Five Roses (31 page)

Rose kept pushing the shuttle through an ever-tightening mouth of threads. Even as she knew it was time to stop, one hand sent the shuttle across and the other thumped the beater toward her. Time to stop, she thought.
Time to stop
. She finally jolted herself to a halt, stretched her foot to free the brake, and rolled the warp forward.

She was weaving cloth patterned with hexagons of brown, gold, and rust — autumn forest colours — for Kenny. He'd smiled shyly when she'd shown him, then said that if she sewed it up as a cushion he'd take it to the cabin, where they needed one for the sofa. She was pleased with how he'd adopted the cabin and was taking care of it, and only wondered later why she and Maman had never thought to plump out the old sofa with cushions.

She took advantage of having stopped to fill the kettle at the sink and plug it in, then considered the different jars of tea on the dresser. Ginger lemon, chamomile, peppermint, verbena. Leo thought it funny that she took the tea bags from their boxes and put them in jars — that she'd kept her cabin habits of protecting food from mice and weevils. She thought it funny that Leo believed insects and rodents respected city doors and walls.

He'd left early to go to the garage. Soon — except for work — they would always be together. She hugged her arms across her breasts and murmured, “Soon.” They'd looked at a few places, but so far they were too expensive, or over a restaurant or a bar and too noisy.

As she waited for her tea to steep, she walked across the room to the window. The bike path was covered in snow, yet packed hard enough that Rose had seen the odd person trudging past, head lowered before the wind. More frequently she saw cross-country skiers gliding by. Swinging arms, scissored legs.

The canal was frozen and white except for the shadowed holes of paw prints angled from one bank to the other. Animals never crossed ice straight across. Even city dogs, who had never been in the wilds, kept that instinct. By the loading ramp, the sculptor's block of marble was gone. In October men had come with a lift to hoist the finished piece into the back of a truck. The marble had been swaddled in sheets of foam, wrapped in burlap, and tied with twine, yet the sculptor still hovered and shouted anxious instructions.

Curious, Rose had joined the others who had left their studios and ateliers to watch. Once the truck left, the sculptor invited them into his studio for tiny glasses of a clear liquor that smelled like candy but sliced a hot arrow down her throat. She'd seen the sculptor's name — Joachim — on the plaque beside his door, but she didn't know how to say it. His studio was far larger than hers. On a centre pedestal stood a hewn block of granite. He said that was his winter project.

He'd invited himself down the hallway to see what Rose was doing. Look at this! he'd cried. How do you have patience with all those blasted threads? There must be hundreds! And colour! Me, I address form — primary and pure. No distractions.

Annette, the painter, who had a studio upstairs, said colour
was
her medium. Colour and light.

Rose said nothing. She didn't trust language to explain what she felt about the design, juxtaposition, contrast, and blend of colour. How and why she yearned to make cloth.

She squeezed her teabag and dropped it in the garbage. With the mug next to her on the bench, she squinted at the length of cloth she'd already woven and decided to switch from rust to chocolate. She reached for her second shuttle, pulled the beater forward and back, and slid the shuttle across. The dance began again, the interlocking of colour and threads.

The landlord of the small building trudged up the stairs ahead of Rose, complaining about the climb. Four flights were too much for his old legs and heart. Too much, too much.

On the second floor landing he stopped to catch his breath. “You,” he said to Yushi, peering at her in the dim light. “Are you going to live here, too?” Yushi said no, she had a place. She was helping Rose look. Neither mentioned that someone else would be living with Rose. It wasn't his business.

He glanced again at Yushi. “Where do you come from?”

“Ireland.”

He frowned and launched himself up the next bout of stairs.

He unlocked a door and repeated what he'd said when Rose called to ask about the apartment.
“C'est petit.”

The apartment was a single room with a double window, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom off to the side. The refriger-ator was spray-painted turquoise. Altogether the apartment was larger than her studio — and there was a refrigerator, a stove, and a bathroom. She could put Yushi's rosewood table, which Yushi insisted she borrow, against one wall, her bed and dresser against the other. Yushi peered into the kitchen cupboards and the closet, touched the radiators to see if they were warm, peered at the tiles around the small tub. The landlord watched but didn't speak.

Rose wished Leo could see the place, but he was working, and the landlord had said he had others interested in the apartment as well. Leo had told her to take it if it was good. They could afford the rent, and the address — in St-Henri, on the same subway line as the hospital — was perfect. At the window she looked down onto the back of a grocery store, where a beer truck was parked. A man was hefting cases onto metal rollers aimed into the store. Higher up, against the grey sky, she had a view onto the domed steeples of a church.

She remembered how she'd sat curled on the old sofa in the cabin after Maman's death, feeling alone and bereft. And here she was in Montreal — with Leo and Yushi and Kenny. Perhaps Maddy, too. The sculptor whose name she was going to learn how to say. Annette, the painter. That tall woman from the hospital who said she lived nearby. Other people who recognized her on her tube feeding rounds and had started to say hi and ask how she was. Who else might she meet in the years to come? Why stop at five friends?

Yushi joined her at the window. “Do you mind being so high up? You'll have to carry up groceries.”

Four floors wasn't high. Leo's rope ladder was high. And stairs were a lot easier than a ladder.

She turned around and surveyed the room again. The table on that side, the bed on that side. A bed, a stove, a refrigerator, a bathroom. More comfort than she and Leo had known yet.

“I like it,” she said.

“Are you talking to your friend or to me?” the landlord asked.

“To you.” Rose looked at him. “To you.”

Writing a novel is the long haul. Thank you to the friends who listened to me talk in circles around and through it — all of you. You know who you are. You were there in cafés, over pints of beer, tromping down city streets and along the river path, responding to letters and frantic emails.

Thank you to my colleagues on 4NW at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal who aided and abetted my fictional re-creation of a unit coordinator's job; the long-ago Cow Café on John Street in Toronto, where I was actually paid (!!) to make cakes; Len Zorn and Glenn Zorn for demonstrating how to install French doors; Savitree Guness and her family for explaining the finer points of Trinidadian cuisine.

Thank you to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for their generous support of this project.

Thank you to a now defunct writers' group who read early drafts of early chapters: Danielle Devereaux, Lina Branter, Matthew Anderson, Kathleen Winter, Julie Paul.

Huge thanks to Anita Lahey for giving me insightful feedback on the complete draft. Her help was immense, necessary, and invaluable.

I am endlessly grateful to Shaun Bradley of Transatlantic Agency for her editorial input, ongoing belief in the book, generosity of spirit, courtesy, and good humour.

Thank you for the enthusiasm of the fine team at Dundurn Press, especially my editor, Shannon Whibbs, for her patience and expertise in shepherding
Five Roses
into the world.

As always, my love, appreciation, and thanks to Robert for everything else that makes it possible for me to write.

Copyright © Alice Zorn, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editor: Shannon Whibbs

Copy Editor: Tara Tovell

Design: Courtney Horner

Cover Design: Laura Boyle

Cover Image: © Robert Aubé

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Quotation from “Secrets” in
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(Brick Books, 2013) by Charmaine Cadeau used with permission.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Zorn, Alice, author

Five roses / Alice Zorn.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-4597-3424-1 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3425-8

(pdf).--ISBN 978-1-4597-3426-5 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8649.O67F58 2016 C813'.6 C2015-906676-X

C2015-906677-8

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and the
Ontario Arts Council
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through the
Canada Book Fund
and
Livres Canada Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit
and the
Ontario Media Development Corporation
.

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