Cool Water (7 page)

From two blocks away, he hears Mrs. Baxter's rooster. The rooster has a defective
cock-a-doodle-doo
that makes him more irritating than a fully functioning rooster would be. He's not even useful as an alarm clock because he has no sense of night and day. His feeble half-crow reminds Norval of the imperfections in everything.

“I'd like to kill that rooster,” he says. “A rooster that doesn't know the difference between night and day deserves to die.”

His wife says, “You're not listening to me, Norval,” and he turns his attention back to
the list.
All of the items on it have something to do with renovations to the church, which Lila sees as necessary for the wedding she is planning for their only daughter, Rachelle. Lila seems to have forgotten altogether their daughter's age (eighteen), along with the fact that she's just graduated from high school and has no plans to get an education that will be of use in earning her a decent living, and since she's marrying Kyle Hoffert, she really ought to have a backup plan. The Hofferts earned their living until recently off their contract to collect pregnant mares' urine for the hormone-replacement industry. Those contracts were cancelled when science decided the practice of replacing women's hormones was not such a good idea after all, and the farms quickly became a thing of the past. The Hofferts run a few hundred head of cattle and are trying to maintain their horse-breeding program, but the mares' urine had been a lot more valuable than either the cattle or the horses are now.

And in addition to the worry about Rachelle's financial security, there's the notable fact that the bride is pregnant. Lila has decided to ignore this detail until after the wedding, at which time she'll make an announcement as though it's news, when everyone in Juliet already knows, and if they don't they will when they see Rachelle in her wedding dress.

“Can't you take care of some of these things?” Norval asks in the dark.

“I have my own list,” Lila says. “One person can't plan a wedding.”

“What about the blushing bride?” Norval asks. “Perhaps there are one or two things she might do to help out.”

“Don't be sarcastic,” Lila says. “She has a job. She's busy. Anyway, you know how tired she is. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you have to be a woman to know just how tired pregnancy can make you.”

“I thought we were ignoring her ‘condition',” Norval says.

“We're not ignoring it within these walls. Don't be ridiculous.”

“Well, she didn't seem that tired yesterday,” Norval says. “I walked by the swimming pool and there she was, prancing around in a string bikini, her little belly on display. Don't they have rules of conduct for lifeguards? A dress code of some kind?”

“They're not called string bikinis any more,” Lila says. “You're so old-fashioned. Anyway, she's not showing yet. She has no ‘little belly,' as you put it.”

“You're in denial, Lila. One look and a blind man could tell.”

Without realizing he's doing it, Norval pulls the sheet up to his chin. It has something to do with the idea of his daughter
showing.
“So what about Kyle's mother?” he asks. “Can't she lend a hand?”

“Mrs. Hoffert is lovely, but this is the bride's family's responsibility. You can't weasel out that way, Norval.”

Lila's acting like this wedding is the most important event in the history of the town, Norval thinks, when in fact he sees it, well, not so much as a disaster, nothing is final these days, but as a mistake that will be evident before the guests have eaten their good-luck slivers of wedding cake. He wants to suggest again that the marriage take place cheaply and quietly, and that they spend the money to celebrate in a year's time if the future looks promising then. When he suggested this the first time, his wife and daughter in unison called him a tightwad and dismissed the idea without consideration.

Norval sighs audibly, tucking the sheet around his neck as though he's in a body bag with his head sticking out.

“In case you hadn't noticed,” he says, “I too have a job. I too have a list, and a rather long one.” He tries to picture his desk calendar, the one he's refused to replace with a PDA, and wonders who will be the first to enter his office at the bank in the morning playing a sympathy card and asking for more money or more time. And he's pretty sure he has school board business sometime after lunch, the interview of the only qualified applicant for the job of Home Economics teacher. Waiting in the wings is the righteous Mrs. Baxter, owner of Norval's favourite rooster, who has been trying to get her hands on the job for the last ten years even though she doesn't have a teaching certificate. He can only hope the qualified applicant isn't covered in tattoos. If she's at all acceptable, they'll have to hire her or face the teachers' union.

Lila says, “I want you to talk to someone at the church. The foyer absolutely must be redecorated, and I don't just mean a coat of paint. They'll listen to you, Norval. You're an important person in the community and, besides, you're a man.”

Important, hah,
Norval thinks to himself. Important, when his job description includes foreclosure on properties that have been in the family for close to a hundred years. Tolling the death knell for people like Blaine Dolson—who has found work on the road crew, thank God for that, he has a half-dozen kids to support.

What would happen, Norval wonders, if he just stayed in bed, didn't go to the bank on Main Street, just pulled the sheets over his head and stayed in bed until noon, and then got up in his pyjamas and watched whatever was on TV, whatever appeared on the screen when he hit the Power button on the remote—music videos, football or golf, some reality show about redecorating houses or ballroom dancing—and when the day was over he'd go back to bed and sleep with a free conscience. He wonders whether this is possible, if he could ever, at his age, close enough to retirement that the word has entered his vocabulary, quit his job?

And then he reminds himself that he's considering just the thing that he fears for his daughter—poverty resulting from a rash act—and he knows that if it gets too bad he'll apply for a transfer to another town and he'll start all over with new clients who will trust him, or give him the benefit of the doubt, for a few years at least.

Lila sits up in bed. “Did you hear that?” she asks.

“The wind?” Norval asks.

“Not the wind,” she says. “There is no wind. I think it was the front door.”

Now Norval hears something too. Footsteps.

“Rachelle's been home all night,” says Lila. “I'm sure of it.”

“I wouldn't bet your life savings,” Norval says, throwing the covers aside and stepping onto the plush wall-to-wall carpet.

“Be careful,” his wife whispers. “You hear stories. It could be a home invasion.”

“It's not a home invasion,” says Norval, reaching for his pants, which Lila has neatly folded over the back of a chair. “Rachelle,” he calls, “where the hell have you been?”

No answer.

Norval pulls his pants on over his cotton pyjama bottoms and steps into the hallway. He descends the four carpeted steps to the landing, another six to the main level of the house, and finds Rachelle in the kitchen, her head in the fridge. She's wearing cut-off shorts and what they call a “tank top,” which means to Norval that she's only half dressed, or more to the point, she's half naked.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asks again.

“Out,” says Rachelle.

“With Kyle,” says Norval.

“With the girls,” she says, closing the fridge door and turning to face him.

Her eyes are bloodshot and he's pretty sure she's been drinking. He tries to keep his eyes from her belly but they keep drifting there. Maybe Lila is right. You can't yet tell.

“We went to the drive-in. That annoying Willard Shoenfeld checked the trunk of the car again. He has no right. I'm pretty sure about that. You can't just search cars without a warrant.”

“For booze,” says Norval.

“For people trying to sneak in,” says Rachelle. “I suppose you're implying we were driving around with booze in the car. We're not stupid, you know.”

“Rachelle,” Norval says. “You're pregnant. Think about it.”

“I may be pregnant but my life isn't over.”

Norval pauses and then takes the opportunity to say, one last time, “Tell me honestly. Don't you wish, even just a little, that you were going away to school with Haley and Kristen?”

Rachelle looks him square in the eye. “No,” she says. “Why would I want to do that? I'm getting married.”

She tosses her long blonde hair away from her face, a move she's been practising since she was a small girl. There's not much Norval can say in response. He used to say, “Don't you shake your hair at me, young lady,” but he learned long ago that his bland retort couldn't compete with Rachelle's dramatic gestures. She stomps away from him and up the carpeted stairs to her room, leaving him alone in front of the fridge with his pyjama bottoms bunched up under his pants. He stands in Lila's immaculate, glaringly modern kitchen and wonders if he should, after all, give Mrs. Baxter and her family values a shot at the Home Economics job. Maybe she could accomplish something that he and Lila apparently have not been able to, namely, keep teenagers from having babies. But he knows that Mrs. Baxter is not the answer. The best he can do now is wish the unsuspecting Kyle a whole lot of luck. Norval is quite sure that marriage to Rachelle will be a challenge to rival any he's encountered so far in life.

With the house once again silent and his sleep for the night ruined, Norval goes to the sunken living room off the kitchen and settles himself on the couch. Almost every time he sits on this couch he gets pleasure from the memory of how it was acquired. Lila had special-ordered not just any couch, she said, but an item of fine furniture, from some fancy company for half a fortune. When the couch arrived in Regina, she'd sent Norval to pick it up in a borrowed truck. She'd given him a photograph printed off the Internet to make sure they'd sent the right one. When he got as far as Swift Current, he drove by the local furniture store and saw the parking lot filled with row after row of couches and La-Z-Boys and bedroom suites. A portable sign on the sidewalk advertised a one-day-only pavement sale.

Norval got out and had a look and sure enough, there was Lila's couch, or one close enough to it that he couldn't tell the difference from the picture she'd given him. So he bought it for a third the price and called the Regina store and told them to send the fancy one back. Even when he paid the shipping and took the deposit into account, the parking lot couch was still almost two thousand dollars cheaper than Lila's special order. There was a manufacturer's tag on the back—the wrong one of course—but Norval figured if he could get the couch installed against the wall in the living room before Lila could look at the tag, he'd be home free. And he'd got away with it. Lila had never examined the couch closely enough to find the tag, and the manufacturer of the expensive couch had never phoned to ask why it had been returned. Norval had paid the credit card bill without Lila seeing it, and he'd saved himself some money and proven that even Lila couldn't really tell the difference between haute couture and the local offerings.

Norval flips through a variety of infomercials—cooking appliances, home gyms, skin care products—and finally settles, as usual, on the Weather Channel. Its forecasts are notoriously wrong, but he listens to the perky female announcer who tells him the day will be sunny, warm and windy, with a slight chance of a thunderstorm later in the day. Well, he thinks, you could probably make that prediction for southern Saskatchewan on any day in the summer and stand a pretty good chance of being correct, although the thunderstorm part of the forecast has been unusually absent for the past few summers. He stares at the television, which makes the same prediction every ten minutes, until his eyelids begin to feel heavy.

He's just about to lie down on the couch when he hears a truck pull up in front of the house. A door slams and footsteps sound, coming up the walk. Loud footsteps, unmistakeably Kyle's boots. Norval makes it to the door before Kyle can ring the bell.

“Well,” Norval says to Kyle, who is teetering on the top step, one hand on the railing, trying hard to look sober for his future father-in-law but not succeeding. Norval notices that he's left his truck lights on.

“Good evening, Mr. Birch. Sir,” Kyle says. He's trying to stand steady but gravity pulls him back down a step. It takes him a few seconds to regain his balance.

“It's hardly evening, Kyle,” Norval says. “It's more like, well, the middle of the night would be more accurate.”

“Sorry,” Kyle says.

“What can I do for you, Kyle?” Norval asks. Of course he knows Kyle is here for Rachelle, but he makes him say it anyway.

“Can I talk to Rachelle?”

“I would imagine she's asleep,” Norval says.

Kyle shifts from foot to foot, still holding the railing. A full minute passes. He seems to have forgotten where they are in their conversation, if it can be called that.

“I guess I should go,” he finally says.

“I think that would be best,” Norval says, feeling irresponsible for sending Kyle out on the road in the state he's in, but damned if he's going to let him into the house to climb the stairs and crawl into bed with his daughter. He has his limits.

He watches Kyle stumble down the walk, a cell phone in one back pocket of his Wranglers and a round tobacco tin in the other. Kyle's about to get in his truck—he's having trouble finding his keys—when Rachelle bounds down the stairs and pushes past Norval wearing some kind of gym pants now and a very worn and almost transparent T-shirt. She and Kyle throw their arms around each other right on the street, and then Lila calls from upstairs, “What in the world is going on down there?”