Good to a Fault (3 page)

“I’m going to need some cash,” he said, hovering between threat and casual assumption.

“No,” she said. Easy enough to open her wallet, give him a twenty. No.

“Can’t get by on nothing, we got nothing left now.”

“No cash.” She looked up at the calendar. It was still Sunday. She’d sat in church today, deciding to do this, or realizing that it was not a decision.

“Tomorrow I’ll get you an appointment at Manpower, we’ll find you some temporary work.”

“Fine!” His hands went flinging palm-up in submission, as if she’d won some fight. “Fine help you are.”

He left, shouldering past her closer than he needed to, but she stood still. She was a little frightened, but only for a moment, because she was doing the right thing. She was surprised at herself, and again thought that she was doing the right thing—but maybe a foolish thing.

Listening in the den, Darlene ran her fingernails along the carpet. Her mom had clipped them when they cleaned up before they left her at the hospital, and the skin on Darlene’s fingertips was frayed-up, nervous. She was having a hard time seeing with her eyes but her fingers were working overtime. She closed her eyes and combed along the carpet, and listened to the evil snake sssinging:
Trust in me, just in me, Sleep safe and sound, Knowing I am around…

While the bathwater ran, Clara pulled off Trevor’s shirt and shorts. His ribs were sharp under his bluish skin, but he did not look malnourished. A sore on the left side, probably a mosquito bite he’d scratched. She popped him in.

“Hot! Hot!” His little body squirmed away from the water, almost levitating.

She grabbed him out again, with a rush of fear in her throat, and put her hand into the water to check—she was sure she had checked—yes, it was only warm.

“It’s not hot,” she said. “Put your foot in first, and see. It’s warm.”

He tried his foot, obediently, and said
hmm
. He brought the other foot in, and stood there letting the water get used to him. Then he squatted, his pointy bottom submerged, but kept his arms wrapped around his large-boned knees.

“How old are you?” she asked. She imagined six or seven.

“I’m five!” he told her. He was big. Or her ideas of size were wrong.

“Sing,” he ordered. She wanted to comfort him—he was only five. As she lathered up the soap she started off on a winding minor tune, the sad pig song her own mother had sung for her.

Clara held each hand in turn and washed his thin arms, trying not to tickle him. With his free hand he crowned his kneecaps with bubbles.

“Like my mom,” she heard a voice behind her say. It was Darlene standing in the bathroom doorway. Her long eyes sharp as diamonds again, her arms trembling.

“Like my mom, laid down and died.”

“She’s not dead yet,” Clara said, rattled. Stupid thing to say! Her hands were soapy. “She’s ill, Darlene, but Jesus will look after her. Jesus died for us, you know.” Oh, how had that come out of her mouth?

“Like the pig,” said Trevor in the bathtub.

It wasn’t until ten o’clock that night, when the children had finally gone to sleep, that Clara realized she had not left a place for herself. She got a blanket and a pillow and lay on the sofa in the living room. She startled awake all night at every noise, then lay planning and thinking what to do: how much vacation time she had left, what files she needed to clear up at work, what to feed them all. The grandmother went to the bathroom many, many times. At least the baby didn’t cry. The father got up and ate noisily about 2 a.m. But she could deal with him, and the children needed help. About dawn, she fell into a deep sleep.

The children were staring at her, in broad daylight.

“My dad’s gone,” Darlene said.

“He took your stuff,” Trevor told her sadly.

Her nightgown was awry. She pulled it straight and rolled off the couch, wrapped in the afghan, and went to check. He had taken her mother’s old car, which she had been using since the accident. The stereo from the den, the silver clock from her dresser. The silver teapot, but not the Spode cups and saucers, which were worth far more. Nothing she couldn’t spare. A loaf of bread and some ham. The money from her wallet, but not the credit cards.

“He’ll be back when that runs out,” Mrs. Pell said, coming to join the party. She hadn’t spoken since coming to Clara’s house—Clara couldn’t remember ever having heard her deep voice, rasping like a plumber’s snake scraping the side of the pipe.

Darlene stood beside Clara looking out the front door at the empty driveway. Trevor held on to Darlene’s T-shirt at the back.

“Will we have to go to the shelter now?” he asked her.

“No,” Darlene answered.

She looked up at Clara.

The baby started to wail in the bedroom, and Mrs. Pell showed no signs of going to attend to him. Clara was thinking what to do.

She could report Clayton, they’d probably catch him quickly. But what would she report—a missing person or a car thief? She could choose to say she’d lent him the car, she could get him to come back.

Instead she went into the bedroom and picked up the little baby, the new one, the morning dew. The baby quieted immediately, holding her hand, his other arm clinging to Clara’s neck, his body conforming to hers, his head warm against Clara’s face.

Mine,
she thought.

W
hen Clara got to Lorraine’s room in the afternoon, after picking up a loaner car at the garage, Lorraine was too tired to talk. The tests had worn her out, or just the discovery of her illness. Clara put the flowers in a vase the freckly nurse found for her, and left a box of shortbread cookies from her neighbour Mrs. Zenko on the window ledge.

Clara didn’t know whether to tell Lorraine that Clayton was gone. It would upset her, but it was hardly Clara’s secret to keep, and she dreaded Lorraine finding out somehow and blaming her—or shrieking at her again. Lorraine’s face screaming, her finger pointing, Pearce at her bare breast on the street: these images returned to Clara’s mind too often already. She prickled with guilt for not telling her, but Lorraine didn’t even ask about him. Perhaps he had told her he was going, had said he
wouldn’t stay in that house,
some bluster like that. Clara sat in the straight blue chair, not the orange recliner, and talked about the children, how they were settling in. She asked if Lorraine was able to express (proud of herself for pulling that unfamiliar word from memory), and if she should bring Pearce in later.

“No, keep on with the formula. I can’t nurse him now, all this stuff they’re putting in me. It was about time to stop him anyways, he’s nine
months old. He’ll be a year, September 10th. But it was such a pleasure, why stop? Easier, too, when we were moving around all the time. Didn’t have to clean bottles or buy those plastic baggies…”

Lorraine’s voice threaded out, as if she’d gone to sleep on the thought of travelling, safe in their seashell car, her whole family close around her and her baby at her breast.

Clara watched her for a while, until she was sure she was either asleep or tired of company. She went home, stopping on the way to get fried chicken for supper, which was a great hit and made her believe she might almost be able to manage them.

On Tuesday morning Darlene waited until Clara had been gone ten minutes before she got up from the living room and went down the hall. Gran was watching TV, propped back on one elbow with her old potato feet on the table, in the little bedroom where their dad had slept that one night. Darlene could imagine him going around the house, the look on his face, walking past Clara out in the living room, finding the car keys in her handbag. She did not want to have to tell her mom about him being gone. In Gran’s room Pearce lay sleeping in the basket, with a bottle drooling out of his mouth. Gran had dumped her stuff out onto the floor, as usual. It smelled like her in there: old teeth and hair.

Darlene had already gone through the desk in the living room: bills all tidy, and a cheque-book: $5,230 in the balance place, that was a
lot
. She had put it back carefully at the same angle.

No reason she shouldn’t go in Clara’s room. It was hers and Trevor’s for now; maybe she felt like a nap. Their pyjamas were folded on the bed. The other furniture all matched, but it was all old. The chair by the window was covered with faded cloth. There were dents in the carpet where other chairs or dressers must have been before. Green walls, like her mother’s sweater that Darwin gave her. Darlene loved the smell in there—like flowers, and maybe a long time ago someone had smoked a cigarette. It was lucky that she and Trevor got to sleep in here. For now. In the night-table drawers she found almost nothing: a nail-clipper and file and some flat blood-coloured cough drops. She tasted one, but it was disgusting. She spat it out, dried it off and
put it back in the package. The dresser held a hundred sweaters, it looked like, smelling of clean wool and perfume. She was tempted to pull one out and rub her face in it, but she did not think she could fold it back properly, and then Clara would know.

Where was anything good? Darlene didn’t even know what she was looking for. Not candy or money, they wouldn’t be in here. The closet: she dragged the armchair over and pulled boxes off the top shelf. Old cream-coloured satin shoes, with a sway-backed heel and a button. They couldn’t have ever fitted Clara, they were about her own size. She put them on, liking the ladylike arch in her foot, but didn’t dare button the stiff strap, or take a step in them.

In a yellow box she found government stuff and old browned photocopies, little pictures with wavy edges of guys in uniform. A bunch of letters tied up in string might be good, but Darlene was too chicken to open the string. If she couldn’t get it tied right it would be like that time in Espanola.

In another yellow box, a marriage license for Clara Purdy and Dominic Raskin, 1982. Why wasn’t she Clara Raskin, then? Some photos, a few letters, all jumbled together.

There was a noise in the front hall—Clara coming back?

Darlene had half-scrambled the yellow box back to the top shelf when she realized it was her grandmother banging the screen door, going out for a smoke. She could hear her yelling to Trevor, “You put the channel back when I get back!” and Trevor saying yes, yes.

She put the box on the shelf anyway. Another time, when she knew how long she’d have. She fluffed the clothes to make them look ordinary, fitted the chair back into its dents in the carpet by the window, and scuffed her sock feet over the drag-lines made by the chair. Trevor was shrieking in the living room. Gran yelled at him to shut up, and then Pearce was crying. She could do the bathroom any time—but there was still the kitchen.

The nurse must have just been in. Lorraine sat propped up, flipping channels, the sheets tucked tight around her. She looked sick, and Clara said so.

“It’s the fever,” Lorraine said. “They can’t get it to stay down. Is Trevor okay?”

“He’s happy outside. He likes the old birch tree that my father planted when I was born.”

“A tree planted when you were born? How big is it?”

“It’s not
that
big, I’m only forty-three.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Lorraine said, coming close to a laugh. It seemed to hurt her chest. “How about Darlene?”

“She can tell me what they’re used to, now—” Now that Clayton was gone. Clara steered away from that. “She’s very good with Pearce, too. If he cries she can calm him better than any of us.”

“He crying a lot?”

“Oh no, I didn’t mean—Just when once in a while he makes a murmur.”

“Because he’s a good baby, he doesn’t cry.”

“He’s a perfect baby. You must be missing him.”

Lorraine began to sob. Clara sat watching, in an agony of guilt. After a moment, though, Lorraine stopped. As if crying took more energy than she was prepared to expend. “Spilt milk,” she said. “They took that other lady out—the ovarian one. She went in for surgery, but when they opened her up they couldn’t do anything. They sewed her back up and sent her home to Wilkie.”

Difficult to respond to that.

“That’s the bad part,” Lorraine said. She patted the bed restlessly, and fumbled with the small flowered pillow that Clara had remembered to bring in for her.

“Can I fix it?” Clara slid her arm under Lorraine’s neck, lifting her head gently. In one quick motion Clara slipped the flowered pillow out, shook it into softness again, and smoothed it into a double fold to fit nicely beneath Lorraine’s ear.

“You’re good at that.”

“I had practice with pillows, looking after my mother for many years while she was ill.”

They sat together in silence for a while but Lorraine was still restless. “We were on our way to Fort McMurray. Clayton’s got a job lined up there. His cousin has an RV dealership, used, and now that so many people can’t find any place to live up there, there’s lots of people buying. Clayton was go
ing to help Kenny fix up trailers, there was one on the lot that we could use while we figured out where to live. It would have been okay for a while, until we found something better.”

“Lots of work up in Fort McMurray, they say.”

“He can do a lot of things you wouldn’t expect,” Lorraine said. “He’s a good cabinet-maker. He upholsters furniture, too, and that’s hard work. That’s what his cousin wanted him for, to reupholster the trailer fittings. He’d surprise you, how good he is.”

Maybe he’d gone on without them, Clara thought.

Lorraine stopped talking, and twisted her head from side to side. “My neck hurts.”

“Do you want me to see if they can give you something?”

“I don’t want to take anything. I’m already taking stuff. I don’t know.”

Clara thought the fever was increasing.

“It’s hard,” Lorraine said.

“Yes,” Clara said. Not knowing what else to say.

On the very top shelf of the last kitchen cupboard Darlene found a brown envelope taped down on a glass pedestal thing. Tons of money in it. It added up to seven hundred and something, counting pretty quick, one ear open for Clara coming back from the store. But it was no good to her, it was strange pink money from England. The car! She jumped down from the counter. Too far, so the balls of her feet hurt, but she didn’t get caught.

Finding the house in surprising disarray, Clara tidied the living room and the TV room, and the hall, and the back steps—Trevor had made a fort there with blankets and pillows—before making lunch. Mrs. Pell went to her bedroom and shut the door, and they all left her alone. Clara gave Pearce a bottle. He stared into her eyes thoughtfully while he drank, his fingers splayed against her chest.

When he fell asleep she did three loads of laundry. She remembered to phone and extend the insurance on her mother’s car, thinking she might be liable if Clayton got into another accident. She made cookies and started a list of necessities on the door of the fridge: formula, diapers, chicken soup
from an envelope. They did not like canned. She wrote down everything the children asked for. It seemed like they were all in cotton wool, or that same smothering membrane which had been bothering Clara herself lately.

After supper Clara walked them to the park in the darkening evening. The children played on the flat merry-go-round, Trevor standing in the middle and Darlene running it around and around, faster and faster, until she could jump up too and they went spinning on and on through the indigo night air.

Clara stood a little distance away from their orbit, letting Pearce rest against her chest, feeling the weight and the balance of his body against hers. It wasn’t so hard, being with children.