When Boomers Go Bad

by Joan Boswell

“How about your husband. Doesn’t he like to repair things?” he asked as he put the tools away.

  Elizabeth laughed. “Are you kidding? He’s a lawyer. Lawyers would rather sue people than fix things.”

  Walker stayed late at work most of that week, but on Friday he came home early and invited Brady to walk up to the neighbourhood pub for a drink after dinner. Elizabeth put the children to bed and tidied the kitchen. She was in bed reading when she heard them return. When she asked Walker what they’d talked about, he yawned.

  “Nothing much.” He folded his trousers carefully over a hanger. “I told him if it was me, I’d rather fight this insanity on my own soil. Go back home where I stood a chance of making a difference.” He slurred over the word “insanity.”

  On Saturday, Brady began building a partition in the basement, and Walker went out about noon, not returning until late that night.

  Sunday dawned sunny and warm. Elizabeth caught Walker’s elbow as he was heading into his study after breakfast. “This may be the last nice day of the year. Why don’t I pack a lunch and we can go to the park? Just us and the kids.” But Walker had to work on a case that was coming to court the next week. “Ask your boyfriend,” he said, removing her hand from his arm. “I’m sure he’d like to go.” He shut the study door behind him.

  At the park, Brady said, “I think I better find somewhere else to live. Things feel a bit tense at the house.” They had finished their picnic, and he and Elizabeth sat side by side on a park bench watching Sarah push Rosie on the swings.

  “I’m sorry about Walker.” She scratched at a bit of egg salad on the knee of her jeans. “He blundered into this draft dodger program for all the wrong reasons. His law firm is known for its stand on social justice issues. They do a lot of pro bono work for charities and left-wing causes, and poor Walker’s never really fit in. I think he thought if he did this one thing, the others in the firm would admire him for it, see him as one of them.”

  “Only I don’t fit the bill.”

  “It’s not your fault. He’s just a bit of a snob. It’s the way his parents brought him up.”

  They sat quietly for a moment until the girls ran up and caught Brady’s hands. “Come and play hide and seek with us. You’re it.”

  Brady hunkered behind a huge maple tree whose leaves were beginning to turn a brilliant orange. He covered his face with his hands and began to count to one hundred in a deep baritone. The girls flew off to hide among the play structures.

  Elizabeth felt tears prick her eyes. It hadn’t occurred to the kids to ask her to play. When had she become so old in their eyes? How had she become so staid at twenty-six? She thought of girlfriends who were having the time of their lives teaching in the slums of Liverpool or backpacking across Europe and Asia. And here she was with two kids who thought she was ancient and a husband who at thirty was well on the way to becoming a lush.

  Elizabeth sat watching the game and reliving the events of the last eight years. She squirmed as she remembered the weekend she’d gone up north on a ski trip with some girls from high school. Belinda’s family owned a chalet, and the girls had expected to have the place to themselves, until Belinda’s brother and some of his law school friends turned up on the Friday night. They’d brought booze and pot, and Elizabeth had gotten high and ended up in bed with Walker. It was the first time she’d slept with a boy, and she became pregnant. Walker had wanted to find someone to fix the problem, but her father had overheard a phone conversation, and before they knew what was happening the two families had frog-marched the pair down the aisle.

  Monday was windy and overcast. Wet leaves piled up against the curbs, and the girls wore trousers and turtlenecks to school. Elizabeth gave Brady the car keys, and he returned with boards to enclose the section of the basement that held the toilet and basin. On Tuesday, he landed a job at a local camera shop.

  “It’s only part-time right now. But when the Christmas rush starts, I’ll get more hours.”

  Thursday morning, they awoke to rain. Elizabeth helped the children into their slickers and boots and kissed them goodbye at the door, but they reappeared in moments, their eyes welled up with tears.

  “Daddy scrubbed away the hopscotch,” Sarah said.

  “He wouldn’t do that. It must have been the rain.” Elizabeth countered. But Rosie had dragged the push broom from the garage, and they both pointed accusing fingers at the wet chalk adhering to the bristles.

  That evening, Brady worked late at the camera shop, and Walker came home early. During supper, he suggested the girls help him rake leaves in the back garden, but they protested, saying it was too dark and wet. Walker exploded in anger, throwing his plate to the floor. “You only want to do things with Brady. Is that it?” Spittle flew from his mouth, and the children cringed away from him. “Well, you know what? He’s going to leave pretty soon, and then you’re going to have to do as I say. You hear me? I’m your goddamned father!”

  Elizabeth put both children into Sarah’s bed and read to them until they slept.

  The family had been invited to spend Saturday at a cottage in the Gatineau Hills owned by one of the partners in Walker’s firm. Walker woke up that morning groggy and sick.

  “You’ll have to go without me,” he said. “Give some excuse.”

  “You don’t want me to tell them you’re hung over?” She snapped at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  The children argued that Brady should come, but Walker wouldn’t discuss it. “Besides, he’s got to finish the basement,” he said while they were packing the car.

  When Brady came up to say goodbye, the girls clung to him, saying they wanted to stay with him. “You go.” He helped them into the car. “And I’ll have a surprise for you when you get back.”

  For Elizabeth, it was a day fraught with tension. Wave after wave of thunderstorms kept them trapped in the cottage among people she hardly knew. The kids whined and clung to her. It was late when they finally got back to the city. She carried the children into bed and went directly to her room. There was no sign of Walker, and it was a relief to have the empty bed to herself for once. She was only vaguely aware of him getting home much later.

  In the morning, they found a typewritten note from Brady on the kitchen table. He thanked them for everything they had done for him but said he realized if he was going to be serious about protesting the war in Vietnam, he should go back home to do it from there. The girls were devastated that he’d left, but they soon convinced themselves he’d be back in a day or two. They were certain he’d return when they found the surprise he’d promised them. On the driveway, he had painted a perfect hopscotch in blue sealant.

  Walker went to the garage and returned almost immediately in a rage. “That cretin has stolen my car,” he shouted.

  Elizabeth watched mutely while Walker picked up the phone and reported the car stolen. Within days, they got word that it had been found abandoned near the Ivy Lea Bridge, at the border crossing.

  Elizabeth waited throughout October and November for a letter or a phone call from Brady. She carried an ache of confusion and betrayal in her chest, and Walker began to drink more heavily than ever.

  Halfway through December, the children began campaigning for Christmas lights on the house. “Brady promised he’d put them up,” they cried together.

  “I’ll do it,” Walker said after dinner one night. “I’m sick to death of hearing about all the things Brady can do.” Sarah and Rosie fell silent, not used to being addressed directly by their father.

  When the children were in bed, Walker put his drink down and pulled on boots and a parka.

  “You hold the ladder,” he told Elizabeth. “And keep it steady.”

  She urged him to wait until morning, but he brushed her away. “And keep this flashlight trained on the roof so I can see what I’m doing.”

  Together they lifted the extension ladder from the garage, and using the rope, hauled it up to its highest level so that Walker could reach the roo
fline above the attic. Elizabeth fetched the lights and untangled them while he fussed about finding twine, nails and a hammer and dumping everything in a pail that he could carry over his arm. He staggered a bit on the bottom rungs but managed to get to the top.

  Elizabeth braced herself against the ladder and held the flashlight so it shone against Walker’s hands as he pulled a bone-handled penknife from his pocket, opened it and cut a length of twine to tie around the eavestrough. He folded the knife and looked down at her.

  “Hold the ladder steady,” he shouted, but it had already begun to lurch from her grasp. He hardly made a sound as he thudded into the middle of the blue hopscotch court. The penknife skittered across the drive and landed in the grass at the side of the lawn.

  Elizabeth roused herself and wiped her swollen eyes. She wondered briefly about calling Rosie to ask where she had found the contents of the shoebox and how she had kept it hidden all those years, but thought better of it. Both her daughters were married, with their own families now. They might not even remember Brady or the events of that fall of 1970. Their father’s accident would have put most other things out of their minds.

  But Elizabeth remembered. And she thought she knew what must have happened. She wondered if the blue hopscotch court had been the last straw for Walker. Or perhaps it was just an accumulation of jealous grievances that had tipped him over the edge that night while she and the children were driving home from the Gatineau Hills. He and Brady must have argued after the younger man was already in bed, or at least had removed his boots. Whatever happened would have been an accident, though. Walker was not a cold-blooded killer. He would have been drunk and in a rage, and Brady would not have wanted to put up a fight against his host. As soon as he realized he’d killed him, Walker must have come up with the plan to drive to a deserted section of the river close to the Ivy Lea Bridge, let the St. Lawrence River sweep the body away and then abandon the car. Such a respectable looking man would have had no trouble hitching a ride home.

  He’d made a mistake with the typewritten note, though. That wasn’t Brady’s style at all. Brady would have used orange crayon on newsprint. But a worse mistake was not getting rid of Brady’s penknife. The one he’d inherited from his grandfather. The one he never went anywhere without.

  The actual death would have been accidental though, just as Walker’s fall had been accidental. She had wanted to do as he asked that night in December. She had tried to hold the ladder steady and focus the flashlight on the eaves. But once she’d seen the penknife, the beam kept drifting to the rope hanging just in front of her. It was as though a hand belonging to someone else had reached around and tugged on that loop. She had been amazed that such a slight pull could cause the ladder to shift and Walker to begin his descent onto the driveway.

  Elizabeth looked at her watch and realized she must get to her new apartment so the movers could finish their job. She placed the items back in the shoebox and carried it down to the driveway, where she dropped it into the garbage can, along with the other refuse from her move. She searched the grass at the edge of the lawn until she found a small, smooth stone to toss into the faint outlines of the old hopscotch court before climbing into her car and driving to her new home.

  Sue Pike has had stories in all of the Ladies’ Killing Circle anthologies, and she co-edited the two previous books, Fit to Die and Bone Dance. Her stories have also appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Storyteller, Cold Blood V and Michael Connelly’s Murder in Vegas. She won the Arthur Ellis award for Best Short Story in 1997.

  There was an Over-aged Hippie

  There was an over-aged hippie from Clyde

  Whose bigot neighbour committed suicide.

  The tie on his neck was delicious,

  But not his style, so suspicious.

  One could say that he was...tie-dyed.

  Joy Hewitt Mann

  Seeing Strawberry Red

  H. Mel Malton

  Hows the pickin’ today?” It was the standard opening line at the basket-booth next to Plunkett’s Pick-yer-Own Strawberry Paradise out on Highway 11, north of town. Joy and I had met in the parking lot at a quarter to ten on Wednesday morning. The fields open at ten on the dot—never before that, because they like the dew to burn off a bit and the owners like to pick a fair amount themselves for the take-out trade before they let the hordes in.

  We’d been picking two days already, but it hadn’t gone very well, so we were back for a third try.

  “They’re beautiful today,” Shirley Plunkett, the owners’ daughter said. She runs the booth in the summer to help pay for university down in the city. She’s doing a law degree, so she can become an agricultural lawyer—whatever that is. The strawberry operation is only a small part of the family farm, and they’re doing pretty well, I guess, if they can afford to send Shirley to school.

  “It’s a good day for it, at least,” Joy said. “I’ll take six of those empty baskets, dear.”

  Joy has this kind of strawberry obsession. Every year she picks seventeen six-quart baskets of berries and makes jam, which she gives out at Christmas. Her jam is famous around here. She’s been winning blue ribbons at the Craddock Fall Fair almost every year since we were in high school together, which was a good while ago. She learned to make it in Home Ec—the last year the course was offered—before the women’s libbers forced the school board to axe it. Joy was the Queen of Home Ec. I don’t think she ever got over Mrs. Beamish having to retire, and when they turned the Home Ec room into a computer lab, Joy actually picketed outside the door. That was back in the seventies, when demonstrating was the thing you did.

  Joy is not a good name for my friend. I love her dearly, don’t get me wrong, but she’s never been a very joyful person. Her brother used to call her Misery. I wouldn’t go that far—maybe Bitterness would be more like it, or Mission Control. Joy is a very active person, and she does a lot of good in the world, but she likes to get her way in things, and she hisses like a pressure cooker if you cross her.

  We’ve been best friends forever. She lived down the street from me, and we met when we were about seven, the day my parents moved to Craddock from Toronto. I walked down the street with a bag of my Mom’s peanut brittle, looking for friends, and in half a second Joy had taken official possession of the bag and was rationing pieces out to the neighbourhood kids and introducing me to everybody.

  We’ve stuck together through both our weddings, my pregnancies and her miscarriage, her divorce, various accidents and personal disasters, and, of course, our triumphs, too. Hers have always been more public than mine. Joy’s a big name in this town, in some circles. She’s the president of the Community Womens’ League, the Chair of the Meals-on-Wheels program, she started up an arts-and-crafts store (which she sold profitably a few years ago), she works on the organizing committee of the Craddock Fall Festival of Fun, and that’s merely a sample of her activities. Now she’s training to be a real estate agent. She’s what you’d call goal-oriented, the strawberry-picking season is short and I’ve always been her sidekick, so it wasn’t any big surprise that we were there together for the season opener at the Pick-Yer-Own.

  You might have read about what happened in the papers. It got some pretty wide coverage, probably because nothing happens in the District of Kuskawa in the summer-time, so it got splashed in the local weekly, and the nationals picked it up. I know this kind of stuff because I write the community column for the Craddock Chronicle, so I’m a bit of a journalist, you might say.

  The Chronicle originally headlined it as “Mysterious Deaths in Cottage Country.” The headlines got more sensational after that, but that’s how it started.

  I should tell you about Monday and Tuesday, first—the picking days that didn’t go very well. On Monday, we’d arrived ten minutes before opening, as usual. There was quite a crowd, and we were way back in the line, which made Joy all twitchy.

  “The best berries’ll be gone before we get a chance,” she muttered, although the
fields are huge, and it was the start of the season.

  “Relax, Joy. There’s plenty for everyone.” I said. She shot me a look of pure contempt.

  “That attitude is why you never win anything,” she said. “The secret to my jam is, as you very well know, the fact that the fruit is hand-picked at the perfect moment. The perfect moment is now—and those people at the front of the line are going to trample the rows, take the best berries and leave us with the small, sour ones.”

  The Plunketts are pretty strict in the way they organize the pick-yer-owners. You can’t just wander into the field and start anywhere. There are marshals who walk up and down the rows with baskets, in case you need extras, and they give you a row number that you’re supposed to stick to. Flags mark off where you can and can’t go. Most people obey the rules, but some don’t. Some people row-hop, and it drives Joy crazy.

  A certain part of the field will be designated for a certain day, and it’s got to be stripped before the Plunketts open up the next section. If you come late, you sometimes get a second-hand row. But we were early enough that this wasn’t going to happen to us. Still, Joy seemed to think it would, She was fuming already, and I had a sudden premonition of disaster.

  The line on Monday moved swiftly, and we got our baskets and headed out, Joy at a trot, trying to overtake the family group in front of us—two hippie-looking people, man and woman, and four kids.

  I’d been watching them in the lineup. They weren’t your typical pickers for a weekday—usually it’s older people, seniors and boomers like us—the people who are serious about picking and whose berries are destined for jars and bottles, careful labels and dates and entries into the Craddock Fall Fair homemade jam division. We’d already waved (at least, I had) to Joy’s arch-rival, Selena Parrish, whose jam had once or twice stolen the blue ribbon out from under Joy’s nose.