Sweet Life (19 page)

After Erik vanished, Roland gave up his condo in Winnipeg and moved home. He replaced the heavy furniture in this living room with his own modern pieces, and Agatha would’ve agreed to anything to have him back, even allowed his girlfriend, Bernie, to move in. The woman didn’t have much of a personality, but at least she had her own place and wasn’t possessive.

Not like Karin. She’s a squeezer, and if Roland doesn’t watch it, she’ll squeeze the life right out of him. Agatha’s seen the look on the girl’s face: a smug
Let me at the buffet
look
.
She wants Agatha’s place for herself, the house Agatha’s great-grandfather built from fieldstones picked from the land, the timbers hauled all the way from Ontario.

She yanks the blind cords at each of the four windows and light scrambles across the grey walls. Roland insisted on the colour, claimed it went best with the furniture. He also hung several pictures, has an eye for good art. Why, then, did he allow Karin to redo his bedroom, turn it into a brothel? Those purple and mauve cushions, the monster canopy with its fringe and black beads.

Now all that coffee Agatha chugged back is looking for a way out and she doesn’t dare wait. She imagines the flesh of her organs has shrivelled like her skin; it’s only her brain hasn’t aged. There are times it becomes electric, her thoughts pulsing quick and furious; other times it’s serene as a sanitized room after someone’s gone through with a vacuum and dust rag.

In the powder room, light sparkles from a cascade of looped crystals, a custom-designed chandelier she bought to match the larger ones at the front entrance and in the dining room. She often catches Karin staring at them. No doubt the trailer she grew up in was lit by bare bulbs, enough light to show off the velvet Mexican painting.

On her way back to the kitchen, she hears Karin and Roland gabble like a pair of geese. They shut up when they see her. Karin whacks lemons in half; Roland turns on the juicer and watches it throw a fit.

Of course. It’s the May long weekend and he’ll be getting at the annuals. He’s a skilful gardener, her boy, and each summer their yard makes a big splash this side of Winnipeg, this side of the road, this side of the sun.

And there’s the witch’s familiar at the door, streaking the glass with its paws, poking smudges with its snout. Karin better watch out; little dogs die out here, picked off by coyotes or run over, sometimes in their own yards.

“Filthy thing.”

Karin swings round. “Who are you to talk? You didn’t bother washing your face this morning, there’s drool on your chin.”

“A rose by any other name.”

Roland pours the lemonade into a glass pitcher. “Maybe we could get through one day, just one.” There’s wetness to his voice, like raindrops clinging to dust before they hit the ground.

~

Agatha’s mother’s weak voice was soft as rain slipping off leaves. She’d descend the stairs slowly in a white peignoir, looking like a translucent ghost long before she died. Once downstairs she’d keep to the living room sofa and cover herself with a cotton blanket. She had subscriptions to
Photoplay
and
Chatelaine
, read each issue cover to cover until her brain (she told Agatha) had the whole thing locked up.

Agatha would kneel by the sofa and yak non-stop, looking for the right words to keep her mother close. She talked about school and friends and the farmyard, rattled off made-up stories, but eventually “all that monkey chatter” wore her mother out, sent her back upstairs for peace and quiet.

The summer she died began badly. Agatha’s teacher quit being lenient about her school work and held her back
.
(The other students weren’t sympathetic, merely curious: “Is your mom dying? My mom says so.”) Agatha’s father, forgetting to be sarcastic, told her that only a dummy could fail grade three. She’d let him down and couldn’t have the pony he promised; she didn’t deserve it.

Some of the cattle sickened and died before the vet discovered a treatment, and Agatha’s father couldn’t get through a day without blowing up. He even snapped at Mrs. Grimm, a woman from Santa Maria Church who was only doing her Christian duty, coming over once a week to clean, make meals, run the washing machine. “That high and mighty Stanley Hubick,” she muttered one afternoon, grabbing the soup bowls and dropping them into soapy water. Next, the cutlery crashed into the sink and Agatha, half-afraid she’d be lifted from her chair and tossed in too, took off to a shed. She couldn’t find the new litter of kittens, and thinking that their mother, Mimi, must’ve moved them to a feeding box, Agatha checked the barn. Her father was inside with a sick heifer.

He didn’t look up. “Kittens? Their mother ate ’em. Cats do that sometimes.”

Stick in hand, Agatha searched everywhere, but Mimi, too, was gone. Lucky for her, because if Agatha had caught her, she would’ve beaten her into a furry pancake.

By July, Agatha’s mother wouldn’t leave her bed, and it became Agatha’s job to empty the chamber pot. She knew this was another punishment; she had a talent for disappointing her father. Terrified of slopping on herself, she clung to the smooth bowl, slid her feet along the carpet, storing electricity that sparked from her head when she used it to bump the bathroom light switch. Although she held her breath while pouring, she couldn’t help seeing what came from the bowl, all that thin, bloody soup.

Nurse Edie arrived and took over. When she set herself up in the sickroom (a cot at the end of the bed; her few clothes in a small case; toiletries in a zipped bag) she didn’t respond to Agatha’s aggrieved: “I had to empty the pot.” Nurse Edie informed Agatha’s father that she did not approve
of children in a sickroom: they got underfoot, demanded at
tention and asked questions.

Agatha was allowed one visit a day. She’d sit on a chair by the bed and speak in a calm, hushed voice; her mother’s voice shaky as a wind-whipped telephone wire. The first day she refused food was also the day she spoke her last words, and those were to Nurse Edie:
Let me out.

The morning of the funeral, Agatha sensed this was the day the crows would come, and they came, all right, swooped in while the coffin was being lowered into the hole. A great, shivering cloud beat back the sky, muffled the rest of the day in darkness.

~

The darkness wants back in. It circles the house like a feral dog looking to bite.

The dog’s dish is on the floor and Karin squats to scoop soft food from a can.

Agatha’s mind hasn’t yet made it into high gear. She gets a cup from the cupboard and pours herself another coffee. “There’s this neighbour down the road. You’ve met him. Big Tony.”

Karin snaps a lid onto the can. “Roland and I went to his place for supper. You wouldn’t go.”

When Roland reaches to refill his own coffee cup, he makes a point of nodding at Agatha’s. “Haven’t you had enough?”

He means enough caffeine, enough yipping, but Agatha’s off to the races, her mind snapping like firecrackers. “Big Tony’s cat had kittens. One was small, a runt, and sick all the time. Well, one day Big Tony starts burning trash in his barrel and next thing he knows, this cat comes out of nowhere, jumps right into the barrel.”

Karin waves the can. “If this is about the smoke alarm going off when I went outside, you need to get over it. If you hadn’t been upstairs sleeping it off, I could’ve told you to keep an eye on things. The meat burned, but there wasn’t any fire.”

“I had a migraine.”

“Whatever.”

“The reason Big Tony’s cat jumped into the fire barrel was that the stupid thing didn’t know any better. And just like that cat, there are people who get themselves into trouble because they don’t have a lick of sense.”

Karin opens the fridge and sets the dog food inside. “Roland, do you know what your mother is babbling about
this
morning?”

Roland reaches past her and plunks the lemonade pitcher inside the fridge. Jars rattle. He rubs at his chin as though he can force the day-old whiskers into his skull.

Agatha looks out through the screen, where a warm breeze floats dead leaves along the patio. Last fall, pruners cut away most of the old crabapple tree, yet missed, on its highest branch, a shaggy cocoon. This thing now sways like a chunk of grey fur.

Roland pushes the screen door aside. “Someone else can think about lunch. I’ll be busy.”

If only Agatha could comfort him the way she did when he was a boy. She calls out to his retreating back: “There should be enough chowder from yesterday.”

When she turns, Karin’s playing wifey, rinsing the juicer and knife, setting them on the dish rack. Then she starts sorting the horticulture magazines Roland left scattered on the table.

Agatha grabs the dishcloth and rubs lemon juice from the granite counter. “I’ll make lunch. That way my house won’t burn down.”

“There you go again, whacking out about nothing. Like when you charged out of the house just because Baby dug a little hole.”

One smack with the cloth is all it would take to shake loose those fuzzy eyes.

“You were the one with the shovel.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t have a shovel. When Roland got home, all his shovels were right where they belong. I was trying to stop Baby – oh, what’s the use of talking.” Karin drops the magazines and picks up a paperback, one of several whodunits she leaves all over the house. She takes her mutt outside and it takes off running. Karin plunks herself at the patio table with her feet up like a queen.

Roland’s not in sight. He’d have a fit if he came in now, and saw Agatha head for the liquor cabinet. “Northern Comfort” was what her father called his whiskey those evenings he settled in the living room with a newspaper, slogging back while Agatha’s mother rested upstairs with her magazines.

The funny thing about drinking martinis is that by the time Agatha’s on her third, she can smell rhubarb pie, the way its steam filled the house one morning when Mrs. Patsy came over to get at the cooking and cleaning.

With her skinny legs, yellow dress and short socks, she reminded Agatha of a Hilroy pencil. Busy taking the pies from the oven, she didn’t see Agatha slip into the pantry, hide behind the partially closed door with a bag of white sugar between her knees. The back door squeaked open; her father’s heavy boots hit the floor. There were whispers and funny noises. She sucked at her fingers, rubbed sweet granules against the roof of her mouth with her tongue while the kitchen table went
thump-thump
against the wall.

Several days later, Mrs. Patsy fell from the top stair, rolling far enough to fracture ribs and snap two bones in her right arm. She claimed someone pushed her, but there wasn’t anyone in the house except for Agatha who, her mother insisted, had spent the entire morning at her bedside. Mrs. Patsy didn’t swallow that one. “Since when do you give the poor girl more than five minutes of your precious time?” and was fired on the spot.

If only Agatha could fire Karin.

There’s Roland, a Tilley hat shielding his face as he digs in a flower bed next to the driveway, the dark ground soft after being rototilled. He turns over a plant and taps the container with the back of a spade; sets the released plant into a hole. Karin’s yelling at her dog and there it goes, hellbent on running down some animal, tearing through the trees like a mad thing with Karin right behind.

It’s the same path Erik took the last time he left the house, striding into the dusk, trailing cigar smoke and the tail end of Agatha’s screaming. During the decades he worked overseas, he must’ve forgotten about her hair-trigger temper. Sell everything and split the money so he could shack up with a woman in Arabia? This was her thanks for all the years Agatha held down the fort while he worked overseas, gone for months at a time. She rented out the land; looked after the house; raised their son, and on the cusp of his retirement, Erik went into a song and dance about another woman. Next time he left, it would be for good.

Only he wasn’t expecting to be gone that soon.

The best thing Erik ever gave her is kneeling in a flower bed next to the driveway, making the yard pretty, looking after things the way he’s done for Agatha ever since he moved back home. But for some reason when it comes to doing something about Karin, a raisin’s got more juice.

Roland’s probably worked up a thirst by now. Agatha drops ice cubes into a tall glass and takes the lemonade jug from the fridge. There’s a single lemon seed floating on the juice, but when she tries to fish it out with her fingers, it slips away. Oh well, it’s only one seed. She dries her hand
on her shorts. She’s halfway to the front door before she re
members to duck back into the powder room, rinse with mouthwash.

She carries the glass outside. Paving stones warm her bare feet until she reaches the grass along the driveway and there’s her boy, patting at the raw soil with his hands.

Later he’ll smooth the ground between the plants with a rake before he gets out the watering hose.

“I brought you lemonade.”

Roland leans back on his haunches and looks around. “Where’s Karin?”

“Chasing her mutt.” Agatha waves toward the trees, takes a step sideways and bumps the rake with her foot. Although the tines dig harmlessly into the ground, he reminds her to be careful. Dear Roland. Looking out for her. Like he did last night when he moved Erik’s body.