Casserole Diplomacy and Other Stories

by Various

  Emily was still grinning. She shut off the ignition, closed the fuel cock and grunted the Vincent up on its main stand. She undid her helmet, shook her hair loose and coughed.

  “Are you okay?”

  She smiled, “I am in love.” She hugged him. “Sandy, it’s wonderful. I’m so pleased. You should be proud of what you’ve done. I have only one question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What’s a ton?”

  “Ye nae did a ton?” Sandy exclaimed. “She’s hardly run in.” He began to fuss around the machine, feeling for signs of stress.

  “I don’t know. What is a ton?”

  “One hundred miles per hour. A Black Shadow will easily do the ton, but neither it nor you are ready.”

  “Admonishment accepted. No, I only had it up to fifty or so. A half-ton, just like my truck.”

  “A good first ride. I want to check my clearances and torque settings. Was the clutch okay? It seemed to grab just a wee bit early.”

  “The clutch was fine for me. I read these vintage bikes are difficult to shift.”

  Sandy said, “They can be, for some. But you have a natural feel for timing your throttle and clutch coordination. You’re a gifted rider and I don’t say that often.”

  “Thanks. Coming from you, that is a great compliment. And you’re a gifted, no, a magical mechanic. I shall celebrate by taking you out for dinner this evening. You will close early, and I will pick you up at seven o’clock.”

  Sandy stammered, “I’d better get her inside. Do I need a tie?”

  “For supper? I hope not. But no overalls, either.”

  Dinner was at a little place overlooking the river. They watched in silence as the sun set over the arid hills to the west of town.

  Sandy couldn’t avoid the obvious question any longer. “When do you want to collect the bike?”

  Emily put down her wine glass and looked down for a minute before responding. “Could you keep it for a while longer? You said you had to check the torque settings and such.”

  “Aye, I’ll do that tomorrow, and she’ll be finished. I’ve never had a project come together so painlessly. I’ll miss her. And you. Around the shop, I mean.”

  Emily said, “Why Sandy, I’ve never seen you that color. I didn’t think you could be any redder. It’s quite becoming.”

  “It’s warm in here, I’ll admit with no shame.”

  “I’d like you to keep her for now. I may not be able to enjoy her immediately.” She coughed into her napkin.

  “What’s wrong, lass? Is it the Hodgkin’s?” He felt insensitive as soon as the words left him.

  “They found a shadow on my lung in the last x-ray, but there is treatment I can undergo depending on the diagnosis.”

  “It’s their damn machines. They manufacture problems. You take a motorcycle. If it does nae run proper, you eliminate the potential trouble spots logically. You tell them that you won’t have being sick anymore. Hold out your arms.”

  He moved his hands from her shoulders down to her fingers, as close as he could without touching her skin. “Ya feel that? That is your energy.” He repeated the process two more times until the rough spots were eliminated. “As long as you can marshal it in one direction, you’ll be right.”

  “I do feel it, Alex. I will fight this and win. There may be the odd setback along the way. So will you keep the bike?”

  “Of course. I’m planning to go back to Glasgow in a few weeks and the Vincent will be safe in the shop.”

  Emily brightened. “You’re going to Scotland? How marvellous.” She squeezed his hands. She bit her lower lip for a moment then asked, “Can I go with you, Sandy? I’d love to see Scotland again.”

  Sandy was dumbfounded. “What would your mother say? And she’s my age.”

  “How long have you lived in America? My mother can say that her adult daughter is in Scotland, fulfilling a dream with a true gentleman.”

  “I will always be a gentleman in the strictest sense with you.”

  “I know, I would not ask you for more; it would jeopardize what we have.”

  “What about your treatments?”

  “Don’t you want me to come?”

  It was Sandy’s turn to cough. “I would enjoy your company verra much, but I don’t want the trip to be the last thing you do.”

  “Sandy, it won’t be. Neither will it be the last thing we do.”

  Three weeks later, they stood in line to board their plane. Emily said, “Sandy, I have a going away present for you.”

  “Your coming wi’ me is present enough, surely.”

  “This is something special.” She pulled a paper out of her handbag.

  “My reading glasses are stuffed at the bottom of my pack,” he protested.

  “I’d love to read it to you. It says I am in remission. I just have to check in every month or two, but that’s all. Bonnie Scotland, get ready for me.

  “Sandy, I’ve never known you to be at a loss for words.”

  “If I say too much, I’m afraid I’ll choke up.” He ran his hands along her sleeves. Her energy was in unison. He continued to comb her aura.

  Emily whispered in his ear, “Softie. If you’re still too choked, I’ll eat all that haggis myself.”

  Sandy shook himself. “That you will not do, young lady.”

  Sandy dismounted his BSA and walked over to where Emily and the Vincent were parked.

  She pointed at the Pacific Ocean hundreds of feet below. “The fog filling all the inlets reminds me of the Scottish coast, remember?”

  “Aye, a wee bit warmer here though.” He sat on the guardrail, savouring the moment and the company. They had spent the last two months riding every weekend, following Emily’s quest to see every bit of northern California, on two wheels.

  She pointed to the map on her tank. “The bed and breakfast is another hundred miles. No need to rush but I am tired.”

  She started her bike. It coughed and quit. She gave a second kick. It caught, but she had to keep revving the throttle.

  Sandy took off his helmet and knelt down. “Stay seated. Keep it running.”

  He listened and ran his hand down her back. He passed over the engine. Rider and machine were ill. It was more than he had the reserves to mend. He made his choice. Sandy stood behind the bike and caressed both hands down Emily’s spine and legs. He repeated the ritual from her shoulders to her hands until he was drained.

  He said, “You’ll ride my Beezer back home. I’ll wrestle with this beast.”

  Emily nodded, “I feel better, but I think you’re right.”

  Back in the shop, Emily wrung her hands, “I knew it! I went too fast and broke it.”

  Sandy shook his head, “It’s nothing you’ve done, lass. She’s a stout machine; and as near as I can tell, she’s nae broke.” He ran his hands over the engine, listening to the rough idle and trying to smooth it out. “I don’t understand it.” He stood and wiped his hands then turned the ignition off.

  Emily put her hand on the seat. “I have to tell you something, Sandy.” She hesitated then continued, “It was over a month ago. I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “The ton. A hundred miles an hour.” She grinned. “I couldn’t help it. She just purred and I thought to myself, Emily, if you don’t do it now, you’ll always wonder what it feels like. So that’s why I thought I’d broken it.”

  “Nonsense, she was meant to be ridden, not sit here looking prideful. You run along home. You’re still tired from the trip. I can tell. We’ll right her tomorrow.”

  “Okay, I will see you in the morning.” She gave his cheek a peck and walked slowly to her truck.

  When she had gone, he solemnly placed both hands on the tank. He closed his eyes and willed the energy to flow but there was no magic. He had lost his gift for the Vincent. He walked over to the BSA and tried it. Not just the Vincent then, he concluded. His talent now flowed only to Emily.

  Twelve months later, the Vincent still sat in Sandy
’s shop, its only movement by hand, to keep out of the way of the other mundane projects. Sandy covered it, turned out the lights of his shop, and resigned himself to a visit he did not want to make.

  He knocked on the door, his cap gripped firmly in both hands. Emily’s mother opened the door to Emily’s room. “Hello Sandy, she’s expecting you. I’m going for a bite to eat.”

  “I’ll stay as long as you want and Emily can stand.”

  She said, “Don’t you ever think that. You gave us all so much more time with her.”

  He squeezed her hand and went inside.

  “This is better than the last time I was here,” he said. There was no machinery. Emily lay in bed by the hospital window, the lone medical instrument an IV tower and bag.

  “Sandy,” her whisper was hoarse.

  “You’re wearing that wig we found in Sonoma.” He brushed the bronze hair back from her forehead.

  “It was always your favourite.” The low sun cast shadows through the window across her bed.

  Sandy said, “It’s turning red under the sunset.”

  “Never as red as your face that night I asked you to take me to Scotland, do you remember?”

  “Aye, that’s a night I’ll ne’er forget. Nor the other trips we made.”

  Emily said, “I liked Santa Barbara the best.”

  “Santa Cruz,” Sandy corrected her.

  “Of course. The painkillers confuse me.” She raised an arm an inch above the bed and waved the IV tube. “I don’t even recognize Mum some days. I never knew there were battles a body isn’t meant to win.” She coughed. Sandy held her until the spasms stopped. “How’s the bike?”

  “I fuss wi’ her regularly. I’m not ready to give up on her yet.”

  “Don’t let it eat you up. The Vincent served its purpose.”

  “Aye,” he said, staring out the window at the lengthening shadows. “It gave you life, Emily.”

  “It gave us life, Sandy. You’re a different man than when I met you.”

  “Only around you,” he said.

  “No. I see you smile more often and you are unaware of it. It’s who you are now.”

  He held her and whispered, “I found purpose.” He could feel Emily’s aura fleeing her body. He held her tighter, trying to corral the energy that could no longer be contained within her. He stared at the tube running into her arm. There was nothing to silence his pain.

  Sandy took a final look up at the Black Shadow, lifeless in its repose, the only “trophy” he’d ever built. Every bit of his magic had gone into it, but he did not regret that loss. It had freed him. And Emily, she had freed him and exhilarated him.

  He shuffled to the front window of his shop and picked up the other new sign he had ordered. It slid out of the packing, and he placed it facing toward the street. He stepped outside and checked it in the dying sun. Apprentice Wanted. Apply Within.

  Originally published in On Spec Summer 2009 Vol 21 No 2 #77

  Al Onia is a geophysicist living in Calgary, Canada. In addition to On Spec, his fiction has appeared in Ares, The Speculative Edge, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Spinetingler, Marion Zimmer Bradley and the anthologies Body-Smith 401, North of Infinity and Warrior Wisewoman 3. Al is a two-time Aurora Award finalist in the short story category. His first novel, JAVENNY, will be published in August 2014 by Bundoran Press.

  The Resident Guest

  Sandra Glaze

  Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, I was a part-time front-desk clerk at the Edwardian Hotel. In that time, I also graduated from high school, learned to drive, had my appendix out, lost my virginity and nearly finished a degree in history. But when I see my appendix scar, still white against the flesh made pink by the heat of a bath, it isn’t nearly dying that I think of, but staring out into the darkness of the lobby at midnight supported by four massive pillars.

  A hotel lobby is a whirling eddy of humanity. You can never step into the same lobby twice, to paraphrase the philosopher. To a girl from the suburbs, the lobby was a well of experience by proxy—a lot of it cynical and tawdry, in fact, so much the better. It was a shabby place that had known grander times, but I was a new woman, at least in those hours away from parents and school friends. Each guest was an audience for whom I could rehearse my new self.

  Standing behind the desk—we could never sit no matter how empty the lobby or how late the hour by edict of Mr. Herschel, the general manager—my duties were to file keys, take messages, advise housekeeping which rooms needed to be made up, register guests, and very occasionally, turn guests away. Mr. H had also decreed that we could not register guests of opposing sexes who wished to share a room, if they could not provide proof of “benefit of clergy.” This decree was embarrassing to uphold and faintly ludicrous, the year being 1973.

  So, it is 1973 and I am standing in the lobby of The Edwardian Hotel around midnight on Remembrance Day. My absent appendix is throbbing. I get some relief by shifting my weight from foot to foot. My feet, curiously, do not bother me at all, despite seven-inch platform heels. Nietzsche said something to the effect that a woman who was aware that she looked good would never catch cold, despite the inadequacies of her dress. In those days my feet never pained me so long as I stood stylishly. This is no longer so. Nietzsche also said that what didn’t kill us made us stronger. Two proofs that Nietzsche is of limited application, but I digress.

  The lobby of a hotel is a public space. The public, provided they are presentable and solvent, are welcome to visit the lobby and even linger if they are on their way to a function or the bar. The Edwardian had two bars, each one named for London squares: the Leicester, and the Trafalgar. The Leicester Square had a theatrical theme and was a favourite with the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company when it was in town to perform at the Royal Alex Theatre. I never learned to like Gilbert and Sullivan, but I loved being in the passing company of those world-weary actors. I didn’t mind when they compared the Edwardian unfavourably with other hotels they stayed in, because learning the name of a better hotel in New York or Tokyo added to my own varnish of worldliness.

  The Trafalgar Square had a naval theme, complete with the de rigueur denizens of a port. Dan Gregson, chief of security, his bald head the shape of a bullet, would sweep these ladies out every night. After which they would drift back, not drawn by the possibility of trade so much as borne back by an irresistible tide.

  For hotel guests however, a lobby is also a private space, an extension of their room, where they are free to linger as long as they like. Mr. Leslie treated the Edwardian’s lobby as his parlour. It was where he read the newspaper and socialised. He never had visitors, of course, and he never spoke to the other guests. He only spoke to the bellmen, myself and Rose, who ran the switchboard. She was a tiny sparrow of a woman who loved the ballet and who seemed held to earth only by the weight of her luxuriant hair, which she wore in thick braid to her waist.

  Another contradiction contained in a hotel is the idea of the resident guest. Mr. Leslie was our resident guest. How can someone be a resident, that is to say, occupy their home and be a guest there at the same time? Mr. Leslie said it wasn’t so strange when you thought about it, because we are guests in our own bodies. He was a small, thin man, always dressed in carefully-pressed grey trousers and a blue jacket, with the left sleeve carefully pinned in place, so that his phantom hand pressed against his heart in a perpetual pledge. He was a veteran of Vimy Ridge. It was rumoured among the bellmen that he had won the Military Cross, but he only spoke of the war to amuse you or invite you to think him a fool.

  When I asked him about his Military Cross, he explained that he was assigned to a regiment of Dr. Barnardo’s Boys. All of the men in his unit were orphans who had been dispatched to Canada to be fostered or enslaved, depending on whose care they had the luck or misfortune to be handed to. Mr. Leslie had been sent to a tobacco farm outside of St. Mary’s. “That farmer thought hisself hard done by, being sent a pair of tiddlers like me and my sister. We worked hard, but h
e were fair to us and didn’t do my sister no wrong, which was more than could be said for many, I can tell you. I often think it were the hard work in the clean air on that farm what made me fit fer trenches.” Despite being sent to Canada as a boy and decades spent in a shipping office of the Canadian Pacific Railway, his Yorkshire accent endured like a dry-stone wall.

  To promote esprit de corps, the men of the First World War were often assigned to regiments by some commonality, “Pal Brigades” they were called. They could be lads from the same village or town. There was a brigade made up of professional football players, and another of coal miners all drawn from the same pit. Mr. Leslie said all of the Barnardo boys were on the small side, most having nearly starved before coming out to Canada—and many starved here.

  To hear him tell the story of his medal, a general stopped by for an inspection. Having done the rounds of the barracks, he said, “Here are some medals lads, a VC and a Military Cross. They’re all the King can spare today,” and threw them to the troops. Being one of the tallest of the shortest, Mr. Leslie said he caught the Military Cross, but he only ever wore his general service medal, “a sign of comradeship,” he said, and nothing more.

  My first night back after my operation, Mr. Leslie appeared out of the darkness, smiling broadly and advancing upon the desk so rapidly, his medal beat time on his chest. He leaned into the desk enthusiastically like an invading ship making the beachhead a little too fast. “E lass, thou were that close, but thou look well on it now.”

  I almost wondered if he’d visited me in the hospital in my delirium, even though I knew he never left the hotel. It seems Freddie, the bell captain, had told him what had happened. “Thee’s lucky thou didn’t have my surgeon,” he chuckled, “I went inta’ infirmary with trench foot!” He turned to where at least one bellman should have been waiting with Freddie for me to call “front” and carry up the bags of late arrivals. Tonight, however, there were no late arrivals: there were no bookings at all, except a small airline crew who were expected around three a.m. So, there was only Freddie, but no other bellmen in sight. They were probably in the labyrinth of service corridors, smoking, or giving the hookers the all-clear.