The Birthday Lunch (13 page)

“Nowadays everything is done by machine,” Hal says. “Cows are inseminated by machine and milked by machine.”

The Mazda rumbles through the covered bridge crossing Wards Creek and soon they are passing another silo, another cow barracks. A few miles on, the landscape changes and modest acreages appear: house, barn and vegetable garden, sometimes a cow, sometimes a horse, sometimes a tractor in the driveway. Farther on, two hand-painted chairs are set out for sale beside the road; at another, barnboard portraits hang from a gate; farther still, handmade quilts are pegged to a clothesline. None of these items would be suitable for Better Old Than New, but Hal admires the enterprising spirit of their makers. Their optimism and industry give him a lift and a few miles along the road when he sees two little girls sitting at a lemonade stand, he insists on stopping. He gets out the car and asks, “How is business?”

“Not very good,” the older sister says. “You’re the first ones to stop.”

“We made the lemonade ourselves,” the younger sister says.

Hal tells them they will have four glasses. Matt takes out his wallet but Hal beats him to it and hands over a five-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he says. It takes so little to make children pleased with themselves and Hal seldom passes a
lemonade or Kool-Aid stand without stopping. For a moment the older sister stares wide-eyed at the money. “Thank you,” she says, and pocketing the five-dollar bill, she pours the lemonade while the younger sister carries the glasses to Matt who passes them around. “We need the glasses back,” the older sister says. “Our mother said so.”

“If your mother said so then we’ll do what she says,” Matt tells her. The older sister reminds him of his enterprising daughter who likes to set up a lemonade stand at the end of the driveway. The older sister reminds Laverne of the summer she set a bench on the sidewalk in front of their house in Bridgewater and displayed her wares: a Jersey Milk chocolate bar, an orange, a handful of grapes, six squares of Mackintosh toffee and a bowl of hand-picked raspberries. Laverne remembers waiting hours for customers who never showed up. Only Lily showed up. She had no money but she showed up and at Laverne’s insistence, signed her name to what their father called a promissory note for the sum of fifty cents so that she could pay for Laverne’s wares. Lily eventually paid her back, five cents at a time from her weekly allowance; even so, it did not seem fair to Laverne that her sister had eaten the chocolate bar, the toffee squares
and
the raspberries Laverne had picked as well as the raspberries Lily had eaten as she was picking. When Laverne complained to her father about the unfairness of the exchange, Lou smiled and said, “You could have eaten the candy and the berries, Laverne. Instead you decided to sell them and accept a promissory note. You can’t have it both ways.” Laverne remembers asking why she couldn’t have it both ways, but her father had no answer for that.

As they resume their drive and enter St. Martins, the smell of the Bay of Fundy sweeps through Claudia’s open window. Living in Sackville beside the swamp smell of the Tantramar Marshes, Claudia misses the salt sting of the air she enjoyed when she had a summer job here after she finished high school. Little has changed since she was last in St. Martins: the same old houses line Main Street, one of them the Miller house where she boarded. Built by a sea captain, and one of the few mansions to survive the fire of 1900, the house stands well back from the road. There are no rocking chairs on the veranda, no open windows, no washing on the clothesline. By now Enid and Hazel Miller may have died. The sisters were elderly and strict, imposing a curfew of nine o’clock when the doors were locked. The night his father and brother drowned, Roger had boosted Claudia through the kitchen window and she crept up the back stairs to her bed in what the sisters referred to as the maid’s room.

To the right of Main Street is a vast expanse of red beach, the high tide having pulled the sea miles away from the shore. The road curves downhill and a wharf piled with lobster traps comes into view. Tied to the wharf are three fishing boats stranded on ruddy sand slick with water from the creek flowing beneath the covered bridge. The road continues to a small park where an old lighthouse serves as a tourist centre. By now the car windows, front and back, are wide open and the bracing sea breeze sweeps through the car. All four were born beside the North Atlantic and the smell of the sea runs deep. An elbow turn and soon they are rolling through another covered bridge, this one fording the creek, and the Mazda climbs
the hill to a rough parking lot. Matt pulls up beside the Cave View Restaurant sign advertising Chowder, Clams, Lobster Rolls. “Lobster. Boy oh boy,” Hal says. The sea air has given him an appetite.

The restaurant is larger than Claudia remembers. There are no customers except her family and she chooses a window table overlooking the pebbled beach and the enormous sea cave. Drained by the tide, the ochre red cave is exposed like the maw of a massive sea serpent.

“No menus,” Claudia tells the family. “We order at the counter.”

“That’s right,” Matt says. “You used to work here.”

“I did, the summer you worked in St. Andrews as a waiter.”

“Not as a waiter. I was a busboy cleaning up after the waiters,” Matt says. “Now I’m taking orders. What do you want, Laverne?”

“Chowder, please.”

“Dad?”

“A lobster roll.”

“Claudia?”

“The same.”

Matt brings the tray of food to the table and they eat in silence, avoiding one another’s eyes, Claudia gazing out the window, following the sloping promontory where Pete Monahan’s body was found. Not for the first time Claudia imagines driving to Maine to see Roger. After they broke up, Roger sent a postcard from Prospect Harbor, which Claudia knows isn’t far from Bangor, three hours at most. By now Roger is probably married with a family. Claudia has no illusions
about them getting together but it is important to her, if not to Roger, that he know she has not forgotten him, that she still cares enough to seek him out.

As a kid Matt usually talked his father into taking the Sunday Drive to Fundy Park and has only been in St. Martins twice before, but he seems to remember there being another route home and he asks his father about it. “The Lisson Settlement Road,” Hal says. “We pick it up after Hammondvale. I’ll tell you where to turn.”

By now the lemonade stand has gone but the quilts are still pegged to the clothesline, the barnboard portraits still hang from the fence. They pass Hammondvale and come to Jeffries Corner. “Turn right,” Hal says. “This road will take us to Waterford.” There is a map inside Hal’s head that comes from his years on the road working as a pharmaceutical salesman looking for the shortest route from one place to another. The Lisson Settlement Road is rough as a washboard and when they climb the steep, unpaved hill, stones kick against the car’s undercarriage. Matt has never driven a Mazda before and doesn’t know how it will stand up to this rough a road. “Take your time,” Hal says. “We are in no hurry.” Battalions of gigantic spruce barricade both sides of the road. “Not a place I would want to spend the night,” Matt says.

They pass a logging track off to the left and farther on another track to the right.

“We’re almost there,” Hal says.

“What do you mean by there?”

“You’ll see.”

At the top of the hill is a vast brushwood clearing that allows a wide view of the countryside. Matt stops the car and the four of them get out to admire the distant hills, the hay and cornfields on the far side of the valley.

“Once when Lily and I were picking blueberries up here,” Hal says, pointing to the last tree left standing, a gaunt spire not far from the road, “she spotted a great horned owl in that tree. She was beside herself with excitement and insisted on waiting until the owl flew away. She wanted to watch it fly.”

They stroll about, stretching their legs. Without a breeze to keep them away, the blackflies soon surround them and they clamber into the Mazda and the car bumps and dips over the dirt road. By the time they have gone a few miles Claudia’s stomach is churning and she asks how much longer it will be before they reach Waterford.

“Not much longer,” Hal says.

“I’m feeling nauseous.”

“So am I,” Laverne says.

Ten minutes later they leave the washboard road behind and pick up rough pavement that takes them to the village of Waterford. Hal points to the dirt road beside the St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church. “Up there at the top of that hill, is where I ran into car trouble,” he says. Matt asks what he was doing up there. “Delivering furniture to customers of mine who have built a small inn. I carried the furniture inside, had coffee with the owner and got into the Impala but it wouldn’t start. I kept trying to get it going but the engine wouldn’t turn over. I phoned Joe Northrup twice and eventually his son
showed up and towed me back to town but by the time I got there Lily was dead.”

Dead
is the saddest word in the language and hearing himself say it, Hal digs a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his eyes and blows his nose.

From the back seat Laverne hears snatches of conversation and is distressed that Hal is talking about the accident. Has it occurred to him that it might be painful for Matthew, Claudia and herself to hear him talking about Lily’s death so soon? Apparently it isn’t painful for Matthew because Laverne hears him say, “Going by the tire tracks in front of the Creamery, the gravel truck must have been going at least twice the speed limit.” Such talk in Laverne’s opinion should be set aside until after her sister has been buried.

By now they are on the Dutch Valley Road whose rundown bungalows have been spruced up since the last time Matt has been out this way.

The summer before he left for university, Matt biked out here on Saturdays to one of these houses and handed over half the pay he earned bagging groceries at the Dominion to Melody Stiles’s mother, who opened the door only wide enough to snatch the money. Matt had barely known Melody Stiles: he was two years ahead of her in high school and the only time they spoke was when he and his pals biked to Sussex Corner for a swim in the creek. Melody usually watched them swim and one afternoon after Matt had hauled himself out of the water, Melody led him into the bushes. Months later word got around that Melody had quit school because she was pregnant. When Matt confessed to his mother that the kid might be his
and wondered what he should do, Lily asked if Melody had sex with others. Matt said, “Well, I’ve seen her lead other guys into the bushes.”

“In that case,” Lily told him, “you will have to let your conscience be your guide.”

Matt glances at the houses as they pass but none of them resemble the shabby house where Melody lived.

Pulling to a stop at the Corner intersection, Matt glances in the rear view mirror, and asks, “How are you feeling back there?” No answer so he turns left onto Main Street. By this time of day traffic is usually sparse, but today there is a steady stream of cars, children holding red and white balloons out the windows and waving Maple Leaf flags. By now Hal’s head is nodding and they pass Better Old Than New without comment. Claudia is not asleep and when the bridge comes into view she taps her brother on the shoulder and reminds him to avoid the accident scene by taking the back way home.

The supper basket is on the doormat: tuna casserole, coleslaw and fresh buns Sophie did not get around to making until this afternoon because she’d stayed overnight with her granddaughter while Carol was in Saint John with her boyfriend. Claudia asks her aunt if she would like to come upstairs for supper. “No, thank you,” Laverne says. What she needs now is solitude and after taking a bath, she will wash and pincurl her hair and go to bed.

Matt sets Sophie’s basket on the kitchen counter and dials home. The last time he called home was from the airport two days ago. Only two days ago? Trish answers after the second ring and asks how they are doing.

“We’re muddling through. Mom is being cremated and there will be a reception on Sunday afternoon after the ashes are buried. Did you manage to book a flight?”

“AC 6432, arriving in Moncton eight p.m. tomorrow.”

“Good. What about the kids?”

“Mom will stay here until we get back. Do you want to speak to them?”

“Sure.”

“Guess what, Daddy,” Jenny says. “Taffy threw up on the living-room carpet and Dougie tore an arm off my Barbie.” Matt hears a scuffle. “Go away!” Jenny tells her brother who is wrestling her for the phone. “You can’t have it! I’m talking to Daddy.” Matt hears a wail and Trish takes the phone and says, “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”

After he hangs up, Matt leans his head against the kitchen wall. He is exhausted and cannot face another sleepless night on the enclosed porch and will ask his sister if she will take a turn sleeping there. She and their father are in the living room, sitting side by side on the sofa watching the local news. Matt interrupts to ask if Claudia minds if he sleeps in the yellow spare room. “Sure,” she says. “As long as you get the obituary written. Remember the deadline is tomorrow.”

“Trish is coming tomorrow night.”

“Good,” Hal says. He is fond of Trish.

After supper Matt moves his carry-on from the porch to the bedroom, closes the door, strips naked and climbs between the sheets. He will write the obituary in the morning.

——

Hal has never been much of a movie watcher and wants go to bed but, as Claudia reminds him, he cannot go to bed until after his brother calls. They watch an episode of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
in which a police constable, who was having an affair with a police woman, lies on the kitchen floor, bleeding to death from a head wound. While his wife waits for the chief inspector to arrive, she rinses her husband’s blood from the frozen leg of lamb, pats it dry, rubs it with oil and rosemary and shoves it in the oven. All this has happened and still Welland hasn’t telephoned. Hal decides that if his brother hasn’t called by the time the movie is over, he will go to bed and Claudia can take the call. The telephone rings just as the chief inspector begins questioning the constable’s wife.