The Dime Box

by Karen Grose

  She sighed. The fact that her mother asked every week on the way to the candy store annoyed her. She pressed the five coins she’d earned into her palm and looked out the window.

  “If you keep spending them all, you won’t have money for a rainy day.”

  She extended her hand through the car window and peered up. “No rain in sight, Mom.”

  “It’s an expression.” Her mother turned around and peered into the back seat. “It means you need to save for the unexpected.”

  “What I’m expecting is a bag full of candy.”

  Her mother’s back stiffened and she turned away. “No need to be saucy, Greta. If you ever decide to start saving, I’ve got a dime box for you.”

  She opened her mouth to ask a question, but Ian caught her eye through the rear view mirror. He was mouthing her mother’s words. Her mother looked at him in disbelief. When he started to laugh, her mother’s head dropped, and it took a moment for Greta to notice her shoulders were shaking, too. Furious with them both, she closed her mouth and leaned her head on the back of the seat as Ian drove along the tree-lined streets. She knew the route to the downtown core by heart and could tell exactly where he’d turn off to get to the parking lot beside his office.

  Ian Giffen, Municipality of Bracebridge.

  As the truck pulled in, she stared at the sign. She didn’t know why he had one but, from the very first time she’d seen it, she’d guessed he was someone important. She waited until the engine was shut off and then jumped out of the car and hugged her mother.

  Ian smoothed the wrinkles from his Sunday suit and came around to their side and hoisted her up on his shoulders. He poked her hard in the side.

  “Where are we going?”

  He laughed as if he didn’t know.

  Greta ignored the pain in her ribs and played along. “Candy store, candy store, candy store.” Light and free clinging tightly to his head, she kept her hands to the sides, careful not to touch the top because he didn’t like to have one hair out of place. He turned around and jogged down the street.

  “Wait for me,” her mother called out.

  Ian ignored her. In high heels and a dress, she ran behind them, trying her best to keep up. When Ian stopped to talk to friends on the street, she waved her arms to let him know she’d nearly closed the gap. Just as she got close, he looked her way; solid, calm and confident. Then he sped off again. The sign for the old-fashioned candy store appeared in the distance. Greta’s mouth watered, evaporating any desire to wait. She pleaded with Ian to go inside.

  “Go get ’em, tiger.” He ruffled her hair with his hand, a rare gesture of affection.

  Greta pushed the door open. She shut her eyes as a strong, sugary smell hit her. Opening them, she inspected the familiar glass jars lined up in rows on the counter and recited the names of the candies out loud. Caramels, Pixie sticks, Tootsie rolls, Licorice pipes, Wild strawberries, Cherry sours, Gummi freedom rings, Laffy taffy, Swedish fish. She knew which ones cost a dime and which ones cost less. Her favourites cost a penny. She took a brown paper bag from the pile on the counter and began to fill it up.

  As the weight of the bag grew heavier, her mother pushed open the door of the store behind her. “Don’t forget my cherry sours,” she said with a smile.

  She hadn’t. Though her mother had taken forever to catch up, they were her favourite and she’d already stuffed five in the bag. As she grabbed two Pixie sticks and a Caramel for Latoya, an unfamiliar voice called out.

  “Emily?”

  Greta took her eyes off the glass jar and watched a strange woman approach her mother.

  “It is you. Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, smiling.

  Her mother’s eyes widened with surprise. “Colleen… It’s so good to see you again.”

  She recognized the name, but when Colleen hugged Emily tightly, Greta noticed her mother didn’t hug her back quite as much. She was looking around the store, eyes darting left to right, scanning the aisles in front of her. Why was her mother so scared of her old friend? Her stomach knotted, and she put her candy bag on the counter in front of her and studied her.

  Colleen wore make-up on her eyes. Her long brown hair was cut prettily, and she didn’t dress like them; she wore nice jeans and a soft, stylish black leather coat. She was fancy. She got the sense she was not someone good and that Ian would be mad.

  Colleen leaned towards her mother and touched her arm. “You alright?” she heard her murmur. “Is he here?”

  When Ian walked through the front door of the store, she turned around and finished counting out her candy. Bag full, she walked to the front of the store and waited, but they didn’t come to the front. They were huddled together at the back of the store with Colleen, talking in sharp whispers. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she could tell from their faces they weren’t happy.

  Without warning, Ian broke away from the conversation and charged up the aisle to the cash register. “Let’s go,” he insisted. “Now.”

  Greta moved quickly. She handed her bag to the cashier, who smiled sweetly and took her five dimes. Her mother strolled calmly to the front of the store, took her hand, and pulled her out of the way as Colleen brushed by abruptly.

  On the street outside the store, Ian’s mood soured instantly. He shot her mother a look Greta knew spelled trouble. She braced herself. “Did you know?” he snarled at Emily.

  “How on earth would I? I was as surprised to see her as you were.”

  Ian got right up in her mother’s face. “Oh, I know how you could have. You’ve already proved that, haven’t you? Don’t get me started.”

  Her mother paled. “She’s entitled to be in the candy store as much as anyone else. It was a coincidence.”

  “Coincidence my ass.” He spat a big, white blob on the street. With his face bright red, he clenched and unclenched his fists. He stepped forward, snatched away Greta’s candy bag, and jammed it in the garbage can.

  Greta watched in disbelief. “But I got everything perfect. You can’t take that.”

  “Oh, yes I can.” His look reduced her cry to a sniveling whimper. “And I just did.”

  “But why?”

  Ian fumed.

  “Tell me why.” Her voice was shrill and desperate.

  He lowered his face to hers and growled. “Life’s not fair, kid. And I don’t want to hear one question from you.”

  “Then close your dumb ears!” she screamed back.

  Ian’s eyes bulged. He shot up and backed away from her, then turned on his heel and strode up the street, leaving them in his wake.

  At home where no one could hear, the yelling started. Greta watched her parents fight from the top of the stairs. Her father’s eyes were glassy and his words unclear. She tried to make them out.

  If you ever tell anyone, I’ll fucking slit your throat.

  Her eyes widened.

  Same goes for…

  She leaned forward, but his sentence trailed off. Colleen?

  And hers too.

  Who’s too?

  All fucking three of you. Don’t think I won’t.

  Her tummy ached. Was she in trouble now, too?

  The fighting went on for ages. Her mother tried to get him to listen, but it was like he couldn’t hear or didn’t want to. Greta’s ears hurt from all the noise, and so she gave up, went to her room, curled into a ball, and pulled her sheet up over her head. Even the soft weave of Bunny’s ear couldn’t calm her; not this time. Colleen had wrecked Sunday, and it was an eternity until the next one.

  Greta hated her father, and whoever Colleen was, she hated her, too.

  TWELVE

  D etective Perez peered over the top of her glasses. Long lines ran across to the bottom of the page of her notebook, words capitalized, underlined and crossed out.

  “If what you’re telling me is true—”

  “It is.”

  “Your mother must have been scared, too.”

  Greta laughed bitterly. “She was
n’t scared of him. She put up with him.”

  The detective whistled through her teeth and made a dipping motion with her head. “In which case, that’s a strong woman.”

  Something about the detective’s comment finally put her at ease, though she couldn’t quite tell what it was. She twisted around the back of the chair, pulled her phone from her purse again, and punched in the passcode, flicking through the pictures on the roll with her thumb. The Xiangzis. Her teammates. Shots of Bracebridge. Goofball Latoya. An endless stream to choose from, but only one taken before she had turned fourteen. She tapped on her mother’s face and passed it over to Detective Perez. “It’s a little older,” she explained. Detective Perez examined the screen and, when she glanced up, Greta added, “The picture I mean.”

  The detective passed back her phone. “Tell me more about her.”

  She dropped the phone back into her purse, groped through the folds in the side, and found her chapstick. She ran it around her lips. “Chatty and loveable.”

  It was the second hottest summer Greta could remember—well-above normal temperatures. She gave up wiping the sweat dripping from her forehead and let it run freely in rivers down the sides of her face. The ice cubes in the hand-squeezed lemonade her mother had made had melted in minutes, and the little pithy lemon pieces sunk, pooling together on the bottom of the glass like a knot of worms.

  “Why’s it so hot?” She unpeeled her thighs from the faded green and white plastic patio chair. They’d had those same chairs forever.

  “We can’t control the weather,” her mother said. “Besides, if we didn’t have it, what else would we all talk about?”

  Her mother always told her people in Canada loved to talk about the weather. Each time she met somebody new, the conversation always started in the same way… Rain. Sun. Snow. Humidity. Hey, can you believe the…? It was always a case of insert-the-weather-of-the-day. It was like the typical Canadian’s greeting.

  That afternoon, two main roads had collapsed in the heat. The municipality cordoned off the highway because of the size of the sinkholes, but as the cottagers had started to come north for their vacations, they needed the road crew to work double-time. Ian was scheduled to work late that evening, and then his boss told him he’d be working the night shift all week. While it wasn’t his preference, any evening she had with her mother at the cabin by herself was a rare opportunity to stay up late and talk or watch what they wanted on TV.

  She waved her hand at the back of her neck and flapped her shirt. “Tell me about when you and Ian met.”

  Emily rolled her eyes and gave her the not-this-again look. Her mother had told her the story when she was younger, but she didn’t remember it clearly. Now that she was eight, she wanted to hear it again. Maybe then she could figure out her family’s secrets? Why Ian hated her so much and why she didn’t have any memories as a little kid.

  “It was July 1996. Your dad and I fell in love in The Hammer.”

  She leaned back on the patio chair. That’s so weird, she thought. How anybody could fall in love in a place named after a tool was beyond her, but she wasn’t asking questions this early on in the story or she knew her mother would stop talking altogether.

  “It was love at first sight,” her mother said.

  “Like the googly-eyed Lady and the Tramp love? When they sat down at supper in the fancy restaurant and ate spaghetti together?”

  Her mother laughed. “I was sixteen.”

  Yuck, Greta thought, her mother was old. Sixteen is pyramid ancient.

  “We spent every day of that summer together, your dad and I. A couple of days with Aunt Hannah—”

  She eyed her mother. “Aunt Hannah? Who’s Aunt Hannah?”

  “My sister.”

  “What?” She hadn’t seen a single photo of her mother’s sister anywhere around the cabin. Not on the walls or in the living room. Not even in her mother’s bedroom. Had her mother drunk the worms in the bottom of the lemonade? She tried to keep her voice even. “You’ve never said anything about her before.”

  “We’re not discussing it.” Her mother looked wearily at her lap. “And don’t bother with the third degree. It was a long time ago.”

  She examined her mother’s face in the early evening light and knew it wasn’t worth pushing. Though she’d always wanted a sister to hang out with, she decided she’d have to file Aunt Hannah away for later.

  “After six months,” her mom said, “your dad and I were so in love we started a new life together.”

  “What was wrong with your old one?”

  “It’s an expression.”

  She’d never heard any adult say anything like that before, but decided to believe her. “Keep going,” she directed, adding “please.”

  “We bought a couple of newspapers. The Brantford Expositor. Maybe the Toronto Star? I can’t remember which one, but we checked out the classifieds for somewhere to live. That was back in 1996, before things were online.”

  She nodded, knowingly. “Yeah, you guys lived in the dinosaur age. You had to drive to see your friends. We can speak to ours anytime now, like on Facebook.” Not that Greta did because they didn’t have internet at the cabin but, even still, she knew how it worked. She’d been on Facebook at the school library. “And you listened to music on black shiny discs as big as car wheels. Or on tapes the size of a book.”

  “Eight tracks,” her mother said. “They were called eight tracks.”

  “Whatever. Now we have iPods that get, like, hundreds of songs. Not that I have one like everyone else in my class.” Pleased the way she’d worked in that subtle hint, she hoped a little guilt would pay off on her next birthday. “I’m so happy I’m not a pioneer lady like you. It would’ve sucked.”

  Her mother frowned. “I’ll have you know 1996 was an interesting year, Greta. Ontario had a wicked tornado outbreak. And Marc Garneau flew off on his second space mission.”

  She grimaced. “Good to know.”

  Her mother’s history lessons annoyed her. She was always doing it and she knew her lame tricks. She’d be right in the middle of a good story and then she’d wreck it by weighing it down with useless details; inconsequential facts no one wanted to know and nobody cared about. It was like her mother thought she was too young to realize she was trying to open her eyes to the world beyond their northern Ontario neighbourhood.

  She sat up in her chair, clenched her jaw tight, and glared at her from across the patio, so mad at the way she started the story—the story she asked to hear. She didn’t want to hear anything else. She didn’t care how she and Ian met—she didn’t like him anyway—and she wasn’t interested their history anymore. She picked up her glass, went back inside, and slammed it in the sink. When her mother joined her on the couch in the main room, she grabbed the TV remote off her lap and turned up the volume.

  The next morning, Greta tiptoed out of her bedroom, crept down the wooden staircase, and stole out the front door of the cabin. Then she ran. Down the steps. Around the side of the house, sprinting past the stone patio, heels kicking up dust on the dirt path. No time for dilly-dallying. She raced through the backyard. When she reached the end of the grass, she crossed her legs in front of the rotting structure, raising her eyes to the sky.

  “Please, don’t make it squeak.”

  She knew it was no use—and couldn’t wait any longer.

  “One, two, three.”

  The door groaned. Feeling her way, she shifted forwards a little, then an inch to her left, far away from the crack on the seat. Held together with a screw, one wrong move meant drowning face first in the brown muck underneath. “Ewww,” she moaned, covering her mouth. It didn’t work. She held her breath too.

  Greta didn’t understand why some people called an outhouse a privy. It wasn’t private. Whole colonies of flies buzzing around her head made it their home. After her eyes adjusted, she waved her hands to command them.

  “Okay, shut up and listen,” she told them, then she paused, making sur
e she had their attention. “Jones family, you have the floor. Santos family, you take the bench. And McKenzies, this morning you’ve got the roof.” But the flies didn’t listen; they buzzed all around, their families mixed together.

  Then Whomp. Greta jumped, nearly falling off the seat.

  “What ya doing in there,” she heard Ian yell from outside. He shook the walls of the latrine.

  Greta groaned. What did he want?

  Whomp. Whomp.

  She felt the rough seat shift beneath her butt. Her face grew hot and she gripped the sides of the bench. “Not funny,” she said.

  “It’s coming down, Greta, it’s all coming down,” he said, laughing manically. He rattled the boards outside. Greta felt like she was sitting in the midst of an earthquake. Then it stopped. Ian opened the door and peered inside, a tree branch clutched tight in his hand. He stared at her, her pants down around her ankles. He smirked.

  “When it falls,” he said, “I’m not jumping in to save you.”

  “Get out,” Greta warned him. Her bottom lip quivered. She threw the roll of toilet paper at him.

  Ian poked her legs with the branch—hard. She lifted them up and, when she did, heard the toilet seat creak. Her back broke out in a sweat. She reached down to the floor of the latrine and felt around the damp boards. She found the rock she had hidden, just for emergencies like this, and hurled it directly at Ian. It hit him on the forehead.

  “What the—” he said, dazed. He brought his hand up to his face. When he dropped it, there was a red smear on his fingertips.

  Greta’s heart leapt into her throat. She felt his dark eyes upon her. He took two steps forward.

  “I’m gonna shove you down that bloody hole.”

  Greta stood quickly, pulled the outhouse door closed, and snapped the inside hook down through the eye. She clutched the inside handle. “You’re such an asshole,” she muttered.

  She felt the door rattle in her hands. The hook slipped but she held on as tight as she could. She screamed at him, “I’ll cut your throat while you sleep if you ever do that again.”