Mrs. Ferguson dropped into her chair and smiled at Derek, as if she had bested him somehow. Larry Maraniss was a thin New Englander who had made the news when his proposed bakery touched off a zoning dispute. “Newfoundland needs to get with the program,” he scolded the paper.
“Do you want me to bring your coffee? You could stay…”
“No, no, Mom’s fine. She likes being at the window. She’s fine for a couple of minutes.”
Even seated, the old woman didn’t stop, her dark eyes flitting about the room. Her fingers worked the hem of her coat as if something had fallen through a hole in the pocket and into the lining.
“There’s nothing here,” she said, looking Derek in the eye.
Derek and Kelly retraced their steps. He knew he should ask about her boy. Sebastian, did she say? A bit precious.
“You lie in bed at night,” said Kelly. “And there’s a person next to you, and it’s completely strange. My body left Billy. It took a long time for my head to catch up.”
Derek’s cell rang. He left it for a moment while Kelly dropped her head to her chest, red curls collapsing about her face. Then she looked up, blinking at him as he fumbled for the phone.
“Hello?”
“Can you go with Mom to pick up the girls?” asked Cynthia.
“That’s already the plan,” said Derek. “Mom asked me this morning. I’ll drive her.”
“They’re supposed to be ready at six o’clock. Don’t let him dick you around.”
“It’ll be fine.” What was he supposed to do if Rob dicked him around? Rescue the youngsters at gunpoint?
The bitterness between Cynthia and Rob remained fresh and incendiary because something still stirred between them. That’s what Derek figured. Cindy hated herself as much as her ex-husband.
Kelly waited while Derek finished the call. Over her shoulder, her mother sat looking into her lap. She might have been asleep.
“Do you know what I found, last time I was at the house?” said Kelly, as Derek folded the phone. “Fucking porn. Fucking DVDs stacked up at the TV. I knew what it was. I put one in. I mean, no holds barred. I said to Bill, ‘You expect me to leave Sebastian here, in this house?’ ”
For a woman so careful of civilities, this was an alarming indiscretion. The girls behind the deli counter turned and stared. Kelly either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Perhaps she was fed up with prudence, the hypocrisy of the domestic front. She was probably blurting the truth to all within earshot.
“Be careful, Kel,” said Derek. He didn’t know what he meant by this.
“I guess I’m in a weird place right now.” Her eyes widened to the direct, unguarded look that had always unnerved him. Her freckles were unchanged, brown at the nose running to rust along the cheekbones. She smelled faintly of something bitter, old orange juice maybe.
“Good luck,” said Derek, and stepped out the door.
He hurried down the sidewalk, light-headed and somewhat sick to his stomach. Water Street was flattened in the late afternoon, without dimensions. The distance to the old post office looked false. He could reach over it and press his hands to the painted sky.
Good luck. Where did that come from? Why did his mouth form words without him?
In the two decades since the end of the brake-and-muffler debacle and their return to St. John’s, Lou and Elizabeth Butt had drifted east to the suburban flatlands and back again, swapping one house for the next. A cul-de-sac near the university was their smallest but most central location yet, a secluded home backed by a slip of garden. Built on an irregular scrap of land left over after the big lots had been parcelled out, the bungalow was half-turned from the street. Its driveway cut across the front to make a pie slice of the lawn. Derek had never slept there.
He brought the car up to the side door, which his mother always used. She was down the steps before he came to a stop, her hand on the rail. She walked deliberately since her surgery six years ago. What was supposed to be a minor, almost negligible bowel procedure had left lingering pain.
“We have to take Cynthia’s car,” she said. “It has the child seats.”
“As long as someone drives me back.”
“Joey or someone will take you. But we can’t put the girls in your car and they need theirs for the morning.”
Cynthia’s Accord was beaten down, with grimy cup holders and a jagged crack across the windshield. Chunks of something like granola bar cracked under Derek’s feet. The gas pedal raised a trilling sound in the engine. Light rain began as they turned onto Freshwater Road, and there was a gritty sound of dust blowing hard against the windshield.
“Derek, Cindy told me something on the phone. She said Nicole is moving away.”
“She’s gone to Ottawa.”
“What, dear? To stay?”
“For now, it looks like.”
“Derek!”
Fuck.
“Derek, how long—”
“With everything else happening, I just didn’t want to bother everyone with it.”
His mother fell silent, perhaps conceding that his loss was dwarfed by larger events.
“Can we stop for a juice or something?” She indicated a service station. “I’m parched.”
Derek waited in the car while his mother walked slowly, ignoring the two boys with skateboards who rushed ahead of her and into the store. She stopped to read the posters taped to the door, giving particular attention to a desperate appeal for a lost cat: He is old but not so wise. He is greatly missed. The lines at her mouth and eyes were more pronounced now. Her face had withdrawn, become smaller. Strangers took this for severity and kept their distance. At the cash she counted out the exact change, and returned to the car with a Diet Coke and a straw.
“Your father’s in the paper,” she said, popping the tab of the can and taking a long sip before inserting the straw.
Derek made an involuntary noise—a pure anxiety grunt. It came out something like En-gehh!
“No, no.” She put a hand on his arm. “It’s nothing. It’s just a picture. Blood donors getting awards or something. Just one of his things, honorary things.”
He gripped the steering wheel and gazed at his hands. There was a silent crack in the back of his neck.
“The fellow at the cash had the paper open in front of him. That’s all.”
Derek looked up, as if to confirm the presence of a fellow at the cash, and a newspaper. He started the car so they might have some noise.
“Oh my.” His mother put a cold hand to the back of his neck and leaned closer, smiling and trying to catch his eye. “Oh my. It’s alright.”
He shifted into drive, the taste of Lou Langdon’s folly flooding his mouth, black and oily. His mother sat still. Three years older than her husband, Elizabeth Butt had learned the virtue of inaction. She could gather anxiety, cup it in her hands like water, and gaze into it, regard it fully. Only her narrow eyes showed the strain.
“Can you stop again for a minute?”
Derek stopped next to the car wash, its windows splattered with soap from the soaking and thrashing within.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes.” He dropped his forehead to the steering wheel. “Jesus.”
“I’m sure your father’s news was an awful surprise. And to your sister, as well.” She stopped, perhaps expecting a response. They were quiet for a few seconds before driving on. “Do you think marriage is awful, after seeing some of the trouble between your father and me?”
He couldn’t address this.
“Are you talking to Nicole?”
“Yes.” In fact, they hadn’t spoken for nearly a week. He had yet to tell her what was going on, and this realization came with a pang of betrayal.
“I thought of her as a person of good intentions,” said his mother. “She doesn’t have that…impatience you see f
rom so many people. She doesn’t need everything right away.”
“Nicole knows how to look out for herself first.” Derek paused, trying to decide what he was certain of, and how much of it he was prepared to share. “I don’t think I knew her. She keeps so much to herself.”
“Don’t worry so much about that. Secrets aren’t the be-all and end-all. In the movies there’s always a secret and it turns out to be the key to everything. But life isn’t like that.”
A woman crossed the street in front of the car, her head shaped like an egg by a tight red stocking cap. Her face was scrunched, like everything else in this raw April.
“Alright,” said Derek.
They parked on the street outside Rob’s house. Derek knocked on the door, not expecting an answer. The Volvo station wagon, purchased by Rob and Cynthia before their wedding, was not in the driveway. He returned to the car and turned the ignition so his mother could have the heat on her legs.
“When is Curtis coming?” he asked.
“He hasn’t worked out his flight. He should know in a week or so.”
“It’s not the perfect time for visitors.”
“He may as well come. I told him everything about your father, but he didn’t seem put off by it. They got on okay the last time he was here.”
“He’s not bringing the new wife?”
“No. She must be six months now, and she doesn’t want to travel. But the baby’s fine.”
“When did his father pass away?” Derek felt indecent, bringing John Ogilvie into view like this. But given the events of recent days, there were no impolite questions anymore.
There was only the slightest delay while his mother drew a long breath.
“Nineteen eighty-seven,” she said, probing her pockets for her cigarettes. “Curtis was in Korea, I remember that. John didn’t have much. His sister was with him. There might have been a woman, a girlfriend, I mean. It was good for him to have someone there, anyway.”
She said this while drawing a cigarette from the pack and propping it between two fingers. She found her lighter and stepped from the car.
Hoisted from the back seat of the Volvo, the girls identified their mother’s car and silently set out towards it. They didn’t look back or wave goodbye. It was the same when they left Cynthia. They never looked back.
Their grandmother met them on the hard, brown lawn, scooping Natasha into her arms and taking Vivian by the hand. Chattering baby talk and turning to the car, she didn’t pause to acknowledge Rob. That was Derek’s job. He got out and walked down the driveway.
“Where’s Cindy?”
“She got called in to work,” said Derek. This wasn’t strictly true. Cynthia had worked a morning shift at the hospital, but was off now and could have collected the girls. Rob understood, just as Cynthia would understand that her mother and brother had been left sitting in a car on the side of the road when the girls should have been ready at six o’clock sharp. Until the girls were grown, Cynthia and Rob would carry on like this, slipping pebbles into each other’s shoes.
“Do you have Vivian’s inhaler, or…”
“She has a separate one now, that she just keeps here,” said Rob. He handed over the jackets and smoothed back his brown hair, which was longer than when he was married. Derek looked for hints of defiance or despair. All he saw was a man exhausted from an afternoon with kids.
The girls were strapped into the back seat. Vivian held a plastic horse, making it gallop before her.
“And the pony goes plop, plop, plop!”
“Plop!” cried Natasha.
“Okay, please,” said their grandmother.
The houses were small along New Cove Road and Elizabeth Avenue, and lights began to appear in their small windows, flaring weak against the overcast evening. The turn up Allandale Road brought them into Pippy Park, its rolling expanse of evergreen trees black and featureless in the twilight.
“You remember Kelly Ferguson?” said Derek.
“The red-haired girl? Didn’t her father pass away?”
“Yeah. Now she’s split up with her husband, who works down with us. And her mother isn’t so good. I ran into them this afternoon.”
“Isn’t good how?”
“Mind’s gone.” Derek waved a hand at his temple. “She’s not so old, maybe seventy.” Should he talk to his mother in this way? She wasn’t so much younger.
“Is she frustrated?”
“Frustrated?”
“When their mind starts to go, if they’re aware of it, that’s the real tragedy. Because they understand what’s happening to them. The lucky ones are oblivious.”
“I don’t know. It was all downhill in a hurry, I think.”
“A lot of changes are like that.”
She sipped her drink, holding the straw with two fingers. Derek remembered the swimmer, their days at the pool. Her maiden name, Elizabeth Fonteyne, was young and musical, and Derek imagined this youth returning when she slipped into the water and surfaced with a gentle splash. But when he was old enough to go to the pool by himself, she gave up swimming. It was strange to him. He always assumed she needed it.
“Your father works all the time now,” she said. “Nine mornings he’s been on, without a break.”
The sisters had settled back into their restraints, gnawing on knuckles and exchanging private giggles.
“I think he, especially after you were all grown up, I think he wondered whether he believed in that job, or in anything at all. And that’s very hard.”
She measured these words carefully, like a doctor explaining a diagnosis. Derek wanted to know what happened in their house at night, how his father might give himself away with furtive glances or false intimacies. Where they slept. How they slept. He wanted something from his mother that felt like violence.
My skies are looking bright and blue
That song was in his head again. Lou Langdon in the studio, cherry-red cardigan, headphones clamped about his ears.
Chase away the cloudy days
“Will you be coming in for coffee or something?” his mother asked, as they pointed the car towards Tupper Street.
“I’ve got a lot to do, laundry and stuff for work tomorrow.”
“How long have you been at that job now?”
“About fifteen years.”
“Will you stay at it? Do you like it?”
“It’s fine.”
“Curtis is more like your father. He goes into something all enthusiastic, and then he’s let down when it fades away. Like this foolishness with sheep. They want to be devoted to something, and that’s hard.”
“I don’t know that I’m devoted,” said Derek. “At least I don’t hate my job, like some people.”
“You’re in it for the money, then?”
“Oh, no doubt about that.”
“I think that’s how work ought to be,” said his mother. “I think it’s easier to be happy that way.”
EIGHT
The DVD fell from its sleeve, polished and smooth, an avatar. This was how technology promised only good things, by keeping up appearances. The machine pulled the disc from Derek’s fingers and made seductive whispering noises before the television screen shuddered to life.
In this big land of ours you will always find a touch of tradition…In the taste of today!
Derek settled into his chair and adjusted the volume as a smart young man burst through swinging doors into the street, carried down the sidewalk by swells of brass. Office towers soared behind him.
Modern people like you, people with a taste for ale, get the true ale satisfaction they want in Molson Export!
His older colleague waited outside the lounge. Men of modern business, sheltered by the splendid reach of skyscrapers, savouring the froth of Molson Export on the tongue. They’d be dead by now, probably. The older on
e for sure. The game would be full of dead people too. The announcers, at least some of the players. Anyone in the crowd past forty or so.
Derek felt like a peeping Tom, crouched outside a window in hopes of catching a steamy embrace. He tried to imagine his father as a young man hot with devotion, refusing to be turned from his love by the disgrace of an unwed mother, or the taint of the guy who had been there before him. Lou and Elizabeth’s engagement must have been an unspeakable disgrace, and their perseverance lent great drama to the romance. The drama intensified with their heroic quest to Detroit, their need to claim Curtis and make a family. Now Derek had cracked a curtain on that story.
Measured against the wonders of true ale satisfaction, the Detroit Olympia looked almost gothic, much of the black and white picture losing its detail in shades of grey. The players threw long shadows and most of the crowd was shrouded by the gloom. A rotary clock loomed over centre ice, its hands sweeping away the minutes and hours.
“Bill, it would be useless to say there isn’t more than the ordinary amount of tension around this game tonight. I noticed that even the fellow who drives the ice-making wagon appeared to have tightened up before this game.”
“This first goal is going to mean a great deal, Jim.”
Jim spoke with a drinker’s warble, a fumbling grip on each word. He was surely a man of the hotel bar, drowning all the useless hours between games.
The picture froze and dissolved in a brown blister, followed by a few seconds of spitting interference. The screen went black, and then 1965 returned with more clarity, bright and spacious. The game was underway.
“It all comes down to this,” said Bill.
A few names confirmed the evening’s archival merit—Hull and Howe, of course. Lindsay, Esposito, Henderson. Others were unmistakably antique: Elmer Vasko, Warren Godfrey; names belonging to brush cuts and tweed jackets and rye whisky. The players were mostly indistinguishable, uniform as fence posts, their faces drawn. Derek saw nothing of the modern athlete’s cold vanity or near-autistic absorption with the task at hand. Nor did they share the supreme confidence of those other obsolete heroes, the pop stars in Lou Langdon’s office. These were small-town men who married young, made decent money, bought rounds at the Legion, and worked a bit of construction on the side. Most retired with nothing.
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