Patterns of Swallows (21 page)

*
* *

Graham didn't come home for
supper that evening.

"Where's Graham?" Mom
asked when she got back from the store.

Ruth was in the kitchen starting
supper.

"I don't know. He went out
somewhere. He didn't tell me where he was going."

"Did the two of you have a
fight?" Mom asked, concerned.

"Nothing big. I'm sure
he'll be back for supper. He didn't say he wouldn't be."

Mom didn't pry, and Ruth didn't
volunteer any further details.

"I picked up carrots at the
store. I thought we could roast them with the beef you defrosted
this morning. Maybe with a few potatoes."
"That sounds
good. That's what I was thinking, too. Though I didn't think of the
carrots. Thanks for picking them up. I've got the roast in
already."

The roast stayed in longer than
it should have while the women waited for Graham to come home.
Before it was completely ruined, the two sat down to supper together
without him.

"Maybe it was a bigger
fight than you thought," Mom said with a worried crease in her
forehead.

"Oh well. If he wants to
sulk about nothing, I guess I can't stop him. He'll get over it. Or
maybe he went out to meet someone and something came up. I wouldn't
worry," Ruth told her.

But Ruth was good and worried
herself by the time she heard Graham's car pull into the driveway at
two o' clock in the morning.

She wasn't sleeping, but she
pretended she was when he staggered into the bedroom in the dark,
undressed noisily, and slid clumsily under the covers next to her.

She had to say something then,
get things out in the open, or she'd never sleep that night.

"Graham! You're drunk,"
she said in an angry hiss, mindful of his mother asleep in the next
bedroom.

"Nah," he said. "I've
had one or two, but I'm fine. Just feeling good." His volatile
mood had swung back to jovial.

"You drove home in that
state?" Ruth said. She wished away the accusatory note in her
tone, but it remained.

"I told you, I'm fine.
I've only had enough to help me relax."

"You were so relaxed you
almost fell onto the bed."

"It's dark in here in case
you hadn't noticed."

"Where were you, anyway?
Why didn't you tell us you weren't going to be home for supper? Your
mom was worried."

"Would you lay off? I wish
I hadn't bothered coming home at all if I knew I was gonna get the
third degree. Bernie 'n' me had some things to discuss if it's all
the same to you. Don't worry. I was with Bernie the whole time. We
had a lot to talk over, and then we had a couple drinks together to
seal the deal. It got later than I realized, that's all."

"Oh, that's all, is it?
You were with Bernie Jansen the whole time, like that's supposed to
make me feel better, and sealed some kind of deal that I'm not
supposed to know anything about with enough to make you stumbling
drunk. After which you drive yourself home at two in the morning,
and I'm just supposed to lie back and not worry my pretty, little
head about it, is that it?"

Ruth regretted it all, even as
she said it, but seemed powerless to stop the flow of words.

"Where're you going now?"
she asked in alarm when Graham rolled out of bed and began pulling
the top blanket off the bed and draping it over his arm.

"Apparently, if I want to
get any sleep tonight, it has to be somewhere else. I'm going to the
couch, seeing I know you won't." And he left.

He'll
think it over tonight and feel bad about it all in the morning, and
it'll blow over as quickly as it started
,
Ruth said to herself. But the sense of foreboding refused to budge.

*
* *

Bernie had a girl with him that
Mrs. MacKellum would have pegged as "cheap" and "painted"
from the amount of makeup she wore and the peroxide colour of her
hair and the heavy scent of perfume that permeated the atmosphere
around her. Ruth didn't know the girl and so did her very best not
to categorize her based only on her looks (and smell). It was an
uphill battle, however. Especially when the peroxide blonde looked
at her boldly, even challengingly, from under her artificially long,
artificially black lashes when Ruth came to take their order.

For Graham's sake, she was
determined to try hard with Bernie. She'd decided her dislike of
Bernie was not worth the cost of her marriage. She forced out a
smile at Bernie and the girl that came across as painful and felt as
though it did. Faking friendliness was not among Ruth's catalogue of
achievements. It was foreign to her nature to fake anything, and she
did it poorly.

"Glenda, I'd like you to
meet Ruth MacKellum. She's the wife of my new business partner, the
one I've been telling you about, Graham MacKellum."

"How d'you do?" Glenda
said coolly. She made no effort to fake friendliness.

Ruth refused to let the smile
slip though it felt more painful by the second. "I'm glad to
meet you, Glenda. What're the two of you having this evening,
Bernie?"

"Give us a few more
minutes, willya, Ruth? We haven't had a chance to look at our menus.
I've been too busy bending Glenda's ear with all our plans for
opening our own garage."

"Oh, I see. I'll give you
some more time then." The smile was frozen on now.

Graham had continued to hedge
when the subject of Bernie and their plans together came up. Ruth
hadn't liked to press him, fearing another scene. It was the first
she'd heard about their business plans, and it had to come from
Bernie Jansen. Of all people.

"Yeah," Bernie went
on, "Like I was telling Glenda, with Graham's expertise at
running a business and my mechanical experience, the way I figure it,
we can't miss. We'll start small, expand slowly, hire on more
mechanics in time. Sell gas and cigarettes and bottles of pop and
all that, too. Something for everything. It'll be a great little
racket."

Bernie wasn't talking to Ruth
anymore. He'd leaned back, slouched nonchalantly in his chair, one
arm extended across the back of the empty seat next to him. His head
was cocked back, looking out of half-lowered eyelids at Glenda, and
everything he said was for her benefit. Ruth was only an excuse to
repeat the spiel Glenda had heard at least once already.

Apparently, Glenda was capable
of smiling when she chose as she had no problem smiling at Bernie.
She listened raptly as though it was the first time she'd heard his
plans.

"Graham'll be the brains
behind the operation," Bernie said modestly, "and I'll
provide the brawn. We'll be equal partners, though."

"And where's the capital
coming from to open up?" Ruth couldn't stop herself from asking.

Bernie looked at her as though
surprised to see her still there.

"Well, you know. I'm sure
Graham 'n' you've talked it all over. Can't see that being a
problem. The banks'll be happy to help finance two enterprising
young gentlemen with a good name about town. And a decent
collateral," Bernie finished, smirking at his own joke.

Ruth knew exactly what he meant
by collateral, and she started a slow burn. But she held her peace
and turned to wait on the table next to Bernie and Glenda's.

Marshall Mitchum (otherwise
known as Mars), one of her regulars, a logging truck driver in his
early thirties, handed her his menu and looked straight into her eyes
with his own serious, brown ones.

"Are you ready to order,
Mars?" she asked. She was afraid the fake smile was permanent.
But now it felt angry, and she didn't want Mars to think she was
angry at him. None of this was his fault.

"You know you deserve
better, Ruth," he said boldly but quietly.

"What?" The shock of
his abrupt comment wiped the smile off her face.

"Sorry. Maybe it's not my
place to say so, but I couldn't help overhearing what Bernie was
saying. It's hard not to overhear Bernie when he opens his big, loud
trap. Big talk about opening a garage with your husband." Mars
snorted. "It's never gonna be more than talk. You know, don't
you, that rumour has it he and your husband have been spending a lot
of hours together? At the tavern. They don't always leave alone,
either."

Now Ruth was angry and at Mars.
And she didn't mind anymore if he knew it.

"No one wants to say things
like that to a woman about her husband, but you're too fine a person
to be treated that way. I don't believe in talking behind people's
backs. I thought it was time someone let you know the lie of the
land if you didn't already," Mars continued.

"I'm sure you mean well,
Mars, but if you don't believe in talking behind people's backs,
maybe it's not me you should be talking to. Maybe it's Graham."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean
it to hurt you. I'd never want to hurt you."

"You haven't hurt me, Mars.
I trust my husband. I know he's not perfect, but who is? He's
going through a rough patch, I admit, but he'll pull through. Now,
are you ready to order?"

Mars put in his order in a
thoroughly chastened manner.

Ruth couldn't imagine what he'd
hoped to accomplish through being the bearer of bad news and town
gossip. She was cold to him the next few weeks when he came into the
Morning Glory, but he bore with her coldness so humbly that she had
to forgive him.

He
probably did think he was doing the right thing
,
she told herself.

Whatever Mars had hoped to
accomplish, what he did accomplish was to plant unsettling imaginings
into Ruth's head.

More and more, Graham had been
going out in the evenings, coming in at all hours, hiding bottles
around the house where he thought his wife and his mother wouldn't
think to look.

The women carefully sidestepped
any discussion on the subject. Graham couldn't possibly have hoped
that either would be convinced when, in the evenings after supper, he
would mumble something about needing to get together with Bernie to
talk business and then not arrive back home until the wee hours.

Ruth had learned her lesson and
always pretended to be asleep when he came in. She feared above all
things to become a nagging, poison-tongued wife who drove her husband
away by her own doing. And she understood her own inability to
control her words.

But her lying-awake hours were
filled by envisioning Graham at the local joint with Bernie; Graham
talking cheap, familiar talk with girls like Glenda; Graham and
Bernie leaving to "drive the girls home"; Graham sitting in
the backseat with some girl, talking as big and as loudly as Bernie,
his arm across the girl's shoulders.

Her imagination never went any
farther than that. She knew Graham still loved her in his way, and
she trusted him to an extent. She was sure Graham would never let
anything go any farther than flirtatious talk and maybe an arm around
a waist; maybe at the very worst, a quick, guilty kiss. She was
sure it would never be any more than that.

But that was enough. Those
imaginings were enough to play themselves over and over and over in
her head until she feared for her sanity. She'd double her fist into
a ball and bite down on it to keep from screaming out loud.

But what could she do except
hang on and wait it out. If there were other girls, she knew they
meant nothing. Graham would come to his senses. He'd been through a
lot, after all. He'd find his way out. She just had to wait.

And pray. She prayed desperate,
anguished prayers and wrestled against insidious doubts that they
were never heard or would never be answered.

*
* *

Mars had been right when he'd
told Ruth that nothing would come of the plans Bernie and Graham had
to open their own business.

But plans had progressed so far
as for Graham to bring up the subject with Ruth finally.

"Y'know how we'd talked
before when we were gonna try and get a loan to buy Mom's house about
putting up the farm as collateral?" he said to her casually
after they'd gone to bed on one of his rare nights in.

"Yes?" Ruth said,
knowing what was coming and bracing herself.

"Well, I was thinking.
Y'know Bernie and I are talking about opening up our own garage. It
would be a great little racket. I'd handle all the business end of
things 'cause Bernie wouldn't have a clue about that, and he'd do all
the mechanical work. We'd sell gas and whatever else. Something for
everyone. We couldn't miss. I was thinking it would be a good idea
to work on getting that loan we'd talked about. We could use the
farm for collateral still."

The nearly verbatim speech that
she'd heard from Bernie's own lips not long ago made her want to
shake Graham.

"Are you crazy?" she
exploded.