Good to a Fault (8 page)

On the hall divider shelf sat three ugly teddy bears, one dressed in baby clothes. That one stuck out over the edge and Dolly nearly knocked it off. She stopped it wobbling. The clock in the hall made a really loud ticking. The mail was there:
Mr. B. Bunt, Mr. & Mrs. Bunt, Occupant.
Nothing interesting. She put the pretzels back in the pantry and went down the hall, peeking into two little bedrooms packed tight with boxes and papers: too hard to search. Their bathroom was pink and black, a woolly swan on the shower curtain. Dusty razor blades and pill bottles stuffed in the medicine chest. Nothing was very clean.

The main bedroom was full of bears, like a collection on TV: shelves of them, a hundred teddy bears sitting all over a giant bed covered with drooping pink satin, like icing. Dolly sat on the slippery bed and played with some of the bears, the less-pink ones. One lying close by the pillow had a nightcap on and a candle in his paw, and a zipper pocket on his butt to hold pyjamas. He crinkled. Dolly unzipped his pocket, and there was a lot of money. A
lot
of money, all sharp-edged brown hundred dollar bills.

She sat looking at it. First and last month’s rent, right there.

A rush of air gasped down the hall, as the front door opened.

She’d never gotten caught before. Clary would be really mad. Dolly darted into the closet and pulled the half-door shut, then thought,
stupid!
Maybe it was clothes they’d forgotten.

She dodged out of the closet, but there was nowhere else to hide in this bear-filled room. Mrs. Bunt trotted down the hall murmuring, “Where, now where?” She was coming to the bedroom. Dolly slid gently back into the closet behind the folding door, squeezing Mr. Bunt’s suits to the end. Her head filled with his old aftershave stink. She could see Mrs. Bunt’s beigey-grey chickenhead through the crack of the door, rummaging on the dresser. Next she would look in the closet. Mr. Bunt yelled from the front door: he’d had enough, he was sick of waiting for her, she was disorganized and sloppy and a waste of air. Mrs. Bunt ran to the bathroom.

Dolly heard her crying, “Oh! I found them! Don’t be mad! I left them on the sink!”

The front door slammed shut again and the blinds on the bedroom window clapped as the air in the house settled back. Dolly stayed still until she heard the truck fade away, then climbed out. She zipped up the bear’s butt with the hundreds still inside. She knew where they were, and she could get in here any time. She put him back on the bed exactly where he had been, then went out to the living room and ran her fingers down the yellowy sheer curtains, staring out at what the world looked like from the Bunts’ house. She was tempted to cut those curtains up with a big pair of scissors. But they might notice that.

Time to go. As she passed, she knocked the baby bear off the hall divider, but she picked it up and put it back carefully. Then she went back and flushed a pair of Mr. Bunt’s socks down the toilet, and skipped out the back door.

Clara took the elevator to the fifth floor, tossing over possible lies. She couldn’t very well say she’d been upset by a call from Clayton. She had stopped downstairs to get flowers. But up in the room, Lorraine’s face was already shining, and bouquets ranged all along the window ledge on the opposite side of the bed.

“Hi!” she said. “More flowers! Must be my horoscope today, hey?”

“My goodness,” Clara said. “How lovely.”

Lorraine had been eating her lunch with a good appetite, but she pushed the rolling table aside. “My brother! And look what else he brought.” She shuffled her feet beside the bed for a pair of moccasins, beaded all over the top in an intricate pattern. “He was here all night. And he’d driven seven hours before that, he was bushed. He laid down on the other bed for a while, till a nurse came and chased him out, I don’t know, maybe five in the morning?”

“This is very good, that he could get away to come and see you,” Clara said.

Lorraine laughed. “Darwin can always get away! That’s Darwin!”

“What does he do?”

“Moves people, drives truck, paints houses—anything portable. Sometimes he works with a guy, this artist, who does big murals on the side of buildings in towns all over. Darwin sets up the scaffolding and helps with finishing, you know, setting the picture out. He builds houses sometimes
but he’s not like a trade or anything, just temporary help. He’ll be back later, you’ll get to meet him. And he wants to see the kids.”

The bloodwork nurse came to the door, and Lorraine stuck out her arm patiently.

“They already took blood this morning,” she said.

“Well, they need more,” the nurse said. Clipped, busy. Not in this for her health.

Clara stepped back out of the room while the nurse got on with it. Darwin, the brother. She tried to remember the picture Lorraine had shown her, but was distracted, worrying about the children—she’d been out too long. She went to the pay-phone and dialed Mrs. Zenko’s number.

“It’s Clara,” she said. “I’m sorry to ask, but would you mind checking on the children for me? I left them with—”

“I’ve just come back from your place,” Mrs. Zenko said. “I brought the children with me and gave them some lunch, because I wondered if she would be too busy.”

“Thank you.”

“She was sleeping, actually,” Mrs. Zenko said.

They sat on the phone in silence together for a moment, no comment necessary between them.

“And Dolly was out roaming. But they’re happy now, they’re washing dishes for me.”

“You had dirty dishes in the sink?”

“They’re washing my plastic containers. From time to time, you know, it’s good to wash them all out and start fresh. They’ll have a good time. Don’t you hurry.”

“Is Pearce okay?”

“He was sleeping too. That’s a sleepy baby,” Mrs. Zenko said. “I think I’d be looking into that.”

Clara felt hot blood crashing through her shoulders and chest—what had she missed?

“You could take him to Dr. Hughes, but I don’t need to tell you what to do.”

“I don’t—You can tell me what to do any time,” Clara told her.

“Well. I never gave you the buns I’d made, this morning. You can take them tonight.”

Clara hung up and went back to Lorraine’s room, bracing herself to be friendly. The brother was sitting in the blue chair, his black felt hat on the end of Lorraine’s bed, against the footboard where the charts hung. Mrs. Zenko would not like that, a hat on the bed. Clara picked it up quickly, fanning the bad luck away, before she recognized the hat.

“Here’s Darwin, Clara,” Lorraine said. “My brother Darwin!”

It was the drunk from church.

This was too much. Would she be expected to look after a drunk, as well? Grace would have a field-day with that.

He looked up and nodded, and then stood, very tall. He grinned with his teeth showing higgledy-piggledy and his pocked cheeks bunched, so amiable that she could not help but smile back. He raised a long-fingered hand to Clara in a kind of salute, as if they were in a secret society together.

“We met in church this morning,” she said, putting out her hand to shake his, giving him the dignity of an ordinary person. She kept her voice carefully unjudgmental, not to betray to Lorraine how drunk he had been. He reached forward and took her hand, his big brown hand swallowing up hers.

“Church?” Lorraine said, and Darwin raised his eyebrows high.

“Me?” he asked.

She blinked. At the sound of his easy voice she realized that it could not have been him, how could she have thought so? It was the same kind of hat, a black rumpled jacket. Not surprising, if he’d been here all night. But she could have sworn—she felt a blush flood up from her neck to her hair. She had been so cool and gracious and proud of her compassion. She tried to let his hand go, but he held on little longer, smiling, and gave her the orange chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought…” She couldn’t go on.
I thought you were a derelict, I thought I would keep your shabby secret.
Her scalp was hot.

“Everybody always knows me,” he said. “I have Face Number 3.” He was younger than Lorraine. He had the biggest head she’d ever seen on a human being.

Lorraine was overflowing with happiness. “You kill me,” she said.
“Church!” She pulled her eyes away from Darwin and turned to Clara. “How’re the kids doing?”

“Trevor and Dolly are well.” She hoped it was it all right to say Dolly, if that was Lorraine’s own pet name for her.

Lorraine didn’t seem to care. “What about Pearce?”

“Happy enough—he’s too young to tell us that he’s missing you,” Clara said. “Clayton found Darwin, you know. How many places did he have to try, Darwin?”

Darwin had tipped back in his chair, looking out the big window. “He must have called all over,” he said.

Still off balance, Clara tried not to stare at him. Had it been him?

“He caught me up at Fort Smith, I’d been up there working a couple weeks.”

“Too long, Darwin,” Lorraine said. “I missed you too much.”

He kissed her hand. Clayton had done that too, Clara remembered. Clayton had darted down and stabbed at her fingers with his lips; Darwin brought her hand up and met it, kissing the heel of her palm and holding it to his cheek for a moment. Clara had always wished for a brother.

“You enjoying the kids?” Darwin asked.

She nodded, and tried to be more sociable. “We all went to the grocery store, it was an adventure for me.”

“This is such a good day!” Lorraine said, rearranging herself in the bed. “First time you ever had three kids in a grocery store, eh? You don’t need to say another thing.”

“Well, Mrs. Pell came too.”

Lorraine looked alarmed. “Did you check her pockets?”

Clara didn’t understand.

“She shoplifts,” Lorraine said. “Three convictions in Winnipeg. Her case worker was so mad.”

Clara said nothing. I am such a fool, she thought.

“She’s off probation now, or we wouldn’t have taken her out of the province. The lady she was living with, Mrs. Lyne, she kind of threw her out.”

Darwin groaned.

“Well, Clayton couldn’t just leave her.”

Clara nearly laughed at that, but her stomach was too unsettled. She remembered the clanking in Mrs. Pell’s coat climbing into the car after the grocery store. She could see the manager following them—Fisher Jr., from church. Oh God.

She looked up, and thought she saw in Darwin’s face that he was laughing at her. Enough. She stood quickly. “The children—my neighbour is too kind already, and I’ve left them with her.”

Darwin said, “I’ll walk out with you.” The last thing she wanted. He was already kissing Lorraine, and at the door.

“Thanks,” he said, as they reached the lobby.

For what? She pressed the button for the elevator. She couldn’t meet his eyes, having mistaken him for a drunk.

“You’re doing a great thing, here. Big job, taking on three kids.”

Clara nodded. She was still smarting too much about Mrs. Pell to cover his thanks with mannerly protests.

“I haven’t been much help to her these last few years. Been moving around a lot.”

The elevator was taking forever.

“She’s bad, isn’t she?”

Clara looked up. “Have you talked to the doctor? Or did she tell you?”

“I talked to the nurse while she was asleep, and Clayton. He must have spent a bundle on phone calls. He says she’s dying. Couldn’t handle it, he said.” No censure in Darwin’s face about that. Clayton couldn’t take cancer, like other people couldn’t take the sight of blood.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“He wouldn’t say. Around, I guess. He phone you?”

She nodded. The fear from that call was draining away. Had to, she thought, to make room for Mrs. Pell’s shoplifting. Her hands dewed with sweat again at the image of Mrs. Pell getting caught, with all the children standing there, and everyone so surprised that it would be Clara Purdy—George Purdy’s daughter!—in charge of her.

Darwin got into the elevator with her. “She needs a sleep. I’d like to see the kids.”

“Oh,” Clara said. “Of course.”

The elevator sank to the ground, and they sank too.

T
revor was shy of Darwin until Dolly ran past him and got twirled in the air and pulled Darwin to show him Mrs. Zenko’s kitchen, plastic containers everywhere from their bath. Trevor had been looking forward to fitting them back into their intricate nests in the bottom drawer.

“You can finish these after supper,” Mrs. Zenko whispered to him. She picked up his kangaroo jacket from the chair, slipped it on
swoop, there, done,
the tidy way she did everything, and zipped it up for him. “You go enjoy your uncle, he looks like good fun to me.”

She nipped his earlobe with her two first fingers and gave him a big container of tarts, like the witch with the gingerbread house, only not wicked. She was so little and compact, like a grandmother in a book. He wanted to carry her in his pocket.

His own Gran was more of the bad witch, or the wolf. “Nobody saw fit to tell me where you’d all gone,” she was complaining to Clary when they went through to their yard. Darwin gave her a hug and said Clayton wanted to know was she okay, but she went off in a bad mood to watch TV.

After Trevor and Dolly took him for a quick tour round the house, Darwin offered to make scrambled eggs, his specialty, while Clara bathed the
baby. Especially after Clayton’s hostility, Darwin’s undemanding friendliness was a relief. And Dolly was so happy to see him.

“We can make a bed for you here too,” Clara said, when she brought Pearce into the kitchen for supper. “There’s the basement but I’m afraid it’s only roughed-in down there, and a bit cold.”

“I’m going back to the hospital,” he said. “The nurse said she’d give me a cot. I think Lorraine could use someone there overnight.”

Clara was ashamed. She should have thought of that herself.

“You couldn’t,” he said. “You’re looking after the kids so Lorraine doesn’t worry about them. But can I have a nap here tomorrow? A good dark basement—I can catch some sleep in the afternoon.”

While the others were finishing supper, Clara took Pearce to Mrs. Pell’s room to find that special soother she was always boasting of. The room was a pigsty.

Holding Pearce up against her chest with one arm, she rummaged through the mess on the dresser and the bedside table. Nothing. Fallen into the wastebasket? She squatted down in one smooth slide, keeping Pearce vertical, and sifted through the basket gingerly. No soother. But two empty bottles of Benadryl. Three. In a wastebasket that had been empty last Sunday. Clara stood up, her head pounding with the effort, clutching the third bottle. 0-6 mos., ½ teaspoon. 7-12 mos., 1 teaspoon. She knew perfectly well what Mrs. Pell had been doing, and she wanted to kill the old harpy.

Mrs. Pell croaked from the doorway, “You take him in with you, see how you like it.”

“Yes,” Clara said. “I will.”

“You’d be amazed at how many people do it,” Dr. Hughes said, his tone calm enough to reassure Clara. “I’ve been tempted myself, on a long night. You check the dosage, you think how nice a little sleep would be…No real harm to the baby, but let’s change the arrangements, no?”

“I kept him with me last night. I can look after him.”

She felt her whole head hot and swollen, her neck swelling like it might burst, with the shame and horror of not having noticed this before. And it had been a long night out there in the living room with a wide-awake baby. Things would have to change.

Pearce batted the stethoscope dangling in his view. He was a good weight and size for his age. His birthday was on the health card—September 10th. Dr. Hughes admired his sturdy legs, and the way he stood holding onto the desk chair, joggling slightly as if there was music they couldn’t hear and grinning at them with his wide, drooling mouth.

“More teeth coming there,” the doctor said. “You may be using that special soother after all.” But he was joking. She knew him well enough to smile and shake her head. Pearce grabbed the stethoscope again, but Dr. Hughes caught it in time.

Dolly and Trevor would be all right with Mrs. Zenko for another hour. Clara stopped at the mall, where the BUNK BED SALE sign had been up for a month. Strange, she thought, to have noticed that sign long before she could ever conceivably have had a use for bunk beds.

They cost more than she thought they should, even on sale. But she had money lying useless in the bank, and something had to be done. Duvet covers were two-for-one. She popped Pearce into a handy crib to keep him happy while she flipped through the colours. When she turned back, he was tracing the outline of a bear with one finger, singing to it. So she bought the crib, too, and paid extra to have the whole shebang delivered right away.

Darwin came back from the hospital in time to help Clara move the pull-out couch out of the TV room, and the single bed into it. It wouldn’t be Clayton’s room any more. They abandoned the heavy couch in the kitchen doorway till they could think how to get it down the stairs. Mrs. Pell sat stony in the living room through the upheaval. Clara had moved the television in there, onto the carpet. How horrified she would have been, even last week, to think of the TV in the living room—but it was only pretension to hide it, as if they were too cultured to watch.

This was going to be much better! Clara had a bubble of joy in her chest, even in the middle of the chaos, because now the children would be across the hall from her, and she’d be in her bed again. The crib would fit under the window in her room, close enough that she could reach out and touch Pearce’s hand through the bars, to reassure him.

And Mrs. Pell would be safely stashed in the little room, farther away. She was easy to dislike: surly, criminal, sly; but Clara could not be bothered.
New things! Since her mother’s death Clara had been clearing things out, not bringing things in.

Mrs. Zenko came across before noon, just as the delivery truck pulled up, and led the children out the back and through the hedge to give them some lunch at her place. Darwin talked the delivery guys into carrying the couch to the basement, and then Clara asked them to bring the small bureau in from the garage, for the television to sit on. She tipped them $20 each and they walked out, slapping Darwin on the back.

And of all the days, Paul Tippett drove up as the delivery van pulled away.

“I thought I should render an account of my visit to your friend,” he told Clara in his shy, stilted way, climbing the steps. “But perhaps this is not a good time…”

Dusty and giddy, Clara couldn’t stop herself from repeating, “
Render an account?
”

He laughed at himself, dutifully. “Well. I thought you’d like to hear how it went.”

“I would,” she said, sorry to have mocked him. “Come in, we’re moving furniture, please come in. Oh, this is Lorraine’s brother, Darwin.”

Paul shook Darwin’s hand. “Of course,” he said.

Darwin gave him a grin and a thumbs-up and went down to sleep on the demoted pull-out couch.

Clara drew Paul down the hall to see the bunk beds, still in pieces. He unfolded the cryptic instructions and squatted down in the middle of the rubble as if he was finally home. She offered to make coffee and he nodded, immersed already. But he called her back to hold the first headboard steady while he fit the supports into slot B, and by the time they had managed to put the beds together properly and went back for it, the coffee was stone cold. Paul put it in the microwave without even asking her.

“I’ll make fresh,” she said, shocked at the idea of microwaved coffee.

“It’s the way I like it,” he said. “I make a pot in the morning in the church office, but I’m the only one there most of the time, so I reheat it all day.”

Clara was about to ask why he didn’t go to the good coffee place beside
the church, but remembered in time that of course he didn’t make enough money for lattes and Americanos.

“Good thing you happened to come over today,” she said, instead.

He took his cup out of the microwave and went back down the hall to the new children’s room. She thought he had not heard her, and she followed to say again, “Good that you chose today—”

“My wife left this morning,” he said.

He put his cup down carefully on the dresser and opened the exacto knife to slit the plastic on the first mattress. It made a satisfying zipping sound as it ripped.

“Where’s she off to?” Clara asked, before she realized that it could not be a trip. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, idiotically.

Paul laughed slightly again, that deprecating, priestly laugh he used to make people more comfortable. Clara was sorry to have occasioned it twice in one visit.

“No—yes, she’s left me,” he said. “Everyone will know, soon enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Clara said.

“Well. I’m sorry about it too.” He took the corner of the mattress cover she handed him, and they fitted it around the square edges of the new mattress.

When Paul stood up from stretching the last corner he cracked his head on the upper bunk, and yelped. He smacked his hand to the bump and ground it around, as if to smear the pain away.

“Ice?” Clara asked.

“Ow. No. Thank you. It’s making my eyes water,” he said, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

She sat beside him. “How long were you married?”

“Twenty years next May. A long stretch,” he said, thinking of an elastic band pulled all that time, getting thinner and thinner. How it would hurt when it snapped on the fingers.

An egg had bulged on his forehead. Instead of bustling off to fetch ice or rubbing alcohol as he would have expected, Clara sat still beside him.

“Are you heartbroken?” she asked.

He bent his head toward his knees. “I think I’m stomach-broken, more
than anything. I threw up after she left, and again after lunch. Do you think that’s normal?”

“I felt terrible when my husband left me,” Clara said. “Physically. I lay in bed for days. It was an ache in my chest. I thought I was dying.”

Her gravity made him laugh. “I’m not dying. I think I’ll calm down soon.”

“We were only married for a year. I was being left when you were marrying your wife.”

“And do you feel better now?”

“Oh, yes. A million times. Today, in fact, I’m happy as a lark. But I think that’s the new bunk beds, and the crib, and the children.”

“We didn’t have children.”

As of course she knew. As everyone knew. “That was hard, was it?”

“It would have been easier, better for us, perhaps, if we…I wanted to very much.”

She looked at his face, what she could see of it, his head still bowed in his hands.

“You would have enjoyed having children,” she said. “From the little I know of the whole business. I’m certainly enjoying it, in between the worry.”

“I should have gone out and found some,” he said.

Late at night Dolly and Trevor lay in their new beds. Trevor was sleeping, but Dolly kept herself awake. She could hear Clary walking down the hall to her room. Crooning to Pearce, telling him some story about how good he was, what a good boy. You start out good, and then you turn into Dad, or Gran. How does that happen? Or you start out good and you get sick—No talking about her mother. She quickly switched it to Paul. He must be good, he was the priest. He had a big bump on his forehead.

Darwin. Darwin is the best of our family, she thought. She could think about Darwin as she went to sleep, as long as she didn’t think of him at the where-he-was. He would be sleeping on the pullout couch in the basement tomorrow, he would be there.

Clara’s spine had grown used to the living-room chesterfield, and back in
her bed she had a ragged sleep. About midnight Pearce woke, hot and cranky. She gave him a sponge bath by the kitchen sink, with only the stove light on in the dim night kitchen. Poor lamb. Was this mild fever from illness, or new teeth coming in? Or withdrawal from the Benadryl. He was good-natured about it, lying peacefully on the towel as she sluiced him with trickles of water. His legs slid open and relaxed, and he turned his melon head on his small neck to look at the dark gleaming window over the sink, and through the window, to the moon shining out there in the night.

“There is the world,” Clara told him. “There is the moon.”

He reached his finger out to it, and looked back at her, to make sure she saw too.
Beloved.
She dabbed him dry with a couple of tea-towels from the drawer, so the water could evaporate and cool him that way. She dried between his fingers and his beautiful toes while he stared and stared at her, at the amazing presence of another human being. Clara had never understood that a baby could be so physically, solidly satisfying. When she picked him up to take him back to the crib he put his arm around her neck in a tender way, a partner in this. Not only a baby but a person, too, already.

Pearce was still staring at the bears in his crib when Clara heard a noise from the children’s room. It was Trevor, awake and crying.

“My mom,” he said—she could hardly make it out. She lifted him down off the bunk, took him to her room and tucked him into her bed. His shuddering gradually calmed.

Dolly appeared at the door. One a.m. “What’s wrong?” she asked, tears in her eyes too.

“They’re fine, Dolly. Come and sit with Trevor for a minute, and we’ll see if we can sing Pearce to sleep.”

Clara went to their room, opened the window and left the curtains open, plumped up their pillows and added a fleece blanket over Trevor’s duvet. Then she put them back to bed. She sat in the semi-cave of the lower bunk, smoothing Dolly’s shin; Pearce lay curled on her lap, happy to be held.

“
Betty Pringle, she had a pig,
” Clara sang for Trevor, and he chimed in softly, almost with the tune. “
As on my way to Strawberry Fair,
” she sang, and “
Baby’s boat is silver moon, sailing in the sky.
” She felt Dolly going limp as she patted her, and heard her breathing change. She stopped singing.

“That was wonderful,” Trevor said from above her.

Clara sat on in the little cave, wondering if she would be able to recall this later, when she was an old woman alone in some nursing-home, if she would remember Trevor saying
wonderful
, and the sleeping weight of Pearce on her lap, and Dolly under her hand, and how she’d done that herself, put them at ease, even though they were not her own.