Waiting for Joe (28 page)

“It doesn’t matter what your experience or education is, if you want to, you can make it here. You could become a supervisor. We’ve got two of them out there right now,” Tracy says. Laurie nods at the appropriate moments, regretting not having been honest, impatient for Tracy’s spiel to end.

“Well, that’s it, then. When you come to work at nine tomorrow, be sure to wear closed-toed shoes. You’ll have the vest to protect your clothes, but don’t wear anything good to work. You’ll likely spend the first half of the day filling out personnel forms,” she says then slaps her hands against her thighs as though to say, well, that’s done! and rises from her chair. “Laurie, welcome to Value Village.”

Her welcome reverberates as Laurie goes back toward the entrance. Welcome to the dead end of a shopper’s world, where three dollars will buy you a tea set that you can then put in a garage sale and sell for four. But even if you don’t sell it for four dollars, but only three, even if you sold it for less than what you paid for it, you still had the pleasure of discovery, of imagining making a pot of orange pekoe tea at
the end of the day, setting the pot down on a small table beside your chair, adjusting the lamp to fix the light directly on the page of your book, lifting the pot and feeling its weight, the tea, a steaming amber liquid, rising up the inside of the cup. You might only make tea in that pot once, or not at all. But it doesn’t matter, because it is the imagining of what you might do that is the real pleasure of spending.

Through the span of windows at the front of the store she sees that the sky has cleared now, as it did yesterday around noon. Too piercingly clear and cloudless, not what she would have liked for driving. From what she remembers of their arrival in Regina she knows that the ramp to the highway is only a short distance from the Safeway where the Western Union is. The sun will be behind her all the way to Winnipeg. She’s almost at the door now, almost out of the store when she remembers the jam pot and sees it there on the rack at the first cashier. She goes over and picks it up and sets it on her hand, admires the bands of colour around it, each one printed with apples, peaches, grapes, pears. The lid is shaped like a strawberry and when she lifts it and sets it back down, the porcelain makes a satisfying little grating sound. She could fill it with pebbles, tiny polished river stones, present it to Alfred when she sees him. It’s small, but she can see it on the bureau, brightening his room.

T
HE TAXI PULLS UP BESIDE
the wrought iron gate across the entrance to the driveway, the bronze fish symbol on the gate assuring Joe he’s got the right address. With some effort he gets out of the cab, stiff from the long bus ride from Calgary. When the taxi leaves, he stands on the side of the street looking after it, catapulted into daylight, the sky, the inlet far below, all rushing toward him and making him light-headed. He turns his face up to the fine drizzle of rain, and inhales deeply. Thank you, he breathes.

The gate is electric, he discovers—someone will need to let him in. When he sees the panel on the stone wall, he goes over to it, finds the intercom buzzer beside the code pad and presses. While he waits he takes in the upward sweep of the grounds beyond the gate, the lawn interrupted by raised flower beds cascading with vines and flowering creepers, wet and vivid with dashes of colour.

Throughout the years he’d kept up with Maryanne and Ken’s energetic accounts in newsletters, the successes and
failures of their television ministry, their reports of last-minute bailouts by God, doors opening, doors closing; the adventures and misadventures of their only child, a daughter, Cerise. But he wasn’t prepared for their prosperity. His thoughts scatter as he hears Maryanne’s exclamation of pleasure when she says, “Joe.” She must see him on a monitor, he realizes.

She waits at the front entrance, a woman in her mid-sixties, trim and fit in an off-white wool pantsuit, the ruffles of the neck of her turquoise blouse a foam of silk. He follows the drive through a grove of Japanese cherry trees, their leaves polished by the rain. When he emerges at the front of the house, she raises both arms and hails him. Her hair is silver-blonde, as it has been all the years he’s known her, although she wears it smooth and shorter now. An Asian man rises on his knees in the garden, and beyond him sheets of water flow across plates of black shale, bushes are clipped in the shapes of large and small deer. A bird calls out. Welcome to Janat Aden, Joe thinks with a smile. The Garden of Eden. Maryanne rushes toward him, and she enfolds him in an embrace.

“Hey, guy, you have no idea what it meant to us when you called the other night.” She squeezes him hard before releasing him. When he steps back he sees the tears in her eyes. “You look exactly the same, Joe.”

“Ha,” he says.

“Well, almost the same.” She laughs as she takes in his three-day beard, the orange juice stains on the front of his white hoodie. Then she presses her fingers against her mouth and says, “We’ll talk, for sure. But not yet, okay? Once Ken gets home, we’ll talk.” Ken has been kept
late at the television studio with an unexpected meeting.

She links her arm through Joe’s, draws him toward the entrance while explaining that she’s just got home and hasn’t had a chance to remove her makeup. Which accounts for her exaggerated features, Joe thinks. Her bright peacock blue eyelids and thickly coated lashes, rose-coloured lips that go on farther than her smile. When he steps inside the house he’s aware of height, the ceiling far above, daylight flooding the entranceway and a large room beyond.

She leads him into the kitchen, into the sheen of steel and polished granite; then surprises him as she peels off her wig and drops it on a counter. She rakes her fingers through her short, wiry grey hair. When she sees his look, she laughs. “You didn’t think it was real, did you?”

He grins, but doesn’t reply, thinking that her teeth are whiter and more perfectly shaped than he recalls them being, and wonders if the miracle, the yellowish patch of filling in her molar, is still there. Muted voices draw his attention to the small television suspended from a corner cupboard, the image of Pastor Ken leaning into the space between his chair and the man seated across from him in a television studio. “Ouch, that must have hurt. Sometimes God just hauls off and socks it to us, right?” he says in reply to something the man has said. “I remember one time Maryanne and I were in an airport. Man, oh, man, if you’re ever going to lose it, it’ll be in an airport.” He relates an incident from their private life, a vacation, a clash of wills. Maryanne watches, lost for a moment, a pucker growing between her eyebrows while she gnaws at her thumbnail.

Joe remembers Ken’s kinetic energy, how even when he’s sitting, he’s not sitting still. Sometimes they’d played touch
football and Ken would get carried away and lay on a tackle. He dislocated a boy’s shoulder once. But Joe hadn’t experienced any roughhousing, or Ken’s spurts of impatience while they were on the camping and canoe trips, or during the outings when Ken played surrogate father. Rather, Joe remembers Pastor Ken calling out the beginning of a line of scripture as they paddled from island to island, and him finishing it.
I can—do all things through Christ, who strengthens me
.

“That’s last week’s program. I haven’t had a chance to watch it,” Maryanne says now. She turns off the television. “Let me fix you something to keep you going until dinner.”

He’s had soup and a sandwich during one of the many bus stops along the way, he tells her.
Amina, say sandwich
. He expects she will ask about Laurie, why he’s come on a bus, but she doesn’t.

“Well then, let me give you a tour of the house.”

He follows as she clacks across stone floors from room to room, several of them unoccupied. Her daughter’s suite, she says as they stand in the doorway looking into a sitting room of bamboo furniture with jungle print cushions; what appears to be a mosquito net hangs from the ceiling around the bed in the room beyond it. Although Joe has seen pictures of the fair-haired and sunny-looking girl at various stages of her life, he’s never met her. She is away, studying communications in a Christian college in the States. “And, I hope, finding a great guy,” Maryanne says and laughs. And Joe recalls that she’d met Ken at a Christian college in Chicago. He thinks of Crystal, and where they might be now after twenty-some years of marriage. In a falling-down church in the country, taking care of a small and
aging congregation. Or some place in Africa, teaching English in a refugee camp to people like Lino and Amina. But he doubts that.

“Do you ever hear from Crystal?” Joe asks as he follows Maryanne down a hall toward another set of rooms.

“I sure do,” she says, then turns and looks at him. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder,” he says.

A thought passes across her face, and then she says, “Well, she seems pretty satisfied, happy, now. It took some time, though.”

She turns away and leads him farther down the hall and stops in front of one of the guest rooms. This room, she says, has been done in red mahogany. “This is where you’ll sleep tonight. You’ll be in good company.” Tim LaHaye and Jim Kennedy have slept in the four-poster bed. Kennedy, the evangelist, she explains, surprised that Joe wouldn’t know who the man was. Then she laughs and says, “He snores like you would not believe. We could hear him all over the house.”

Near the end of the tour she takes Joe to the gym where she and Ken work out to a fitness program every morning. Beside the gym is another small room, tiled, and holding a sauna and Jacuzzi. There’s one more room, she says, in a way that suggests she has saved showing it until the last, and for a reason.

They go up some steps to a large open space with windows the full length of the house, revealing the side of the hill and the dripping, green tangle of vegetation beyond. Joe hears soft music, water trickling across stones. He sees two young women at the far end of the room seated in front of computers.

“Hey gals, I want you to meet one of my favourite people,” Maryanne calls out, and they both rise and come toward him, soft-complexioned blonde women whose tailored white blouses are tucked into their narrow beige skirts, both wearing necklaces of polished wood and sea-shells that clack pleasantly when they shake hands with him. He recognizes their radiant smiles; the music playing is a treacle of praise songs like the water trickling over stones in a fountain at one corner of the room—peaceful, but only for a short time. After that it has him gritting his teeth.

When they return to their desks, Maryanne takes him around the room to show him the “product” stacked up on the floor-to-ceiling shelves. The merchandise she calls
product
is all natural, she explains. There are herbal remedies to be rubbed into the skin, ingested and inhaled or immersed in. Products to be worn, to clean the house, to fend off cancer and help cure it, to prevent the physical and mental effects of aging. She explains that years ago, when they were so poor they sometimes had a hard time making rent, she took on the product, just as she had once invested in gumball machines, ten of them, placed in the lobbies of various institutions in Winnipeg. The money they’d earned from gum dispensers had helped finance some of the church outreach programs and supplemented their income. When she took on selling product, they had financial stability for the first time in their married lives.

She goes over to a shelf and takes down a plastic bottle and shakes it. “I’m going to fix you a drink before dinner, and you won’t believe how good you’re going to feel.” Again, her eyes sweep over him. “Listen, while I go and see about dinner, why don’t you have a shower?”

Call Alfred, Joe reminds himself moments later when he’s in the bathroom of the mahogany guest room. He leaves the shower running and returns to the bedroom to get the cellphone, and is stopped short at the sight of a shirt and pair of pants, socks and underwear lying across the bed where he’d tossed the phone.

The phone is on the bedside table now, and beside it his watch and wallet, and, he notes, an electric shaver. The clothes he shed and left on the chair are gone. The bathroom door was open and there was no way Maryanne could have come in and left the room without having seen him in the buff. The thought is unsettling as he turns off the shower, winds a towel around his waist and goes back to the bedroom. He sits on the bed and calls his father, then listens to the telephone ring in his room at Deere Lodge. The two-hour time difference makes it near to nine o’clock in Winnipeg, late to call, he knows, and yet his stomach clenches as the telephone continues to go unanswered.

What are his wishes regarding his father’s health care, the supervisor will want to know, if he calls the desk. In the event of impending death due to pneumonia, the friend of the elderly on their final ride. He’s heard it can overcome the old within hours. Likely what the supervisor meant to ask was did he want his father to be taken to the hospital, or be made comfortable at Deere Lodge while he succumbed. What would Alfred want? It’s a question that demands a certain history of openness in order for him to ask. He lets the phone ring longer in the event Alfred is in the bathroom, each ring shriller than the last.

“Hello, Joe,” Alfred finally says, his voice hollow and far away.

“How did you know it was me?” Joe laughs too loudly with relief.

“Who else would it be?”

Joe wants to tell Alfred about the accident, but it is too much information, he knows. He would need to sort through his father’s confusion, just as he had when he was a child. He would come home charged up over something and be made to speak slowly. To begin again. To explain, and his urgent need to tell his father what had happened, would dissipate. He’d soon learned that it was less frustrating if he kept things to himself.

“You sound better. Your cold doesn’t sound as bad,” Joe says.

“I am better. They did their best to make me think I wasn’t. Gave me a shot. I told them, you stick another needle in me and I’ll stick you-know-what in your ear.” His voice is strong and clear.