by Joan Boswell
My heart thudded wildly in my chest. “You’ve got to be kidding. I didn’t think you’d want anything to do with this place.”
His face creased in something approximating a smile. “I don’t. All I want is the money.”
“No way. We’re not selling. This is my home. My life.”
“You want to stay in this dump? In Deadendsville? If you have half a brain, you’ll sell up and move to the city.”
“There’s nothing for me in the city.”
“This is a wasteland.” His gaze fluttered over me, cold and appraising. “You’re what, forty-six, forty-seven? That’s not quite geriatric yet. You could still have a life.”
Like acid, anger welled up and engulfed my fear. “Oh, yeah, you’re a big expert on having a life. You’ve spent half of yours behind bars. What do you know about having a life?”
He sighed, pulled a cigarette and box of matches from his breast pocket. He scraped the match across the kitchen table, touched it to the cigarette and inhaled. “Yeah, you’re right.” His cold blue stare brought a metallic taste to my mouth. “I learned a lot in jail, though. You don’t want to cross me.”
I swallowed hard and unclenched my hands. It was true, I didn’t want to make things worse than they already were. “Look, Vince, I really don’t want to sell the house and the business.” A million thoughts churned in my head. “Maybe we can work out some kind of deal. I could pay you a salary as a partner in the nursery.”
A cruel smile twisted his mouth. “Why would I take some little pittance on what, a yearly basis? I’ll tell you what—if you have the money, buy me out. Otherwise we sell.”
Vince turned and headed for the front door. “Don’t think I’m leaving,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m just getting my bag to take up to my room, in my house.”
Late into the night, I lay in bed as caustic anger ate away at me—my head throbbing and my throat raw with trapped screams. Every creak and groan the old house made zeroed my gaze onto the flimsy hook and eye lock on the door, being used for the first time in a decade. Heart drumming, I strained my ears, waiting for any sound from Vince’s room. The soft clang of the grandfather clock striking one hour after another was my only comfort.
How could Vince just walk back in like he’d never left? Where did that leave me? If I sold the house to pay him off, could I keep the business? Could I contest the will—say my dad wasn’t in his right mind? What would Vince do to me if I tried? Just before sleep finally descended, I resolved to go to the bank the following day and see where I stood financially. Maybe I could buy him out. I needed to get rid of him.
The next day, shortly after lunch, I left Eddie to handle the shop and trudged the three blocks to my local branch of the Bank of Montreal.
The news was good or bad, depending how you looked at it.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
Brian Guthrie was built like a whippet and had a persistent nervousness about him. It was not the most comforting trait in a loan manager. He ran his fingers through his receding blond hair before responding. “This is good news, Cheryl. You’ll have to get a professional assessment, of course, but houses in your neighbourhood are going for around three hundred.”
“Thousand?” I asked, my voice an octave or two higher than normal. Call me naïve, but I’d never really thought about the value of my parents’ house. It had always just been there. I knew from old stories that they’d only paid $24,000 for it when they bought it in the early sixties. Who’d have thought its value would increase more than tenfold in forty years.
“Lots of people are looking for those big, old houses, especially if they’re in great shape. You shouldn’t have any problem selling.”
I stared at the diploma on his wall and tried to calm my breathing.
He continued, “There’s no telling how much the business is worth. All the merchandise would have to be itemized and valued. It would be a big job.”
I felt sick. Swallowing with an audible click, I asked, “Assuming your figures are right, would it be possible for me to borrow half the value?”
Brian studied me for a moment before leafing though the file folder on his desk. “The store hasn’t been doing very well this year, has it?” he asked.
“It’s been too hot. People are tired of replacing their scorched plants.”
He nodded. “The mortgage your father took out against the house in order to build the new greenhouses isn’t paid off yet, so I’m afraid your credit is already at its limit.”
Flames of fear licked at me. “You know I’m good for it. This has just been an abnormal year.”
He had the self-satisfied look of a small man who thought he looked big. “I’m sorry.” He shrugged, a half smirk playing at his lips. “You realize, if your brother wants his money, you’ll have to sell the house at the very least.”
My head spun, nausea gripping me with cold, clammy fingers. “So that’s it? What am I supposed to do now?”
Brian stared at his hands, fingers splayed like large bleached spiders against the dark wood of his desk. “Why don’t you put it up for sale? What do you need that big of a place for anyway?”
Indeed, what did I need that big old house for anyway? It’s not like there was a family to fill it up. Fate and time had seen to that. My high school sweetheart had waited for me as long as he could, but I’d dropped out of university in my second year to take care of my dying mother, and eventually he met someone he had more in common with. My mother had fought hard for three years before slipping away, and after her death I spent a few years not really wanting to do anything. Then my father had started showing the first signs of Alzheimer’s, and I’d found myself in charge of running the shop. I’d had a few relationships over the years, but they seemed to sputter out before they ever got established. Eddie was the only one who ever looked at me with affection any more. I wanted to feel the same way about him, but when I looked at him, all I saw was the pimply, knock-kneed boy from high school, not the man who’d spent close to twenty years on construction sites, only to be forced off the job by a back injury.
What did I need the big house for? Because it was my home, dammit!
I stuck my head in at the shop to see if the place was overflowing with customers. Not bloody likely. “Eddie, I’m kind of tired. I’m going home for the rest of the day. If it gets real busy or you need anything, just call.”
He gave me a sad smile. “Okay.”
As I stepped through the door, I could feel Vincent’s presence polluting my home. I found him sitting on the floor in my parents’ room, sifting through my father’s personal belongings.
Heat crept up my neck and into my face. “What do you think you’re doing?” I grabbed the dark wood jewellery box from him. “Can’t you even wait until he’s in the ground?”
“What?” He held a pair of cufflinks to his sleeve. “It’s not like you’re going to use this stuff.”
“I can’t believe you.”
He smiled and blinked his hard blue eyes at me. “Believe it, baby. Did you figure out how you’re going to get the money yet?”
I didn’t answer, just spun on my heel and headed out of the room. I closed the door to my room and stood, looking around for somewhere to hide the jewellery box. I tucked it into my gym bag, figuring Vince would never think to check in there.
Seeking therapy, I headed out into the garden. Weeds were few and far between—even they suffered from the heat—but I attacked a thriving patch of crabgrass. Using the hoe, I hacked the clumps to pieces, all the while wishing it were Vince under the blade. Like a tongue worrying a loose tooth, my thoughts kept creeping back to the idea of selling the house. Selling my home. Selling my home. How could this have happened? How could I be on the verge of losing my home to someone who had no respect for it?
Trading the hoe for a spade, I worked my way around the edge of the flowerbed. My beautiful garden. Tears trickled down my face and plopped on the greedy dirt. Tears for my father, tears for myself.
I finished edging the beds just as the sun began to descend behind the trees on the west side of the yard. Sitting on the step, sweating and exhausted, I stared into the gathering twilight.
Vince banged open the screen door and came out onto the porch. He yawned loudly and clomped down the stairs. “You and dad always were the gardeners in the family.” The stub of a cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. He dropped the butt into the flowerbed, where it glowed briefly. Taking a book of matches out of his pocket, he walked it backward and forward through his knuckles as he stared at the house. “How much insurance have you got on this place anyway?”
Something tight and hot lodged in my throat, choking me. The sweat on my body alternated between hot and cold.
He smiled in the gathering evening, a flash of white. Letting the threat hang heavy between us, he turned to survey the backyard. The ornamental belt buckle my father had received when he retired from the fire department glinted at Vince’s waist in the last rays of daylight.
Reaching down to ruffle the leaves of the dwarf burning bush next to the step, Vince said, “I don’t think it’ll come to that. This garden is going to be an excellent selling feature.”
I don’t remember standing up. One second I was sitting on the top step, the next I towered over him with the spade in my hand like an axe. Without thinking, I swung.
“We should get a good price for—” Vince never finished his sentence. The spade caught him on the side of the head with a resounding thwack, and he went down as if someone had cut off his legs.
Pitching forward, Vince landed in the midst of a stand of Miss Pepper Phlox. Only his feet protruded from the patch of spiky flowers. The blood-covered spade dropped into the dirt with a thump, and I started to shake. I wasn’t sure if I was more scared I had killed him, or that I hadn’t. A little voice inside my head whispered hit him again, just to be sure.
A second blow wasn’t necessary. Pushing aside spikes of pink phlox, I leaned down and touched his neck with my fingertips. Shaking, I had a hard time deciding if there was the throb of a pulse or not. As I leaned closer, the answer was obvious—there was a deep, crescent-shaped dent where I’d hit him. I started to giggle, “Who’s got the edge now, Vince?”
The giggling transformed into gagging, I turned away and threw up amongst the crimson impatiens. On my knees in the dirt, I realized I needed help, and there was only one person I could call.
One of the things Eddie was renowned for in high school was his knack for solving the unsolvable problem.
I sat on the top step, clutching my arms across my chest, cold despite the heat, as Eddie surveyed the situation. Without a word, he went back into the house and started banging around. When he came out, he was armed with my rubber gloves, duct tape and a box of garbage bags.
He placed the supplies on the top step, sat close to me and leaned over so his lips just brushed my ear. “Now, we just wait for full dark,” he said.
Bagging Vince in the dark amongst the plants took the two of us. He had started to stiffen up, and with one arm thrown forward to break his fall, our finished product resembled a large, plastic-wrapped swordfish.
We pulled the Buick into the backyard and dragged Vince into the back seat—it was the only car big enough to carry him in his stretched out state. I covered him in old blankets and newspapers while keeping an eye on the nearest neighbour’s house. I wasn’t too concerned though, since the old codger was pretty much deaf and couldn’t see more then three feet beyond the end of his nose.
Pulling out of the driveway without turning on the headlights, Eddie headed for the construction site where the foundation of the new church had recently been dug.
With only a Coleman flashlight and the moon to light our way, we climbed down into the unfinished foundation and began to dig. It was hot, sweaty work, and I wished we’d thought to bring some water, but the long hours spent in the garden and hauling flats of plants at the nursery had prepared me well for the task at hand. We took turns, and before long we had a hole big enough to dispose of our problem.
“They’re going to pour the cement tomorrow,” Eddie said.
I nodded. In the moonlight, his face had a chiselled strength I’d never noticed.
He put his arm around me. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”
Back at the house, Eddie changed into a pair of my dad’s old overalls, loaded up Vince’s belongings and drove away in the Buick. I took the clothes we’d been wearing out to the fire pit. A squirt of barbecue starter, the rasp of one of Vince’s matches and fire consumed them.
It rained the day of my father’s funeral. It was the first rain in thirty-three days. Falling as a fine drizzle, it muted the pastor’s voice and turned the world a soft gray. Eddie held an umbrella over us, and I leaned against him slightly, gathering strength as I said goodbye to my father.
As we walked toward the car to head off to the reception put on by the ladies of the church, Brian Guthrie approached.
“I really am sorry about your father,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“I didn’t see your brother here.”
“He took off. Decided he didn’t like small town living.”
Brian’s brows furrowed. “Before the funeral? Without his part of the money?”
I took Eddie’s hand. “No one has ever been able to figure Vince out.”
Brian’s mouth puckered as he mulled over my answer. Then he smiled. “Just as well. If he’d have stuck around, he probably would have tried to burn down the new church when it’s built.”
I looked up at Eddie and smiled. “Oh, Vince has changed in that respect. Nowadays he’s very involved in supporting the church.”
Bev Panasky is an award-winning mystery writer from the hotbed of crime writers in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa. She’s a member of Capital Crime Writers and the critiquing group CrimeStarters. “Slow Burning Fire” is the second of Bev’s stories to be included in a Ladies’ Killing Circle anthology. When not plotting nefarious crimes, Bev can be found in her tiny garden oasis entertaining the squirrels.
Call him Ishmael
Janice MacDonald
I wish a whale would come and swallow him whole. Then I would be rid of him once and for all. My friend Margie disagrees.
“Too many people survive being eaten by whales.”
“What? What do you mean? I can only think of Jonah and Gepetto.”
“Right. And how many people can you name who have been swallowed in the first place?”
I see her point. I do not want a survival rate of 100%. I want him gone. I don’t want him to suffer the pain of shark bites or barracuda mastication, just to be swallowed and to sink without a trace would satisfy me. I think this is rather benign of me, and I pat myself on the back for thinking of something so painless in terms of removal from this sphere.
“It’ll never happen.” Margie reads the swirls of creamer in her coffee as if she were divining the future. “You think this is bad, it’s just going to get worse.”
She is likely right. She is very often right. I used to be right quite a bit of the time. I wonder when I got so stupid, when I became a victim rather than a conquistador.
“You’re not a victim. You were just sort of stupid about men when you married him. You were on the rebound, your biological clock was ticking, and he said he loved his mother. Three strikes, anyone would be out. Sheesh, it’s not as if you hit a school bus full of retards or anything. Let up on yourself a bit.” Margie reaches for the sugar.
I am not sure what shocks me more, Margie’s political incorrectness or her insight. I think a killer whale might bite. A blue whale would just open its vast jaws and take him in, like baleen, and small appliances. I am the good one, after all.
What I wonder is whether the kids will ever be able to distinguish this, if they will ever look back over this time in our lives and remark on how wonderful I was not to rant about their father’s perfidy; how
magnanimous I was to allow them the pretense of having more than one parental unit who cared whether they had new shoes for school. Or will they go on adoring him, in the blissful ignorance they do now, without the evidence that mounts in the metaphorical closet I stand against, in case the door swings wide and all the shit falls out onto the shiny, worn kitchen floor.
Part of me longs to tell them about the mistresses, and the lies and the bills unpaid because he was spending money on phone sex lines. Part of me wants to explain to them the reason we ate spaghetti so often wasn’t because mommy loved it so much, but because he was balking at paying the requisite amount of child support. Part of me wants to tell them that our new car was almost repossessed because their father had used the old car we’d traded in as collateral on a loan, even though it wasn’t registered to him. Part of me wants to tell them of his furor whenever he was questioned about his tremendously questionable spending practices. Part of me wants to cry.
Part of me wonders where one can find a blue whale in a landlocked province.
Margie is working her way through the yeast-laden cinnamon bun we had ordered to share. I don’t feel hungry. I haven’t felt hungry in two years. This is just as well.
“So, if you can’t have him disappear off the face of the earth, what else would you want?”
I look into Margie’s bland face. I am slightly annoyed that she has thrown my blue whale back out of the boat so flippantly. I had thought I was being deliciously wicked in having this thought at all. Now Margie wants more?
I think about what I really want. I want my children to be well-adjusted and happy. I want not to have to monitor my words, my thoughts, my bankbook quite so rigorously. I want him branded, so that everyone he meets will know right off he is a jerk and a liar. Most of all I want to be free.
An older woman I know told me about hearing about the death of her ex-husband. They had been divorced for years, the children grown, lives disentangled, and yet she had found herself pouring a glass of cooking wine and dancing about the kitchen at the news. She’d told me that she’d felt as if she’d been paroled all those years ago, and suddenly she was truly free.