The Journey Prize Stories 27 (16 page)

“Well,” I said, “we’ll have to meet her first before we can talk about that.”

“Y’know, your mother and me, we were together for fifty-three years,” my father reminded me, as he often did. “It’s not easy now. I get lonely.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I know you do.”

As soon as we hung up I realized I didn’t even know what this woman’s name was. But I also knew that if I called back to ask, my father wouldn’t remember it either. She was still just an idea in his head. Not a real woman.

I drove home on Sunday morning, a two-hour journey down the 401 from Toronto. It was a bright, sunny June morning, warm, and in a way it seemed a shame to be spending such a marvellous day behind the wheel. Michael and I had been separated for about half a year by this time (we were legally
common law for seven), yet I clung to the idea that, no matter what, we could still be friends, that his encounters and brief relationships with other men didn’t bother me, and that maybe one day we could get back together again. And so, in a completely thoughtless moment, the day after my father called, I handed the tickets over to him. “Here,” I said, “take whoever you want,” as if trying to make some kind of magnanimous gesture of open-mindedness, as if to say I was above petty jealousy and bitterness.

“You sure?” he said.

Michael was a tall, good-looking man with dark hair, dark eyes, and a dark band of stubble that no razor could ever come close to cleanly shaving off. But as soon as we broke up, he made a prodigal return to the gym and within a couple months lost the paunch I’d always known him to have, along with the scrawny arms and sagging glutes, and, at thirty-eight, he managed to reverse the flow of aging and become once again the handsome man with the winsome smile he was at thirty.

“Great!” he said, flashing teeth he’d also had professionally whitened, and I regretted it instantly.

When I got to town, I stopped at Zehrs and picked up an apple cinnamon coffee cake, plus a precooked barbeque chicken and a tub of coleslaw for lunch. Then it was back onto the highway and into the country, past newly planted fields of corn and hay and orchards of apple and pear trees in their long and perfect rows. When I at last pulled into the driveway, I saw that the front and back lawns were freshly cut (my father must have eagerly fired up the tractor mower, keen to spruce up the place) and that the barn doors stood open, revealing the
back end of the ’92 Dodge Caravan inside, which had not been driven since my father gave up his licence a year earlier. And I wondered what this woman—whatever her name was—would make of this scene: the tiny brick bungalow that was our house, the barn that had once held more than two thousand laying hens, the dilapidated greenhouse, and the surrounding acres where potatoes and green beans and onions and cucumbers had once been planted but which were now fallow fields of tall, monstrous-looking weeds. I wondered if she’d find all this somehow quaint, or if she’d want to run away, the way I did when I turned eighteen and set off for university. My father came to the door. He was wearing his usual blue jeans and a short-sleeved plaid shirt—his Sunday shirt—and I could see that he had shaved. “Oh good,” he said as he opened the screen door, “you got cake,” forgetting that he was the one who asked me to pick it up in the first place.

In the fridge I found a casserole dish of rigatoni in tomato sauce—“noodles,” my father called it—that one of the PSWs had likely made the day before. I heated it up in the microwave and we ate that along with the chicken and coleslaw I’d brought. “Y’know,” my father said when we sat at the kitchen table, “she says she’s looking forward to meeting me.” Like the other day, he sounded proud, the way he reported this bit of information, as though no one had ever said that to him before, and when I think about it and the solitary life my father had always led, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. And then he said this odd thing: “The way she talks, she sounds like she’s always crying.” I could tell he found this trait both attractive and reminiscent of my mother. A lachrymose woman, my mother wept not only at sad movies but also,
somewhat disturbingly, whenever she saw scenes on the news of natural disasters, war, or violent crime.

“You see,” my father said, waving a forkful of rigatoni, “
you
got a partner, so why shouldn’t
I
have a partner?”

I didn’t entirely follow my father’s logic (what if I had a disease?); I also didn’t tell him about the breakup. Although he’d met Michael many times over the years, my father and I weren’t close and I hardly ever told him anything related to my personal life. I also offer this as an example of the recent changes in my father’s diction. I’d never heard him use the word
partner
before; usually, he only ever said
friend
(as in, “Your
friend
there, does he
have
to come to the funeral?”), as if the word were something unpalatable he was forced to chew.

Shortly after three I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. We were both watching TV, my father and I, and when I went to the window I caught a brief glimpse of a young woman behind the wheel of a silver SUV and the shadowy figure of an old woman beside her.

“Company’s here,” my father said, clicking off the TV, and together we stepped out onto the porch. “Hello, hello,” he called out, waving happily, as he went round to the passenger side of the vehicle.

“Hi, I’m Lisa,” said the young woman when she slid out of the driver’s seat. “I’m in on Tuesdays and Thursdays for your dad.”

Since my mother died, I’d met several of these personal support workers. I’d met Courtney and Brittany (ridiculous pop-star names) and Stephanie, but it was the first time I was meeting Lisa.

“Isn’t it exciting?” she said, leaning in conspiratorially. “I told Barbara all about your dad. Y’know, I just thought they’re
both around the same age, they’ve both lost a spouse, they’re both lonely. So I figure, why not?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling politely, observing up close that this woman was probably half my age, a kid of maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, a recent grad in social work no doubt. “Yes, why not.”

“So I said to Barbara, ‘There’s someone you just
got
to meet,’ and she told me she was
so
excited after they talked on the phone. ‘He sounds like a
real
sweetheart,’ she kept saying on the car ride over. Look at her, here she comes, all dolled up.”

And there she was, being led by the elbow by my smiling father, not at all the thin, wiry widow I’d expected, but a plump, regal-looking woman, like a dowager of some distinction. She was dressed in a white skirt and a matching white jacket over top of a white blouse flecked with tiny blue polka dots. A string of pearls hung from her neck and a pillar of tightly curled white hair crowned her head. “Hello, luv,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m Barbara.” And I heard what it was that made my father think she sounded like she was crying: it was the warble in her voice. She was English.

“Well, I’m off. Barbara—” Lisa called. “I’ll be back at five, okay?” She turned to me and whispered, “Let’s hope it works out,” and made a fingers-crossed gesture as she climbed back into her tank-like Ford Explorer.

“What a lovely home you have,” Barbara said when we entered the living room.

“My wife and I built it,” my father said, aiming her in the direction of the couch as he took his usual place in the armchair. “Have a seat.”

“So …” I said, clapping my hands together. “Coffee?”

“Tea, dear,” she said. “I’d love a cup of tea—with milk and sugar.”

“The usual for me,” my father said, referring to the thick, syrupy black coffee he consumed throughout the day.

As I poured water into the kettle and got the coffee maker going, I felt compelled to make as much noise as is possible when preparing coffee and boiling water so that I didn’t have to listen to their small talk. Perhaps it was because it embarrassed me that my father was on a date, and because I found the whole thing sad and symptomatic of the many changes he was undergoing. For the first time I wondered what my mother would make of all this, but just as quickly I saw her dismissively wave away the whole thing and tell my father, “Ach! Do what you want.” Although whether she meant that, I couldn’t be sure. I also realized I was in the uncomfortable and unnatural position of being my father’s chaperone, and I did not look forward to the conversation that would follow once Barbara left, the talk my father and I would have about her suitability as his bride and what she could bring to the marriage table, and the fierce quarrel that would inevitably ensue.

They were both laughing at something when I came back into the living room, and for a moment I caught the glimmer of something in their eyes, like a look of recognition—or relief: something that said,
So glad to meet you. At last
. “Did you put in sugar, luv?” Barbara said as I set a tray bearing two cups of coffee and one of tea onto the coffee table. She smiled at my father. “I have a weakness for sugar, you should know. And cream. And wine. Yet I’m as healthy as a horse, I’m told.”

“Me, I love my coffee,” my father said, raising his own cup as if making a toast.

In a way she did look like a bird, I thought, as I settled into the armchair opposite my father. A large, flightless bird, like a turkey, the way her neck was stooped and the thready skin beneath her chin flapped. She also had a long, beaky nose and small dark eyes, and I wondered if she’d been pretty when she was younger.

“So you’re from England,” I said, after a moment’s silence. She was sipping her tea and without turning her head she swivelled those avian eyes in my direction and smirked, as if what I’d said was the kind of banal observation she’d heard countless times and might have hoped I was above making. “How long you been in Canada?” I said, flustered, not knowing what else to say.

“Very good tea, dear, thank you.” She set her cup on its saucer. “More than forty years, to answer your question.”

“Really,” I said reflexively, and glanced up at the little clock on the wood-panelled hi-fi. The play would be well under way by now, I thought, and I wondered whom Michael had gone with, not that I knew any of the contingent of men in his life now; they were all just a slew of names to me, interchangeable.

“And before that we were in South Africa, Robert and I.” Barbara turned to my father. “You remember Robert?” she said. “I told you about him. On the phone?”

“Your husband you’re talking about,” my father said, midway between a statement and a question.

“We were there for several years,” Barbara said, fixing her gaze back onto me. “He was a banker, you see. But you can imagine it. The political situation … the strife …” She shook
her head disdainfully. “So when a similar position opened up in Toronto, naturally he seized it.” She picked up her tea again, but instead of drinking from it, she cupped it in her palm and gazed at the picture window as if she were staring at a photo from long ago. “Nineteen sixty-eight it was when we came here.”

“That was the year me and my wife built this house,” my father said. “Nineteen sixty-eight.”

“And it certainly is a lovely home,” she said again, gazing disapprovingly about the room as though mentally disposing of the old curtains and wallpaper and putting up everything new. “But I had no idea how far out in the country you are. I said to Lisa, ‘Where
are
you taking me?’ That’s certainly going to make it difficult for this to work out since neither of us drives anymore.”

For this to work out
. The words echoed in my head and, like a stalled truck, sat there.

“But why did you give up your licence, Bert?”

“I get disorientated,” my father said. “One time I was coming home from”—he gestured vaguely to the corner of the room—“what’s it called now? The mall over here? And I ended up way the heck over by Highway 20. I said to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And that’s not the first time it happened either. I was supposed to go in to write the test, but I just figured, ach, forget it.”

“So you’re at home all the time now,” Barbara said.

I saw then what Lisa must have meant by “dolled up”: the subtle application of a faint but sparkly blue eyeshadow, nails that were painted a dazzling red; even her toenails were painted. The complete opposite of my mother, I thought. She
was never one for cosmetics of any sort, my mother; occasionally she’d apply a clear polish to her nails, but that was the extent of it. Farm work was ill-suited for such extravagances. Barbara’s well-pedicured toes reminded me of my mother as she lay dying in the hospital, comatose from all the morphine they kept pumping into her: when the nurse pulled away the blanket to point out the mottling that had started in my mother’s bloated feet and legs—the sign that death wouldn’t be long in coming—I saw her long and filthy toenails, chipped and uncared for, and a strange and inexplicable combination of shame and sadness welled up within me.

“I’m stuck here,” my father said, throwing his hands up in the air.

Barbara shook her head. “You must get so lonely,” she said, as though she’d stumbled upon the thing that linked them together and that, hand in hand, they could conquer.

“Oh, I got the girls coming by every day,” my father said, downplaying any suggestion of loneliness. “They bring me my groceries and do the cooking and the cleaning. And I keep busy. There’s always grass to cut, and I do a little gardening in the greenhouse.”

“Oh, I know all about loneliness,” Barbara insisted. “I suppose this young man doesn’t know anything about
that
”—she smiled wistfully in my direction—“but thank goodness for my Lisa is all I’ve got to say. I just wouldn’t be able to manage without her. She’s a wonderful darling. Bathes me in the morning, makes me something to eat. Makes me my tea.” She sighed a little, as if the occasion called for it. “I’d die if it weren’t for her.”

—

Somehow we got onto the subject of church. Barbara said she belonged to an Anglican one in town, that it was walking distance from her house, and she wondered if we belonged to a church as well (we did, a Lutheran one, but we never went). She talked about her daughter, a woman who lived in Calgary with her second husband but seldom called home. “You’re lucky to have this young man living nearby,” Barbara said, once again smiling in my direction. “Angie wouldn’t care if I were dead or alive.” And then she sipped her tea, no longer delicately like before, but greedily, hungrily.