Grandpère (19 page)

Grandpère and I meet the bus when the girls arrive and take them to the home, where Angel introduces her mother to them. They go with her on a kitchen tour, and when they come back, all the girls are helping with trays to bring lunch out to the garden. Jane tells everyone Angel is her daughter and the other girls are her nieces.

The garden beds look spectacular, full of vegetables. A lot of the luncheon ingredients have been harvested from the garden, including peas still in the pod and baby carrots. I give Bertie all the credit for it whenever anyone tries to compliment me, and she is proud. She points out that the salad all comes from the garden, and so does the zucchini, which the kitchen has cut in rounds and fried with cheese on top. It’s all delicious.

Rose comes out and has lunch with us. She makes a big fuss over the girls, and Jane and I are both brimming with pride. The girls go to help clean up at the end of the meal, and Rose turns to me. “So you and Jim really hit it off. I hear he spends weekends out at the farm,” she says with a look that tells me she really wants to hear it all. I tell her I think I’m in love again and go on about Jim for a while till she holds up her hand to stop me and starts laughing. “Nobody deserves it more,” she says as she hugs me.

I feel a bit guilty to be so happy when she’s probably still lonely. “You deserve to have someone special in your life too.”

She laughs, “Don’t be too sure I don’t,” and evades my direct query till I threaten to phone Bella and find out. Then she spills it. The administrator at the hospital, who lost his wife to cancer about the same time Rose’s husband died, has been calling. They’ve been going out a couple times a week for dinner and are going on a vacation together in the fall. She sounds as happy as I feel, and we sit there giggling.

She waves her hand at Bertie. “That one should not be in here. Still quite capable of living on her own, but her children won’t hear of her moving out, so she stays.”

“I thought once you got hold of them here, they could only leave on a stretcher.”

“Oh Anzel, you are too funny.” She thinks I’m joking, but I’m not. Finally she realizes I am serious and she says, “For heaven’s sake, Anzel, she signed herself in here. She still tends to her own finances. Her children pay for her to live here, but if she wanted to move out, she could do it tomorrow.”

I thought about Bella looking forward to moving into the home, and realized that till now, I’d always imagined people being coerced into living here. I ask Rose if she knew Bella was planning on moving into the home.

“Oh my God. If she becomes a resident, I think I am really going to quit.” We burst out laughing at the thought of Bella here. “She’ll have to keep a notepad to keep track of the daily scandal in this place.”

“Maybe you could get her to write a weekly scandal sheet,” I suggest, and we laugh some more about what the headlines would be. Then she looks at her watch and bids me goodbye. “My break ended fifteen minutes ago,” she exclaims, then heads back to her office. I round up the girls and Grandpère, and we head back to the farm.

The girls settle in at home as though they’re staying forever, their stuff spread all over the house. They spend a lot of their time talking about boys, but they still follow Grandpère and me around and try to help with everything. They love to cook and tell me they’re going to cook every other day to give me a break. Sometimes I sit at the kitchen table and direct them while they try something new. I get out all the cookbooks, and we cook things none of us has tried before. They print Grandpère’s stories that I have in the computer, and we talk about them. If we really want to know if Grandpère or Sven was my blood grandfather, they point out, we could get DNA tests.

“It’s not necessary,” I say. “It wouldn’t make any difference to us. Grandpère is my grandfather. Sven is just a name in a story.”

I show them the family tree in the album, and they like it so much they copy it out, complete with the question mark branch with Sven written on it. They draw a dotted line from Ben and add in Jane, then Angel. They tell me they’ll make copies at school and we can all have one.

I don’t give them the story filed under “Folly.” That can wait till they are older.

They go camping again and leave the tent set up for the rest of their stay. They say they weren’t even one bit afraid this time and they’re going to sleep up there again before they go.

When Jim comes on the weekend, he suggests we sleep in the tent, and I agree. We pack a supper that can be cooked over a fire. The girls bring Grandpère up on the four-wheeler, and we cook sausage over the flames and have potatoes that have been blackened by the campfire inside their wrappings of tinfoil. The potatoes taste different cooked like this, their flesh soft and sweet, the skins black but oh so good.

After supper the rest of them go back to the house. Jim and I sit by the campfire, and he talks about his wife. He got married young, just out of high school. He felt as though she wanted to have a husband and children just to show she was successful. It was all so boring for him that he felt trapped in a life he didn’t want. He wanted to travel and see the world, she was only happy surrounded by her home and the two children. He loved the kids but grew to resent her, and by the time he was thirty, he had strayed from the relationship in all ways. She caught him being unfaithful, and the divorce was bitter. He ended up just driving away, leaving her the house and the children. He went to northern Alberta and worked on the oil rigs. He stayed in camp and worked long hours; that’s when he started using hard drugs. First he just used them to stay awake, but then he needed them all the time.

“I’m not really proud of that part of my life,” he says. “I quit even sending child support.”

He credits Alcoholics Anonymous for his recovery. He wants to repay them by helping other people recover, and he’s committed to this goal.

His wife remarried, and when he saw his girls again, ten years had passed and they were like strangers. He felt as though they were judging him and finding him inadequate on all fronts. He thought their mother had blamed him for everything and taught the kids that he was not a person to be proud of at all. He says that he’s on better terms with them now, and they have children of their own who call him Grandpa Jim. His wife divorced again and died young — in her early fifties — of lung cancer. By that time Jim had recovered from his addiction and made peace with his ex-wife. He returned to look after her while she died. “She left me the house, but I couldn’t live there and sold it as soon as she passed on. It was worth ten times what we paid for it. I gave each of the girls a hundred thousand dollars and put the rest in the bank. I continued to live as I always did.”

I don’t know why he’s telling me all this. I have no intention of telling
him more about Lorne. It’s a chapter of my life that’s mine and Lorne’s, and it feels
wrong to talk of him to Jim. I am silent and comfortable in my silence. But he isn’t
telling me confidences to entice
me
to tell them. He says, “I just want you to
know that I’m not as poor as it may seem. I like to work, and this job suits me. They
don’t need as many maintenance men in the winter. At the end of October, my job there is
over.”

“And then what will you do?” I ask, half-fearful that he’ll tell me next that he’s moving on again.

“Till now, I’ve never found a place where I want to stay,” he says, grinning at me. “This winter I think I’ll remodel the apartment. Jane has her own ideas of how to make it more livable, and I think it will be easy and fun to do.”

I am relieved that he’ll still be here, and to my surprise, tears well up in my eyes. I don’t know if they’re tears of gratitude or happiness, and I surreptitiously wipe them away. “I’m glad you’re staying. You’re very dear to me,” I say, pleased that my voice is steady. I want to tell him I love him, but for some reason, I want him to say it first.

But he doesn’t. “Well come on, love, let’s hit it,” he says. His lovemaking, which is always gratifying, seems more tender and sweet than usual. The campfire smoke, the sleeping bag smell and his man scent blend together in the small tent, making me feel like a gypsy in a caravan, bunked down for the night.

I dream of Lorne, my parents and my two lost children. They rise up out of the ashes and dance around the campfire. Duke comes out of his box like smoke and coalesces into his old form by the campfire. All of them swirl together and become a rainbow, which fades out and turns to ash, then falls like snow all around us. The sound of orchestra music accompanies the dancing, and there is a tremendous crash on the drums while the rainbow fades. I wake up to the sound of rain on the tent and thunder crashing in the distance.

We stay snuggled up in the tent. The rain is starting to pass in a fine mist through the fabric when we hear the sound of the four-wheeler coming.

Sarah yells at us, “Do you want a ride back to the house?”

We gratefully pull on our clothes and speed back to the warmth of the house with her.

“Thanks a lot. We would have gotten soaked if we walked,” I tell her, and Jim echoes my thanks.

We have just finished breakfast when Jesse and Jane arrive together.
He doesn’t have Aaron this weekend. He brings the
Vancouver Sun
. They sit
together on the couch in the living room, looking through the paper. I hear Jane give a
small gasp, and look up to see what is the matter. They are reading the middle pages.

“Oh my God,” Jane says. “A few weeks ago no one knew where he was. Now he’s dead!”

She suddenly realizes she’s talking out loud and has everyone’s attention. She focusses on Angel. “Come here, read this.”

Angel goes over and sits beside her mother. Jane puts her arm around her shoulders as she reads.

“I’m glad. I hate him!” Angel says defiantly.

“The guy who hurt Angel — he’s dead,” Jesse says to the rest of us.

There is a long silence.

“I hate him, too,” I say into the silence to stick up for her. Then, because I know better than to hate, and with my mother’s stricture “Never speak ill of the dead” echoing in the back of my mind, I add, “But he’s dead now. He can never hurt anyone again. And hating him now is pointless. It can’t hurt him, so maybe we should just let it go.”

Angel holds my eye and nods at me, agreeing.

Jesse changes the subject, and soon he has the girls laughing again.

My thoughts keep coming back to the dead man. I’m trying to sort out my feelings. I have to admit to a certain satisfaction in knowing that guy can’t hurt anyone anymore. I wonder if Grandpère felt like this when he gained the lakeshore in his last story, and I feel that maybe we’re not so far apart on the issue of vengeance.

Chapter Fourteen

Parker and Kristen arrive to spend a week while the girls are visiting, and Ezra has his birthday while they’re here. We let him decide what we should do for the day. He wants everyone to go to the lake swimming, then hike up to the falls for supper. Jim offers to take the four-wheeler along so Grandpère can get to the falls, and Parker and he load it up into the back of his pickup. They prop two boards up on the tailgate of the truck and tell me to drive it up.

“No way,” I say.

Jesse drives it up.

“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything,” Jim says to me.

“I’m not afraid,” I reply. “I just have more good sense than to try to drive the bike up these skinny boards.”

“Mm-hmm,” is his only retort. He crinkles his eyes as though he wants to laugh but knows enough not to. He’s getting the teasing habit from Grandpère.

“There’s a difference between fear and common sense, eh,” I say.

“Mm-hmm,” he agrees, smirking.

We put the canoe on top of the car — it has a roof carrier — and tie it to the front and back bumpers. Viewed from the side, it looks like a giant mushroom. We take the car, the pickup and Parker’s car to fit everyone in. The giant cooler that we strap on the bike’s carrier we fill with the food we need for the day. We have beach towels, sunscreen, beer, pop, junk food and a chocolate cake with “Happy Birthday, Ezra” written in blue icing on the top. The cake was made by the girls, who let Cameron and Coby write the greeting. “Happy” is written in big letters, “Birthday” has a hyphen and takes up most of the last two lines and “Ezra” is written in tiny letters in the last corner. The boys point out they had a hard time fitting it all on, but Ezra assures them it’s a really good job, not as good as Mom might do, but pretty good for boys. His ten-year-old maturity tickles me, and Jim catches my eye and grins. I can tell he thinks it’s pretty cute too.

Jane comes with us. She, Parker and Jesse talk for a while of old times. Kristen came into our lives after Jane left, so she’s meeting her for the first time. She’s heard the story from the family, so she knows who Jane is and where she fits in. She keeps looking at Jane, then she blurts out, “You’re nothing like I imagined you.”

“What did you imagine me to be like?” Jane asks.

“Harder. Meaner. More depraved. I don’t know.” Kristen looks embarrassed, as though she wishes she’d just said that to herself.

“If you knew me last year, you would have said I was all those things.” Jane’s voice is quiet, and she’s looking at the ground. “I have promised myself to never become that desperate person again.”

“Well, I’m glad I met you this year. I think we’re going to be friends.” Kristen, always impulsive, leans around Parker and squeezes Jane’s shoulder. “Did anyone warn you I seldom think before speaking?”

“No. They all speak very well of you,” Jane replies, and we all laugh at how seriously she says it. “Come on, you guys, let’s jump in the lake. Can’t let the kids have all the fun,” says Jesse. Grandpère, Jim and I decline. Instead we sit at the picnic table and watch them all in the water. Jim tells me how much he likes Parker and Kristen, and I can tell him the feeling is mutual, for they’ve both told me already how much they like him. We sit and hold hands. I’m becoming attached to him. I wonder what it will be like to meet Jim’s children.

Even Cameron and Coby can swim well, and they all swim and play and eat the afternoon away. For supper we walk up to the falls. It is only a half-hour hike, and Jesse brings Grandpère and the cooler on the bike. The bike is allowed only on the designated trail, which fortunately is wide and smooth. The cake is still fine when we get to the falls. The creek spills over its rocky bed and drops about five feet into a pool, pounded out by time and spring floods to make a beautiful swimming hole. The men dive off a rock, and the girls, not to be outdone by their uncles, follow suit. Ezra stands on the rock for a while, then says he thinks he will walk in, and the smaller boys follow him. They don’t stay in long. The creek water is cooler than the lake, and soon everyone is gathered around the fire, where we’ve spread out the birthday supper on the picnic table. We all sing “Happy Birthday,” then eat our cake quickly, for the wasps have discovered our supper and are particularly attracted to the icing. We pack up everything, and this time the girls take the bike — with Grandpère and the cooler — back to the parking lot.

When we get there, the park warden has stopped them and is asking for the bike licence and registration. The girls are very happy to see me. Grandpère is mad. He calls the park warden a parasite and mutters about someone who doesn’t have anything better to do than harass young girls and old men. He keeps banging his walking stick on the ground for emphasis, and I notice the warden is standing out of range of the stick, looking as though he wishes he were somewhere else. Parker steps right up and is so pleasant and reasonable that the warden, with noticeable relief, says he’ll let it go this time. He admonishes me to make sure I have the bike licensed before I bring it to a public place again. I assure him that I will, and he drives off.

Jesse tries to tease Grandpère out of his anger, but he’s still mad. “Goddammit, what’s the world coming to, when you can’t even take a bike down a trail anymore?”

“Grandpère is swearing, Mom.” Coby looks at Kristen.

“Grandpère, it’s not nice to swear,” Kristen says, and that finally makes him laugh.

“Just gets my blood up,” he says, reaching out to ruffle Coby’s hair. “Your mom is right, it’s not nice to swear.”

“My dad swears too, when he gets real mad, doesn’t he, Cameron?” Coby looks at his brother for confirmation.

“Yep. When people get mad, swearing comes out,” Cameron says matter-of-factly, nodding his head, and this makes all of us laugh.

We tease the girls on the way back about getting stopped on the bike and tell them they could all be in jail for driving a bike with no licence on a public road. Jim tells us that the girls still couldn’t be driving it without drivers’ licences, even if the bike was legal. I have to agree with Grandpère, silently though.

The summer races by, and soon it’s the end of August. Darcy and Faith come to get the girls in the middle of the last week of August. They are happy to see each other. Faith tells the girls they’ve changed so much in only three weeks, and they want to know in what way.

“You just all look so much more grown up,” she tells them, and they all puff up.

I want Jane to talk to Darcy and Faith without the girls present, so I send them in to town to visit her at the apartment she shares with Jim. I ask the girls to help me in the garden. Jim tells Darcy he’ll leave, but Jane tells them she wants him to stay. “He’s practically my father,” she tells them.

Darcy and Faith stay in town all evening, and in the morning they tell me it’s all settled for this year. Jane told them that she and Angel had agreed already that Angel would go on living with them. “It’s best for her to stay with you. She’s doing so well and she’s happy.”

Jane promises to let them keep custody, and they promise to let Angel visit during school holidays. They tell her she’s welcome to come there and visit any time she wants. They part on good terms, and later Jim tells me that Jane cried for a long time after they left. He says she still has some work to do, healing herself.

“She is really nice. I’m glad things are working out for her,” Faith says. “Still, I’m glad she’s leaving Angel with us.”

When they leave, Grandpère, Bertie, Jane, Jim and I stand in the yard and wave till they disappear. Jane bursts into tears after they’re gone, and we all try to console her.

“Christmas will be here before you know it, and you’ll see her then,” I tell her, but she just cries harder.

“I’m feeling sorry for myself. Just let me cry for a while,” she says, and Jim nods to us over her head. She goes over and sits on a bench by the garden, and we leave her to her grief. After a while she wanders off, and when she comes into the house, she’s feeling a lot better. She tries to apologize for “losing it,” but I assure her it’s a natural thing and tell her sometimes a good cry is not only called for, it’s downright refreshing.

“Well, I guess I am refreshed,” she says, and we settle down to a quiet supper. After supper Jane takes Bertie back, and Jim spends the night.

It is so quiet that we go to bed early and lie talking for hours about the kids and the summer. He has met everyone but Clint and Patty and likes all of them. We talk about Bertie, and he says he has a plan but won’t tell me what it is. “I don’t know if it is going to work out yet,” he says.

When he leaves in the morning, the house is quiet. Grandpère gets up late and comments on how quiet it is with everyone gone. The sun doesn’t come out all day, just hides behind a bank of grey cloud cover, and we both spend a lazy day.

The boys have sawn our firewood again, but Jim has been widening the trail and says he will help us haul the wood to the shed with the pickup. I make a list of the things I need to get out of the garden but don’t feel rushed. We have all fall to do them.

I’ve been wanting to ask Jim if he’d like to move in here, and I mention it to Grandpère.

He snorts. “He might as well be living here, he’s here all the time anyway. What are you waiting for?”

“Maybe he won’t want to,” I say.

“Maybe the sky will be green tomorrow,” he replies, as though I’m supposed to know what that means.

On Wednesday I go for my usual stint at the home and find Bertie in tears. Jack has died. “He was just sitting in his chair, smiling,” she says. “He was fine, then he was dead.”

Bertie is far more upset than I think she should be, since Jack has been giving up on life since before I met him. She’s always looked after him, wheeling him out to the yard and making sure he ate his supper, and I wonder if it’s just one more thing missing from her life or if she truly will miss the person he was. He couldn’t have been much company for her; he hardly communicated, unable to remember from one moment to the next who people were or even where he was.

I ask Rose if I should take Bertie home with me.

“Yes. If you don’t mind, take an overnight bag and keep her for a couple of days. It’ll get her mind off Jack and do her good,” she says.

Bertie definitely wants to come. Ten minutes after I ask her, she’s waiting in the parking lot by the car, suitcase in hand. She regains her composure by the time we get home, and she and Grandpère visit in the living room all afternoon. I hear them laughing once when I come in, and by the time Jim arrives for supper, she is able to tell him about Jack without tears. He already knows but lets Bertie tell him about it again. “It’s good for her to talk it out,” he tells me later.

After we have Bertie installed in one of the spare rooms, and Grandpère is snoring softly in his own, we sit on the couch. He’s talking about the changes he’s making to the apartment, but I’m only half-listening. I want to ask him to move in with me but I’m nervous. What if he says no? Finally I just say, “Do you want to move here?”

“Say that again,” he says, and I repeat it in a slightly clearer voice.

He starts grinning. “I thought you’d never ask. It’s what I want more than anything. I never want to go home. I wanted you to ask — I couldn’t just ask you. I love you, Anzel, more than I’ve ever loved anyone in my life.”

I am limp with relief. “I love you too, Jim. I couldn’t say that before. I wanted you to say it first,” I say, and suddenly we are both giggling. We wrap our arms around each other and we keep whispering “I love you” to each other and laughing.

He tells me he hasn’t said “I love you” to anyone except his daughters and grandchildren since his marriage ended. He says he waited thirty-five years to find me.

That night our lovemaking is different. Our kisses carry commitment along with the passion. There is new tenderness in our caresses, and I feel as though we have passed a marker that we have been racing toward all summer.

We make plans for him to move as soon as he finishes the renovations on the apartment. We keep looking at each other and smiling. In the morning he tells me the rest of his plan. He wants Bertie to move out of the home and into the apartment with Jane. He says Jane and he have talked about it already, and she thinks it’s a great idea. When he leaves for work, I’m full of ambition. I clean the house; the dust bunnies are thick in the corners, and none of us has dusted for weeks. When Grandpère gets up, he asks me if the Queen is coming.