New Year's Eve (2 page)

You could see right away that Sharla was not happy to see us.

Ron cried, “Grady! Grade-
A!
You
bugger!
Come on in!”

Sharla just stood by the kitchen island, waiting.

“Nice place,” Grady said, looking around. Smiling now, in the warmth. “You lucked out here!”

The house was big. Open plan, lots of wood cabinets. A long island with a granite top between the kitchen and the living room. Velour recliners with drink holders, giant TV.
Wheel of Fortune
was on.

“Built the house last year—before that we were in the barracks. Or what used to be the barracks, in the old days. It was bad, eh, Sharla?” He laughed, she didn’t. “But Sharla’s dad is a builder. He came for three months, and we put in some sweat, got ’er up in no time.”

Linoleum in the kitchen, beige carpet everywhere else. I would have gone for hardwood if it had been our house. Except of course our house was old and rented, my dad not being a builder. Not one to hand out emergency credit cards, either. But he had stopped drinking. So if I decided to take Daisy to live in Regina, staying with my dad might be okay.

I stood on the mat by the door, holding the baby in her car seat. I hadn’t taken off my boots, so I didn’t dare move. Sharla is a major bitch, if you ask me. Lucky nobody asked.

“Wow, Dixie!” Ron said, catching sight of the car seat. “Who’s this?”

Ron’s a nice guy. I pulled back the blanket so he could peek at the baby.

Daisy’s hat had come undone. Under it her red hair was damp and curly. Little finger ringlets. My mom would have loved her hair.

“Look at that! Would you look at that—look, Sharla! What a princess!” Ron glanced up quick, to check that it was a girl.

I nodded and grinned at him.

Ron was shorter than Grady. Short for a Mountie, but in good shape, with a thick cap of brown hair and a nice sense of humour. I liked Ron.

At their wedding and every time we’d met since, Sharla had spoken to me exactly zero times.

“What’s the baby’s name?” Ron asked.

“Daisy,” I said. “She’s called Daisy.”

Sharla laughed.

I could see she thought naming a baby Daisy was stupid.

We had meant to call her Ruth Anne, after Grady’s mom and mine. But after she was born, she opened her eyes, dark sky blue, and stared up at me. I knew right away her name was Daisy. Grady had been sitting beside my hospital bed in his uniform. People probably thought I was under arrest. He said, “Are you nuts?
Daisy?
” Then he got called out. So I filled out the forms by myself, and I named her Daisy.

Now Grady sang to her,
“I’m half crazy, all for the love of you...”

He couldn’t be kind to me, but he could be soft to the baby. We did that a lot. Talked to each other through her.

“Wait till she opens her eyes,” I told Ron. “You’ll see, it suits her.”

Ron gave me a quick hug, around the car seat. He was in uniform, and the police radio sat on the counter. That meant he was on duty, even on New Year’s Eve.

“Come on, sit, sit,” he said. He took the car seat while I got my coat and boots off.

Sharla said, “I need another cooler! You, Grady?”

Grady shrugged. She gave him a vodka cooler, but he didn’t open it. Ron was not drinking, so Grady wouldn’t, either. He was polite about keeping people company. He didn’t even like to eat a sandwich while I sat without one. Eating every time he did was making me fat. Or Daisy was doing it. Something was making me pretty huge.

I said no thanks when Sharla finally shoved a cooler toward me. The doctor said it’s okay to
have a drink once in a while. Even Grady’s mom said a beer at supper would help with nursing. But I didn’t like it any more. Couldn’t drink coffee, either, since I got pregnant. If someone cooked bacon, I had to leave the house.

Even now, the chicken wing smell from the oven was making me a bit queasy.

“To what do we owe the honour,” Sharla said, still leaning her hip against the island. Not asking a question, just making us feel stupid for coming by. She had on a purple velvet dress. Her bare legs were fake tanned, and she had little diamonds pasted on her toenails. Her blonde hair fell in soft curls like she’d had it done at a beauty salon. She must have used a ton of hairspray.

“You’ve got a party going on here,” I said. There were chips and dip, M&M food boxes by the sink, platters all over the island. “We can’t crash the party, Grady. We ought to get back on the road pretty quick.”

“No, no!” Ron popped open a beer and gave it to Grady. “A couple of people were coming over—but the snow’s stopped most of them. And I’m on duty, as you see. Tim Lamont’s gone to Vegas,” he told Grady.

“Without Jade,” Sharla said.

“He’s on a golf trip,” Ron said, to excuse Tim for going without his wife.

“Yeah,” Sharla said. “
Golfing
in Vegas, I bet.”

“You have a three-member detachment here?” Grady asked Ron.

“Yeah, we still have three. Tim and me, and Marie Poirier is the other member. She’s out with a broken leg till February.”

“Are you still trying to get a transfer?”

“Not now we’ve built the house,” Sharla said. “Anyway, Ron lies down and lets Staffing walk all over him.” Her voice had a curling tail in it, a little sting on the end all the time.

Ron laughed again. He laughed the way I said
sorry,
too often and in the wrong places.

But no, that wasn’t fair. Grady didn’t act anything like Sharla.

“Come see my new truck,” Ron said, still laughing. The men disappeared through a door into the heated garage. We could still hear their voices, but not what they said.

“My dad carpeted the garage, around the edges,” Sharla said, staring after them. “Pits for
three cars. You can change your own oil. It’s quite the showplace.”

“Wow,” I said. “You’re lucky.”

She looked back at me.

“Want a drink?”

“I can’t—I’m nursing,” I said. That word
nursing
sounds weird.

“How old is the baby?”

“Um, almost six months.”

Sharla leaned over the island, as if she might lean far enough forward to see the baby.

But then she straightened up again.

“Well,
I
can have a drink,” she said. “How about a pop?”

Being with her was hard. She was all jagged edges. Maybe she just didn’t like me for some reason. Maybe I reminded her of some girl in grade nine who stole her boyfriend.

“I’m going to—” She stopped talking because Ron’s police radio began to squawk.

“Ron!” she shouted, and he poked his head back into the kitchen in time to hear it.

“Alpha 22, Alpha 22,” the radio voice said. “10-71... I have a caller reporting loose animals.
Horses on the road north of town, before the gravel pit turnoff. Copy?”

Ron hit the button and talked to the Control person. He said he’d head out and check. We knew a guy in Drayton Valley who had been killed when he hit a horse on the road. Moose are even worse. Their legs are so long that their bodies smash over the hood of the car, right through the windshield.

As Ron was talking, Grady came in from the garage. He set his still-full beer in the sink and picked up his coat. “I’ll go, too,” he told Ron. “If there’s a few horses loose, you could use a hand.”

Ron said sure, and they got their boots on.

I was giving Grady the bug-eyed beg:
Please please don’t leave me alone with Sharla!
But he avoided my eyes. Laughing to himself, he bent over to do up his boots. I was mad at him, but it
was
kind of funny.

They left.

Cold air ran into the room, and a flurry of snow.

“Jeez! Shut that door!” Sharla was used to telling people what to do, boy.

I went to shut it.

“Fuck, it’s cold,” she said.

Around our house we had stopped swearing. You can’t tell what words the baby will pick up.

“You need a shawl or something,” I told her. That sounded kind of rude. I added, “Nice dress, though, Sharla.”

“Yeah,” she said. She laughed. Ron not being there to laugh for her. “My Christmas present to myself.”

“Wow. Nice, a nice colour on you.”

No blonde should ever wear purple, in my opinion.

I looked at the TV instead. The
Wheel of Fortune
boxes read:

__v__r s t a y y__u r w __ l c __m__

“I’d like to buy an O!” shouted a giggly woman on the show.

Vanna touched the first box, and two more. Now the letters spelled:

o v __ r s t a y y o u r w __ l c o m __

The woman cried, “Is there a K?”

She’d kick herself for that later.

“Maybe you should get the baby off the tit,” Sharla said. People without kids are always giving you advice, I notice.

She had six shot glasses lined up on the counter, filled with bright stuff.

“Jell-O shooters,” she said. “Don’t you have some of that formula stuff to give her just this once? You’d be more fun at a party if you were drinking, too.”

I put my coat over a chair. I couldn’t escape now that Grady had gone off with Ron. “How about a beer? I could finish Grady’s beer.”

Sharla clapped her hands and cheered.

She handed me a fresh beer from the fridge and knocked back a green Jell-O shot to
celebrate. Then she had a red shot and shook her head fast, so her cheeks jiggled. It was funny.

“Plus, what you were you thinking?” she asked me. “Daisy and Dixie? Ha!”

“Well, she’s not going to call me Dixie, she’ll call me Mom or something.”

“Did you get called Dixie Cup at school?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Yes! And D Cup. That wasn’t as bad as them singing
I wish I was in Dixie...
”

“Isn’t there a Daisy song, too?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I checked it, though, I don’t think there’s anything bad in it.”

“You’d be surprised,” Sharla said. “A girl in my class, Theresa Doherty, her parents wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with that. But she got called Turdo all through school.”

Sharla was making me laugh on purpose. Weird. I wondered what she wanted. Maybe just company.

“And her poor brother Dilbert...”

She must be drunk already, I thought. At her wedding she was Ice Princess Barbie, frozen in a full ball dress. She hadn’t cracked a
joke or a smile all that night. Living out in the wilderness must be good for her.

The radio crackled. We could hear the guys out there somewhere.

“Control?” Ron was laughing into the radio. “This is Alpha 22. It’s not horses on the road, it’s
buffalo
. They’re just north of town. Three of them.”

Control’s answer was lost in static.

“Yeah,” Ron said. “The rancher is on scene. The buffalo are moving south toward town. Could I get you to contact Fish and Wildlife Services, see who they’ve got around? We could use some extra hands.”

“10-4, Alpha 22,” Control came through.

In the background you could hear Grady shouting, “Watch out! Watch that one go!”

Great. They’d be out all night, I thought. Dancing with buffalo.

The radio crackled off. Sharla picked up four more shooters, two in each hand. “They’ll be farting around out there for hours, waiting for the fish cops to show,” she said. “I’m going in the hot tub. Come on. Bring your beer.”

I picked up Daisy’s car seat and followed.

The hot tub had steamed up the closed-in sunroom at the back of the house. All I could see outside the sliding glass doors was more snow. The water smelled clean. Ron was a neat freak. If Grady and me had a hot tub, it would stink. Both of us waiting for the other one to clean it.

I set the car seat close to the tub and turned down Daisy’s blanket. Under her tight-closed eyes, her round cheeks were as smooth as pudding.

“Cute,” Sharla said. “Where’d she get the red hair from?”

“That happens,” I said. “When one parent is blonde and the other has darker hair.”

Sharla laughed. “Okay, okay! I’m not saying you cheated on Grady! You’d be a fool to do that.”

I stood by the edge of the tub. The bright blue water was still, but clouds of steam swirled on the surface. There were lights under the water. No way I was getting in there.

Sharla flicked switches to turn up the heat in the room. “We should eat the caramel apple pie. It won’t keep. Nobody else is coming to the party, looks like.”

“I guess I am a little hungry,” I said. Now that she’d mentioned pie, I was starving.

As if I hadn’t answered, she started stripping her purple dress off. She dropped it on the cedar floor, then her sparkly necklace. I was glad to see that she had a black spandex thing on, like a bathing suit.

There was a big TV in there, too, mounted high up on the wall.
Biggest Loser
was on. The contestants were talking about their love lives. “I was so shy, my wife had to propose,” said a huge guy, his limp hair parted in the middle. “Or I’d still be single.”

“Single. Lucky him,” Sharla said, and hit the clicker to turn the TV off. She made a moaning noise as she slipped into the hot water.

The beer was good. Cool, in this steaming hot room. I sat on the edge of the hot tub.

“For Pete’s sake, get in,” Sharla said. She knocked back another shooter. “Aren’t you cold out there?”