“They got it knocked up there in Alberta,” Vern said.
“How come you’re not up there, then?”
“Nah, can’t be at that. I’d only be up there wantin’ to come home out of it.”
One of the fellows leaned over the counter and said something to Frankie that Audrey couldn’t hear. Frankie said, “Yeah, alright, I got this done now. Aunt Audrey, can you keep an eye on things? I gotta run out for five minutes.”
“I was keeping an eye on this store before you were born.”
The phone rang while he was out, and it was another one of those friggers wanting to know if Frankie was in and hanging up when she said he was out. No pizza order, no message, no manners.
Audrey wished she could put her finger on what was wrong with the young people. Lazy, was that it? But she had always known people who were lazy. Look at the Walshes: three generations of lazy. And dishonest. She felt like she had been chasing snot-nosed Walshes and Cadwells out of the store forever. Richard was the only Cadwell who ever made anything of himself, and she couldn’t think of a single Walsh who wasn’t on welfare. So laziness was nothing new.
The young folks, Rachel’s and Frankie’s age, were always drifting around complaining and doing nothing at all. Did any of her crowd ever complain that much? She didn’t think so. Although maybe they did complain when they were young and she just didn’t remember. At her age, most of her time with friends was spent talking about the old days, and people’s memories didn’t often line up with the way Audrey remembered them.
Take Doris, for example. Doris loved to tell the story of how she came over on a boat during the war, thousands of miles from home, knowing nobody. She said she came with the other war brides while Les (Poor Les, as she called him now that he’d passed away) was still on a naval ship at sea. Doris told everyone how she had cried and cried those first weeks, how afraid she was that Les would be killed and she’d be stuck here forever in this godforsaken place. She even gave an interview to some missus from the CBC that was doing a piece for the TV about war brides. As Audrey remembered it, Doris didn’t get to St. John’s till well after the war, when her and Les came back together, but Doris was right into her version of the story.
“I stuck it out,” Doris liked to say, “I did, settled down and did my bit, and when the war was over Les came home and we got our own little place, it wasn’t much but it was ours. Two rooms, no running water, but it was our very own little place, and a year later Laura was born….”
She told the story that same night over a cup of tea at Audrey’s table—to Rachel, who had heard it before, and to Rachel’s young man, Larry, who hadn’t. Larry was face and eyes into everything Doris was saying, and although he didn’t have a notebook and pen in front of him, Audrey knew he was filing away every detail, picking out bits and pieces that would probably end up in a song somewhere. She had clipped out the Newfoundland Herald article that called Larry Kennedy “one of the brightest lights in this generation of songwriters,” though the reason she cut it out and kept it was for the pictures of him and Rachel and the part about “Rae Holloway’s haunting, soaring voice.”
Anyway, if Larry could get a song out of Doris’s war-bride story, why not? It wasn’t like the thing was made up of whole cloth. Doris did marry a Newfoundlander, and come over here as a war bride, and no doubt she had her hard times. If she had shifted the story around a bit over the years to make the hard times sound harder and herself a little braver, what harm in that?
Doris made noises about calling a taxi around nine-thirty, and Larry said no, him and Rachel would give her a ride. Henry said he wasn’t going out anywhere tonight; he sat in what used to be Wes’s old chair in the living room, playing his guitar. “I’ll call you tomorrow or Monday,” Larry said to Henry as they went out the door, “about that gig with Dave at the Ship. Thanks for the tea and cake, Audrey.”
“Good night, Nan, good night, Henry,” Rachel called, blowing Audrey a kiss as she went to the door. She seemed so much happier, Audrey thought, since Larry came back and she got back together with him again. More easy, more relaxed. Henry said it was wonderful to see but what the hell did Henry know? Audrey knew Rachel and Larry went back a long time, and she had never seen Rachel look at Jake Hibbard or any other fellow the way she looked at Larry. If the girl ever did settle down, it would be with Larry Kennedy. But that meant if she was going to get her heart good and broke, that would be by Larry too.
When they had gone out through the shop, which was still open for the late-night pizza orders, Audrey picked up the mail from the table where she had dropped it earlier. “Nobody writes letters anymore. Bills, bills, bills. A letter from June.”
“You said nobody wrote letters,” said Henry, contrary as always.
“June don’t count. She’d rather make a long-distance phone call than pick up the pen.”
“But she did write you.”
“It’ll only be four lines on a card. Who’s this from?”
“Hard to tell when you’ve got it in your hand and I can’t see it.”
“Don’t be saucy. It’s got an American stamp, but it’s not from Louise, or Marilyn’s Tina—who else do I know in the States?”
“What’s the return address?”
Audrey squinted at the tight, tiny handwriting. “Shreveport,” she said. Her stomach tightened, and she looked up at Henry. This wasn’t Harry Pickens’s hand-writing. “When was the last time you heard anything from your father or Carol?”
Henry shook his head. “Years ago. I was out of touch with Dad longer than I was with you. So I guess…what? 76 or 77? God, it’s been nearly twenty years.”
“I’ve heard from him since then,” Audrey said. “I called him when I heard from you again, when I knew you were all right. We didn’t keep in touch much, over the years, but I did tell him that. But that was, what, nearly two years ago.”
“Open the letter, Mom.”
It was from Harry and Carol’s son. Henry’s half-brother. A man she had never met. She scanned the lines quickly.
“Lung cancer,” she said. “Last Thursday. Well. I suppose it makes sense…he smoked like the tilt.”
“You’re one to talk. Anyway, you don’t even know—he might have given it up years ago. You don’t know a thing about him. No more than I do.”
Audrey sat down across from Henry, still holding the letter. Neither of them really knew the man. But his son had known they would have to be informed of his death. More Henry’s business than hers, really: whatever else, Harry was still his father. But Audrey’s was the address Harry’s son would have had.
“Well, there you go.” Audrey read the few lines over. I know Dad would have wanted you and Henry to know of his passing. He was pretty much at peace in his last hours. Not a lot of pain. He was a good man and I hope you all have some good memories of him.
There wasn’t much else to say, was there? Good memories? Audrey found she had hardly any memories left at all of Harry. Dances at the Caribou Club, Harry in uniform. When it all seemed so grown-up and glamorous, going out with an American soldier.
What kind of memories did Harry have of her? Maybe it was like Doris and her stories; if Harry were to tell the story of him and Audrey, he’d remember it all different. But she would never know now. Harry was gone and all his memories with him. And someday they all would be—Audrey, Doris, Henry, everyone. So what difference did it all make if the stories were true or lies?
RACHEL
“How’s your Nan these days?” Larry asked Rachel.
“She’s all right, I s’pose. Oh, she called and asked if we wanted to come over for supper Saturday night. Hopefully Henry’s cooking, unless you want Kraft Dinner and Vienna Sausages.”
Larry was fond of Audrey, and of Henry too for that matter. He liked going over to Nan’s place, playing 120s with Nan, Richard, and Doris; sometimes they’d do that on a Saturd
ay evening. Rachel and Henry, neither of them big card-players, would do a little father-daughter bonding, play a few songs while the others played cards. Larry dragged her off up the Shore to see his own people, his parents and grandparents, and they played cards and played music down there too. Larry genuinely liked older folks. But even for him, just asking about Nan out of the blue was odd. “Why?”
“Just wondering. How are things going at the store?”
“Same as usual as far as I know, why?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing…something somebody said, is all.”
“Who said what?”
“I don’t know…like I said, it’s no big deal.”
She left it there. Lots of women wouldn’t, but Rachel didn’t care to play games. If Larry wanted to tell her what he did or didn’t hear about Pizza Presto!, he’d tell her. If it really was nothing, why pester him about it?
Anyway, Rachel had a lot on her mind. She and Larry were working on another album, and they had a huge gig coming up, opening for Blue Rodeo when they came to St. John’s. Rachel was also teaching voice lessons to a dozen students, which was great, because on top of arts grants, teaching was the one thing that brought in some actual money. They couldn’t count on something like the Blue Rodeo show coming up on a regular basis.
They had been living together a year now, managing to make their rent and buy groceries. Rachel’s Honda Civic was still running, barely, so they even had a car when they needed it. Not bad, Rachel figured, for two musicians who were making a full-time gig out of the music business. Her last contract doing music therapy didn’t get renewed: another government funding cut. Playing music with sick kids was all well and good but you couldn’t prove, on paper, that it made money or saved money. Therefore, in the St. John’s economy of the 1990s, you might as well forget about it.
For Larry, being a full-time musician included working a couple of shifts a week at Fred’s Records and doing the sound for a lot of other people’s shows. Larry and Rae—they had gone back to the old duo name—got a fair few bookings, but even so, the music business was never going to be easy. Rachel could imagine dizzying heights of success: what if they were as popular as Great Big Sea or the Irish Descendants? She knew damn well how hard those guys worked, how much they toured, and how little spare cash they had. Even “making it” in Newfoundland—with “making it” being defined as “people who aren’t other musicians recognizing your name,”—didn’t always add up to a living wage.
They had a nice place—the first two floors of a Gower Street house, not one of the ones that had been renovated but one that was in its original rundown state after years as a boarding house. Someone else rented the top floor, and Larry and Rachel rented out a room in their apartment to Larry’s friend Mikey Fitzgerald. Mikey was a stand-up comedian, one of the few professions with a less rosy outlook than musician. His day job was stocking shelves at Sobeys.
She had been scared, moving out of the security of Nan’s house into an apartment with Larry, and then losing her contract so soon afterwards. Rachel knew herself well enough to know the fear was only partly about money. She had fallen, so fast and so hard, back in love with Larry Kennedy after all these years. The day after she first saw him back in St. John’s she could have moved in with him, even married him; she was that sure of her feelings. Could a feeling so strong really be trusted?
Late that night—the same night he asked, out of nowhere, how Nan and the shop were doing—Larry came home from running the sound for a gig at Junctions, and slipped into bed beside Rachel, who had already been asleep for a couple of hours. She loved this: him getting into bed, her half-waking, drowsy, to say hello, remembering that he belonged here, that they were finally together.
“You know what I think?” Larry said.
“Mmmmm. Your feet’re cold. Mmmmm.”
“I think…we should have a baby.”
“You’re crazy. You’re an actual crazy person. Go to sleep.”
“I can’t. I’m wide awake. And I want us to have a baby.”
Rachel rolled over, half-opened her eyes. “Where is this coming from?” It was the second thing he had said today that was out of the blue, no context. Generally speaking, Rachel was not a huge fan of surprises without context.
“Terry had his baby with him.”
“He took a baby to Junctions?”
“Not for the show. He dropped by earlier to bring in his amps and stuff, and the baby was with him.”
“So what, you saw a baby and now you want one? They’re not puppies, you know. Actually even puppies are not—I mean, you can’t just say you want one and then get one. They’re a lot of work.”
“What, puppies or babies?”
“Both.”
“People do have babies though. All the time.”
“Yeah…other people.”
“Not us? Not ever?”
“Not now.” This was the sort of thing you were supposed to talk about before you got married, which was one good reason for getting married, Rachel supposed: it gave you kind of a deadline for talking about this stuff. Whereas if you had known each other forever, and you got back together after years apart and then moved in together, maybe the topic of having babies never quite came up until you were lying in bed at two in the morning and your boyfriend was wide awake and had just seen his friend’s cute baby.
“It’s just. You know. We’re nearly thirty. This is, kind of, the time of life when people think about this.”
“People who have two jobs and a mortgage. Not our kind of people.”
“So our kind shouldn’t reproduce? That sounds a little… Nazi.”
Rachel laughed. “Look, I don’t hate kids or anything. I just—you know, we barely make rent as it is. And that’s with Mikey here. If we had a baby, Mikey would have to go, and the baby wouldn’t be able to get a job at Sobeys to help with the rent. Babies don’t make money, they cost money.”
“But we’d have an exceptionally beautiful baby, and it could be a baby model, and make money from being in commercials and stuff.”
“So we don’t even have this baby yet and already you’re exploiting it. What a great dad you turned out to be.”
Now it was Larry’s turn to laugh, and Rachel hoped he would drop the subject like he dropped the other thing. Because she didn’t want to untangle it all, to put into words the fear that if they had a baby, someone would have to give up music. Someone would have to get a full-time job and the someone would probably be Rachel. She had a degree in Folklore— useless—and half a Masters in Psychology. She might have to finish the degree, work in a school as a psychologist or something. Ten years would go by, and she’d keep saying she would get back to making music, but there would never be time. Talking about a baby felt like standing in a long hallway and, all around, doors were slamming shut. Slam, slam, slam till you ended up standing in the hall looking at a bunch of closed doors.
AUDREY
“All right, all right, hold your horses, I’m comin’ down,” Audrey called out, the second time Frankie bawled up over the stairs at her. She kicked off her slippers and pushed her feet into her comfortable shoes. The heels were a bit trod down but that was better than bending down to put them on properly. Much as she hated to admit it, she was getting to that age where she had to stop and think every time she bent over: “Is this really worth it? How much trouble is it going to be to get back up?”
Climbing up and down this steep set of stairs several times a day was not her idea of fun. That was what had forced her mother into St. Luke’s, in the end—living in a house where she couldn’t get around with her bad legs. Marilyn and George were in a bungalow; so were Alf and Treese and so was Richard, and Audrey had to admit she could see the value in it. She’d be glad if she didn’t have to come down over the stairs all the time, especially in response to Frankie Junior hollering at her.
&
nbsp; It was only quarter to twelve and she wasn’t supposed to work till two, but Frankie had asked could she run down and watch the counter for a few minutes. Audrey almost told him it would have been better to flip the sign to CLOSED for that amount of time. But she had given him a tongue-lashing a few weeks ago for doing that very thing—told him that customers counted on the shop being open regular hours, and you couldn’t go shutting it whenever you had to run out to do some message or whatnot. Frankie’s recent habit of calling her down every time he went out was his way of punishing her for that lecture, she was sure.
“Fine, I’m here, you can go on and do whatever it is you’re doing,” Audrey said when she got down to the counter. “But don’t be no more than twenty minutes now, I wants to get up and get some dinner before I comes down to work.”
“Back in fifteen, I swear,” Frankie said, and ducked out the door.
Not a soul came in the shop in the twenty minutes he was out, which proved he was probably right about putting up the CLOSED sign. It made Audrey contrary, so when Frankie came back and told her she could go on, she said, “I’ll go when I’m damn well good and ready, this is still my shop.” It was one-third her shop, which made Frankie Junior her employee, whether he called himself manager or not. “I might just stay down here now till my shift, it’s only an hour anyway.”
“I thought you wanted to get your dinner.”
“Maybe I’ll have pizza.”
“Ha! That’ll be the day.” Audrey was no fan of the store’s product. It wasn’t just Frankie’s pizza—she’d never really taken to pizza anyway. An awful lot of flavours all in together, and eating it with your hands felt untidy.
All the same she stayed down in the shop and had a bag of chips for her lunch, which was why she was there at quarter to two when the door opened and two policemen walked in. Audrey assumed they were there for pizza, or maybe to buy a pack of smokes or something. She glanced at Frankie and only when she saw the look on his face—pure terror—did it occur to her to worry. She’d never thought anything bad about the police being in the place. There were certainly people in the neighbourhood who had good reason to worry when a cop car pulled onto the street, but the Holloways had never had any kind of trouble. If anything, it made her feel more safe, like the store was less likely to be robbed, if she saw a cop around.
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