Waiting for Joe (25 page)

“My handbag,” she mutters.

The words are barely spoken, but Joe understands.

When he goes up to the car, the ambulance attendants are hurrying toward it, and he shouts to gain their attention and points to Amina and Lino, and they veer away from the highway and go on down into the ditch.

Both sides of the highway are lined with vehicles now, and police cars are parked across the two lanes, the headlights illuminating the people gathered around the other car, the swirling blue and red lights laying bare in flashes the shattered glass scattered across the pavement, pieces of twisted metal. Joe looks for the man with the cellphone, wanting to tell him Amina is alive. He wants to fall to his knees, his teeth chattering now, the shock setting in.

L
AURIE AWAKENS IN THE MORNING
on the lounger, still wearing the fox jacket, the top half of her body sticky with heat while the bottom is cold and her muscles cramped when she struggles upright. She groans when she sees the cut-out bits of postcards and photographs, the scraps of newspaper and McDonald’s wrappers scattered about on the floor. The collage covers the dinette table. She remembers her impulse to glue the pieces down, telling herself that hot water would soften the glue enough to scrape the image off before Joe would return. And then she’d decided to leave the collage intact, as a reproach, wanting Joe to see it and know how she’d filled the time while waiting for him.

She awoke during the night to the sight of the green light glowing from the bedroom and knew why she hadn’t been able to sleep there. It was as though a creature had taken refuge in the room and was giving off its last breath. But up front in the cab, the two empty seats were starkly
lit by the parking lot lights and emphasized the feeling that she was the only person on the planet still breathing.

Compared to the house, the Meridian is a cigar tube. The house with its wide oak trim, ten-foot ceilings, the stone basement, Verna’s clock chiming the hour—yes, even that clock, much as she had resented it sometimes—gave weight to the conviction that she was exempt from destruction by earthquakes, floods and killer weather. But, nonetheless, the sturdy house had not protected her from heartache. Like other women all over the world, she had listened for the turn of Joe’s key in the lock, his footsteps on the stairs. And sometimes when he’d climbed into bed beside her she’d smelled someone, a woman, on his skin. The thought was another one of those things she’d crammed into a jar and put up on the shelf beyond reach.

Alfred’s cut-out face looks up at her from the floor between her feet. You’ve been good for Joe, he says.

“Yes, Dad, but has Joe been good for me?”

She’d used Alfred’s face, Joe’s, their torsos, hands, legs, along with the postcard images to create a collage profile of her own mother’s face. The hours had passed swiftly while she snipped Joe and Alfred free from picnic and dinner tables, from veranda chairs and campsites, all the while thinking that in the morning she would regret having destroyed the photographs.

But she doesn’t. Rather, as she stands at the dinette looking down at the collage, she’s surprised at how much she actually likes what she’s made. The picture Verna took of Karen, her pregnant mother, lies on one side of the table, Laurie’s guide to creating her rather long and slender nose, her straight ash-coloured hair. In the collage, patches of
photographs torn from the newspaper have become her hair. Her mother’s mouth is open wide, and narrow strips of news stories radiate out from it and across and over the edge of the table. She picks out random phrases from the streamers of words—
-fairly urgent, predicted it would, which means
—things her mother might have said.
I thought, the world
—of you, she finishes. There had been a silver seal on the tissue paper, and it’s become her mother’s eye.

When she’d finished the collage, she’d laid the tissue paper over it and squeezed out the remainder of the glue, and spread it thinly with her fingers. Overnight the glue had dried like a varnish, rendering the tissue translucent, what she’d hoped for, and her mother’s face seems to come forward through the tissue in the way it does through the fog of her imagination. Joe’s mouth smiles out from her eyelid, a daisy of splintered postcard images adorns her cheek, the body of a red-coated mounted police officer, topped with Alfred’s face, dangles from her ear.

She fingers the narrow red ribbon that had bound the photographs, stiff with glue now, looped and flattened in a bow at her mother’s throat. When Alfred gave it to her he couldn’t say for certain if it had belonged to her mother or not, as all the Rosemont Place girls had worn them beneath their collars. It was part of the uniform they were made to sew when they first arrived, the smocks being different colours, but all of them had the white picture-frame collars and the red ribbon tied beneath it. Intended to draw the eye upward and away from their embarrassment, Laurie concluded. Soon after Verna died, Alfred, while out walking along the river, had come across the ribbon washed up in a flotsam of debris, and when Laurie introduced
herself into their lives, he knew, he said, why he’d kept it all those years.

She’s surprised by her creation, the words especially, and wishes now that she’d thought to cut the newspaper strips into something complete for her mother to say. Made her the kind of mother with patience enough to explain, to advise, to be playful, everything her grandmother was unable to do. Unless you were a dog.

A vehicle passes by in the parking lot and she turns away from the table, figuring that later today she’ll soak a towel and lay it on the collage and clear it away. Right now her stomach is reminding her of the twenty dollars fate put in her pocket, and the promise she’d made to herself to indulge in a substantial breakfast. Her breath reeks like a barn, the stale pizza, she concludes. And although she washed her hands last night, the sour smell of the garbage can still clings to them.

More than breakfast, though, she longs to be clean, for warm water against her skin. She goes to the bedroom and changes out of her jeans and sweater, puts on the brown track suit, clips up her hair, and gathers several toiletries and puts them in the tote bag. When she presses the button on the panel beside the door, the Meridian steps unfold with a resolute whirr. Before leaving she pats her pocket, assures herself that she’s got the sock, and the twenty dollars rolled up inside it; the lanyard with the ring of keys hangs from her neck.

Judging from the few vehicles in the parking lot, she’ll likely be among the first in Walmart this morning. The door swings open and she braces herself for the cheerless smile of the white-haired greeter and is relieved when she
doesn’t see him in his usual spot. Nor is he hovering near the shopping carts, with the roll of stickers. Instead she’s confronted by a rack of geraniums parked just beyond the entrance. The sparks of crimson draw her over and when she smells the pungent odour she can’t help but regret the loss of her backyard garden; forgetting that her anticipation of it in spring was quickly defeated by indifference when it ultimately failed to live up to her expectation.

She feels watched, turns and sees the greeter and a female employee leaning on their elbows at the customer service desk, looking her way. Letting her know that they know she’s in the store. She hurries off along a frozen food aisle, the frigid air raising goose flesh, through the chocka-block of kitchenware, toward the back of the store and the washroom. Along the way she must skirt a wire bin filled with toss cushions and a tower of DVDs that weren’t there yesterday.

She notes the sign on the washroom door declaring that no merchandise should be taken beyond this point. Although she hasn’t any, she hesitates, thinking of the toiletries she brought with her in the tote. As she enters she’s met by the push of warm moist air smelling of disinfectant, gratified that the floor looks freshly mopped and that the row of sinks, although mineral-stained, appear to have been cleaned, too. She sets her tote in a sink and takes out the jar of sculpting face cream she’d bought the first day in Regina, satisfied by the clink of heavy glass when she sets it down. Then she takes out the new cake of soap rolled in a washcloth and her small towel, toothpaste and brush.

She’s about to turn on the tap when she realizes the sink doesn’t have a stopper, but a metal screen, of course, it
wouldn’t. She berates herself for not having thought of this, and is crestfallen that her plan for a warm water sponge bath has been thwarted. She picks at the edge of the screen with a fingernail, thinking she might stuff the drain with something, but is unable to lift it. A nail file, something to get underneath it, she thinks, and when she sees herself in the mirror she takes out one alligator clip, her hair falling down the side of her face.

After several attempts to hook its teeth under the screen, she succeeds in pulling it loose. Then she jams a corner of the washcloth into the hole, works it down tight into the drain and turns on the tap. “All right,” she says, congratulating herself, as the water rises up the sides of the sink.

She glances at the door before unzipping her track suit jacket, then quickly peels off her sweatshirt and drops both onto the counter. She’s startled by her face in the mirror, the crackling energetic person she knows herself to be is an ashtray this morning. Thumbprints of blue beneath her eyes, her mouth looking like a dried-out squeegee. She straightens her shoulders and sees a slightly muscular tanned and freckled woman in a lace full-figure brassiere, in recent years a staple of her wardrobe. At near to a hundred dollars apiece, she had the foresight to buy several before she couldn’t.

Her breasts pop free from her bra when she unhooks it and it dangles from her arms as she dips the towel in the water and works up a lather of goat milk soap, the scent a pleasant twist in her nostrils. Just as she’s about to sponge the acrid worry smell from her armpits, the door opens, and the woman she saw at the customer service desk enters the washroom, her eyebrows rising at the sight of Laurie’s
nakedness. Quickly she looks away, her face tightening as she goes into the nearest cubicle. Laurie hears her mutter.

Sent to check on her. She slides her bra back up her arms and fastens it, her face growing warm. Likely the parking lot has video surveillance and the security men saw her dip into the garbage can last night, which accounts for the keen interest in her this morning. She glances at the ceiling. Surveillance here, too? Well, at least she gave them something worth peeping at. She yanks the washcloth from the drain. Moments later the toilet in the cubicle flushes and when the woman emerges and comes over to a sink, Laurie is dressed.

“You’re from the motorhome, aren’t you? The manager would like to talk to you. Come by customer service and ask for him,” she says while washing her hands. Then she flicks them dry and begins to pluck at her hair while looking in the mirror. “This washroom is here for the use of our customers. And it’s certainly not a place for you to take a bath.”

“Where’s the sign that says that?” Laurie asks. Her sarcasm startles the woman who stares at her, her mouth open.

Laurie gathers up her toiletries and tosses them into the tote bag with more force than she needs to, energized by her smart mouth, surprised to find her younger self so instantly there.

When she goes through the paint section there’s a man supposedly perusing paint chips who has been sent to watch her too, she concludes, as are the several people wheeling carts along an aisle in groceries. The greeter stands near the entrance, his hand rising to his hip as she nears him. He turns toward her when she passes by. She’s in the foyer, the
door swinging shut, and his failure to call out
Thank you for shopping at Walmart
is a stone pitched against her back.

“Steve, it’s Laurie,” she says, almost shouting, when he answers the telephone, and for a moment she’s unable to continue for fear her voice will break. Then he tells her that he’s heard from Joe. He expects to see him by the end of the day.

“Hitchhiking,” she exclaims and grasps the receiver with both hands, presses it hard against the side of her head as though to transmit the information more directly into her brain.

“That’s what he said. He called from the road last night, around Brooks. You’re in Regina, I take it, in a motorhome. So, what’s up with you guys?”

“We’re broke.” Laurie looks out beyond the windows of the mall foyer at the parking lot, filling with vehicles now. Groups of people hurry toward the entrance, children running on ahead. When the door opens, the chilled grey air washes across her face.

“So I gathered,” Steve says.

“Did he tell you that we’ve lost the house?”

“Jesus. No. Where’s Joe’s dad?”

She senses he’s holding his breath. “In Deere Lodge. We didn’t have much choice. I mean, what else could we do?”

When he doesn’t reply she tells him about having sold several pieces of jewellery for their gold, Joe having sold his vintage pinball machine. Verna’s mantel clock.

“Everything’s gone. Including the Explorer, and my car.” Her little boredom-buster, which sped her away from scenes of inertia and the pervasive question of what was she doing here? In the world. With her life.

She’s stuck in Regina, she tells Steve, without money, waiting for Joe, not knowing where he was. “And I think I’m about to be evicted from the Walmart parking lot.” When she becomes aware Steve hasn’t said anything for several moments, she says, “Steve? You there?”

“I’m here,” he says.

“How did Joe sound to you?”

A woman’s voice interrupts and their connection is severed as she instructs Laurie to deposit more money. She digs frantically through the sock for dollar coins and then feeds them into the pay phone.

“Steve?”

“It’s me,” he says. “Listen, there must be a Western Union somewhere in Regina.”

She remembers seeing a sign at Safeway, she tells him.

“I’ll send you some money. I’ll go down to the one here and you’ll have it within an hour. Put some gas in that thing. You could make it here in a day and a half. Stay in a motel tonight. Call me when you get into town and I’ll tell you how to find me.”