Patterns of Swallows (27 page)

Mom had begun taking over the
accounting for the household, seeing she did the marketing.

She sat at the kitchen table on
Friday of their second week in their new home, frowning over a sheet
of paper.

"There's just no way around
it," she finally mumbled to herself.

"Around what?" Ruth
inquired carelessly. She was humming and sewing a hem on a curtain
for the window over the sink. Yellow checked. It would be friendly
and welcoming in the big, sunlit farm kitchen in the summer. And in
the winter, the yellow would give the illusion of sunshine.

"I'll have to go."

"What're you talking
about?"

"I'll have to go live with
Pat. Earl makes a good wage. And Pat's my own daughter. There's no
reason you should have to take me in and not my own daughter. I
can't live off of you forever, Ruth. There's just no way around it.
Even without paying rent on the house in town, your income from the
cafe just won't cover what we spend in a month, not for the two of
us, not with bills to pay and property taxes to save for. And I
refuse to be the cause of you running through all your savings. My
son put a good dent in them with his drinking and carousing and not
working. At least he had the decency to leave you with what was
still in the account when he left. I can't help but wonder what he's
living on now, though."

"I'm sure he's found work
by now. Of course, Lily probably had a fair bit of money of her own
for the two of them to live on till Graham was working," Ruth
said.

It was the first time Lily's
name had been spoken between the two women since that eventful
February morning. It cost Ruth a great effort to bring it out
casually, but she succeeded fairly well in keeping her tone even and
her voice from shaking.

There was thick silence in the
room for a long moment.

"I know what the rumours
around town have been saying, Ruth, but there's no need we have to
listen to them. Just because the two of them left town around the
same time, it doesn't have to mean they went together. Let's not
jump to any conclusions till we know a little more," Mom said
finally.

"I do know," Ruth said
quietly and regretfully. She hated to cause pain. "I didn't
tell you this before, but I saw them. I saw them leaving together
that morning."

There was another long moment of
silence before Mrs. MacKellum, without speaking a word, got up to
leave the room. She wouldn't cry in front of Ruth. Ruth had enough
to carry without having to comfort the grief of the mother of the boy
who had caused her own.

She gave her an hour alone, but
then Ruth went to find her mother-in-law. They had to get this
leaving nonsense settled.

"Now, about you going to
live with Pat and Earl, that just won't work, and you know it,"
was Ruth's first approach and an unwise one.

Mom bristled. "I don't see
why not? She's my own daughter. After her father died, she made the
offer to have me come and live with her and Earl, you know."

Ruth knew, but she was also
fairly sure the offer had been an insincere one.

"Really? You think you
could live with Earl?"

"We'd manage," Mom
said, and she set her shoulders.

"I'm sure you could
manage," Ruth hastily placated, "But what would I do?"

Her heart wrenched at the sight
of the older woman, squaring her shoulders, making up her mind to
live the rest of her days feeling leftover and unwanted. If only
Ruth could convey the truth to her.

"Don't
you see?" she pleaded. "I need you here. I need you with
me.
I
need
you. I
want
you here. I know it's not quite the same as being with your own
daughter, but don't I count, too? After all, Pat has Earl and the
kids."

"But," Mom faltered,
"But Earl has a good job. I can't ask you to support me on a
waitress's wages."

"Then I'll find a different
job," Ruth said. "I'll get a job as a secretary. It
wouldn't be a lot more, but it would be a little more, and that would
be enough. I know it would. And living out here, we can eat what we
grow. We can grow a big garden; not like that little postage stamp
of a garden we had in town. It'll soon be time to start putting the
garden in. And I'll need you to help with all the extra work around
this place when I'm working. It's not like living in town. I really
won't be able to keep up the housework and the garden and all while
I'm working."

"Don't you see?" she
said again. "I need you, I really do. And besides needing you,
I want you." She couldn't explain beyond that.

"But if you want to go..."
Ruth said, playing her trump card.

"Of course, I don't want to
leave you," Mom said, anxious not to be misunderstood. "Of
course I'd rather stay with you if I could be useful to you. But I
don't know ... I just don't know. Earl has a good job. It's not
fair to you."

"Well, how about this?
I'll start out first thing tomorrow to see if I can't find a
secretary job. I'll give my two weeks' notice at the cafe. If I
can't find something with higher pay by then, well, you can do
whatever you feel you have to, and I can go back to waitressing.
Though I hope you'll stay even if we have to tighten our belts a
little on my waitress's salary."

"But you love working at
the Morning Glory," Mom said dismally. One way or the other,
she could see Ruth would be forced to sacrifice on her behalf.

"I love working for Jim and
Glo, that's true. But you don't realize how little I'm enjoying my
job at the cafe these days," Ruth told her. And there must have
been a ring of truth to her statement because Mom agreed to wait and
see if Ruth could find another job in those two weeks.

*
* *

Secretarial work was not as easy
to come by as Ruth had pictured to herself. She'd imagined that two
weeks should be plenty of time to locate a new job. Because her job
at the Morning Glory had fallen into her lap as almost the first job
she'd applied for, she was unnaturally optimistic about the job
market.

And, though she'd given her
notice, she was still working at the cafe for another two weeks which
limited her hours for job searching.

Glo had taken the news hard that
Ruth was planning to quit but not as hard as Jim had taken it.

"You just think it over,"
Jim told her. "If you get to the end of those two weeks and you
haven't found nothin' else, or you think better of it, you don't have
to follow through, y'know. You know we'll always take you back. We
ain't gonna hire nobody new. Not till we know for sure."

It was a tremendously long
speech for Jim and took a lot out of him. By contrast, Glo was
strangely silent (which took a lot out of her).

It was very near the end of the
two weeks Ruth had given herself, and she was beginning to worry.
Not that staying on at the Morning Glory would be unbearable. It
would surely get easier with time, but she felt sure that Mom would
decide duty called her to go and live with Pat and Earl if Ruth
couldn't find a better-paying job. And Ruth had tried almost
everywhere.

There was one place in Arrowhead
she hadn't tried yet, however.

Graham had refused to ask Gus
Turnbull for a job, but a certain kind of pride had been a large
factor in Graham's make-up. Ruth had a different kind of pride, and
hers didn't preclude asking Gus Turnbull for work.

"I wonder if Mr. Turnbull
would have a moment to see me," she asked the girl at the desk
in the outer office. Ruth couldn't understand why but her heart was
beating hard as though she'd run all the way to the sawmill.

"I believe Mr. Turnbull is
engaged just now. I could make an appointment for you. What is it
regarding?" the girl asked her, examining her out of ice-blue
eyes behind horn rims. She looked very young, younger even than
Ruth.

"I'd like to speak to him
about a job," Ruth said, not knowing what else to say.

"And your name, please?"

"Ruth MacKellum."

Ruth wondered if it was pretence
or if the girl genuinely had no idea who she was. She felt as though
everyone in the entire Arrowhead valley knew who she was and knew
every detail of her life. At least her life in the past few months.
Was it possible she was still anonymous to a handful?

But the blue eyes opened a
little wider at the name, and Ruth knew the girl recognized the name
if not the face. Anonymity was an idle dream.

The door to the inner office
opened, and Gus, himself, emerged.

"Marcie, I ... oh, hello,
Ruth," he said. "Are you here to see me?"

"I did hope to see you,"
she said.

"Well, come on in then.
Come right in. I have a few minutes to spare." The heartiness
in his voice sounded false and even fearful to Ruth's ears. Was he
expecting trouble from her?

"Now, what can I do for
you?" he asked after they were seated.

"I was hoping you might
have an opening in your office," she said, coming right to the
point. "I have a little experience. I took a four-month
secretarial course. I can show you my transcripts. I have them
here. And I worked briefly in the office at MacKellums', so I'm
somewhat familiar with this kind of work. I'm sorry there's no one
to ask for my references from the mill. Actually, you could ask
Dorothy Madden about my qualifications and abilities, though."

Ruth hadn't intended her remark
about her lack of references to make Gus squirm. It was not her
intention to play on his sympathies or guilt him into giving her a
job. It had occurred to her while speaking that she had no
references for her secretarial work to give him, and so she mentioned
it.

Gus Turnbull's discomfort at the
mention of references was palpable.

"That wouldn't be
necessary," he said quickly, "I have no doubt you're very
capable. I'd like to be able to help you, Ruth, but problem is, we
just don't have any positions available. I'd like to be able to help
you, though," he repeated lamely.

"Maybe if something comes
up ..." Ruth said preparing to leave.

"Of course. I'll make a
note of it right here that you're looking for something. And if
anything comes up ... I don't suppose you'd like to try working on
the green chain with the men?" He smiled at his own little
joke, and Ruth did her best to smile back.

"Well, sure, Ruth, if
anything comes up, I'll certainly keep you in mind. Your number's
listed in the directory, I assume?" Smiling to reassure her
that he would definitely keep her in mind if something came up, Gus
ushered her to the door, and Ruth was once more subjected to the
study of a pair of cold, blue eyes as she left the office.

She'd known it was a very long
shot, but one never knew until one tried, did one?

But perhaps some remnant of a
vestigial conscience hounded Gus Turnbull for the next few days.

Or perhaps his wife, in learning
that Ruth had been in to ask about a job, reminded him that it
wouldn't look good if the town got to hear about it (as they
assuredly would). The townsfolk would say that it was Gus Turnbull's
daughter who had run away with that Chavinski girl's husband and
you'd think the least Gus could do to make amends was to give her a
job. But oh, no! Not old Gus!

Whether it was conscience or
fear of public opinion that landed her the job, Ruth did indeed find
herself working at A.A. Turnbull Enterprises within a week.

She was on the point of telling
Jim and Glo she'd changed her mind and would stay on at the Morning
Glory when she got the call one evening.

"Hello, Ruth? Yes, this is
Gus Turnbull. After you left my office the other day, I got to
thinking ... We could use someone as a filing clerk. Marcie, my
regular secretary, she says I give her too much to do in a day to get
through it all. Especially doing payroll and month's end billing.
But we could probably keep you busy the rest of the time, too. I
guess there's probably enough work for two, if you don't object to it
not being much more than filing work and stuffing envelopes."

"I wouldn't object at all.
I'd be very grateful," Ruth said happily. Strange to think
about being happy to go to work at Turnbulls', but working somewhere
out of the public eye sounded very good to her just then.

"Would you be able to start
Monday, then?"

"Monday would be perfect."

The Weaver family immigrated to
Canada from Poland shortly before the start of the war.

Their name hadn't been Weaver,
then, of course. It had been something that sounded, to Anglophone
ears, like a cross between a sneeze and an expletive. One of Jozef
Weaver's first acts in Canada was to learn the English word for their
Polish name and change the name accordingly. And so the family
became the Weavers.