Sweet Life (3 page)

Even during his impending demise, Bert had taken charge. A lapsed Presbyterian, he forbade any clergy, prayers or hymns during his funeral. His coffin would remain closed; the last glimpse anyone would have of him would be a photograph: a healthy man in his prime, smart in a suit and tartan tie.

During the funeral Angie furtively reached behind to scratch through the stiff, black dress Bernice had bought for her. Bernice used a steady supply of tissues and pushed one at Angie, who accepted it with the implied rebuke: Why haven’t you cried, what’s the matter with you? Angie twisted the scrap in her hand and forced herself to listen to the eulogy.

“…made his home on Vancouver Island...successful….”

The monotonous drone snaked across her shoulders. She wasn’t aware of her surroundings again until a locally famous tenor started on
Danny Boy
. Johnny wept unabashedly while Angie stared at his beefy hands resting across the red and green kilt. She imagined those hands squeezing bread dough; the way Bert’s hands had squeezed commission cheques.

She could ask Johnny to take her to Scotland with him. She saw herself in a white apron selling shortbread and at twilight, walking down a cobblestone street to her own honeysuckled cottage. If she rushed home now and packed a suitcase, she’d be ready in time. After all, what would she be leaving? A house, too large for one person, and a sister, also too large.

After the funeral the mourners huddled beneath umbrellas in the cemetery while a cuffing wind flung sporadic rain against their legs. A stiff spray of red roses covered the casket; the sodden ends of its long ribbons sputtered against the wood. Michael fiddled with a tape recorder because the man hired to play the bagpipes had come down with the flu and had sent a tape. The forlorn notes of the absent bagpipe coiled about Angie’s legs and when she tottered, Johnny steadied her with one hand under her arm.

“I could feel my brother’s spirit rush past me on its way to heaven,” he averred later by the coffee urn at the reception.

Angie, who found her own cup and saucer heavy, didn’t think to remind him of Bert’s apostasy.

Johnny looked down at her, the wee mite he likely wouldn’t see again, the girl distance had kept him from knowing. At her wedding he’d thought her too young to be a bride and now too young to be a widow, although she’d managed to make herself look matronly the way she’d clipped her hair to the top of her head.

Michael appeared at Johnny’s elbow and in a low voice reminded him it was time to leave for the airport. When Johnny hugged Angie in good-bye, she forgot to ask if he would take her with him; after he disappeared up the stairs, she forgot he’d been there.

Bernice was busy filling Angie’s plate with a suitable assortment of nourishing food. Her dark dress accentuated her hourglass figure and, even with her face mottled from weeping, she still managed to look alluring.

Sexual attraction had not been the reason Bert proposed to Angie. A rigid believer in forthrightness, he made it clear that he didn’t want a wife who attracted other men. “You have other, more valuable attributes.” It took several years for her to realize he’d been talking about her sexual naivety.

Mrs. Warner, an elderly widow, compressed her lips and doggedly threaded her way through the mourners toward Angie, who rushed up the stairs to the vestibule where the coats hung on wire hangers. A man in black lurking by the exit hurried to take her teacup, helped her into her coat and opened the door.

She stepped into a dull drizzle, snapped open her umbrella. A spurt of energy enabled her to walk briskly, determined to reach home before Bernice commandeered someone’s car and
began searching for her. Meddlesome, tiresome Bernice couldn’t
understand how there was a limit to her usefulness.

Angie strode along the wet pavement between two stands of firs and didn’t notice the rain had stopped until a blue, Stellar Jay swooped across her path.

“Life goes on,” Mrs. Warner had told her at the graveside.

What was it about her life with Bert that could survive?

She hurried along the gravel drive leading from the paved road to her house, passed the double garage standing on its own and facing the road. Inside the house she dropped her wet things, took an open bottle of Bert’s favourite Scotch from the cabinet and filled a glass halfway.

Upstairs, she yanked the dress from her shoulders and heaved it across the bedroom. She slid into a cotton nightgown, dropped onto one of two straight-backed chairs and raised the glass to the wedding photo on the dresser.

“Here’s to you, Bert.”

The drink tasted like gasoline, but she kept sipping at it. She was asleep when the phone rang. She listened to the answering machine pick up, and then lurched across the room in time to interrupt it. “Bernice I’m going to bed.”

And she did collapse, struggling to haul the duvet over her shoulders. The phone rang again, a muffled sound travelling through water. Angie slept through the night.

~

Next morning Bernice arrived early,
armed not only with leftovers from the reception, but a stoic resolve to steer Angie through the roily waters of grief. Bernice found her sitting on the back patio with a crocheting magazine and a pot of tea.

In a voice Bernice later described to Michael as sounding nothing like her sister’s, Angie stated she had no time for visits, she was starting the to-do list Bert left her.

Item #1:
Wash or dry-clean each item of clothing but not my underwear, which you will throw out.

It took a week before Angie finished fitting polo shirts, buttoned cardigans, pleated slacks and brown loafers into several cartons. These she stacked inside Bert’s SUV and dropped off at the Sally Ann. She’d dealt with Item #3 when she mailed Bert’s gold watch and tie pins to Johnny.

Next, she packed the books in the living room, beginning with the six-volume set of
A History of the English Speaking People.
She fanned through the volumes first, not to look for hidden money, but because she’d a vague notion Bert could’ve left something between the pages, a few words meant only for her.

She’d no reason to believe this. During their courting and marriage, he hadn’t once copied out a poem or left her any scribbled endearments, so it wasn’t a surprise the history yielded nothing, as did
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
and the
How to Make the Money You Always Dreamed Of Making.

Angie filled the shelves with her own books, beginning with books by Daphne Du Maurier. Bert had made all decorating decisions because she was too young to understand good taste. Throughout their marriage she continued to stand a distance behind him on the road to maturity, not permitted to make decisions more pressing than the arrangement of the kitchen cupboards.

During the past two years she’d secretly considered leaving. Pack her things and go. But to where? Her parents were dead. She couldn’t go to Bernice; she would’ve connived for reconciliation. And Angie had become so firmly stitched into the weave of Bert’s life that her only friends had first been his.

While rifling through closets, she came across boxes stashed away throughout the years. These held her needlework projects: crocheting, knitting and cross stitching, all shrouded within layers of tissue paper. “That stuff,” Bert would sneer, believing anything made by hand to be worthless.

Angie opened the boxes. Doilies long hidden in the darkness floated like bubbles of surf. Whites and creams shone next to vibrant mauves and pinks edged with crimson and fuchsia roses. Her hands tingled when she bore the doilies from room to room, deciding where to put them.

The last room Angie looked into was Bert’s study. For a full minute, she stared at the computer monitor where he would spend much of his time working budgets, keeping track of markets and planning her weekly to-do lists. Over the monitor she draped a pink doily then snatched it back, left the room and shut the door.

It was from behind this door four days later, she heard him call out. She froze, the familiar dread clutching her arms. “You’re not there, Bert, you’re not.” And then, unconsciously quoting her late mother: “And that’s the end of that.”

He didn’t call her again. He showed up.

One evening, after showering and combing out her long hair, she re-entered the bedroom to see the silhouette of his shoulder beneath the bed covers. She fled to the bathroom and locked the door. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she yelled, “You get out of the bed, Bert, and don’t come back.”

When two men arrived and removed the king-sized bed from the house, she quickly shut the door, afraid Bert would somehow leap from the mattress and hurl himself inside.

The first night in her new bed she dreamt she cradled something in her lap, while stitching with a darning needle and heavy black thread. She awoke, shivering, with the realization that it was Bert’s shrunken head, and she’d been sewing his mouth shut.

Angie didn’t dare admit any of this to Bernice. After their parents died together in a car accident, Bernice went into therapy and came out of it considering herself to be an expert on grief. She was already launching an assault on Angie’s refusal to communicate her feelings.

A month after Bert’s burial, she insisted she and Angie resume their ritual Saturday morning visits, and arrived at her doorstep bringing pastry from the coffee shop where she worked as baker. Angie led Bernice to the kitchen, using the hallway opposite the living room because she wasn’t yet ready to face Bernice about having replaced the hunter green furniture with a pink chintz sofa and love seat.

They drank tea and talked about the wet weather while Angie waited for Bernice to manoeuvre the conversation toward the real estate market.

“You’d get a good price for this place.”

Angie saw a future of Saturday teas aimed at her like bullets bursting from an automatic weapon. “I'm not selling.” Giving up her home would complete Item #17 on Bert’s list. Using his life insurance, she’d paid off the mortgage and, if she was frugal, she could live on the remainder for a time. His investments and bank pension were for her old age, a long time into the future.

“I know Bert wanted you to sell the house.”

“You seem to know a lot about what my husband wanted.”

Bernice stopped chewing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m going to find a job.”

“You’ve never worked.”

“Yes, I have.”

“A bowling alley when you were a kid. And all you have is high school.”

“All you have is high school.”

“I have a trade. I’m an expert in -.”

“Making dough.” Angie automatically finished the tired joke. Through the window facing the backyard, she watched the red arbutus shake in a sudden gust of wind.

Bernice wiped chocolate smears from her fingers. “They say after you’ve lost someone, you shouldn’t make important decisions for at least a year. Because you’re not yourself.” She dropped the napkin and gave the teapot an experimental shake. “You are grieving? In your own way?”

“It’s empty.”

“Oh, my dear, of course it is.”

Angie pushed herself from the table. “The
pot’s
empty. Give it to me; I’ll make more tea.”

~

Ed Whyte, owner and manager of Whyte’s Groceries,
positioned himself with a clear view to the door and stood next to a cart of honeydew melons. What had Bert Buchanan told him years before at the bank?
I’m sorry, but we are unable to accommodate your request for a loan.

And now Mr. Big Shot Buchanan’s wife was coming to him for a favour. Well, what goes around comes around. Ignoring the arthritic ache in his knuckles, Ed squeezed a melon.

The electronic bell rang and there she was, hesitating by the magazine rack. She wasn’t a bad looking woman, though he preferred more on top. The collar points of her grey print dress aimed straight at her narrow chest. After staring toward the rear of the store, she lifted her chin and headed for his office.

Ed took his time emptying the cart before he, too, marched into his office, perched his skinny bottom on the edge of the swivel chair as though pressing matters could cause him to fly off. “Good morning.” He took a ballpoint pen and worked its end with his thumb like a man priming a pump.

“I need a job.” Now why had she blurted it out?

Ed scowled at his desk as though the correct response could be found in a stack of papers.

Was he having a bad day? Angie shouldn’t have come. No one would hire her. “That is, if you have one.”

Ed looked up. He would drag out the interview before tossing a rejection onto her lap. Sure the woman was a widow, but she was a Buchanan. And he resented being asked to hire someone unattractive. Why did she wear such awful clothes? Maybe Mr. Big Shot had been too stingy to give her money for nice things. Ed had given his wife nice things, yet she’d still left him.

When he met Angie’s eyes, he saw how right now, he was all she had. “I could use a cashier three days a week. I don’t suppose you know how to work a till.”

Both surprised, they reached across the desk and shook hands.

~

Angie began training the following Thursday.
She checked out groceries while standing at the till for seven and a half hours. Once home, she warmed herself near the fire in the living room and drank a glass of Scotch, which no longer tasted like gasoline.