Every Time We Say Goodbye (12 page)

Grace sank into the armchair under the lamp. “I used to sit with my mother right here,” she told Theresa.
And when she got sick
, she thought,
I lost her and I turned into a little bird and tried to fly out of the world
.

“I think you should go upstairs and start to pack Danny’s things,” Theresa said. “I have a feeling this is going to get difficult.”

Going to get difficult?
Grace thought. She wanted to laugh or cry, she couldn’t tell which.

Upstairs in Danny’s room, she rolled his clothes up and put them in a pillowcase. Downstairs, she could hear Vera questioning Theresa. Did Theresa work as well, and how did she know Grace, and where was she from, and who were her people. “Where did Grace get to?” she heard Vera ask, and then the door opened downstairs and Frank called out, “Who’s here, Vera?”

When she came downstairs, Vera was whispering to Frank in the kitchen and Theresa was sitting with Danny in the living room. Grace handed the pillowcase to Theresa, who put it under the chair. Vera called out, “I’ve got to put Danny to bed. Grace, your brother’s home now.”

Frank kissed her cheek and held her hands and said she looked different, completely grown up. It was good for her, the move down south. “I’ve come to take Danny back,” Grace said, and he looked away. “I know,” he said. “But let’s have some dinner first.”

At the table, Theresa and Frank did most of the talking. Theresa told them about Peterborough, Grace’s little coach house with oak trees in the yard, Grace’s successful laundry business. This made Frank smile proudly. “So you started your own business, Gracie. Well, well.” He told her that people were moving closer to town, but also, town was moving closer to them. They were building houses for when the men came back. Some of the men who signed up were coming back in bad shape. John
Cherniak from across the road, Grace might remember him, had come home on leave and Frank didn’t even recognize him. Oh, he looked fine, physically, but there was something different in his face now. The things the men saw over there …

Grace cut her meat into small pieces, but swallowing was painful, and Vera kept getting up to get something from the kitchen. By the end of the meal, there were two plates of bread and a collection of salt shakers on the table. “How long can you stay?” Frank wanted to know. Grace said, “We both have to get back,” and Theresa said, “We can come for a longer visit in the summer.” Frank said that would be ideal.

Vera went to make up the bed in the attic room for them.

In her old room, Grace sat on the edge of the bed while Theresa opened and closed drawers. “Do you have anything you want to take back?”

Grace shook her head. She wanted to creep downstairs to where Danny was asleep and lift him out of the bedclothes and carry him out to the car, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was like stealing. Worse than stealing. She was afraid Vera was having the same thoughts. She might try to take Danny away, hide him somewhere, maybe at Mrs. McCabe’s. She would not sleep the whole night.

“What’s in here?” Theresa asked, her voice muffled inside a cupboard. She brought out a red tin box and shook it. Something inside clattered.

“My mother’s button box!” Grace took it from Theresa and opened it. “The bride and groom buttons.”

Theresa put the box in Grace’s bag. “Give it to Danny when he’s older. He can keep his toy soldiers in it.”

After Theresa went to bed, Grace sat by the window and listened. She heard the sound of the creek, and she remembered the feeling of the bliss hovering over her. She had told Ruth Ellis
about the bliss once, and Ruth had shown Grace a photo of the whirling dervishes and another of a man sitting cross-legged under an enormous tree. “They want to escape the world,” Grace said, but Ruth said no. “They want to know it directly, without the filter of thought.”

Grace stared into the darkness. She could still feel the mark of the bliss, in the quietness behind her eyes and in her hands, but she no longer yearned to dissipate into it. She didn’t want to escape the world. She was bound to it now that Danny was in it.

In the morning, Vera smiled at them, and her face was milky smooth again. Frank was still upstairs. Danny was in his high chair in the kitchen, and when he saw Grace, he waved his bottle at her and said, “This! Where my this?”

“Would you like tea or coffee, girls?”

Theresa said, “Coffee, please,” and Grace said, “We have to leave, Vera. It’s a very long drive.”

“Of course. I’ll pack you up some sandwiches. How’s that?”

“We’ll need Danny’s bottles as well,” Grace said. “I’ve already packed his clothes and toys and things.”

“Yes, I know. I found them and put them back. You know very well you are not taking that child anywhere,” Vera said. Her voice was mild.

Theresa leapt up from the table. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “but Danny is her child and—”

“I beg
your
pardon,” Vera said, “but you don’t know the first thing about it. She gave him to us. She—”

“I didn’t!” Grace said. “I left him here so I could get set up.”

“You left him here because you couldn’t look after him. You wanted to start fresh down south!”

“I wanted a fresh start with Danny.”

“You don’t know how to look after him! You don’t know the first thing about raising a child.”

“I’m his mother.”

In the high chair, Danny’s face creased and he started to cry. “Look how you’re upsetting him,” Vera said, whirling around and picking him up. His foot caught under the tray, and he cried harder.

“Give him to me, Vera.”

“Leave him alone.”

“Give him to me!” Grace tried to pull him out of Vera’s arms.

Danny sobbed and hid his face in Vera’s neck.

“Over my dead body,” Vera said.

The kitchen door swung open, and Frank said hoarsely, “Let him go.”

“Listen to your brother, Grace!” Vera said triumphantly.

“Let him go, Vera.”

Vera turned to stare at him.

“She’s his mother,” Frank said. He looked sick.

Vera’s eyes overflowed and the tears splashed onto Danny’s head. “Grace,” she croaked. “You can have another baby. Please don’t take him away from me. Please.”

Grace knew the size of that grief, how it obliterated the world and left you a blind, naked, howling creature. “I’m sorry,” she said and opened her arms for her child.

Theresa said everything for her. She said that they were doing the right thing, that Grace talked about nothing but her little boy and how much she wanted him back. She said that Grace was doing very well on her own and that she had good friends who would help if she needed help. She said Frank and Vera should come down to Peterborough to see them, and she would drive Grace and Danny back up in the summer for a visit. She said this to Frank. Vera had gone upstairs. They could hear her crying.

Frank went up and came down with a bag of Danny’s clothes and added some of his toys. They looked, but they couldn’t find the dog in the shoe, and finally Theresa said they’d better start
back. Frank carried Danny out to the car. Danny had his arms around Frank’s neck and was playing with his collar. When Grace reached for him, he hung on to Frank. Frank kissed him and unhooked his hands from his neck and handed him to Grace. “You go with your mommy now,” he said.

“Mommy!” Danny cried out, reaching for Frank. “Mommy.”

“Take good care of him, Gracie,” Frank said, his voice quivering. He turned his face away as they climbed into the car.

Danny cried in her arms and would not stop. “It’s all right, Danny, it’s all right,” she kept saying. He flailed and wailed and choked on his tears. She held him and tried to kiss him, but he writhed and twisted and pulled away. “Mommy, mommy, mommy,” he cried.

“He’ll be all right,” Theresa said. “It’s going to take some time.”

They turned onto the highway, passing through Garden River and Bruce Mines, and still Danny cried. Grace cried, and even Theresa had to stop driving to blow her nose.

“Stop, Theresa,” Grace said finally. “Stop.”

Theresa manoeuvred the car onto the side of the road. Danny had stopped flailing and screaming, but he was still crying in Grace’s arms. “Mommy,” he said. His voice was broken into pieces by hiccups and sobs. “Mommy, mommy.” Grace stared ahead, blinded by tears. This was worse than when she had left. It was worse than all the nights without him. It was worse than anything she had ever felt.

“Grace?” Theresa asked softly. “Grace, what do you want to do?”

W
hile the beginning was still ending, before the real ending began and everything fell to pieces and went to hell in a handbasket, there was a brief period when it seemed their luck had changed and things were going to work out after all. Dawn came downstairs one morning to find Geraldine and Jimmy murmuring over a jar of grape jelly. Geraldine smiled at her over Jimmy’s tousled blond head and said, “The day has Dawned.” She hadn’t said that in a long time.

Jimmy said, “Look, Dawn. A secret message.” Inside the jar, a small patch of white gleamed. They tried to dig it out with a knife and then a fork, and finally they emptied the thick purple mass into a bowl and Geraldine plucked out the paper and opened it. She burst into laughter.

“What is it?” Dawn and Jimmy yelled.

She showed them. It said, Boo. Geraldine was still laughing. “Your father,” she said. She kissed them both on the top of the
head and made them jam sandwiches for lunch, singing, “ ‘When you’re near, there’s such an air of spring about it. I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it.’ ”

“That was a nice morning,” Jimmy said on the way to school. But Dawn thought it was more than that, and by the end of the day, she had proof. First, Dean announced he wouldn’t be going away on business anymore because he was opening his own business, right here in town, and if they would give him their full and undivided attention for a moment, he would tell them all about it.

They were eating a double supper: the Kentucky Fried Chicken and fries that Dean had brought home and the pork chops, peas and mashed potatoes that Geraldine had already cooked because apparently Dean had never heard of this new invention called The Phone. Dean said it was great that she had cooked, because now they could have an all-you-can-eat buffet feast, and he even set it up like a buffet, using all the bowls and serving platters they had. He loaded their plates: a mashed potato volcano spilling peas, with chicken and pork chops like houses at the base and a forest of fries climbing the slopes.

“Dig in, kids,” he said, “and I’ll let you in on The Plan.”

The Plan was this: downtown, a few doors from the Sunset Café, Dean was opening a club the likes of which this town had never seen. “Club” meant nightclub, where grown-ups went at night to talk and listen to music.

Jimmy said, “You mean a barroom?”

Dean laughed. “No, Uncle Frank. Not a
barroom.”
It didn’t look like anything now, because the carpenters were ripping it up and stripping it down, but in a few weeks, when the lights were installed and the round mahogany bar had been built, oh man, the bar was going to be the centrepiece, the showpiece of the whole place, right in the middle of the main room.

“Who’s paying for this?” Geraldine asked.

“The investors,” Dean said. “They’re really excited—”

Geraldine snorted.
“The investors?
Dean, you’re getting in over your head with this guy.”

“This is nothing for Del. Peanuts. With all the deals he’s got going, this is small change.”

Geraldine sighed.

Dean said, “Don’t worry, Ger, I’ve got him just where I want him.”

Dean hadn’t come up with a name yet, but he was open to suggestions. He leapt up and played a drum roll on the table with his index fingers. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “guys and dolls, cats and chicks, Turner Enterprises is pleased to present, all the way from Toronto—”

“Donny Osmond!” Dawn said.

“The Jackson 5!” Jimmy said.

Dean sighed. “Well, that’s not quite the
calibre
I had in mind, but who knows, maybe we’ll bring them up to do a special concert and you two can emcee.” He drew the room for Dawn and Jimmy with some cutlery, the salt shaker and a straw. “The whole place goes completely black. Then a single ray of light cuts through the darkness. It hits the edge of a guitar …” He stopped and shook his head. “All I can say is, minds are going to be blown.”

Dean put his arm around Geraldine, and she leaned against him, and that’s when Dawn saw that things really were going to be different. Because Dean wouldn’t be away on business now, so Geraldine wouldn’t have to do everything by herself—work all day and then come home and look after the kids, make dinner, wash the clothes, do the shopping—and the club would be a smashing success and make bushels of money so Geraldine wouldn’t have to worry about the bills on top of the fridge (and Dawn wouldn’t have to stand on a chair to count them), and things would finally get back to normal and start to come true.