: Oh how I long for those bright days to come again once more, but come again they never will, for now I’m sixty-four. Audrey didn’t like those old songs anyway but she liked that one even less now that she would be sixty-four her next birthday.
The next person she went over it with was Marilyn, on the phone that night. “None of it sounds like a bad idea to me,” Marilyn said. “Let Frank and Alf go to the bank, get their names on the loan, and let Frankie manage the pizza. You could take it easy, maybe even retire. And for what it’s worth I don’t think you moving in with Richard is the worst idea in the world. He’s a good man, and his house is all on the one level.”
Marilyn certainly didn’t mind change: her George had a year to go till he got his full pension up in Toronto, and they already had a piece of land bought down in Torbay where they were going to build their retirement home. And here was Audrey moaning about having a pizza shop downstairs and the possibility of moving in with a man who lived a few blocks away. “I s’pose it all makes sense,” she told Marilyn, “but I likes things the way they are. Richard and I are set in our ways. And as for the shop, Frankie Junior don’t know his arse from his elbow, how is he supposed to manage anything?”
In the background the television flickered. Newfoundland was on the Canadian news again tonight. More complaints about the fishery. The cod were disappearing, the quotas were too low, the French and the Spanish were catching too much, the arse was going to fall out of the whole industry. Maybe Alf was right, Audrey thought, maybe this was something more than just a bad time. Maybe it was the end.
RACHEL
The Joseph and Clara Smallwood pushed through the grey water, more like a snowplough going through a pile of slush than like a ship at sea. The water looked frigid and the ship itself lacked any beauty or grace; it was basically a floating second-rate motel with an engine. A utilitarian way to get Rachel and her Honda Civic back onto the Rock so she could face a ten-hour drive home.
She had been back only once since she moved to Halifax. Her second Christmas away, she went home. Nan was alone in the house; the store was struggling and the shelves were increasingly bare. Nanny Ellen was in St. Luke’s, trundled out in the car for the Christmas dinner at Uncle Alf and Aunt Treese’s, then taken back again as night fell, like a Christmas sweater folded and put back in the drawer. Alf and Treese’s crowd seemed like a real family, arguing and laughing, the grandchildren getting married and having babies, not necessarily in that order. Life seemed to tumble around her at their place, like clothes in a dryer, matched sets of everything. Nan and Rachel were the two odd socks, going home at the end of the day to the rooms over the store, guaranteed to have one big fight before the holiday was over and Rachel beat a retreat to Halifax.
Other than family, what was there at home for Rachel? She didn’t really have old friends, just old acquaintances. Apart from Audrey and Nanny Ellen there were really only two people in St. John’s that she had ever loved, Vicky Taylor and Larry Kennedy, and she hadn’t spoken to either of them in years. They were both gone, too—Vicky to Toronto, years ago, and Larry to Ireland to study with some musician there. That’s what a Newfoundland trumpet player in a Halifax bar had told Rachel late one night, when she got up the nerve to ask if Larry was still playing around town.
So he had moved away after all, after telling Rachel he could never leave St. John’s. Made her out to be the bad one by leaving. If he had been willing to move to Nova Scotia three years ago, would he and Rachel still be together? Probably not. She had cared too much about Larry. If she ever did settle down, get married or whatever, it would have to be with someone she liked but didn’t love. Someone she could live without, if he ever decided to leave.
She met Jake that night on the boat. He played bass in the band that provided live entertainment in the lounge; he and Rachel got talking and ended up having a beer after his set. He was a Hibbard from Bonavista but lived in St. John’s, though he went up to Toronto to work in construction every spring. “Just long enough to get my stamps so I can come home and play in bands the rest of the year.” He was coming home earlier than usual this year because his friend’s band lined up this gig playing on the ferry.
“What about you? You play at all these days—up there in Halifax?” he asked. She had already admitted to having been half of a duo called Larry and Rae a few years ago and he nodded as though he had heard of them.
She shook her head. “No, not at all. I didn’t really know many musicians up there, wasn’t into the music scene. I guess with teaching kids music, the music therapy thing, you know, all day long, I didn’t really want to go play in some smoky bar all night. Or I just didn’t know where to break into the scene. I think you’ve got to have drive, more than anything, and I don’t really have that.”
“Ambition,” Jake said.
Rachel nodded, although she didn’t think that was it, exactly. You wouldn’t say Larry was ambitious, exactly, but he certainly was driven. She eyed Jake Hibbard, trying to gauge how driven he was, what drove him.
“You’ll play a bit when you gets back home though, won’t you?” Jake asked her.
“No plans to. I mean, I’ve been away for years, I don’t really know anyone there anymore.”
“Well, you knows me now, and I knows everybody. And it’s a good time—lotta stuff going on in folk music at home now. Have you heard Rawlins Cross?”
“I haven’t really been following Newfoundland music that much.”
“Oh, you gotta listen to some of this stuff. I got a few tapes here I’ll loan you. You can look me up when we gets back in town and give ’em back whenever, I’m not in no hurry.”
“Thanks. I guess I should…you know.” Rachel shrugged. “I should know what people are playing, anyway.”
“Yeah, it’s great, real happening time in Newfoundland music. It’s like while everything else is dying, the music scene is just waking up, you know? This moratorium, eh? It’s going to change everything. People out home are moving up to the mainland in droves.”
She had heard the news stories on CBC radio yesterday as she drove to North Sydney to get on the ferry. A two-year moratorium on fishing the northern cod stocks. Crosbie, the minister of fisheries, making the announcement in that dry, nasally St. John’s accent of his, and crowds of angry baymen yelling at him. Crosbie losing his cool, yelling that he didn’t take the fish out of the goddamn water.
It all felt distant, remote to Rachel. She had never set foot on a fishing boat, after all, didn’t know a soul who worked in the fishery, though in high school she knew a girl who used to go out to Petty Harbour or someplace like that every summer and make a ton of money working in the fish plant. “It’s a weird time to be moving back home, I guess, when everyone’s moving away.”
“So why are you doing it?”
Rachel shrugged. “I had this job offer back home. Same kinda thing I was doing in Halifax and…I don’t know. I just thought it was time to come home.” She had picked up a few psych courses and done some workshops over her years in Nova Scotia and now she actually had the qualifications to go for a better job, and there happened to be one back home. Of course there were probably jobs in other places, places in Canada where thirty thousand people hadn’t suddenly been put out of work, but she hadn’t thought of looking in any of those places. She was like the spawning salmon, drawn back home to a place she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be. “Anyway what I do is kind of therapy, for, like, disabled kids but also kids who are messed-up, you know, mentally ill. And maybe any kind of therapy will be a growth industry in Newfoundland now.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
Jake Hibbard gave her five cassette tapes and his phone number. Rachel thought she’d probably see him again, after she returned his tapes. He was a good bass player, easy to talk to, and not hard to look at. He seemed like someone who’d be easy to like and easy to leave.
AUDREY
When the renovations started downstairs, Rachel moved out. She had only been home a couple of months, since the beginning of July, and Audrey had been pleased to have company in the house again. Rachel seemed older, more responsible, after three years on the mainland, and of course the fact that she was coming home to a full-time job made all the difference in the world, even though everyone said it was a queer time to be moving home, with so many packing up and moving away.
“Somebody got to have some confidence in this place, in the future,” Audrey had told Rachel after Treese spent half an hour moaning about Judy and Rod and their crowd moving to Calgary, and how soon all the young folks would
be gone.
“I’d say Frankie Junior’s got enough confidence for all of us,” Rachel said.
While his father and uncle Alf and a couple of Alf’s men were tearing up the shop downstairs, Frankie was running around town meeting with people and making big plans. He had a sign-painter in to do a new sign for the pizza shop and someone else making up flyers—all buddies of his, of course. Audrey thought it was a lot of flash with very little to show for it. “Oh yes, that one, running around busy as a fiddler’s bitch at a flea circus, but he haven’t made a single pizza pie yet, only a friggin big mess where my shop used to be.”
The bank loan had come through and the shop closed for renovations at the beginning of September, which meant a lot of money going out and none coming in, and nothing for Audrey to be at all day. It seemed like a lot more tear-up than when they’d renovated the shop twenty years ago, but of course it would be more work, what with bringing in the pizza ovens and all the new electrical and plumbing that had to be run through for it. Back when they did the last renovations, Audrey and Alf had been full of new ideas and energy while Ellen had been cautious and worried. Audrey knew she herself was now the cantankerous old woman who didn’t want change.
“This is a hell of a mess,” Rachel told her. “I might stay with Jake for awhile. He’s got a nice place down on King’s Bridge Road—an old house somebody renovated, and he’s renting the top floor.”
“There’s a lot of people buying up them old dumps downtown, people with more money than sense if you ask me,” Audrey said. “But I don’t blame you if you goes and stays with him, or even if you wants to move in there. I’d move out myself for awhile if I had any place to go.”
Rachel, washing dishes at the kitchen sink, looked back over her shoulder at her grandmother. “Don’t you? Hasn’t Richard been after you to move into his place for ten years?”
Most Anything You Please Page 28