Waiting for Joe (15 page)

Alfred digs too deeply with the paddle, mining the water and bringing it up in splashes, a stroke that soon has his back in stitches. It’s not like the simple efficient J stroke Joe had learned years ago at church camp, but it’s his. Early in life he’d learned that if he only waited and watched long enough he’d find the answers to any questions he might have, and he’d learned his paddle stroke from watching the canoeists going along on the river. As the shoreline recedes he knows the congregation is gathering around the tables spread with food, Joe and Crystal among them, their hands entwined. It’s a love feast, Dad. Stay, join us, Mr. Beaudry. Joe’s and Crystal’s beatific smiles and voices like balloons sailing right on over his head.

When he’d seen that arm of rocks reaching far out from the shore he knew it was a good place to fish, and he’d tucked into the bay on the other side of it, fished there until the baptism party was over. He should have been able to figure that one out. Crystal, coming round to the house with Joe more and more often. He might have guessed there was something behind Joe’s willingness to make the outing a weekend camping trip, and not the usual rushed affair to put the canoe in the water for half a day.

In the evening Joe poked at the campfire hard, and sparks flew up all around him.

Alfred waited until the sparks had arced out over the
lake, and disappeared on the surface of the water. “So why did you want to be dunked?”

“Because,” Joe said, which was what he said when he didn’t want to answer. And then he heaved the stick into the fire and turned to him. “Because I wanted to rededicate my life to God.”

“With a public spectacle.”

“Dad, Dad, Dad.” Joe shook his head and surprised Alfred by laughing, as though Alfred was both incorrigible and lovable at the same time. As though he was a child.

“My baptism is a public declaration that I intend to serve the Lord. You may as well know, Dad. Crystal and I are engaged.” Then he looked straight at him, his pale eyes steady. “We plan on going to a Bible college in the States. We’ll be away four years, at least.”

The words were a cement truck hurtling toward Alfred. “But I thought you wanted to be a teacher. That’s what you said when you went to university.” Joe’s eyes slid away, but not before Alfred had seen what he took to be regret. Joe, Joe, Joe, he thought. Someone’s got you by the short hairs.

“The time hasn’t been wasted. I can get credit for most of my courses. But I’m not sure yet where my studies at the Bible college will take me. Crystal and I want to be open to whatever God has planned. Who knows, maybe I’ll go into the ministry.”

“Become a preacher?”

When Joe nodded, Alfred thought, Crystal, the church mouse. She was bright-eyed enough, and the daughter of the deacon. A man who had taken a special interest in Joe. The times she’d come to the house Alfred hadn’t been able to hear most of what she had to say, as her voice was so
soft. He’d stopped asking her to repeat herself when he saw that it took a considerable amount of courage for her to speak in the first place. But he was certain Crystal was behind the plan for Joe to leave the country and study the Bible.

“When is this going to happen?” he asked.

“As soon as we’ve both got enough money to cover the first year. Maybe sooner. Crystal’s father wants to help us out. And there are others who want to support us too,” Joe said, and Alfred had thought, well, don’t expect the same from me.

Voices grow louder along the hall now, and he hears the squeak of shoes when someone hurries past his room. It’s the hearse, going to attend to the yeller. When he opens his eyes they come to rest on the picture above the bed. A buck and doe step out from a forest at sunset, the sky a pink wash of colour, as it was when he and Joe returned to camp after the baptism party. He’d been lucky fishing that day. Three walleyes in half a dozen casts and then nothing after that. He’d fried the fish in butter, toasted bread over the fire. “There may not be enough here to feed a crowd of thousands, but there’s enough for a baptism supper,” he remembers saying.

“Let’s just say there is a God. And let’s say God wants you to do this. How do you know?” he’d asked Joe. “Did you hear him say so?”

“I don’t need to hear, or see anything. I just know,” Joe replied. Then he went walking along the shore in search of flat stones that he sent skipping out across the lake, and Alfred thought his heart would stop beating.

* * *

Joe’s likely downstairs now, watching hockey, Alfred tells himself, forgetting that Joe is away and had just called. Laurie is watching one of her TV programs in the bedroom, or she’s at the dining room table with her laptop, her eyes fixed on the screen, her periodic tapping at the keyboard telling him she’s playing a game, or researching vitamins and minerals, something to put more zip in his step. Or she’s talking to people—sometimes when he goes across the room, a person will peer at him from the computer screen, looking like they’ve just seen a ghost. Laurie laughing then, saying, they can see you, Dad. She tells the startled person on the screen, “That’s just my father.”

And he’d come to think of himself as being her father, too. Although the first time he’d seen her, he’d wanted to shut the door in her face. Verna’s sisters had said they often saw the girl going about town with her grandmother. Unfortunate, they said. A bit rough around the edges. But they held no grudge against Laurie who’d been an innocent bystander. Alfred came to agree, but it was another thing to see the girl on his veranda. He’d known immediately who she was, all that reddish-blonde curly hair, like her grandmother, Ivy, and his impulse had been to slam the door.

“Mr. Beaudry?” Laurie asked as though she suspected she’d got the wrong house.

Yes, he was that. He was Mr. Beaudry. Her jade green eyelids fluttered. Where had she got her height? he wondered, her grandmother and mother were half-pints. “And you must be the Rasmussen girl.”

“I’m Laurie,” she said nodding. “I’d like to talk to you about my mother. But I’ll understand if you don’t want to.”

“There isn’t much to say,” Alfred replied, his apprehension somewhat eased by her hesitance. Your silly chit of a mother couldn’t decide what to do with you. Whether to give you away to a good home, or to keep you. And so she tried to take you with her. And Verna went after her down to the river, to the nest of trampled grass she’d come across during one of her walks. Likely she thought that’s where your mother had gone and went down there, only to see her go flying off the bridge.

“That’s okay,” Laurie said in a way that suggested she didn’t expect anything more from him.

She turned to leave, and Alfred found himself calling out. “We have a picture of her, taken on the day she died.”

But when he went inside the house and looked in all the usual places, he couldn’t find it.

“Joe should be home soon, he’ll know where it is,” he told her and invited her to wait.

Laurie perched on a veranda step and Alfred sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, listening while she talked. She was like a cecropia moth in the way she was folded up into herself, her body covered in layers of clothes the colours of rust and earth, the peasant skirt meeting the toes of her crinkled suede boots. The frayed cuffs of her brown sweater were darned with what looked like white string and the child-like mending took away his remaining antipathy toward her.

She went on to talk about how much cooler it had been earlier in the morning when she’d got on the bus for the trip to Winnipeg. She’d spent half the day registering at a college, where, in September, she would take courses and become a dental assistant. And before she caught the bus
home, she had to check out several more rooms for rent, as so far, she’d had no luck. Her earlier hesitance vanished and was replaced by a look of tragedy as she described the rooms she’d seen, about the size of a closet. “I wouldn’t let my dog stay in some of them,” she said.

“You have a dog?” Alfred asked. Joe was allergic to dogs, he did not say, but studied the thought for a fleeting moment, the fact that he was considering the consequences on Joe of her having a dog.

“It’s my grandmother’s,” Laurie said. “Our house would not be a house without a dog—one time we had three. Three rooms in the house, and we’ve got three dogs, can you imagine?”

No, he couldn’t, Alfred said.

“You’d never guess how much people are asking for a room,” she went on to say, and then described at length the bathroom amenities of that place where she would not leave a dog.

“That’s Joe coming now,” Alfred said. With him was Crystal, her arm linked through his, her spring plaid coat open and flaring with her spirited walk. Since their engagement, she’d become less of a mouse in the way she took over at the supper table, rising to go to the kitchen to get something Joe had forgotten, sending him and Alfred to the living room while she cleared away dishes and washed up.

Laurie raised her head, and Alfred thought Joe must feel her wavering smile half a block away, her exuberant mouth wide and bright with orange lipstick. Joe stood still, then came toward them, leaving Crystal hurrying to catch up.

“This is Laurie Rasmussen. The daughter of Karen,” Alfred said quickly to get it over with.

“Rasmussen,” Joe repeated, recognition dawning, and yet there was nothing in his face that said he was anything but curious.

Laurie got up from the step and went down to him, and Alfred noted they were almost the same height. “And you’re Joe. My grandmother has an album full of pictures of you.”

When Joe extended his hand, she hesitated before taking it, her mouth twisting with uncertainty when she did. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Joe said, surprising Alfred.

“And I’ve always wondered about you.”

Joe almost tripped over his feet as he turned to Crystal to introduce them. “My fiancée,” he said before saying Crystal’s name, as though he needed to establish that fact right off the top.

“Gosh, you two are engaged,” Laurie said, and Alfred thought she was like a bonfire suddenly flaring up, and Crystal looked as though she wanted to put some distance between them. Laurie
was
rough around the edges, like she was flying apart the way her hair was a pile of kinky wool on her head, about to come tumbling down. Her sweater hung low at the back and held the shape of her behind; the hem of her peasant skirt dipped lower on one side. She had dressed for the cold morning, likely, and it would be cold again by the time she left. But it had turned out to be a warm enough day. And it was still warm, yet she kept on the heavy sweater. Perhaps she felt she needed protection.

“So when are you getting married?” Laurie asked Crystal, making what she thought was small talk, Alfred knew, but he saw the pained look Crystal gave Joe.

“We haven’t set a date yet, but we’re planning on a year from now—next spring,” Joe said, and Alfred was surprised, thinking, so they must be getting their money together. Joe worked full-time now at the small tool repair depot where he’d worked every summer for years, and Crystal at the insurance company that employed her father.

The photograph Alfred hadn’t been able to find was up in his room, Joe said and he went inside to get it.

In his absence Crystal seemed not to know where to look, taking Laurie in with quick glances, while chewing on her bottom lip. Laurie sat back down on the top veranda step and tucked her skirt in tightly around her long legs, once again the cecropia, her wings folded. Alfred invited Crystal to sit in the other veranda chair, but she chose to perch on the bottom step instead.

When Joe returned with the picture, he sat down beside Laurie, holding it between them. Alfred listened as Joe told her about the film having been in the camera almost a year before they’d thought to have it developed. He went on to tell her that in the picture her mother was sitting on these very steps.

“My grandmother has never wanted to talk about what happened,” Laurie said. “I guess that’s because she not only lost her daughter, but her best friend, too.” She turned and glanced up at Alfred, measuring how he’d received what she’d just said.

“That’s true,” Alfred said.

Then Joe told her all that he knew about what had happened that day, Laurie taking it in, their faces intent on each other, while Crystal looked up at them, spots of colour rising in her cheeks.

“You keep the picture,” Joe said to Laurie when he’d finished speaking.

“Are you sure?” she asked, saying, “Gosh,” when Joe assured her that he was. Then she cupped the picture in both hands and gazed at it for a moment before tucking it into her oversize bag on the step beside her.

And what had brought her to Winnipeg? Joe asked and Alfred heard the story of her long day, once again. That the college had proven to be on the outskirts of the city and she’d had to wait at least forty-five minutes for the right bus. And then by the time she’d found building C, where she was supposed to register, she’d almost been flattened by the wind. When she came to the point in the story where she’d seen the rooming house that was not fit for a dog, Alfred interrupted. There was an empty and good-size room upstairs, he said. Maybe she would like to see it. However, there would be no dogs, as neither he nor Joe was fit enough for a dog. She laughed then, her mouth wide open and head tipped back on her shoulders, and Alfred thought it had been too long a time since he’d heard someone laugh from their belly.

By the time summer and autumn had passed and winter set in, Joe and Crystal had gone their separate ways. And in the new year, after Laurie returned from holidays with her grandmother, Joe bought her a tube of red lipstick. And the following spring, he bought her a dark red pop-top that bared her midriff whenever she raised her arms. Laurie graduated from college, and by the time she’d moved out of the house and into her own apartment, she’d already been working a year. Instead of returning to university as Alfred had hoped, Joe continued to work at the
small tool repair depot. Then he went into debt to open the Happy Traveler.

And now that business is belly up. Alfred would like to see the look on Joe’s face when he finds out about the money from Verna’s life insurance policy. When he learns that the cash from the policy his mother was able to pay for by cooking for and cleaning up after boarders had been invested wisely and now amounts to a million dollars. And it’s his. To do with as he sees fit.