Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  Bedtime, then, and she wasn’t sure what to do. Richard got up and took Audrey’s hand to help her to her feet. He held it a minute longer. “Come on, girl. Come in my room for the night. Unless you can’t stand hearing me snore.”

  “If it gets too loud I can always go back in the spare room,” Audrey said.

  Richard went with her went back to the house the next day to pack more of her clothes. She took her case of CDs as well—Henry and Rachel and Larry had finally got her to switch over to CDs, although she’d kept all the old records too. But there was only a CD player at Richard’s place and if she was settling in she’d have to have her music with her. Two suitcases full of clothes, some CDs, a few framed pictures of the family—it didn’t take long to pack up her life.

  Going back to her own place wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be; this was St. John’s after all. It wasn’t as if there were news teams camped outside the shop shoving microphones in her face as soon as she went in or out. Henry and Rachel had already said “No comment” to reporters from both the CBC and NTV, and after that they seemed to have lost interest. There were the neighbours to think about, of course. Audrey came downstairs to find Lorraine Penney banging on the door of the shop. “Oh, you’re not opening up today are you? When do you think you’ll be open again?”

  “I got no idea,” Audrey told her, standing in the doorway, jingling the keys in her hand. Richard waited behind her with her suitcases.

  “Are the police still in there?”

  “If they were, I’d hardly tell the whole street, would I? Anyway, I got no thoughts of opening up anytime soon, so you can go on buying your smokes at Shopper’s where you been buying them this five years.”

  “No, there’s no need to get saucy with an old friend, Audrey.”

  Audrey wanted to push her old friend right off the step but instead she said, “I’m sure you can imagine this is a bit of shock, Lorraine. All any of us wants is to be left in peace.”

  Lorraine left then, and Henry followed them downstairs, carrying a few bags of his mother’s odds and ends. “You don’t mind staying here alone?” she asked him as he put the bags in the trunk of her car.

  “Hell no, I’ve slept in worse places,” Henry laughed. “Anyway somebody got to be here. You can’t have the place standing empty. The windows would be beat out of it.”

  Audrey looked at her son, standing under that big stupid Pizza Presto! sign. “What would you do if I sold the place?” It was the first time she had said the words out loud like they were a real possibility.

  “Oh, don’t you worry about me. I’d land on my feet. I got a gift for that.”

  Audrey had never seen a scrap of evidence to suggest Henry had that gift. But she was sixty-six years old and her son was forty-five. It made no sense at this point to be lying awake nights wondering how her youngster was going to make out.

  When Henry dropped over the next day he brought Audrey and Richard up to date on the latest news about Frankie. He had been charged, but it would be months before his trial. The police had decided nobody but Frankie would be charged, and the lawyer said if Frankie had the sense to plead guilty he would avoid a trial and probably have to serve less than a year in jail. “And I hope he does have the sense to take it, because if he does, none of us are going to have to go through testifying. But if there’s a trial, who knows who they might call?”

  “Frank must be heartbroke over this,” Richard said. “It’s no easy thing, to see your son up on charges like that—I know our Butch was tore right up when Nicky got sent up to Dorchester for five years.” And the Holloways weren’t used to it like the Cadwells were, he didn’t bother to add.

  “It’s no easy thing, for sure. Frank haven’t shown his face since it all happened, and Uncle Alf never seen him either. You heard anything from him, Mom?”

  “Not hide nor hair of him,” said Audrey. “I’m not surprised. Frank got to know me and Alf are pissed off at Frankie, and we got every right to be.”

  Later, when Audrey looked back on those weeks after Frankie’s arrest, it seemed like her life was nothing but one meeting after another. Giving statements to the police. Meeting the lawyer. Long, awkward conversations with Alf and Frank—Frank couldn’t avoid his family forever—about what was going to happen to the business. All the while, young Frankie cooled his heels, laying about at his father’s place, waiting for his court date. Audrey stayed at Richard’s, and Henry stayed on alone in the rooms over the closed-up shop.

  She talked with Richard, with Marilyn, with Henry about what to do about the house and the shop, which was still closed. Finally she talked to Rachel, who looked thoughtful and said she would go home and talk it over with Larry.

  “The house is fully paid off,” Audrey reminded her. “That place you’re in on Gower Street wouldn’t be paid off for twenty-five years even if you bought it tomorrow.”

  “We couldn’t afford to buy a house,” Rachel said. “We’re both musicians. We’ll never be able to own a house.”

  “Unless I makes my house over to you,” Audrey said.

  “Then you get nothing out of it.”

  “I wouldn’t get all that much if I sold it,” Audrey replied, “not in this market.” Houses in the centre of St. John’s were sitting on the market for months, their prices knocked down over and over again.

  “Is she thinking about taking the house, do you think?” Richard asked Audrey after Rachel left that evening.

  “She might be. It’s the best deal she’ll ever get. And I don’t know that I’ll ever want to live there again.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Audrey looked up at him. “Are you sure? You’re not sick of having me here yet?” All these years she had thought it was better that she and Richard lived apart, that they were two old people so set in their ways they’d never be able to manage under the one roof. She’d been at his place six weeks now and the strangest part was she wasn’t thinking of it as his place anymore. It felt like her place. She caught herself asking Marilyn to drive her home, and meaning Richard’s house.

  “Not sick of you yet, girl,” he said. “Why don’t I borrow Eddie’s van and we’ll move the rest of your stuff over here on Saturday?”

  RACHEL

  Rachel walked down Rankin Street in the rain, her hood up and boots splashing in the puddles. It was a warm rain, the kind that came too rarely in St. John’s. She stopped on the corner of Calver Avenue, at the big window where she and Larry had hung up brown paper, at the door with the permanent CLOSED sign. The sign over the door that said Pizza Presto! She remembered the old sign, Pepsi logos on either end, that said HOLLOWAY’S GROCERY AND CONFECTIONARY. It used to light up at night; she remembered switching on the sign as it got dark. She stood on the sidewalk in front of the store and remembered everything: running in with Vicky to get Lune Moons and bottles of pop. Coming in crying after Loretta Hussey pushed her down on the sidewalk and tore holes in the knees of her tights. She even remembered things she might be too young to remember: playing with a doll or teddy bear in the crib in the room behind the counter. Audrey had told her that she used to play there while either Audrey or Ellen was working in the shop, if the other one had to go out and couldn’t watch her. “And the younger ones in my family,” Audrey said, “they all had their turn in that crib—June and Frank and poor Johnny, when they were babies, that was where they spent their days while Mom was working.”

  Rachel imagined her great-grandmother, a young mother with five children, standing behind that counter. Then Audrey, the war bride come home, taking her turn in the shop. Only Henry had gotten away without ever doing more than the odd shift there. They grew up and grew older there, all the Holloways, and the neighbourhood changed around them. Rachel couldn’t find, in the streets of Rabbittown, one single corner store that was still just a corner store. If it wasn’t gone or changed to something else it had been bought o
ut by a chain like Needs, and the family name was no longer over the door. Frankie and his pizza had saved the family business, and then he had to screw it all up for them.

  Rachel had the keys. She went inside, stood in the empty shop. Now that she was inside, she no longer saw the past. Instead she tried to see a future. The pizza ovens all gone and cleared out, the shelves and racks and coolers, even the front counter itself, maybe, gone. Though they’d need some kind of counter, wouldn’t they?

  She tried to imagine tasteful wooden shelves and hooks all over, musical instruments and CDs and sheet music, the back of the shop converted into little studios. “It’s what you’ve always wanted,” she had told Larry. “A studio space, room to give lessons, a little shop—a music shop, to bring in a little money. They’d sell us the business for next to nothing, and Nan says the house is mine already as far as she’s concerned.”

  They’d stayed up till all hours, her and Larry, spinning dreams about the Corner Music Store—that was what Larry wanted to call it—and what it might contain. A space for students and fellow musicians and music-loving customers. A place like the old corner store, where people could gather, except instead of people from the streets around, it could be anyone who loved traditional music and wanted to play and buy and learn. If they ever did have kids of their own—something Rachel could more easily imagine here than anywhere else—this would be the place they’d grow up, living in an apartment above the shop like Rachel herself did as a child. A shop full of the sound of the bodhran and accordion and guitar instead of the ring of the cash register and the chatter of neighbours buying chips and pop.

  Larry was as caught up in the fantasy as she was, but he was also practical: “OK, so we get the premises for next to nothing, but what have we got then? An apartment to live in, a building to pay taxes on, and no money for renovations.” Any assets left in the business would go to pay off the debts and if there was anything left over it would be divided between Audrey and Alf. Frank, shamefaced about his son’s crime, had agreed to be cut out of any profits from the sale of the pizza ovens and other machinery. “I can see it all, just like you describe it,” Larry said, “but how would we ever make it happen? Renovating the shop, starting the business—that would take money we don’t have.”

  Rachel didn’t have any good answer for this, except that she had faith it could happen. She pictured fellow musicians coming in to paint the walls and refinish the floors; imagined friends offering to trade graphic design hours for music lessons. She couldn’t imagine anyone offering them actual stock to sell for free, but if they could get far enough to own the place and renovate it, surely anything could happen?

  She walked from the old shop over to Richard’s place, which, she thought, she should now start calling Audrey’s place too, since her grandmother seemed to have settled in there. Over a cup of tea she tried to sketch out a picture of the dream to her grandmother. As was often the case, when dreams were laid out in front of Audrey they suddenly looked flat and simple, like a picture in a child’s colouring book instead of the priceless work of art you thought you had.

  “So you wants to open a music store?” Audrey said.

  “Well. A store, I mean, there’d be a small store, selling music books and some CDs, and we’d be offering lessons. And we’d have studio space for musicians to rent, too. For practice and things like that.”

  “That’s going to make a lot of racket; you’ll get complaints from the neighbours.”

  “Not, like, rock bands and stuff. Just folk music.”

  “Don’t O’Brien’s do that already? Selling music stuff? How many music stores do people need? Hutton’s have been at it for years and they’re closing down. It don’t seem like much of a time to be opening up music stores.”

  “It’s not mainly about the store,” Rachel said. “It’s—I mean, Larry’s already giving lessons, he could take on more students, and we could get other teachers in to give lessons, if we had the space.”

  “Yes, but is that the best space? There on the corner in the middle of Rabbittown? There’s no parking lot or anything, and the kind of parents who puts their youngsters in music lessons generally wants a place to park the car too. I mean, I’m not saying it won’t work, I’m just saying it’s a long shot. A music store, music lessons and all that, in our corner shop?”

  “I just thought…,” Rachel stopped. What did she think? Why did it mean so much, when she and Larry were talking about it last night? You got carried away, Audrey used to say when Rachel was little and she got excited about an idea. “I just thought it would be nice,” she said, “to have something still there, where the family business used to be. Maybe we could even keep the name. Call it Holloway’s Music Centre or something. Like it would be paying tribute, somehow, to Nanny Ellen and Poppy Wes, to what they did there.”

  Audrey sighed. “What they did was build a house, start a business, raise their youngsters. I know they wanted to pass it down in the family—that’s what everyone expected, in those days—but they must have known it wouldn’t last forever. Nothing does. Seems to me, if you was thinking of opening a studio or a store or whatnot, your best bet would be talk to someone who knows a bit about business, one of your smart university friends, and see what the best spot is for something like that. Not go moving into a place just because your great-grandparents owned it a long time ago.”

  “So—what? You wouldn’t give me the house like you said, if we wanted to use it for that?”

  “Don’t be so foolish, Rachel, and don’t look like I just pulled the tail on your kitten,” Audrey said. “My offer stands, no strings attached. You and Larry wants the house, I’ll go to the lawyer and sign the papers and it’s yours, move in tomorrow. It’ll be off my mind and off your father’s. Neither of us wants it. And whatever you wants to do with the downstairs—a music studio, or an apartment you can rent out to make a bit of money. Open up a bawdy house down there for all I care—that’s your own business. Say the word and it’s yours. I’m only saying, don’t go getting all carried away with an idea just because you’re attached to the house and the shop. Sometimes you got to let things go.”

  Rachel was embarrassed to feel tears stinging behind her eyes. Why did either idea—the thought of moving into the house and transforming it, or the thought of walking away from it all—make her cry?

  “One thing you should know while you’re thinking about it,” Audrey added, “Jim Maher with Century 21, he called me the other day, asked if I was putting it on the market. Says he got a client wants to buy the building right out. If he can get what he says his client is willing to pay, we can sell off the stuff in the shop to a buyer Alf knows, pay down the line of credit on the business, and clear nearly a hundred thousand. That’s good money for a house in this part of town, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “It is,” Rachel said, blinking away tears.

  “If I were to sell it, I got no intention of sitting on the money till I’m dead and gone. Whatever we gets from the assets of the shop, after the debts are paid, I got to split with Alf. And whatever I got for the house itself I’d split three ways—a third of it to see me through my own retirement years, another bit for your father, and the rest for you. You could take the money and put a good down-payment on the house you’re in now, or open a music store, if that’s what you want, in some neighbourhood where you could really make a go of it. It’s no odds to me either way—you take the place, or I sell it and we’ll split the money. It’s up to you.”

  Rachel saw the flaw in this at once—if she took the house as her grandmother offered, she would essentially be taking thousands of dollars out of the pockets of both her grandmother and her father, both of whom could use it. In return for—what? An idea, a dream, of keeping the Holloway name over the door of a corner shop. “I’ll talk to Larry,” she said. But what was there to say, in the face of a solid offer on the building?

  She meant to walk by
the shop again on her way home, to see if enough of the dream still lingered around to outweigh the hard cash a buyer could put into their hands. But in the end, it was getting dark and she wanted to start supper. Rather than doubling back to Rabbittown she walked home the more direct way, past Rawlins Cross and down over Prescott Street as the evening fog rolled in from the harbour and covered the city.

  RACHEL

  Rachel sat next to Nanny Ellen while the racket of Wheel of Fortune blared out of Mrs. Stevens’s TV. Ellen had never liked to eat meals with the TV on; when she lived at home she used to badger Audrey, who was fond of supper on a TV tray in front of the news, to sit at the table and eat properly, having a conversation. For many years now Nanny Ellen had eaten her meals in the dining room here at St. Luke’s, but just in this last year she had complained of being too tired to go down the hall for supper.

  Tonight Ellen had her dinner brought in on a tray and ate it in her wheelchair, and Rachel sat with her, chatting as well as they could with the TV on so loud. There was no shortage of family news to bring her up to date on: cousin Kristi was having a baby; Aunt June and Uncle Norm would be home in August for a visit and they were planning a celebration for Ellen’s ninetieth birthday. And Rachel and Larry were planning a wedding, but only a simple one, she assured everybody, no big deal.

  “Frank said young Frankie will be out of…that place… soon,” Ellen told Rachel. She hadn’t said the word jail since they told her Frankie had gone in there. His case had taken months to come to trial, and when it finally did he got six months.

  “Yes, that’s what Nan tells me,” Rachel said.

  “Frank calls me every Friday night at eight. You can set your clock by Frank.”

  “It’s good that he’s so reliable,” Rachel said. Relations between Frank and the rest of the family were still a little strained; a few months ago he had moved back up to Toronto, and apparently the plan was for Frankie to join him there after his release. Best place for Frankie, Rachel thought. She wondered if her great-grandmother cherished some image of the whole family united, all gathered under the one roof. They would do the best they could with her birthday party when June was home, but real families were not like TV specials. There would always be some Holloway or another missing.