The Big Dream (16 page)

Despite knowing the per-minute costs, Laurence asked about the city, the luggage, her health (but not the ginger tea), their meals. Then he asked, casually, chattily, almost academically, about pie. It was only when she said the baby was spitting up that Laurence consented to let her go.

The next morning, he dug through the basement deep freeze, frost beading his cheeks, until he found the cottage-cheese container marked “Pie cherr. 09” in Syl's tight cursive. The pastry recipe on the back of the lard box took most of the morning, but it finally cohered into something resembling a pie shell. It was early afternoon before Laurence finally put the fruit into a saucepan. After twenty minutes of ardent stirring, medium heat, and a half-pound of sugar, the cherries showed no evidence of a will to be pie. There was a tap at the back door.

Once again, Laurence saw Corey Carbone's big baby face through a screen door. This time, though, his arm was draped around a small Filipina woman.

It was Laurence's turn to say, “Yeesss?”

The woman beamed blankly until Corey Carbone said, “Came to thank you. For the pie.”

“It was from Syl.” Laurence waved his wooden spoon absently.

The woman took this as invitation to open the door wide and gracefully pilot the big man through. She looked like a nymph dancing with a tree. Laurence let his irritation go as soon as he saw the sweat glistening on the side of Corey Carbone's neck.

Laurence set the spoon in the spoon rest, and padded (still barefoot at two p.m., with company!) over to the woman who was manipulating Corey Carbone into the kitchen chair closest to the stove. It was not Laurence's dinner seat, but it was the one he sat in when Syl was cooking and he was watching her. His guest looked so thankful to finally be safely seated that Laurence could not begrudge him the spot. The woman began backing away.

“I come later?”

“Yes, Ciara, thanks.” Corey Carbone leaned back cautiously. Without the screen door intervening, Laurence could see that Corey Carbone's face was smooth-shaven, with the right side mannequin-still. If there were such things as old-man mannequins.

“When I come back? How long?”

“I won't stay long, Brunswick.”

Laurence breathed in deeply through his nose. “I'll take you home, Mr. Carbone. No need to trouble . . . her.” He had forgotten the name already. Pathetic.

When the woman was gone, Corey Carbone shrugged and smiled, and his tiny voice said, “Sorry about this. She tries to get me out of the house regular. But she don't think too much about where besides
out
. Sorry.”

Laurence smiled – the second apology was all he needed to feel generous. “No trouble at all. Syl's more the stickler for scheduling than I am.” Another lie from the clear blue. Laurence felt like cupping it fondly in his palm.

“Whatcha making? Another pie?”

Laurence considered. Finally: “Bake sale. Church. Syl wouldn't want them to miss the donation, just because she had to go out of town.” He was staring into the pot of bubbling watery cherries. It looked liquid, drinkable, utterly un-pie-like.

A shift of chair legs. “Things all
right,
Brunswick? Syl's ok?”

He saw an expectation of tragedy in Corey Carbone's leftside features – not smug, only fearful. “A celebration, actually. Our first granbaby got born. How 'bout that?” Where had the slang come from? To match Corey Carbone's happy-hour slur, perhaps.

“How 'bout
that
?
Fan
tastic, Brunswick.” Corey Carbone slapped his right knee and Laurence winced. “Boy or girl?”

“Boy. Brian. Seven weeks.” Laurence pointed at the fridge picture – the fat mottled face and blue-veined skull. All children were ugly at birth, but Brian looked like a champion anyway. The cherries were making little splashing noises. “Syl's gone to help out a bit.” When Laurence bent over the pot, red bubbles popped and splattered his arm.

“Glad for the quiet? Or you miss 'er?”

Laurence turned down the burner, frowning.

“I could never stand it, myself. Rysa and I spent maybe ten nights apart, all told. Maybe less.”

“Rysa?” Laurence searched his mind for an image of a woman in the Carbone driveway, but he came up empty. It was another strange name, or perhaps only a standard one that Corey Carbone's tongue could no longer render. He hoped she wouldn't turn out to be a Doberman as he asked, “You folks were married a long time?”

“Thirty-five years, but that don't seem long when you start at eighteen.”

Laurence did the math from the apparent age of the man – Corey Carbone had likely been a widower for twenty years. The cherries were starting to sink in the goop. He stirred forlornly. “In all those years of married life, Rysa ever tell you how to make a cherry pie?”

“Well, no, not that I . . . Why?”

“
Why?
What do you – That's what I'm
doing
here.
Trying
to do.”

Silence. Laurence looked up. Corey Carbone sat with both legs kicked forwards, one elbow on the chair arm, the other hand rested atop his cane, which was leaning on his thigh. It should have been a casual pose, but for Corey Carbone's stiff body, it looked like the rack. “Sorry, Brunswick.” He shrugged; only the left shoulder rose.

Laurence sighed. “Sorry, man, sorry. Tough morning.”

“What's gone wrong? Smells good.”

Laurence sniffed dismissively. To him, the smell was over-sweet, syrupy,
wrong
. “Thank you. But it's not like a pie filling. From here, it's like cherry soup.”

“Such a thing, y'know. Cherry soup. Had it on a cruise once.”

“A cruise?” Laurence abandoned the question. “I don't want soup. I want pie. I was trying to boil down the juice to . . . gel, you know. But it won't.”

Corey Carbone shook his head, and his jowls wobbled equally on both sides. “Too much juice? Or not enough thickners?”

Laurence stood completely still and felt his neck crack. “Thickener?”

Corey Carbone's good eye squinted. “Whaddya put in?”

“Cherries. Frozen ones.” The pebbly pie crust looked greyish in the slight sun through the kitchen window.

“And . . . ?” Corey Carbone nodded stiffly, left-leaning, encouraging.

“Sugar. Because they weren't all that sweet.”

“Pie cherries are, uh, sour cherries, yeah. You hafta add the sugar . . . and . . .”

“And . . . ?” Laurence asked. He set the spoon on the spoon-rest. A little of pink dripped on the white stovetop.

“Dunno . . . flour?” Another uneven shrug.

“Flour? Flour goes in the
crust,
I found a recipe for the crust.”

“Didja find one for the filling?”

Laurence turned off the stove. “I don't think she uses one. Anyway, I couldn't find it. Her files are a mess.” He went over and took a seat at the table.

“First time she's been away in how long?”

“Not that long.” Laurence slouched forward, arms on the placemat, chest pressing down. “I used to travel a lot, on business. I only just retired.”

“Ah.” Corey Carbone grinned. His eyelid and mouth stayed flaccid on the right, but both eyes were bright. “First time
she's
been away in . . . ?”

Laurence whistled. “Ever, I suppose.”

“Why didn't
you
go?”

The pink smell of cherries was starting to stifle. Laurence wondered if it would be rude to open a window. “I had work to . . . cover.”

“I thought you retired.”

“The new team, they need a little saving, sometimes.” Laurence had said this dozens of times, always in a hearty, resigned tone. Today, the words sounded almost violent.

Laurence had a momentary flash of Syl's perfect puff of white hair wandering down an ugly alley of thugs and thieves. “Plus, it's hard to travel, laid up like this.” He waved his cane, then glanced at Carbone's own and felt bizarrely guilty.

“Oh, well, I'm sure you've seen enough of the world.” Corey Carbone squirmed in his chair, both hands pressed on the cane top as he hauled his butt forward, then shifted his weight onto his left hip.

“You all right?”

“S'ok,” Corey Carbone said tightly. It was several seconds before he finally leaned back again and relaxed his grip on the cane. “If yer giving up on that pie, we could just eat the cherries, you know. With spoons.”

“Pretty sad thing to offer a guest.”

“Well, I'll take what I can get. Be a proper dessert with a little ice cream, if you got it.”

Laurence got obediently to his feet, though he felt himself listing far more leftward than usual, white-knuckling his own cane. An apology for inhospitality fished around in his brain, but all that came out was, “I think we
might
have, not ice cream but sherbet – ”he opened the freezer and foam-white air fogged his glasses “ – shoot, sorry, Corey Carbone, it's raspberry.” He shut the freezer with a sad thump.

“You think I care about clashing shades of pink?”

“Right.” Laurence nodded and reopened the freezer.

“And whatcha call me by my full name for? Think some other Corey will pop in, demand ice cream – sherbet?”

Laurence jolted again. “No, sorry, Carbone. Your name just sorta slides off the tongue all in one piece, you know?”

“Never heard that one. Course, nothing slides off my tongue, these days.”

Laurence tried to picture the pre-stroke Corery Carbone, sober-spoken and smooth, or at least not sounding quite so boozily meek. He couldn't. The thin red juice dribbled to the bottom of the bowl, and the cherries clung like slugs to the sherbet. It looked revolting. Laurence took the dishes and spoons to the table, sat and asked, “What was your profession, Carbone? Before you retired?”

Corey Carbone swallowed his first bite and smiled. “Professor. Physics. Quantum. The way I worked, no one does any more. But then, I don't do it either.”

The cherries were sickeningly sweet; Laurence figured he'd overdone the sugar in his frustration. Corey Carbone's pants were a shade of an unripe banana, pulled up topside of his gut. He did not look like an intellectual. “You miss it?”

“Must've, once, I guess. Twenty years ago now. Too much else to miss, in the meantime. I miss Rysa, smartest lady in Weston and a damn fine ornithologist. I miss walking to the can without
having to hang off that little girl like a lecher.” Corey Carbone dug his spoon into his pink mess again. “This is damn good, like that spun sugar crap kids get at the fair.” His speech was smoothing out, slightly.

“Cotton candy.”

They were silent a moment, eating. Finally, Laurence had to ask, “Corey Carbone, do you remember what happened when you had that stroke, and Syl came over, all that? Could you see her?”

“Sure I remember, sure I saw her, sorta.” Corey Carbone smacked his lips, glanced down at his empty bowl, then over at Laurence's, still mainly full. “Sorta long to explain, I guess.”

Laurence pushed the pink swirl towards him. “Me, I got nothing but time. You don't mind?”

There was a pink drip of raspberry on Corey Carbone's lower lip that he made no move to lick. It seemed suitable just there, like a beauty mark or a freckle. “You got it right – nothing but time.”

THE RESEARCH DEPARTMENT at Dream Magazines has been reduced. In straitened economic times, something always has to go, and this time it was knowledge, in the form of four-fifths of the research team. More specifically, these are (were) the suspender-wearing architectural historian whose sexuality could never be determined; the tall willowy former model who ate Altoids by the box; the moonlighting Chinese chef with his mounds of recipes and climbing ivy plant; and the legal expert who received an angry phone call from his ex-wife every day at three p.m.

On Monday morning, they were all already gone by the time the last employed researcher arrived. She was 38 years old and possessed of several credits towards a masters in cultural anthropology; twin teenaged boys; a Nescafé jar on the right corner of her desk; and the lowest salary, least seniority, and least sarcastic sense of humour in the department. Leadership felt they'd settled on a prudent choice.

At first, she did not realize that she had become the sole embodiment of the research department. The baffles of her cube were high enough that she rarely saw her colleagues accidentally, and since they were on flex hours, she often couldn't find anyone even if she tried. So the echoing silence did not bother her when she arrived at 8:55, set her lunch bag (SpongeBob, one of the boys' discarded treasures) in the fridge, prepared her Nescafé in the microwave, and set to work on the last of her research for an article on fastenings in
Dream Beading
.

By 10:06, she had already solved what a grommet was, and had begun the question of what one might do with it. Also at 10:06, the team from Building Services arrived and began to dismantle the cubes of the research room. Because of her hard won ability to tune out the hungover mutterings and heavy footfalls of her (former) colleagues, she looked up only when her own walls came down. A vista of dusty desks and dead plants suddenly opened. Far far at the end of the room was a window she had never noticed before. It beamed pale light over her former colleague's many empty Altoids tins.

Men were walking away with the walls. She knew a corset was laced through a grommet, as was a shoe, and also through a grommet a flag was bound to its pole, but she did not know what was going on. She was alone except for a man with “69” on his T-shirt who was removing the phone that had brought so many calls of marital devastation.