Good to a Fault (11 page)

Trevor said, “Waddle, waddle, waddle.”

Nobody else laughed, so Clara didn’t either. But she looked in Darwin’s direction and saw that he had pulled his hat right down over his whole face, and was leaning back on the windowsill, in some silent spasm of laughter.
Lorraine’s eyes were bright as black jet; but her skin was looking much paler than it had that morning. Clara sobered.

“The nurses reminded me that we shouldn’t stay too long,” she said, being the bad guy.

But Lorraine seemed glad she’d said it. “Yeah, you guys have to go get supper on your own, mine will be arriving soon and you’ll eat it all if you’re still here. And I need to keep my strength up.”

Trevor and Dolly were easy to dislodge—they’d had a solid hour to lounge around. The room was almost boring again. Their mother was there, still there. They had been refreshed.

Darwin stood up, taller than she’d remembered. “Come on, you kids,” he said, as if he was a stern man. “I’ll walk you to the car.”

Trevor and Dolly kissed Lorraine and went after Darwin to the door. “We’ll take the stairs, get some exercise,” he told Clara, giving her time to pry Pearce away. Giving Lorraine peace to be pried apart in.

After they were gone Lorraine shifted her feet under the sheet, her long legs. “Do you think you can take him without waking him?”

“No,” Clara said. “Not a chance.” She sat on the bed and began the long process of easing her hand under the sleeping boy.

“Thanks,” Lorraine said, sitting up straighter. “I needed to see them, I should have asked for them before.”

“It went very well. Nobody seemed to be upset.”

“Nope. Except me.”

“Is it bad?”

Lorraine stared at her, the bright eyes subdued. Black pearls, not jet, now.

“I have a feeling like a big hand,” she said. “On a long arm, a hand coming from inside me, reaching around inside…”

Clara stayed listening.

Lorraine shook her head. “I can’t say what it’s like.”

They sat silent.

“Well, the kids’ll be down at the car by now. You’d better get going.”

“I
can
go, because Darwin will be back up in a few minutes. You won’t be alone.”

“Yeah, isn’t that the greatest?” Lorraine lit up again. “When we were little, we shared a room—I used to tell him stories at night. Now he tells me.”

Clara slid her forearm under Pearce and picked him up, willing him to stay asleep. He did. She folded him up against her chest, and his fist came to rest on her neck.

“See you tomorrow. Do you want the children again tomorrow?”

Lorraine’s face was dulled, quiet. “I’m sleepy,” she said, not answering.

When Clara was almost out the door, Lorraine said, “Not tomorrow. But soon.”

Darwin came home before the children went to bed, Lorraine asleep already. He had brought Timbits, assorted. The jelly ones, the tiny perfect jelly doughnuts, made Clara cry. Because they were so perfect and Lorraine was dying. She had salt in her mouth and powdery, dissolving sweetness.

Dolly climbed on Darwin’s lap, and then Trevor, and they both had a good time crying, but it would not last. Like the pleasure of doughnuts only lasts for a second. Icing sugar is like cocaine must be, Clara imagined. Lighter than air, filmier than dust, frail delight. Even if there were fifty she might keep eating them, she thought, weakly happy to see the children dusted with sugar, little puffs of strawberry jam spilling out, bright inside the cushion of sweet.

“My mother used to make doughnuts,” she said to Darwin. She laughed to hear herself telling this, a sweet memory of her mother. “She made
orange
doughnuts, bubbles of dough with orange peel in them, and she iced them with orange icing!”

Remembering the orange doughnuts made her happy, and then of course sad, and the smell of the oil cooking in the kitchen, and how short a time the pleasure of the doughnuts lasts, but how long the oil smell lingers…

Clara shook her head as if she had been drinking, or was too tired to drive; she slapped her cheek to wake herself up. The children were staring at her. “What?” she asked. Darwin stared too, even Mrs. Pell. “There’s nothing wrong! I’m just—”

She laid her head down on the kitchen table and sobbed. What a relief to cry out loud.

In the bedroom she could hear Pearce starting to cry. Now look what she’d done. She cried some more. Mrs. Pell lumbered up and went off to the bedroom.

Waddle, waddle, waddle,
Clara thought, and a doughnut of laughter came bubbling up into her mouth and out, and she laughed at the children and Darwin still watching her. She leaned back in her chair, feeling much better. She was pretty sure that Mrs. Pell wasn’t giving Pearce more Benadryl.

“I think I’m a little over-tired,” she said. She couldn’t keep a straight face, her mouth had to go up or down. “You never get a whole night’s sleep, you know.”

He nodded.

“You’re listening even while you’re asleep,” she said, amazed that she could do it.

“Yeah, that’s what it’s like.”

“How do
you
know?”

“I have a kid. A boy, he’s sixteen now. Same birthday as Trev.”

“I’m five.” Trevor said from under the kitchen table. He had slid down to see if any doughnuts had fallen.

“Yeah, he’s a little older.”

“Phelan is his name,” Dolly told Clara. “It means like a wolf.”

“His mom picked it,” Darwin said, grinning. “New Age, eh? They live out by Tofino, in a commune. No wolves there though.”

Clary wondered, with half-drunk concentration, why she liked him, anyway. His ordinary, responsive face—too wide and smooth with healed scars. Laughing at her over there. His eyes were like Lorraine’s. How transitory his life must be, that he could drop everything and come for her.

Coming back with Pearce, Mrs. Pell knocked the box of doughnuts off the table. Only a few rolled out, and Dolly picked the box up carefully so no more spilled. Mrs. Pell shrieked like a train when Trevor tried to eat one he dusted off from the floor.

“Why is it different now?” he asked her.

“It’s different! That’s enough for you to know!”

“I don’t want it different, I want it the same.” Trevor was almost going to cry again.

Clara would have liked to interrupt but his grandmother had a right to talk to him, more right than she did. She took the baby and checked his heavy bottom while Mrs. Pell ground on.

“
Everything
gets different, your whole life will be one thing and another to get used to. Nothing will ever be the same as it was two weeks ago.”

“But that’s the good thing,” Darwin said. He pulled Trevor up on his lap again. “If it was all the same, it would just be boring. We would be begging for change.”

“No begging,” Trevor repeated. His eyes had gone slanted, in the way that Clara associated with dogs, when they were thinking like a pack. No begging for change.

W
hen Clara woke up and couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, she decided it was time to pull herself together. It was Thursday, 7:30. In the new life.

She had to go in to the office.

Pearce was still sleeping, head tilted back, mouth open. She hopped quietly out of bed—hoping the outward semblance of energy would create energy within, like goodness—showered in three minutes, then got Pearce up and fed him breakfast: mashed sweet potato for the first time. Mrs. Pell stayed in bed till noon these days, so she couldn’t disapprove.

He loved the sweet potato; Clara fed him more. He put a grateful hand on her cheek and banged his spoon strongly in between mouthfuls. She loved his bowl in her hand, the rabbit bowl that had been her baby dish, and how well it fit in her capable palm.

Trevor and Dolly, tired after their visit to Lorraine, were content to sit shielding their eyes from the sunlight darting through the kitchen curtains. While they ate, Clara got herself properly dressed—usually, these days, she pulled on jeans the minute she got out of bed, in case Darwin might roam in from the hospital. Pearce stood joggling in his crib, seeming to like her in her
underwear. She found her good fawn suit and the Amalfi pumps, polished in their shoe-slot. Like old times. How many days since she’d worn lipstick? Lack of sleep was no excuse.

Dolly was tying Trevor’s shoes in the doorway. Clara hoisted Pearce farther up on her shoulder, searched through the hall closet for her good briefcase, and found it. What an efficient morning. Pearce coughed against her shoulder.

She said, hearing with satisfaction her calm, motherly voice, “Don’t fuss, sweetheart!”

But Dolly said, “Clary…”

Then she could feel how warm her shoulder was. She turned slightly to see it in the hall mirror, a fall of curdled sweet potato dripping down her back. Fury rose like a fountain in her chest, up, up—

Trevor began to cry.

Clara looked at the empty wall. It had been years since she’d felt her own temper.

“It’s all right,” she said to Trevor, when she was sure she wouldn’t shout. “I can change.”

At least Pearce had kept his own clothes clean, leaning over Clara. She buckled him into the car seat waiting by the door, and mopped first his mouth and then the floor. Dolly was crying too.

“You sit here with Pearce for a minute, okay, Trevor?” He squatted down obediently. “Dolly, come help me find something clean.”

She tossed the jacket into the dry-cleaning bag. “I hate that suit, anyway,” she told Dolly. “Makes me look like a prissy old lady. You find something better.”

Through her tears Dolly picked out a yellowish Chanel knock-off. “And this,” she said, dragging the violet shirt off its hanger, the one Clara always thought of as Easter Parade. But she had contracted for Dolly’s opinion.

“Why are you crying?” Clara asked as she zipped the skirt.

Dolly thought Clary looked nice. “Pearce spitting up, that’s what he did on my—when we were going to find Darwin, but we couldn’t find him. But now we did.”

“That’s good, isn’t it? Your mother is so happy to have him with her.”

If they weren’t down there by eleven, Clara knew, Barrett would be gone for lunch, which would mean all afternoon. She hustled the children out the door and into the car, and as she was getting in herself Darwin drove up in his pea-green beater. He looked exhausted.

She waited to speak to him. “A bad night?”

“Good to be there. She was dreaming, or maybe delirious, for a while.”

“Did she ask for Clayton?”

“Don’t worry, I told her. She’d figured it out anyway. She’s grateful to you, what you’re doing. She’s working hard, right? No time for being mad.”

Clara nodded.

“You off for an outing?”

“I’ve got to catch my boss to explain what’s going on.”

He laughed. “What are you going to say?”

Dolly got out of the car to give Darwin a leaping hug, and stayed leaning against him, twining one thin leg around his knees. Clara didn’t think she should discuss it in front of her. Besides, she had not exactly worked it out.

“Something will come to me,” she said, with a giddy, holiday feeling. “He’s been kind to me, over the years. He’ll be horrified.”

“But you have the right on your side.” Darwin said. “And you look good.”

His easy assumption of friendship was obscurely flattering. It was good to have people around to like. She was not used to that. Her mother’s social rigour had kept them mostly alone. “Have a good sleep,” she said, pretending to be as comradely as he was, and left him to climb the steps.

She had to park far down the street from Gilman-Stott. They straggled back in the gritty breeze, colder than it had looked that morning. She wished she had a stroller to pop Pearce into. Catching the full glory of her yellow and purple outfit in the double glass doors she almost turned around. But she’d just have to bring them all back again.

Before hauling open the door, she said, “In an office, people are trying to concentrate—like a library, or a church. I need you to stay beside me, and please try to be quiet. Of course if you need to ask me something, do, but let’s see how quiet we can be.”

Sometimes when she spoke to the children she felt like an unimaginably old and inflexible librarian, all wrong for this job. They stared back at her with scared eyes, not even understanding that they should say,
Yes, we’ll be good
. Oh well, she thought. It’ll be interesting for them to see an office.

Mat was at her desk, her throne. Evie the office manager, always easy to deal with, would be in Hawaii by now. Too bad. Mat gave a lady-like squawk and shook her iron hair when she saw Clara.

“You’re back!” Then she registered the children. “Now!” she said. “This would be?”

“First, Mat, has Barrett gone for lunch? I need to talk to him.”

“You’ll be lucky to catch him before he hares out the back.”

Clara grabbed Dolly’s hand, and hoisted Pearce higher. She seemed to have become a creature with four heads and extra legs. Trevor was dragging on her jacket.

“Come, children,” she said, hearing her own voice sounding fake. She steered them along through the corridor of brown fabric half-walls to the real wall at the back, and Barrett’s office.

He was putting on his affected green blazer, one arm halfway through a sleeve when he saw her. It seemed like he would speak, but nothing came out. He stared at the baby, face like a baby himself.

“Hello, Barrett,” Clara said, carefully businesslike. “Could I have a minute?”

She bent down to Dolly and Trevor. “See the table with the magazines?” They nodded. “I need you to sit for five minutes while I talk to Mr. Gilman. I won’t shut the door, you’ll be able to see me. Okay?”

Dolly nodded, since she could see she had to. She pulled Trevor’s arm to sit beside her. There were magazines, but they were all business stuff, nothing Dolly or Trevor could even glance at.

From her chair, Dolly could still see Clary. The fat guy sat down in the working chair behind the desk. He was old, with lots of grey hair and grey eyebrows like bug antennas growing towards each other. He waggled his finger at Pearce, not close enough for Pearce to bother to reach for it. She could see Clary leaning forward slightly, talking quietly, probably so that she and Trevor wouldn’t hear. Clary’s pretty feet looked nice in those toffee-coloured high heels. Maybe she didn’t want the other people in the office to listen in.
The pink-eraser-mouth lady from by the door was standing at the filing cabinet by the guy’s door, but she wasn’t looking at the files.

Trevor started to hum, and Dolly jerked his hand again so he’d shut up.

“Absolutely impossible,” the guy said in a louder voice. Then he quieted down.

Maybe they wouldn’t let her go. The guy stood up. His face was all red. Clary spoke again, but still Dolly couldn’t see her lips, which would have made it easier. Dolly didn’t actually want to hear what Clary was saying, if she was saying things about Dolly’s mother and how sick she was. But she needed to know, to have data. She walked slowly to stand beside the lady still listening by the file drawer, who stared at her for a minute with eyes like nails, and then ignored her.

Inside the office, Clara’s heart was pounding. Once, at a Christmas party, Barrett had kissed her. This was almost worse.

“If a leave is impossible, I’ll have to quit,” she said. “But I’d rather not. I’ll need to come back to work eventually, and this is where I’d like to be.”

He sat down again, giving up, terribly disappointed by her irrationality.

“You know I value your advice,” she said, picking her way. “But in this case, there’s no room for advice. I don’t have a choice.”

“You didn’t take leave when your own mother was dying!”

“She was surrounded by friends and a day nurse, and she had no small children.” She had let frost into her voice, but it wouldn’t help to alienate him. “Naturally I’m not asking for paid leave…”

“This is not your family, Clara, that’s what troubles me. You don’t owe these people anything.”

These people.
Pearce clutched her side, sliding on the blouse under her jacket, his little fist tightening to keep her with him. “It’s my responsibility. Whether real or imagined doesn’t matter.”

“Another question, Clara, is your legal liability, which I believe enters into serious jeopardy when you take in these random strangers in as if you were
guilty
of something. Should you be exposing yourself to this kind of—” Overcome, Barrett choked, and started to cough, and the cough went on and on. He pawed at the desk for a Kleenex, and she pushed the box across.

“When I retire,” he started, and of course he was going to talk about succession.

“It’s not nearly time for that,” she said, slipping into his sentence. “If you can’t hold my job for me, fine. I just wanted you to know that it’s not the work, or your management.”

But it was, and she couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen it before: the mind-numbing work, and his slack, self-satisfied management—it was to Gilman-Stott that she didn’t owe anything. This felt like the recess bell suddenly ringing, like a green door opening in a brick wall.

Barrett leaned back in his fat executive leather chair, spent.

“I’ll come in on Friday and sort through my files, and Mat has everything at her fingertips.” (Mat would be listening at the door in her usual post—give her a plug.) “You might consider that woman from Biggar who came in last winter. She was looking for a move to Saskatoon.” And she’d known how to deal with Barrett.

“Are you trying to ruin yourself?” Barrett seemed to be asking her from genuine worry, and she relented a little.

“I’m trying to mend myself,” she said, without much hope that he’d believe her.

He pulled a face, like she’d said something socially inept.

“I’m being told what to do by the Holy Spirit, Barrett.”

He stared at her, appalled.

She laughed out loud, as freely as she’d ever laughed in her life. “Not really! I’m just guessing.”

Outside Barrett’s door, Trevor said, “Clary?”

He sounded worried, it was time to go. She got up in a fluid rush, happy from her head to her feet, and turned to the door with Pearce twisting in her arms, searching for landmarks. She showed him Trevor huddled beside Dolly at the door. How the children threw the buff and brown into shadow—how their faces glowed in this drab hall!

Mat stood frozen at the filing cabinet.

“Come along,” Clary said gently to the children. “Mat, you cope with him.”

Mat nodded. One corner of her matte pink mouth lifted in her warmest smile. Clary tightened her grip on Pearce to carry him safely through the tangle of half-walls. Dolly and Trevor followed close behind like Hansel and Gretel, not wanting to be lost in this cloth and metal forest.

Outside, Clary realized what she’d done: she’d quit her job. Barrett would never take her back after she’d flouted his advice and laughed at him, the gasping fish. She should have quit years ago—her mother’s money was sitting there, and the money from the store, what was she saving it for? She leaned against the car doing math, counting GICs, cashing in term deposits. She could certainly take a year off.

But everything was so expensive. They walked up the street to the shoe store and found baby shoes for Pearce, so he could walk around the house and practice. Another $30. Well, she’d cut back on her donation to the Anglican World Relief Fund. She would relieve the world right here.