Patterns of Swallows (3 page)

Her first-ever pay cheque came
to her courtesy of Jim and Morning Glory Metzke of the Morning Glory
Cafe.

*
* *

They were Americans – a
Texan couple. And Glo (no one had ever called her Morning Glory)
lived up to every inch of what the townspeople expected of a Texan.
As flamboyant as her name with hair a fiery shade of orange, heavy,
blue eyeshadow, and skin that suspiciously changed colour at the
jawline, Glo's drawl increased perceptibly every year she lived in
Arrowhead. She was as large and loud as Jim was small and spare and
silent. Glo never worried about remembering names. Everyone was
either a "hon" or a "darlin'." Except Ruth who
quickly became "Ruthie" or "Ruthie Darlin'."

Glo liked Ruth's looks right off
(and she was never wrong about her first impressions she was quick to
inform people). They had an opening, so Glo hired her on the spot,
even with no experience.

"You'll learn fast,"
she told Ruth confidently. "I can just tell. My first
impressions are never wrong. Now, Darlin', here's a uniform for ya.
Come in tomorrow mornin' for training. We open at six, but be here
by five thirty so I can show you the mornin' routine."

And just like that, Ruth had her
first job.

She did learn fast. She was a
quick worker and had a good memory which made her a natural for
waitressing. She could have made more of an effort at friendliness,
but Ruth wasn't one to chit-chat. Even for pay.

The regulars who ate at the
Morning Glory appreciated getting their orders hot and soon and
without reminding their waitress about their little idiosyncrasies –
like, that Ray Schultz wouldn't eat onions and that Mrs. Schultz
always wanted extra crackers for her soup – more than they
would have appreciated chit-chat from their waitress. So Ruth did
very well as a waitress, and her tips showed it.

Jim offered to train her in the
kitchen. It would have been a higher wage for Ruth, but she would
have lost her tips, so she stayed waitressing, and Eva Dempstra, the
new girl, was moved from waitressing to cooking. Jim couldn't handle
it all himself, and Glo wasn't the cooking type. She ran the front
end. She provided all the chit-chat any customer could ask for.

The Morning Glory soon became
Ruth's other home. She spent most of her spare time there when she
wasn't working. Most of her meals were eaten perched on a tall stool
at the counter, sampling one of Jim's latest culinary inventions and
listening to Glo tell stories on the customers. Glo's sense of
humour was as expansive and overabundant as everything else about
her.

Jim and Glo were the closest
things Ruth had to family, and she couldn't help being curious about
them. One time, Glo showed her their wedding photo. Jim was
instantly recognizable. Except for the loss of a little hair, he
hadn't changed much. He still wore the same quiet, serious
expression. He looked younger, a little taller, a little less spare,
in his wedding photo, but the Jim of the old photo was the Jim of the
present.

On the other hand, Ruth never
would have guessed the young, slim, glamourous woman in the wedding
photo to be the Glo Ruth knew if Glo hadn't prefaced the exhibition
of the photo by asking, "Would you like to see Jim and me's
wedding picture?" (As Glo told Ruth, she'd changed some since
the photo was taken.)

The couple in the picture made a
handsome couple (in an outmoded kind of way. The old clothes looked
comical to Ruth's modern eyes). Ruth tried to recapture in her
imagination the romance of the young James and Morning Glory Metzke,
wildly in love. It was easily done from looking at the old photo,
but when Ruth looked at the present-day realities, her imagination
balked.

But Jim and Glo were happy
together. Ruth hoped for as much herself some day. Wild romance was
all right in its place, but it did no one any good unless it made way
for or turned into the quieter, calmer assurance of lifelong
togetherness that Jim and Glo shared.

The couple had three, grown
children, all still back in Texas. It was a whim of Glo's that
brought the couple to Arrowhead in their retirement years. Jim, an
accountant, had always had a dream to run a cafe, and Glo had always
had a dream to live in the Canadian wilderness. They picked
Arrowhead off of a map, probably because the name had a
Canadian-wilderness kind of a sound to it and because of the lake and
the mountains.

Although they were both happy in
Arrowhead, they would probably go back to Texas when they retired for
the second time. Glo complained endlessly about seeing only once a
year the grandbabies who were already getting too big to sit on their
grandma's lap. It was no wonder Glo took Ruth under her ample wing.
Ruth needed family, and so did Glo and Jim. It was a good
arrangement.

*
* *

The music was old-fashioned –
just old-timey fiddling, a banjo, and a piano – but even the
younger crowd couldn't keep their feet from moving although they
disdained the music with their mouths. In her mind, Ruth practised
the steps the others were doing. Would her feet ever be able to do
that? If anyone asked her to dance (but no one would), what would
she say?

A middle-aged man she didn't
know approached, looking directly at her, and Ruth felt her spine
tense. But he moved to the punch bowl and helped himself to a glass.
Ruth let her spine relax, but it was a disappointed relaxing. The
middle-aged stranger might have been able to teach her the steps
without shaming her like someone she knew or someone her own age
might.

Graham MacKellum came for a
glass of punch.

"Hey, Wynnie," he
said.

"Wynn!" she corrected,
forming her mouth into the tiny pout she'd practised in front of her
mirror.

"Are
you serving the punch,
Wynn
?"
he asked, extra emphasis on her name, drawing out the "nn."

"Only for you," Wynn
flirted.

"Hello, Ruth," he said
to Ruth (obviously!)

"Hello, Graham," she
said back. And then she said nothing else. If there were anything
else to say, she would have said it. But there just wasn't.

"Are you sticking to the
punch bowl all night, or are you dancing?" he asked Wynn.

"Depends who's asking?"
Wynn said coyly.

"I might. If you're nice
to me. Maybe if you're both nice to me, I might give you both a
whirl," Graham said leering at Ruth and Wynn.

There was no other word for it.
Graham had leered at them.

"We should be so lucky!"
Wynn said, rolling her eyes.

"Does that really work?"
Ruth asked him. Her face had gone unimpressed.

Amazing how fast some things
could happen! Funny how seven years of deluded rememberings could
disintegrate like ice before a flame from the heat of one careless
sentence. She realized then that Graham had changed. Or perhaps
that she had. Or perhaps that she'd never known him at all. Or
perhaps all three.

"Does what work?"
Graham asked, startled, really noticing Ruth for the first time that
evening. Maybe the first time ever.

"Do lines like that really
work on some girls?"

Now Graham was annoyed and
didn't bother to hide it.

"Just ask 'em," he
said nastily.

"Just so you know, it
doesn't work on everyone," Ruth said and turned on her heel to
walk away.

"Is that so?" Graham
said, moving in front of her to cut off her exit. The dance with
Wynn was forgotten. His dander was well and truly up.

"That's so."

"I bet I could get any girl
in this room to dance with me."

"Maybe you could. But
there's more girls in the world than are in this room. All of us are
not alike, Graham. Some of us are ... oh, never mind! I don't know
what some of us are! Some of us don't appreciate the kind of cheap
talk you seem to specialize in."

Graham exhaled long and loud.

"Wheeew! What's put a knot
in your tail? First time I see you in years, and you don't have one
civil word for me? Fly right in with a lecture, why doncha?"

Ruth instantly felt stupid and
miserable.

"I'm sorry! I really am!
I don't know what gets into me," she said.

"You've changed!"
Graham said. "You used to be kinda mousy and quiet." He
didn't sound entirely pleased but maybe a little amused by the
changes.

"I know I've changed.
Somewhere along the way I started to say whatever comes into my head
without worrying what anybody thinks about it. I didn't used to be
like that, I know. I can see you've changed, too, though."

"Course I have. What d'you
think? That nothing or nobody in Arrowhead would change while you
were away? I mean, it's been what? Six years? Seven years? We
were about twelve when you left, right? Some things have changed in
seven years. Not much, but some. Not much changes around here,
except people. People always keep changing."

"I know." Ruth had
nothing more to say, so she said nothing.

There was an awkward moment of
silence. Somehow, with Ruth trying to escape and Graham in front of
her blocking her path, they'd moved away from the punch bowl and were
facing each other, a little too closely for comfort. Ruth's back was
against the wall, and Graham was leaning forward to catch her words
over the music with one hand against the wall for balance. They
looked at each other and recognized the barest hint of fear in the
eyes of the other. It occurred to both that they would look, to any
casual observer, as though they were involved in an intimate
conversation. Graham broke the silence first.

"So if I asked you to take
me up on my bet and prove me wrong, what would you say?"

"What?" Ruth said.

"In plain English, woman,
do you want to dance?"

"Oh!"

Whatever Ruth had expected from
Marjorie Trapwell's wedding, it hadn't been that she would be having
a strange and apparently intimate conversation with Graham MacKellum.
Or more surprising still, that he would ask her to dance.

"I don't know how to
dance," she said. Again, there was nothing else to be said.

"Wha'd'y'mean you don't
know how? Anyone can dance."

"I've never learned,"
she said.

"It's easy. I'll teach
you. That is, if you're not trying to win that bet. I don't think
we shook on it, though, so you might as well dance with me," he
grinned at her.

It was a good thing for Ruth
that she hadn't taken Graham up on his wager. When he shot his
boyish smile at her, reminding her of the old Graham who teased all
the girls in the class good-naturedly, casually as though by
birthright, what else could she do? Besides, she was dying to learn.
The music got into her somehow and took over. She was helpless
under its influence. At least, she believed it to be the music's
influence.

And then she found herself
dancing with Graham. Not one dance. Not two dances. Not even
three. It took her four dances to feel mildly confident that she'd
learned what Graham was teaching.

Graham turned out to be a
patient teacher. He didn't obviously mind spending all his valuable
time (and depriving every other girl in the room of his company!)
teaching her. He almost seemed to enjoy it. He gave her that
heart-jumping grin from time to time as she started to catch on, and
between Graham's smile and the relentless music, there was no
stopping Ruth.

Until after the fourth dance
when Graham said, "Let's sit the next one out. You're wearing
me out. I can't keep up to you anymore."

Ruth sat, and Graham asked,
"Would you like a glass of punch?"

"Yes please," Ruth
gasped. She could feel the sweat on her forehead and a trickle on
her nose. She wiped her face quickly on her handkerchief while
Graham went for punch. She'd never dreamed before how much fun a
dance could be.

I hope you can tell from what
I've told you about her so far that Ruth had a kind heart. However,
I don't mean to leave you with the impression that she had no faults.
She had her faults, all right. She was was stubborn and outspoken –
honest to the point of rudeness. And she had a quick temper. She
often said things she regretted later.

When she and Wynnie and Lily
were all about eleven, there were often times when Wynnie deserted
Ruth and played with Lily instead.

Lily did things like that
occasionally. She'd allow Wynnie to feel like she was getting
somewhere only to dash her hopes after a week or so by some piece of
well-planned cruelty. But it was hard to feel too sorry for Wynnie.
Her cruelties might not have been as premeditated as Lily's, but they
were cruelties nonetheless.

On one particular morning before
the bell rang for classes, while everyone waited on the playground
until the last minute, Lily and Wynnie were in the corner by the
swing set, whispering to each other. Ruth pretended to take no
notice. She'd gone to meet Wynnie as usual, but Wynnie hadn't
acknowledged Ruth's presence, rather turning to whisper to Lily.
Ruth had nothing else to do and no one else to play with, so she did
nothing and played with no one. She stood leaning against one of the
poles of the swing set, looking at her shoes, enormously aware that
whatever Lily and Wynnie were whispering was all about her. She knew
the smartest thing to do would be to leave the whispering pair and go
be alone somewhere, but fatalism kept her where she was. She had to
know the worst. Whatever was going to happen, it might as well
happen and get it over with.