Uncharted

by Graeme Connell

  “Somebody giving you grief?” he says.

  “Yes. I’m so glad you’ve come in. He likes dealing with owners, not managers, and I had to convince him that he’d get paid for his stock. I’ve always paid him on delivery and yet he’s threatening to stop selling to us. He prefers owner-operators. I explained the situation to him—you know, about Melanie and all that. Maybe you should give him a call. He’s a really good supplier.”

  “Come,” Brewster says. They walk out of the work room, through the shop and out into the parking lot. “I’ve decided to part with The Blue Aster and wondered if you have time—say, early next week—to come to my lawyer’s office to begin the formalities to take it over.”

  “What are you saying? Danny and me—you want us to buy the store?” Jo is shaking. “Impossible.”

  They walk across the parking lot to the plaza’s treed boundary. He’s glad they’re outside. He puts his arm on her shoulder. “No, Jo. Don’t worry. I’m not selling out from under you. Maybe that came out all wrong. I want you and Danny to have the shop. We’ll just transfer the ownership, and then your supplier won’t have an issue!”

  “Oh, Brewster, your family has been just great to Danny and me, but we don’t have that sort of money. We’re week-to-week now, with Danny in school. We’re trying to get ahead.”

  “Jo, you’ve worked hard here since the day we opened. You’ve looked after and run the place for this past year. Melanie and I are giving you the shop. There’s no debt—you’re turning a good profit, and I’m sure the future is good for the business. You’ve helped make it part of this community. It’s yours. If you and Danny decide it’s not for you, then we’ll just keep going like we have this past year. You guys are family.”

  “Giving? You mean you’re giving us the shop?” Jo looks back across the cars to The Blue Aster. She turns to Brewster, her eyes glistening.

  “Yes, that’s what I said. There will be some financial stuff around stock and assets, figuring out any receivables and payables, the lease, the phones and the bank. But don’t worry; we can sort through that. That’s what my accountant said yesterday. And if money does have to change hands, we can work something out. I talked with Hannah last night, and I got an email from Harris this morning, letting me know that this is what they want too. It’s what their mom would have wanted.” He chuckles. “And what’s more, they’re glad I’m taking a bit of action.”

  They saunter back to the shop, and no words are needed. At the doorway, to the surprise of customers ready to walk out with their flowers, Jo flings her arms around Brewster’s neck in a tight hug.

  Later, Brewster sits alone at a pizza house, happy that the decision has finally been made to quit the store. He’s confident the exchange of ownership will go as he’s planned. His phone buzzes; there’s a text: “Danny thrilled, scared stiff, excited. Bless you.”

  Chapter Four

  Blackness settles over Brewster as he begins his morning rituals of showering and shaving. His night has been troubled, as though mites found comfort in the wooliness of his brain and have slowly developed nests cell by cell. He stares at the strange face in the mirror, mowing his shaver over an anger, a storm and a pestilence destroying yesterday’s pleasure. He refrains from lashing out and smashing the face looking back at him.

  Punished. Yes, he’s being punished for his stupidity in thinking that his closet doors had all been closed and locked long ago, that his mistakes sealed away forever. Is this the price he pays, spending the rest of his days alone? Why, why, why has she been unceremoniously ripped from the face of this earth? Is this what God does?

  Sure, he knew there’d been a couple of years when he was an utter idiot, and when ego and whisky almost cost him his marriage and threatened his thriving business. But Melanie was goodness itself. Her forgiveness, his remorse and their love enabled them to work it out and renew a commitment that lasted for 30 years. But to wrench her out of existence was wrong. That it happened when it did was a mockery of every beautiful blue sky day forever after.

  This morning’s sun shines on his bowl of cereal. The brown flakes glare up at him. Perhaps today he should walk out in front of a bus. Maybe that way he’ll see her again. All those people have paraded around him, saying she was in a good place now, saying they would pray for him, saying Jesus will heal, saying Jesus will give peace. Yeah, yeah. Blah, blah blah. He remembers the day, after watching his wife for almost two years and seeing a change in her, that he too prayed with a footballer to become a child of God, to give his life to Jesus, to become a follower of the Way. Yes, he’d believed. Oh, how he’d believed and knew the changes he’d experienced in his own life, knowing that someone out there was for him always and forever.

  He abandons the table and his cereal bowl, yanks the toaster cord from the socket, picks up his coffee and walks out the door, not bothering to close it. He heads out like a dark cloud moving down the street, sunshine in front of him and sunshine behind him. Why all this sunshine? Why not black skies—moody, tortuous skies? Get me outta this half life.

  Brewster reaches the intersection, dumps his coffee cup into a garbage container and stares over four lanes of destruction at the crosswalk. Morning traffic zips by—whoosh, whoosh, rhythmic. A fall, a winter and a spring, and all trace of her smashed body has gone. It’s like it never was. What brings him to this place today? He’s avoided it for a whole year. She’s not here, she’s not coming. She was put in a box and scorched out of existence.

  He thinks back to that day. Just as he’s imagined many times before, he sees Melanie walking up the boulevard, stopping to tap the crosswalk signal and then walking across two lanes to the median. She walks in front of a stopped pickup, and then wham, tossed and crushed, her life gone in an instant. His Melanie, a gentle, loving, happy woman lifted from amongst the spilt milk, broken eggs and crushed bread and taken away. He cries as his picture fades. He taps the signal button, pauses for the orange crossing lights to flash, gathers a deep breath and steps out. The cars stop today. No one is out to beat the system. There’s no idiot whipping out from behind a stopped pickup to drive through and move him to eternity. Once across, he waits for the traffic to be rushing both ways again, and he pushes the signal button just as she had. The pedestrian light flashes, the traffic stops both ways, and he walks back to the south side. He crosses over and back three more times. He stops between lanes and glares at the bewildered drivers. He sees them wave at him to hurry across.

  “There is no God,” he yells at the traffic. “There is no God.”

  #

  Miserable as all get out, he steps through his open front door and pulls the phantom screen across. “Hi, Dad. Where are you?” He looks at the phone on the hall stand. “C’mon, Dad. I know you’re there. Pick up.”

  He strides through to the hall table. His hand shakes as he reaches for the phone. Anger—so much anger and bitterness.

  “Hello, Hannah. I’ve just come in from a walk.” He takes a painful, deep breath.

  “Dad, you okay? I had this awful feeling that something might be wrong, so I’m just between classes and need to hear your voice.”

  “Yep, just great,” he lies. “Gorgeous morning here.”

  “I got an amazing email from Jo last night, and I think it’s just terrific what you are doing for her and Danny,” she says. “Mom always said she’d like to do that one day, and I agree that the timing is perfect. I’m glad you dropped in on her.”

  Hannah’s the very image of her mother. Her voice has a nice calming effect, and he looks back to the front door. The sun has moved across the threshold and spreads its warm glow into the hallway.

  The bubbliness of his daughter slowly reaches across the country, and his rage subsides. A pinprick releases the air in a balloon. He listens to her chatter, mostly about her studies, her excitement and her travel plans. “I’ve got a break coming up and will be home for a few days next week. Must
go—have a class.” With that, his spirited daughter is gone.

  He sits in the warmth on the front step and wonders what “be home for a few days” really means. He guesses the detail will come later in her promised email.

  As with most mornings over the past year, Brewster has woken in time to see the sunrise, but nevertheless he has shed the sheets without a plan. The house is a mess, and there’s always laundry to be done; newspapers have to be picked up, and the garbage and recycling need to be sorted. He looks in at Melanie’s empty office. He’s barely set foot in there since the funeral.

  He tackles housekeeping, motivated not only by the thought that Hannah will be home soon but also because he doesn’t want to show her what a slob he’s become. He realizes he’s been living like a hermit, leaving the house simply to escape and avoiding people at all costs. Very few people call him these days, and he’s long ago discouraged drop-in visitors. He feels some sort of sick glee that his church friends now leave him alone. “Never want to see you again,” he’d said to a couple of persistent types. He’s slowly isolated himself, preferring his own miserable company.

  Melanie’s magnet on the washer control panel tells him, As for me and my house we will serve the Lord. “Is that right, Mel?” he murmurs as he sprays a stain on his polo shirt. He stuffs the laundry into the machine. “Jesus, you’re not real. And all this time, I thought you were. It’s what I really believed, until—but now, no matter what anyone says, you’re just not.” He forgoes sorting into lights and darks like Melanie always insisted. As far as he’s concerned, it’s all just dirty washing.

  If there was one chore that Melanie did not like, it was vacuuming. The cleaner was too heavy for her to haul around, she’d say, so as encouragement he’d printed a colour picture for her on the computer. She’d stuck it to the hall closet door. The picture showed a blue aster overwritten with, “Jesus loves me!”

  Not true, he tells the vacuum cleaner. The vacuum whirls around the lounge. On the way to his office, he looks into Melanie’s work room. The busy clutter is just as she left it. He’s not been in there for some time. But today? He warily takes two steps in and looks round. Sewing, mostly; a closet of her fashions through the years; boxes and shelves which he only knew as her stuff, the things of her private and personal world.

  Her desk is littered with his wildflowers photographs. He looks at two pinned on the wall. One, a globe cornflower, has a bee hugging the fluffy, thread-like, deep yellow petals. Across one corner, Melanie has scrawled, “I am with you always.” The other shows a gaillardia face up to a brilliant blue sky, its yellow and purplish-red petals arms up to the sun peeking from behind a dazzling, fluffy cloud. Melanie’s neat printing reads, “I will not leave you.” “Bible stuff,” he murmurs, looking at the open notebook with its simple notations of where and when to find her precious plants. They’d been planning an excursion down to the park when, instead of finding a sparkling woman with a new hairdo at the front door, he’d been confronted by a man and a woman dressed in black greeting him with bad news. Brewster shudders as he recalls the sombre-voiced police. He’s not been this close to her workspace since that black day.

  The walls echo. Accident, tragic, died instantly, paramedics, hospital, some things we collected, can you come with us? Her Bible lies open beside another notepad. Her morning quiet time ritual is forever in the past.

  Brewster backs out of the room, trips over the vacuum cleaner and goes sprawling over and over down the stairs. He lies there. His head hurts from crashing against the banister post. Pain shoots from his knee; a foot is twisted.

  “Are you happy, God? Are you happy?” He tries to roll over to sit up, but an excruciating pain pins him to the floor. His world goes black.

  #

  Postie sees a bare arm and blood on the floor as she drops the day’s mail into the box to the side of the open door. She peers in. “Oh my goodness. Sir? Sir? Oh, no.” She pulls out her cell phone and dials 911. “Oh, no.”

  She’s been walking this route for a couple of years now, and she often stops to exchange a few words with Brewster; she knows he lives alone, quiet and reserved. She tells the operator what she sees: a man sprawled on the floor, a vacuum cleaner humming upside down at the top of the stairs, blood on his head, no movement. She reaches down, lifts his wrist and checks his pulse. “Beating fine,” she reports. She shuts down the vacuum cleaner and waits beside Brewster.

  An ambulance announces its arrival, paramedics take over and an unconscious Brewster is packed away to hospital. She talks to the police, shaken, telling them everything she knows about the man. Then she heads off to complete her deliveries. She smiles at the people who linger on the sidewalk.

  The police stay on and walk through the house. One of the officers notices the phone message and picks it up. She organizes a call trace and is soon telling Hannah the events that have taken place. Hannah recaps the conversation she’d had with her father just a couple of hours earlier. The house keys, she tells them, should be hanging on a hook near the door.

  Chapter Five

  “So what happened to your Dad?”

  “Funny, really,” Hannah says as she trims a fern stalk and places it in a new arrangement. She’s spending the evening helping Jo at The Blue Aster to prepare the flowers for a wedding the next day. “Well, not so funny. He just freaked out when he read some verses Mom had written on a couple of his photographs. He tripped over the vacuum cleaner in his rush to leave Mom’s room, went head over heels down the stairs and crashed into the open front door. He blacked out, and Postie found him and called 911.”

  “And now he’s got a broken arm, a sore head and a twisted ankle,” Jo says.

  “Yep, not to mention a bruised ego.”

  Hannah loves the fragrance of the flower shop. Tonight she’s enveloped in the heady sweetness of daffodils, the lucky flower, in yellows and whites that will decorate the church and reception.

  “I’ll add some gypsophila with the quad-coloured roses for the bouquets,” Jo says. “The five bridesmaids will be in cherry red, so it’s a very colourful wedding. Your dad’s okay, though?”

  “Oh, yes,” Hannah says. “Just as well I came home the day he got out of hospital. Because he lives alone, they kept him in for observation for a couple of days to keep an eye on his head injury. He’s still struggling over Mom. Know anyone who can help in the next couple of days to sort through her things? You’ve made a lovely job of that bouquet, you know. You’re so talented.”

  “Your Mom taught me,” Jo replies. “I think there’s a couple of women at the church who might be able to help. They’re used to this sort of thing. I’ll call them when I get home.”

  Over breakfast the next morning, Hannah talks about her university studies and the planned trip to somewhere in Europe. Brewster senses there’s something else. “Let me freshen your coffee, and then you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Well, Dad, it’s been a year now. I think we should put away some of Mom’s things,” Hannah says. “I know what you’re gonna say, but you have to. I’m here for a few days so we can get through this together. It’s tough, I know. You could just leave it to me too, y’know.”

  Brewster loves his daughter. She’s calm and matter-of-fact, and she likes to get things done. He stands and looks out the window. “People walk their dogs, and they all pee on those front plants,” he says. “Pretty rank when I have to weed around them. Not that I’ve done that this year. What about Harris?”

  “He’s okay. I talked to him last week and we reckon it’s just something we all have to do to move ahead.”

  “You mean that’s why you came home?” Brewster tenses.

  “Kinda yes and no,” Hannah says. “We are on a break this week, and I wanted to see you because I won’t be home this summer. We wanted to bring this up when we were home at New Year’s. Please don’t get mad, Dad.”

  “Not easy
,” Brewster says. “I don’t want to talk about it. Been here a lifetime. Look at all her knick-knacks. Place is full of them.”

  She watches her father leave the room. Discussion over. Hannah is stunned. There’s seemingly nothing she can do. She clears their breakfast dishes. The bond, the joy of being home with her Dad, is temporarily adrift. She shakes her head in disbelief as she sees their car driving down the street. She didn’t hear him go out. This is a mood she has not seen before, this inner turmoil. “Dear Lord, what shall I do?”

  She heads to her room, wondering how she might work through the day, thinking about what her father would do next and how long he’d be gone. She needs to talk with someone, but whom? She’s spent most of the past three years in Nova Scotia, away from home. Her closest friends have gone on with their lives: university, travel, marriage and relocation to other parts of the country. Jo is the closest now. “You’re like sisters,” her mother always said.

  She scribbles a note and leaves it by the phone. “Dad: Helping Jo. She has a big wedding. Love ya.”

  The previous night’s work has left a pattern of greenery, petals and leafy bits around the workbench. As she sweeps, Hannah opens up to Jo. “Mom’s clothes and underwear are still folded on the shelf in the laundry, where she put them from the dryer a year ago. I guess I just don’t understand what’s going on, this grief. What happened when your dad died?”

  “Little bit different in our house,” Jo says. “The boys kinda took over before they headed back up north. What say we add some of these lovely soft pink tulips with the arrangements for the front of the church? Mom sat with us and reminisced as we sorted through Dad’s life. She enjoyed the memories. We’d cry a bit and then laugh.” She holds up the greenery. “What do you think? Makes a nice display. “Look at the time. The bridesmaids are due any minute to pick up the flowers.

  “The toughie was his closet and drawers,” Jo adds. “Packing the clothes suitable for reuse and bagging the rest for pickup. Didn’t take long, which was good. I’ll be going to the church. Wanna come?”