Good to a Fault (12 page)

T
hey weren’t allowed to visit their mom these days because she was having too rough a time with the chemo. Dolly had a block in her chest, like a peachstone stuck halfway down, that stopped her from eating or drinking very much or from doing anything but thinking the same words repeated:
make her well, well, well.
Whenever anybody said
well, well,
her dad would always say
Deep thoughts.
But Dolly had blanked him out of her mind too, along with everything else.

Instead of thinking, she went out. She pretended to go to the basement, but really she’d slip out the back and away down the alley, looking for some sliding patio door open in the late summer heat. In one wide-open house she wandered around in bare feet while the lady was having a bath, singing away in the bathroom. It was a nice place, white and pink, more modern than most of these houses. But not what she was looking for, whatever that was exactly. Money, if it was safe. A house they could live in, maybe.

The apartments behind 8th Street, those would do. Poor apartments, Dolly could tell: ugly, three stories high, no balconies, looking out onto parking lots with old cars parked close up beside them in the alley, some of the windows covered with tinfoil—that meant people worked nights. The money
in Mrs. Bunt’s bear would be enough for sure. No point in taking it though until her mom was out of the hospital. If that would ever be.

She should think about it, about what they would do if their mom died. For a moment Dolly stood still in the alley, letting her mind roam down into the bottom of her brain where it lurked, her mom dying. It made tears leak out of her eyes even before she felt sad. Her heart fell down farther than usual into her stomach, to some root down there that she didn’t want to touch. She gave up and walked on, but it was like she’d turned on a tap that wouldn’t turn off. Tears kept trickling out. Her crotch hurt, because thinking about her mom—about it, about it—was too dangerous.

She’d go into a store, even though she didn’t have any money. There was no way she was shoplifting, it was too easy to get caught, like Gran. She didn’t want stuff, anyway, she wanted not to think, wandering down this dusty grey back-world of garbage bins. At the corner of the alley stood a used book store, Key’s Books. She could dawdle through there for a while, you were allowed to browse in bookstores.

It was not a normal store, it was an old house half-turned into a store. The walls where the living room and dining room would have been were lined with teetering shelves of musty, crammed old books, red and brown and blue. The kitchen cupboards still hung, full to bursting, with books shoving open the doors. Everything was dusty, and there were no customers.

A huge old man sat at a grimy computer, almost hidden behind book-stacks teetering all over a kitchen table. Books piled under the table too. He waved a foot-sized hand toward the archway and said, “More back there. Kids’ books upstairs.”

Because of the shape of the rooms it was like sneaking into a house, but a dream house, a bookhouse. Rickety shelves climbed to the ceiling in every room and crowded down the middles. In the kids’ books room Dolly sat on the floor under the dirty window, in what had once been the bathroom. You could still see where the bathtub had been ripped out. Before she looked up she had read half an old paperback called
The Children Who Lived in a Barn,
about a girl who looked after her brothers and sisters when their parents disappeared and they had no money.

But she had no money either. She had to go, supper would be ready and Clary would notice if she was late. She unfolded herself—one leg was
asleep—and went down the creaking stairs on her sparkling foot, sad to leave that whole room of books. The old guy who owned the store looked at her like she was shoplifting. She only had a T-shirt on, no jacket. He could see she didn’t have anywhere to put a book.

“Thank you,” she said, like Clary said when they were leaving a store but they hadn’t bought anything. “You have some very nice books here.”

The old guy turned suddenly mean. He shouted, “Rich kids, no goddamn idea!”

He thought she was rich because Clary looked after them now. It made her laugh, secretly, and he saw that, and yelled at her some more: “You don’t read! You haven’t read a book in your life. Bookstores are going out of business all over—you think you can sit and watch TV and that’s all it takes. You walk around in a bookstore and by osmosis, you’ve read something!”

What did he think she’d been doing up there for an hour, except reading?

“If you cleaned the place up and sorted your books maybe you’d sell some,” Dolly said in a reasonable voice.

The old guy was not reasonable, though. “That’s it.
That’s it!
” he shouted. He got up, his head almost up to the ceiling.

Dolly looked at him and thought she might get hurt. She made for the door, and he followed, wide as a yardstick, faster than Trevor. Dolly got a good scare. She ran out the door and half-slid down the stairs to the sidewalk, hoping the little book shoved down the back of her pants didn’t show. He filled the frame of the door, white hair crackling around his head, still threatening her. But she was just a little girl! He was crazy! It made her laugh, for a second, and before she could stop herself she stuck out her tongue and blew a fart noise at him.

“Oh, that’s mature,” he cried in triumph.

She ran around the corner, deked to the right through a different alley to hide her real direction in case he was following her, and then booted it all the way to Clary’s.

Safe at home, she hid the
Barn
book under her mattress, and made herself wake up really early in the mornings to read it. It was the best book she had ever read. In the end their parents came back. They were not dead after all.

For the three weeks of chemo Darwin was at the hospital most of the time. Every day, Clary brought a jar of Mrs. Zenko’s broth and watched the hospital staff dealing with Lorraine’s fever and anemia, treating suspected infections, puzzling over bone marrow aspirations. Clary tried to erase it all from her mind when she went home, so the children would not see the pity she still carried. They were subdued and unhappy anyway, in need of distraction, and in a flash of good sense Clary phoned to ask her cousin Grace’s daughter to visit.

Fern was back living with her parents out by Davina. Moreland drove her in and stayed for a quick coffee. As they came in, Mrs. Pell lurched up from the kitchen table and went out through the dining room archway, unobtrusively carting her sandwich along with her. Clary could not be impatient with her—an old woman, purple around the ankles, who had been hungry for a long time.

Fern brought her suitcase in from the truck, not letting Moreland do it for her. She was angry with her parents, blaming them for her life in Davina. Not that they had asked her to come back after university, but Fern had been disappointed in love in her last year, and she hadn’t known where else to go with her wounded pride. Everyone in Davina knew all about it, but at least they hadn’t seen his beautiful face, hadn’t seen him walking out on her with that tender, long-lipped smile, that wide gazey way of lifting his eyebrows, to say
Where’s the surprise? You knew what I was like.

A couple of weeks’ work would do her good, according to Grace. “Take her mind off her own drama,” was how she’d put it, but Clary made automatic allowance for Grace’s attempt to balance Fern’s emotional excess with her own level-headedness. To Clary it seemed that Fern was still in pretty rough shape. Her thin skin looked raw, and she wouldn’t make eye contact. Shame destroys us, Clary thought, and led her to the bathroom.

“No room at the inn,” she said, opening the linen closet where she’d cleared a shelf. “Your things can go here. I’m afraid you’re sleeping on the living-room sofa—I’m very grateful that you can help out.”

“It’s okay,” Fern muttered, then added like a teenager, like she couldn’t stop herself, “Whatever.”

“Are you applying for pharmacy work this year?” Clary asked, and then wished she hadn’t. “Or will you go back to cutting hair?” Even worse. Fern
looked up and stared at her, as if politely not believing her ears that Clary could have asked such an insensitive question.

“Well, I must go and get—” Clary fled. Let Fern have a minute.

Dolly took one look at Fern and loved her. Her hair was the palest apricot colour. It glowed. And she looked so sad. Fern’s back slanted in a long S, her pelvis tilted and swung, her legs were long and thin in her tight jeans, and she had a closed, secret shell all around her. Her face looked as if she washed it all the time. Dolly was struck silent, but Trevor had no trouble talking Fern’s ear off when Clary took her out to the back garden where he and Pearce were playing in the empty wading pool. They filled the pool together, taking turns with the hose.

It seemed to Clary that Fern liked the children. That would help. The sight of Moreland walking Pearce across the grass by his two fists even made her smile at her father again.

Clary gave Fern a package of hot dogs and put her to work barbecuing them with Trevor. Trevor held the spray-bottle in case of flare-ups, and doused the hot dogs regularly. Moreland ate three watery piccalilli dogs before he went off to Early’s Feed & Seed. And Clary left for the hospital, leaving Fern in charge with some relief.

Fern occupied Dolly’s whole mind. She loved getting up in the morning to find Fern drowsy-eyed on the couch, and she loved the slow days they passed doing nothing more than walk to the park and back. Her beauty, her broken heart, how well she could cut hair—the best thing was that she treated Dolly like a person of the same age. They did their nails at the picnic table. Fern did Trevor’s too, so he could see what it was like. They looked at fashion magazines, but no pages that Fern said were too old for kids. She cut Dolly’s hair and blew it dry with product, so that it looked almost as silky as her own.

One amazing night, Fern took Dolly and Trevor to the Exhibition. She came on the rides with them, even the Zipper. Fern
loved
the Zipper. She said it was probably too rough for them, and they were going to get her in big trouble, and the whole time they were waiting in line she kept thinking better of it and almost leaving; but she made the guy put them all in the same capsule, Trevor in the middle, and she pulled their seatbelts tight, and they
rode it. Trevor spent his whole ride trying not to pee because of the zig-zag feeling racing through his body. Dolly shrieked as loud as Fern the first time they spun upside down, but she got hold of herself and did not make one other sound. When Clary’s money ran out, Fern spent her own money on more long coiling rolls of tickets, so they could go on the swings seven times and three times on the Ferris wheel. When the sun was a flattened orange, almost gone, but the sky still electric blue, they wandered down the sawdusty exhibition streets to the million-bulbed entrance and out of the daydream into the ordinary parking lot.

Darwin was there to pick them up instead of Clary. “I’m hungry,” he said through his open window when they came toward his car, his old green slant-roofed Buick. “You guys have been eating cotton candy all day, I bet, so you won’t want any, but I’m going to go get a cheeseburger.”

They were so hungry! In the café booth Darwin made Fern laugh about being too light and floaty and needing to fatten up, until she said she would share a strawberry milkshake with Dolly. The hamburgers came with mountains of fries. Dolly automatically stopped Trevor from threading mustard strings all over his mound, but Darwin said, “It’s okay, he can, they’re his. Here come yours.”

Dolly had forgotten. They hardly ever had to share things any more.

A
t coffee hour after church a woman Clary hardly knew came up to her.

“You’re overstepping,” the woman said. “Christian action doesn’t redound well when it’s done in public.”

Prickly from lack of sleep, Clary couldn’t believe this. Redound?

“Does not
redound
?” she repeated, as cold as her mother in depressing this pretension.

“It’s egotism!”

The woman was a lay reader in some other parish, and organized seminars and workshops. She had a huge chin—everybody in church these days seemed to have strange faces, tiny eyes or overhanging ears or out-of-proportion mouths. That must be over-tiredness.

“It’s just practical,” Clary said. “I’m helping, that’s all. It’s not public.”

“Well, pardon me for saying so, but there are boundaries—and arm’s length agencies—to remove the taint of appropriation. I think you’re doing this for yourself.”

The woman’s eyes were desperate with effort, trying to convey some
terrible conviction of wrong-doing. It would be simpler to hate her, but she was so painfully exposed that Clary could not.

She tried honesty. “Yes, I am. I like the children.”

“And does that count, then? If it’s pure selfishness?” The little eyes stared fiercely at her, demanding some defence. “What gives you the right to run these people’s lives?”

“If I find I’m getting hairs on my chin like that,” Clary said, “I pluck them.”

She walked away and got a cup of coffee. That was the rudest, unkindest thing she had ever said. Her heartbeat galloped, but she didn’t allow herself to leave. Of course, Mrs. Pell was waiting for her at home, to give her much the same talk, from the same overbearing chin.

Darwin was down in the basement with his measuring tape, a pencil between his teeth.

Dolly had seen this before. She started shivering. Partly happy, partly scared. Her dad wasn’t even there, was Darwin going to do it all alone this time?

“You hold this end, Trev,” he said, parking Trevor on one side of the freezer. Darwin pulled the tape down past the washer and dryer, as far as the back wall, sticking his hand in between the boxes piled up against the wall. The doorbell rang, and Dolly ran back up the stairs.

“Tell them to go round the back,” Darwin called up after her.

Two guys carrying long toolboxes were on the front steps. Maybe they knew what they were doing, she thought. She showed them where the side walkway led around the garage to the back door. They took off their boots before they pounded down the stairs in big sock feet.

All afternoon Dolly and Trevor ran up and down stairs getting stuff from Darwin’s car or the guys’ truck, flattening back against the stair rail when people were bringing lumber down or carrying other stuff up. Darwin showed Dolly where the wall was going to go to close off the storage room, where the water heater was. Then there would be a big rec room from the bottom of the stairs around to windows in the back of the house, to have some light down there, and a little bedroom with a little window.

“Not too big,” Darwin said. “It’s good this way, dark and cool.”

“Will the bedroom be for you?” Dolly asked him.

“For now,” he said. “Until the wind changes…”

Did that mean that it would be a room for him till the wind changed, or that he would stay till the wind changed, like Mary Poppins told those kids she looked after?

“The spirit breathes where it wills, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes,” Darwin said.

Who ever knew what Darwin was talking about, Dolly wondered. He was kind of a freak. Pearce woke up and started to cry, surprising her. She’d gotten out of the habit of hearing him cry. He was standing in the playpen in the living room, shouting for attention, but he calmed down when Dolly gave him the bottle Clary had left ready in the fridge.

Mrs. Zenko rang the doorbell. She had the little stroller unfolded.

“Let’s take Pearcey-baby for a walk,” she said to Dolly and Trevor, who was moping around the kitchen looking for something to eat. “Is your grandma awake?”

It was no secret to Dolly and Trevor that Mrs. Zenko was not crazy about their Gran, so they said they thought she was asleep, and they got their shoes on quickly so that nobody lost the momentum of going for a walk. Dolly called down the stairs to Darwin that they were going and he said, “Good! Go play in traffic!”

He came up the stairs three at a time and said to Mrs. Zenko, “Surprise for Clary down here, you want to see the plan?”

He leaned the paper against the wall and Mrs. Zenko nodded her head, pointing with her finger at the good ideas, saying, “My husband would gladly have done it, but no matter how Clary argued and pleaded, her mother wouldn’t have a thing changed from when George was alive. This is wonderful!”

That comforted Dolly and Trevor. If Mrs. Zenko thought it was okay, it would be okay. They went out and left the house to the clattering and hammering. Mrs. Zenko might walk them back past Dairy Queen. It had happened before.

“I’ve applied for the old age pension for Mrs. Pell,” Clary told Lorraine, leaving out the four hours on the phone and three trips downtown, one with Mrs. Pell in tow to sign documents. “It’ll take three or four weeks to kick in, but she’ll be happier when it comes through.”

Lorraine laughed.

“I mean, when she has a little independence…”

“Yeah, I got you. When she’s got money coming to the mailbox. She’s got the balls to be unhappy, does she?”

Clary let it go. No more talking about Mrs. Pell. She took out her notebook.

“Darwin’s got something on,” Lorraine said. “He was on the phone about five times last night, and he had that look.”

Did that mean something crooked? Clary shook her head for even considering it, but she thought Darwin was probably wilder than she knew.

“A surprise for you?”

“Maybe,” Lorraine said. “He likes to give presents.”

“Is it your birthday?”

“Not till March. That can’t be it.” She got up, pulling the i.v. pole along the bed to gather the tubes in her hand. “They’re coming to set up the chemo drip in a little while. Let me go to the bathroom before you ask any more questions.”

“Have you seen the doctor today?”

“
Before
you ask any more.”

Clary got up to help her, but Lorraine pushed her gently down and rolled the pole, clinking and squeaking, over to the bathroom.

The room was getting homey. Piles of magazines, extra blankets, dishes from Mrs. Zenko; she ought to take those back. Another woman had been put in the other bed and had gone, and then another, but Lorraine remained. Clary had a moment of painful dizziness, struck by the recurring awareness that if Lorraine was still here, she was in big trouble—too intimate a secret to know. She hadn’t talked to Darwin out of the children’s hearing for a few days. Maybe he had learned something from the doctor, and was sparing her. Strange to have to be
spared
anything about Lorraine, when she hardly knew
her. But she knew her better than she’d known anyone since her mother died, because she had been paying attention to Lorraine.

Two nurses came in, a woman and a man. Both small and dark-haired. One rapped on the bathroom door while the other stripped the bed with quick, economical motions. Lorraine answered and the female nurse, satisfied, went to help with the bed-making. Clary got out of the way and stayed by the sink, leaning on the counter, to wait until they were through. Lorraine came out of the washroom and rolled her contraption slowly back to the fresh bed. She looked very tired.

The two nurses swarmed around her like tiny, intent shadows, the shiny i.v. pole between them. Lorraine let them have her arms, and what they needed of her, but her face turned to the window with an open calm which Clary had not seen before. The window showed the river and the peaceful city, and beyond the city the prairie stretching in all directions. It was like a painting: Lorraine still, translucent; the nurses, dark squiggles doing finicky tasks; and beyond them, the great expanse of the unmoved world—Lorraine connected to that, removed from the machines and the workers.

Clary was swept with a feeling of despair because she could not overcome her distance from Lorraine to talk to her, could not even listen to her. She was helping, the children and so on, but that was selfishness and didn’t count. But there was Darwin. Clary remembered watching Darwin sitting beside Lorraine, slipping his hand through her hair over and over and over. Sitting on her bed, being with her, hers.

Opening the door, the children dodged back. Some kind of turmoil in the house—they couldn’t see what was going on past the front hall. But they could certainly hear.

“Selfishness!” was the first word Dolly could make out, the snakey S’s hissing out of the living room in Mrs. Pell’s dank tenor. More roaring than words.

Darwin leaned over a pile of lumber and coiled wires to open the door wider for them, and his face broke into a huge smile at the sight of Mrs. Zenko’s face behind the children. “She’s headin’ for the rhubarb,” he said to Trevor and Dolly, nodding his head back toward Mrs. Pell.

“Oh boy,” Dolly said.

More choked roaring, and a magazine flew out of the living room and crashed into the hall wall. Lucky there were no pictures right there, Dolly thought. Another magazine flew flapping and fluttering at the wall. The next one was heavier, so it stayed more solidly together, with a
whump
as it hit. Fern’s
In Style
.

Darwin gave them one more crazy look, and dove into the living room. They could hear Mrs. Pell, gasping and wheezing, her hands smacking.

“Get your—let me go, you friggin’—slime-bucket—”

“He’ll take care of her,” Trevor said to Mrs. Zenko, who had put her arms around the children and was pulling them back out the front door.

“It’s just a temper,” Dolly said.

To her surprise, she saw that Mrs. Zenko had started to cry, a couple of sweet pear-shaped tears. “It’s not that bad,” she told her, to comfort her.

“It’s not dishes this time,” Trevor said.

“Oh, my dears,” Mrs. Zenko said, as if this was awful. Really it wasn’t
that
bad, a magazine wouldn’t seriously hurt anybody even if it landed. Pearce in the stroller was craning his neck to see what all the interesting noise was, fat fists clenched around the bar to pull himself forward. Mrs. Zenko pulled him farther back against the porch railing.

Darwin came into sight again, with Mrs. Pell, hitching her along by walking close beside her, her arms pinned by her sides. He took her into her room and shut the door. Two more crashes. They could hear Darwin in a steady stream, talking her down.

Then it was quiet for a minute.

“She’s probably done for now,” Dolly said.

“We’ll go to my house for supper, I think, my dears,” Mrs. Zenko said. She was pressing her hand into her chest, just under the bone that goes across the shoulders, and that made Dolly worry about her. Her eyes were still damp and shocked.

“It’s okay, really,” Dolly said, and Trevor said too, “It’s okay.”

But they both loved eating at Mrs. Zenko’s, so they shepherded her down the stairs, not wanting to calm her completely in case she changed her mind about supper.

“You don’t have to call 911, Darwin will fix her. When she’s mad, she
goes straight up and turns left,” Dolly said. It would have scared Fern too. She was already kind of weirded out by Gran. Good thing
she
hadn’t seen this, or Clary!

Trevor shook his head, the straight, weightless hair floating away from his skull. “She got a crazy temper, boy—”

He was going to say some more, tell about that time when she chased him around the house with the wooden spoon, going way fast, but Dolly poked him. Maybe Mrs. Zenko would give them perogies. He loved those. But not with sour cream, no, not that.

Moreland had happened to have a few errands in Saskatoon, and he stopped by to say hello. Quite an amount of lumber clutter in the front hall, and the door was wide open, the screen not even shut to.

“Hello?” he called gently, stepping over the first pile. Acoustic tiles. Had Clary finally got somebody in to do the basement? Grace’d be glad to hear it.

Darwin stuck his head around from the bottom half of the basement stairs and said hi.

Moreland said hi back, and then Darwin came all the way up. “You a friend of Clary’s?”

“Her cousin,” Moreland said. “Cousin-in-law, I guess.”

“She should be back already—but it’s a good thing she’s not.”

Darwin was gathering metal braces, and Moreland automatically helped him.

“I’ve been telling her she ought to do the basement for a while now,” Moreland said, making conversation as they took a load of lumber down the narrow stairs.

“Yeah, well, now’s the time,” Darwin said. “You want to help?”

Moreland was taken aback. What kind of contractor was this? Then he surveyed the surprising scope of the damage in the basement and understood that something else was going on. “I guess I better,” he said. He took off his jacket.

Loitering by the café in the hospital lobby, in his usual post, Paul waited for an empty pot of coffee to be refilled. Avoiding visits. When Clara Purdy came
out of the elevator and headed for the door, Paul found himself dodging in front of her, almost tackling her. “Sorry,” he said, catching himself up. “I haven’t seen you for—I wondered how Lorraine is holding up through this chemo, if I should visit her again?”

She looked distracted, but not unhappy to see him. “Some days she seems better,” she said. “It was like this for my father, but she’s younger, and stronger-willed, maybe.”

“Whenever I think illness is all attitude, along comes someone who gripes and complains and whines and still gets better,” Paul said. “Will you have a quick coffee? It must be ready now. Joe Kane, upstairs, is eighty-seven, still snarling and scratching.”

“He was in hospital with my father, eighteen years ago,” Clary said. “My mother called him
irascible
, and that’s how I always think of him.”