Waiting for Joe (16 page)

After the nurses had settled him into the chair, they’d left him in peace to doze. But he knows they’ll be back, this time with a pole and drip. With a pad for his bed that will let them know if he’s up and roaming about, or if he’s thrown himself overboard. There’s no two ways about it, he’s old. Deficient and decrepit. And like the old, not to be taken seriously.

He looks for the metal chair, his way station to the room. When he doesn’t see it anywhere, he realizes the nurses have figured out how he managed to get as far as the window and have taken it away. He’s surprised to find that its absence makes his eyes grow wet. He recalls that when he was in the prisoner of war camp he sometimes saw the faces of men about to die suddenly stream with tears, as though a dam had given way inside. He sometimes saw them turn and look at something that wasn’t there.

L
ATE IN THE EVENING
Laurie enters the shopping mall foyer, intent on using a pay phone. When she sees the metal barrier closing off access to the stores beyond she feels affronted, as though the mesh curtain is a hand raised in her face.

A man using the instant teller glances at her when she goes over to the bank of phones. He keys in a transaction and the electronic burps are inordinately loud in the enclosed glass space; without the doors opening and closing with the constant traffic of people, the air has become overheated and stale. She anticipates Joe’s voice, while at the same time doubts that he’ll answer. More than likely, he’s got the cell turned off to conserve the battery. She hesitates, wanting to know that he’s all right, but dreading that he’ll tell her why he left. A second trip to Canadian Tire after she ran into Pete only confirmed that Joe wasn’t there, nor was he welcome to return. She calls his cell, feeling as though she’s caught in a patch of turbulence, not
knowing when the ground might suddenly give way. He doesn’t answer.

She scoops up her change, drops what’s left of it into the sock. She went through a lot of money while talking to Alfred. She called him thinking to learn, without coming right out and asking, if he’d heard from Joe. Then she’d almost spilled the beans. Why was Joe working if they were on a vacation, he’d asked, and he hadn’t bought her lame answer. All she’d accomplished by calling was to alarm him, and she regrets that now.

Across Gibson Road the stark whiteness of the apartment buildings has faded to grey with the setting of the sun, and shadows darken the windows of the basement suites as though night is working its way up from the ground. Here and there, the anemic lights in windows brighten. It’s the time of day when she would go into Joe’s office and watch the cloud of gulls above the city dump, bright gold pieces flashing against the northern sky. During the time Steve was stationed in Germany she would think of him, that the sun had already set where he was. And as if he knew, he would sometimes call just as she and Joe were sitting down to dinner. When Joe had finished talking and passed the phone across the table to her it was a struggle not to react when Steve went on about how much he wanted her. Although they hadn’t seen each other for years, she’d always thought of him whenever she came upon the bustier, the crumple of butterfly thongs pushed to the back of her lingerie drawer. She wonders if the attraction will still be there, and what will she do about it if it is.

The instant teller whirrs and she turns toward the sound just as the man retrieves his money, folds it and jams it
into his jean pocket. The doors swing open as he leaves, striding off toward a black 4×4 parked in the fire lane with its engine running. She realizes again that it’s Friday. People are going out and doing things, as she hoped she and Joe would do. She realizes she is hungry.

Although she knows it’s futile she goes over to the instant teller, takes the credit card from the sock and feeds it into the slot. The card came to Joe in the mail unsolicited, with a pre-approved ten-thousand-dollar line of credit. Within months that limit was increased to fifteen thousand and then twenty. As the machine tugs the card from her grasp she holds her breath, and when it’s ejected she’s surprised by bitterness, a seed bursting open on her tongue.

She’s about to turn away when she sees a transaction slip lying on one side of the shelf. Either the man forgot to take it, or, as she so often did, only glanced at it to reassure himself he wasn’t overdrawn and left it. His bank balance, she discovers, is half of what she and Joe would usually go through in a month. The thought makes her nauseous. She scrunches up the receipt and drops it into the waste receptacle. How little they had to show in the end for a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, just the tables set up on the veranda and down the walk heaped with household goods. Boxes and boxes, crates and an assortment of laundry baskets covered the lawn, filled with pictures and books, cosmetics and sets of bathroom soaps, lotions and scrubs, still unopened. She’d priced CDs and DVDs at a dollar apiece, and some people had complained, and wanted to bargain. There were beautifully designed boxes of stationery, which, although she hardly ever wrote letters, she could never resist. But people at the
garage sale had resisted, and in the end she’d foisted as much stationery as she possibly could on her friend Sandra.

Sandra had helped arrange the crystal on a special table spread with a dark cloth to better display it, including several pieces of Waterford alongside the hand-painted Japanese tea set, the wedding gift from Joe’s aunts, so appealingly colourful that for years Laurie had kept it out on the buffet. Laurie had set her Noritake dinnerware on the special table; the pottery she’d bought at various craft shows throughout the years; wood inlaid boxes and hand-carved bowls, and the blown glass pieces that leapt off the shelves and bit her while she toured a glassworks in Victoria.

She’d placed her marble chessboard at the centre, which for years had been set with the keepsakes she’d found in various shops across the country while travelling with Joe. She’d bought the chess set for the board so long ago she couldn’t recall what she’d done with the actual pieces. You’re not going to part with that, Sandra objected and offered to keep it for her, as she would the photo albums. A tiny clear glass moose marked the occasion of Laurie’s first orgasm with Joe. It had happened while they were on a canoe trip. Her moaning, he’d said, sounded like the mating call of a moose and he expected their campsite to be stampeded. A pewter rowboat and its tiny sailor marked the passing of Earl, Alfred’s long-time friend; the small amber egg, Steve’s gift when he returned from Germany, and when he’d dropped it down the front of her dress it felt like silk between her breasts. Yes, that, she’d said to Sandra. She was tired of dusting it.

The garage sale was an opportunity to be more discriminating, she told herself when she and Sandra hauled things out of the house. It was a chance to start over as she sometimes had with her wardrobe, emptying the closets and bureaus in one fell swoop, packing the clothing into garbage bags that she left at the various charity drop boxes. Then she’d go shopping. Only to discover a year later that discrimination had flown out the window and that she’d replaced her wardrobe with one that was almost identical.

In the past she’d sometimes happened upon the dismal displays of goods set out on yard-sale tables and the people perusing them, only steps away but a world apart, she’d imagined. She’d scrunched up her nose, thinking of the many times when, as a child, she went to church rummage sales with her grandmother, poking through the broken toys and smudged storybooks, the malodorous jumble cast off from other people’s lives. She refused to recall the excruciating anxiety of knowing there was a limit to the amount of money her grandmother would give her to spend, whereas the allure of objects proved to be unending. Invariably she wound up wanting what she hadn’t bought. Soon after she got her first job, she spent most of her pay-cheque on two pairs of shoes when she couldn’t decide between them, just because she could.

On the day of her own yard sale, Laurie was still in her bathrobe having a first cup of coffee when people began to arrive in cars and trucks, parking in front of the house and in the back lane, people coming on foot and bicycles almost two hours earlier than the advertised start time for the sale. She dressed quickly and went out onto
the veranda and shouted at them to keep their distance, relieved when at last Sandra arrived and they dismantled the barrier they’d erected across the steps and took the sheets off the tables, dragged out from under them the boxes and baskets. The chessboard and its symbolic pieces sold immediately, as did most of the other items on her special table, dealers, Sandra said, knowing exactly what they wanted. Laurie realized with a pang of regret that she’d underpriced them, but consoled herself with the thought that she’d never really liked crystal, china, or Japanese tea sets.

By midday the people were gone and the lawn was trampled, boxes upended and the remains of the contents strewn about. A lampshade was wedged into the branches of the lilac bush. When Laurie went to free it, she found a mat rolled up and shoved in among the branches. Someone had stashed it there thinking to come back later and get it. She unrolled it, a soft pleasant-looking handmade cotton mat she had bought in the Cascade Mountains in a craft shop. Made by a native woman, its colours like the earth, moss and birchbark. She’d paid a hundred and twenty dollars for it and its price tag of ten dollars was so high, apparently, that someone had wanted to steal it.

That afternoon she piled the remainder of the garage sale items, including the mat, against the backyard fence where the usual garbage pickers going by could rummage through the boxes and take what they wanted. The garbage cans were filled to overflowing, and what Joe couldn’t fit into them he’d thrown into boxes along with the remains of the small appliances he had smashed days ago with the sledgehammer.

She was surprised when she saw one of her angels, and then all of them, scattered among the battered pieces of metal and spikes of plastic as sharp as daggers. She had intended to leave the angels in the house, had positioned them where they might surprise a person who happened to glance upward. She’d hoped that this gesture of goodwill to the next inhabitants would in some way be returned to her and Joe. But he’d thrown them out.

As he had the flint stone. She scooped it up from among the rubble and cupped its chalky mantle as though to shield it from the rain. In spring, while readying the upstairs veranda for the summer months, she took the stone from the windowsill and washed it free of dust. And she sometimes recalled the moment when Joe had given it to her, the day she lay beside him on the beach still feeling the thrum and shudder of waves in her body. She’d been waiting for calm, when she could speak without her voice trembling. She wanted to tell him it was over. She wanted time to be on her own, to grow into her work as a dental assistant, the apartment she had rented. Sandra was moving to the city, and they were going to live together, going to go to Cuba in the winter.

She and Steve wanted each other, she did not tell Joe. They’d come so near to having sex at the Glass Spider concert. When their hands first touched she knew it would happen, and they soon found themselves in a corridor, their bodies pressed together hard, their mouths and hips grinding. Where’s a cold shower when you need one, Steve had said laughing, shaking, when they came up for air. She took him by the hand and led him to a nearby coffee shop, her face hot and her breath coming quick. Joe, she said. They’d
left him in the blue section of the arena when David Bowie had appeared, the crowd going wild as he descended on stage in the glass spider. She’d scrambled over the seats to get to the floor, Steve coming after her, but Joe had stayed behind. In the coffee shop Steve reached for her hands, covered them, pressed them hard against the table. It’s always about Joe, he’d said. And although she knew she should pull her hands away, she hadn’t.

When she lay beside Joe on the beach the next day, about to tell him that she wanted to end their relationship, he turned to her. While she’d been out on the lake windsurfing he’d gone for a long walk and found this, he said and put the flint stone in her hand. And then, suddenly, ardently, he asked her to marry him.

Verna, God rest her soul, would have been so tickled
, Laurie’s grandmother had said when Laurie broke the news, and raised a glass of sparkling wine in celebration of her announcement.
God rest her soul
. The words were a bookmark on each of Laurie’s birthdays, marking the page of Verna’s sacrifice. Are you sure about this? Sandra kept asking in the days leading to the wedding. Yes, she was sure she wanted to marry Joe. And what about Steve? Sandra finally asked, and Laurie listened to herself explain that she’d only wanted to break it off with Joe because after three years it wasn’t going anywhere. Steve had just happened to come along. Joe’s aunts and uncles, her grandmother, all of them had already made plans to come to Winnipeg for the wedding. They’d reserved several rooms in a nearby hotel when Alfred insisted the wedding be held in Winnipeg. He didn’t care who married them, whether it was Pastor Ken, or not. As long as they were married in
the backyard. And although Pastor Ken had declined to marry them, Laurie was relieved, for Joe’s sake, when at the last moment, he and Maryanne decided to attend.

She’s reluctant to leave the stale, heated space of the shopping centre foyer and return to the Meridian. Its batteries are low and she’ll need to run the generator for a time if she’s going to have enough light to read, or to watch TV. If she’d known they were going to be boondocking for a time, she would have kept several candles, the down-filled duvet, the picnic hamper, complete and compact in its wicker case. She’d thought, three days at the most; she hadn’t counted on this stopover. Or that they would live in the Meridian once they got to Fort McMurray. When they’d started out Joe had said he would drop the motorhome off at an RV place in Edmonton, where the owner would come to get it. They’d rent a townhouse in McMurray. And buy a house soon after in whatever city they settled in. Where she would upgrade her dental assistant skills, and find work.