Road Ends (21 page)

If only
. The two most pointless words in the English language. If only it hadn’t been Rob, who’d had more to drink than any of them, who volunteered to go home and get some margarine. If only he hadn’t then decided to drive back in his father’s car to speed things up. If only Tom had gone with him. He might not have been able to persuade Rob to walk back, because when he was drunk Rob wasn’t good at listening to reason, but at least he’d have been able to say, Hey man, slow down. We’re coming to the bend. Slow down.

The worst thing had not been the child’s body, which was almost unmarked, or Rob’s face, which was so shocked, so white, that he’d looked as if at any moment he would pass out. It had been the way the child’s mother, sitting in the dust at the side of the road, cradling the little girl in her arms, kept rocking her, kissing her, telling her everything was all right, it had just been a little bump—“Don’t cry, sweetheart, don’t cry”—when the child was not crying and it was absolutely, unmistakably clear from the way her head lolled whenever her mother moved her that she was dead.

Because of the blizzard no newspapers had made it as far north as Struan for the past three days but Tom kept a copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
in the cab of the snowplough in case of just such an eventuality and he took it with him into Harper’s to read over lunch. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to read it again—when they’d studied it in high school Rob had summed it up as the longest sermon ever written and Tom had pretty much agreed—but he needed something dark to match his mood and the only alternatives in his bookcase apart from books about airplanes were
Moby-Dick
, which just plain had too many words in it, and
Jude the Obscure
, which was so depressing it had made him feel suicidal even when he was sixteen.

There were half a dozen people in Harper’s, including a big blond guy sitting at the back in the half-booth across from the one Tom considered his own, but he was reading last week’s copy of the
Temiskaming Speaker
and didn’t look the gabby type, so that was okay. Tom had read the
Speaker
twice already. It was full of the upcoming winter carnival: dog-sled races on the lake, speed skating competitions, hockey games, ice sculptures—fun and games for all. The whole idea made Tom so tired he could hardly hold his head up. Photos of the seven girls competing for the title of Carnival Queen adorned the front page (“Seven Pretty Young Ladies Competing,” the headline said) and they made him tired too—his interest in girls seemed to have vanished along with everything else. So now I’m a eunuch, he thought. The idea didn’t bother him much.

He took off his coat and hat and gloves and tossed them into the corner, settled himself into his place and opened
The Grapes of Wrath
.

“To the red and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows …
”

A hand Tom didn’t recognize set a glass of water down in front of him.

“Hi,” the owner of the hand said. “What can I get you?”

He didn’t recognize the voice either. What was a stranger doing waiting on tables in Harper’s? Then he remembered: Jenny Bates had left, gone to Calgary. This would be the new waitress.

“A hot beef sandwich, fries and coffee,” he said, not looking at her. It wasn’t polite, but she needed to know from the outset that he didn’t welcome chit-chat.

“Oh, hi, it’s you!” she said. “Did you get home all right that night with all that food on the sled?”

Tom’s head jerked up. It was her—the Amazon—the nightmare from the grocery store who’d tried to force carrots on him.

“I had to spend the
night
there!” she said, happily rattling on. “It was my last day and I was so bored in that job I was counting the
seconds
and then that stupid storm came along and my brother couldn’t come to get me and I had to spend the
night
! Anyway”—she grinned at him—“it’s great here. I love it! I’ll get your lunch, hot beef, fries and coffee coming up!” She bounced off in the direction of the kitchen.

Tom stared at the table, incredulous. It was unbelievable! Not only was Harper’s the only place to eat for thirty miles, it was his one remaining refuge. He couldn’t go home because Sherry the Slut would be there, he couldn’t go to the library because Reverend Thomas might be there, and there was nowhere, literally nowhere, else to go.

Calm down, he told himself. You’re overreacting. Just ignore her. She cannot make you talk to her. Read your book.

He pulled
The Grapes of Wrath
closer and leaned over it, elbows on either side, head in hands, like he was studying for some critical exam and must on no account be disturbed.

“
To the red and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows …
”

A bowl of coleslaw landed on the table in front of him.

“Our extra-special Coleslaw Deluxe!” the Amazon announced proudly.

Tom stared at it: bits of raw vegetables sticking out of a thick white goo.

“It’s on the house!” the Amazon said. “It’s our new campaign to help everybody in Struan keep healthy over the winter. For the next two weeks everybody who orders a meal gets free coleslaw thrown in!” She was beaming at him. He wasn’t looking at her but he could feel the beam.

His mouth had gone dry. He licked his lips. He hated all vegetables without exception and he hated goo even more. “I don’t want it,” he said, his voice scraping out.

“You haven’t tried it yet! You’ll love it! It’s got apple and cabbage and carrots and onion and chopped walnuts and homemade mayo. I made it myself and Mrs. Harper thinks it’s fabulous!”

“I don’t want it. I hate coleslaw.”

“This is absolutely nothing like normal coleslaw! I promise! You’ll
love
it! And it’s really, really good for you!”

He could leave, or he could throw it at her and then leave; those were the only options.

“Excuse me,” a voice said.

The big blond guy in the booth across the aisle was leaning sideways, trying to catch the waitress’s attention. Tom could see him in the periphery of his vision.

“Could you come here for a minute, please?”

“What?” the waitress demanded. The cheerful tone disappeared as if she’d chopped it off with an axe.

“Could you come here, please?”

Out of the corner of his eye Tom saw her go. She stood in front of the man, hands on hips. The man said something to her in an undertone.

“I wasn’t!” the waitress said hotly.

The man said something else.

“Well, he doesn’t have to eat it! I’m just offering it! Mrs. Harper said I could!”

The man’s voice became fractionally louder—he sounded as if he was holding onto his temper by a rapidly fraying thread. “She didn’t say you could ram it down people’s throats! Take it
away
! Bring him what he
asked
for!”

The waitress spun on her heel, marched over, whipped the coleslaw from under Tom’s nose and marched out. The kitchen door swung shut.

Tom glanced at the man and inadvertently met his eyes. The man looked embarrassed. He gave a slight shrug and said, “Just ignore her. She’ll probably get the sack in a day or two.” He went back to his newspaper.

Tom felt dazed. He wasn’t sure what had happened. It seemed as if he’d been rescued by a total stranger. Was that right? If so, had he looked as if he needed rescuing? Did he look that bad, that near the brink? Because obviously, if that were the case—if a complete stranger felt he had to intervene on his behalf when a waitress brought him an unasked-for salad—then he mustn’t come here anymore. It wasn’t fair on other customers. He’d have to go straight home when he finished his shift.

The thought appalled him. He realized suddenly how much he depended on Harper’s. It provided human contact without making any demands on him. Going to a café and having something to eat—that was a normal thing to do, it made him feel normal. And the irony was he’d thought he was doing better over the past few weeks. The feeling of balancing on a knife edge had eased; things didn’t get to him as much as they had.

The waitress set his hot beef sandwich down in front of him, went across to the counter, brought back the coffee pot, poured his coffee, set down the cream.

“Say if you want more coffee,” she said. Her tone was sulky, like a kid who’s been told off.

The hot beef sandwich looked just as usual but he was no longer hungry. He sat motionless, listening to the background chatter around him. More people were coming in, taking advantage of the clear roads, seeking company after a week of enforced isolation. The waitress sped back and forth to the kitchen. She moved so fast he could feel the air stir in her wake.

The stranger in the booth opposite stood up—again Tom saw him in the periphery of his vision—and started pulling on his coat. When the Amazon passed on her way to the kitchen he caught her arm.

“Six o’clock?” he asked.

“Half past.” She sounded sullen. “I have to tidy up and help wash the dishes.”

“Okay. I’ll be back then.”

She started to turn away but he caught her again and said in an undertone, “And don’t
bully
people. They don’t like it.”

She shrugged him off.

It wasn’t until the outer door of the café swung shut behind the stranger that the words and the tone in which they were spoken sank in and Tom realized their meaning. Then it was like breaking the surface after a long dive, relief like oxygen flooding through his veins.

The way the man spoke to the waitress—that was not a tone you used with a stranger, it was a tone you used with someone you knew very well who irritated the shit out of you on a regular basis. He was coming to collect her at the end of her shift. “My brother couldn’t come and get me,” she’d said, referring to the night at Marshall’s Grocery. He was her
brother
! The way they responded to each other—instantly annoyed—obviously they were siblings; he of all people should have recognized that. They even looked alike, both of them big-boned and blond. The guy was quite a lot older, mid-thirties, whereas the girl was in her late teens, but there were bigger gaps than that in Tom’s own family.

“Don’t bully people,” the man had said. “They don’t like it.” “
They
don’t like it,” not “
He
doesn’t like it.” Which meant—this was the critical bit, and Tom examined it from all angles to be sure he wasn’t kidding himself—that the reason he had intervened when she was going on about the coleslaw was not that Tom looked as if he was about to fly apart but because she was always going on about bloody vegetables and it drove him, her brother, insane. Tom was so relieved he felt like laughing. God help the poor guy: she was even worse than Meg.

He started eating his hot beef sandwich. It was no longer hot, but he didn’t care; it was excellent anyway. He watched the girl surreptitiously as he ate. Her bounce had come back now that her brother had gone. She was chatting to everybody as she steamed by. Most of them were obediently eating the coleslaw, laughing about it. “Now you eat that up!” he heard her say. The door opened and a woman came in with a little kid bundled up in a snowsuit. The waitress squatted down in front of him and said, “Well, hi, handsome, how are you today? You’re all snowy—is it snowing out there?” and the kid’s face lit up. You could see he thought she was the best thing since sliced bread.

She wasn’t really that bad, Tom decided. He recalled that she’d offered him the sled at the grocery store without him asking for it, which was a point in her favour. Yes, she was irritating, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He could put up with that.

“More coffee?” she asked a minute later as she whizzed past his table.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Thanks.”

There is a law of nature—or at any rate of human nature—that says you should never, ever, allow yourself to think for a single minute that things are finally getting better because Fate just won’t be able to resist cutting you off at the knees.

At five o’clock that afternoon his mother appeared in the doorway of the living room looking wild, her hair all over the place, her face white as chalk. “He’s gone!” she said.

Tom lowered last week’s paper. “Who is?”

“The baby! Dominic!” Her eyes were wild too, ringed with dark circles.

“Where did you see him last?” Tom said.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I had him but now he’s gone!”

“He won’t have gone far, Mum. He can’t even crawl.”

“But he’s gone! He’s gone!”

Adam emerged from his lair beside Tom’s chair. A waft of stale urine came with him. “He’s there,” he said, pointing at a pile of blankets on the sofa. As he spoke the blankets twitched and a very small foot appeared.

“Oh my darling!” their mother said. “Oh my darling. My darling.” She picked up the pile of blankets and buried her face in it.

Tom watched her uneasily. Maybe she’d been like this after the rest of them were born, but it definitely seemed to be getting a bit extreme.

Adam was standing watching her, his fists tucked up under his chin.