Weekend (16 page)

Elliot held the baby high over her head, a heavenly offering.

“Give Scout to me. Don't mess around with a newborn.”

“Joe, back off.”

Joe grabbed the Quebec maple syrup in her hands and gave
the plastic bottle an unholy squeeze so it came out in a sticky stream aimed at Elliot's face. She dropped the bottle and grabbed Scout while Elliot sputtered and wiped at her eyes. “Get the fucking hell away from me and Scout, and I mean it.”

Elliot went inside. Joe heard slamming, the shower, the front door slam, the boat engine.

Joe undid her nursing bra (
wide open mouth
) and pulled sticky, messy Scout mid-cry onto her nipple, wincing. Joe shut her eyes.
This is not happening, not happening, not happening.

       
AJAX

Ajax said yes.

Her simple silver band excited her on some still-vibrating level. At lunch, Ajax realized all their talk had now evolved (
or devolved?
) into wedding chat. What did they want? Who should be invited? Big or small? Where? Who would stand up for them?

Logan said, “My mother tells me I can't get married until she's dead. Toby here”—they dandled the big dog head—“says he gets to be my best man.”

Ajax had made egg salad sandwiches for lunch. “I would have expected more from your mom.”

“Not so much the supporter of queer rights. She has never been okay with me. To the extent that I hide myself—not binding when I'm around her—it's because I don't want her to comment.”

“I was once shunned at a women's centre I worked at for being gay. Which was, and I quote, a ‘lifestyle more suitable for the city.'”

Logan sighed. “It's probably the trans thing. If I was just a lezzie … She despises what I am. Every skirt I wore, I wore for her.”

“But won't it please your mom to see you launched and happy with someone as she grows more frail? It's very powerful, the act of witnessing love.”

Logan harrumphed.

“I've been at dozens of our weddings. Straights
speak
weddings. Love is love is love—people understand that when we show them.” She laughed and looked at her ring. “I've seen surly parents changed, although maybe it was just alcohol speaking.”

“She won't come,” said Logan.

“Hets can destabilize our relationships by treating us like crap.” She didn't quite grasp Logan's relationship with their mother: highly entangled, both doting and acrimonious.

Logan picked up their sandwich, fooled with the lettuce, smiled. “Small or big wedding? Private or public? Toronto or Vancouver?”

“The Bahamas,” said Ajax, without hesitation. “Where I grew up.”

“Can we get married on the beach?”

“I scattered my mother's ashes there. We'd have to take the kids, and the grandkids.”

“Expensive.”

“And your mom.”

Logan scoffed.

“Your mom,” said Ajax more insistently. “She'll come, I'm sure, when push comes to love.”

Logan closed their eyes, said they doubted it.

Later, as they were prepping dinner, Logan joked about just calling their friend the lawyer and having her plug their numbers into DivorceMate software right away instead of waiting, and Ajax erupted into laughter. “Oh god,” she said, thinking of the painful divorce she herself had tucked in her past and
how lower-income earners were inevitably fucked over, “are we completely insane?”

And then she thought,
I'm the lower-income earner again.

Logan said, “Stats would insist we are.”

“Half of all marriages don't work, but really, that means half do,” said Ajax.

“Thank you, Pollyanna,” said Logan. “Maybe they do, or maybe those are mostly lives of quiet desperation.”

“You're such a cynic,” said Ajax. “And yet, I just did not for a
second
see that proposal coming. How the hell long have you been planning it? And why didn't you propose when you had the flower petals scattered around the bedroom?”

“I planned it for years, baby. Since you were a mere chick of forty-nine.”

Logan uncorked champagne, the pop echoing across the lake. “To us.”

Ajax raised her glass. “I guess this, um, implies that we're, um, considering a committed relationship?”

“I'll drink to that.” The barbecue puffed, slow-cooking the ribs. Logan slathered on sauce.

“With, you know, cleaving unto one another.” Ajax scratched a bite.

“Yup.”

Ajax said, “Like, practically speaking, I guess one of us is moving?”
Meaning me
, she thought.
Who else?

“Do you really wanna be on the phone every night till six a.m.?”

“Nah, so done with that,” admitted Ajax. “Or I guess we don't have to live together.”

“I've put in twenty years looking after my mom. I don't need to hang around Toronto any longer, in case you want me to come in your direction.”

“Still, you don't get to suddenly say, ‘Sorry, gig's up, Ma, I'm leaving. You're eighty-three but I've, you know, had it. I'm pushing off now.' She's going to need more of you as time goes on, not less. That job ends when she ends, really.”

“You've got a kid and soon a grandkid in the Bahamas, and a kid out west. What would you prefer?”

“You've got Lake Ontario,” Ajax said, but actually had to stop herself from laughing. They had a faux-beach downtown park with sand poured over concrete some ten feet above the water. The dog beach was lame. Ajax put her head in her hands. “I mean, I can paint anywhere.” She rented studio space from an art school in Vancouver. “I can't believe this, Logan. I can't believe this. Did you really
propose?
”

Toby barked.

“See? Even he's happy. McIntyre, let me ask you something. Do you feel celebratory?”

“Honey, this is one of the happiest days of my life.” Ajax got up, removed Logan's champagne flute, and took Logan's hands. “It didn't even occur to me that I was going to have something like this in my life again; I certainly didn't see it being with you. I mean, we've known each other for a hundred years and nothing happened before now, and you've always been a bad boi.”

“But it means I kind of know you. I've been aware of you over time.”

“I had outrageous fantasies of marrying you before we even slept together.” She shouldn't admit that, she thought, but then she thought,
Why not? Dreams can come true. Even for old people. Even for people in my straitened physical condition. Or not,
she thought.

Logan grinned big, rakish hank of hair falling into their eyes.

“We need to get you a ring, too.” Ajax ran to cut a piece of yarn from the pull-down on the blinds, roped it around Logan's finger, kissed the top of it.

Logan beamed and touched Ajax's face.

“We can figure all this out later. You're right that there's nothing saying we can't continue doing this long distance, at least until we know what we want.”

“But I miss you, miss you, miss you.”

Ajax moved her chair closer to Logan at the barbecue.

Logan said, “I know. I waited all my life and now I'm still waiting. The ribs are done.”

Ajax served the ribs with corn and new potatoes with chives. “My friends do it,” she said. “Vancouver to France, back and forth.”

“You're more or less free to move to Toronto; I'm more or less free to move to Vancouver. It's different than having jobs that lock us down. I can do what I do wherever. One of my former partners has a kid I like in Vancouver.”

Ajax stared at her ring finger, rapt. “Did I say thank you for this perfectly simple ring?”

Logan said, “You thank me a lot. I like that.”

“I'm grateful a lot.”

“I love how you take care of me, Ajax.”

Their eyes met—
I love you passionately
, they said.

Ajax went for dessert—raspberries they'd picked out back. They were half white and not really ready. Ajax put on “Koop Island Blues,” danced, pulled Logan to their feet, and that was somehow it, officially—silver band, champagne, yarn ring—they were engaged.

       
JOE

Joe curled into a fetal ball to nurse Scout; the sights and sounds normal, the smells of baby powder and urine commingling normally. How had she just landed in the middle of a breakup without even having realized anything significant was wrong?

Gone. Joe was numb. She pinched herself and felt nothing. She flicked her cheek, registered a faint sensation. She realized how many times Ell had come up to the cottage alone over the past couple years. Why? Why had she done that? Joe just wanted it to make sense. And this made no sense. Was it too much to ask that it make sense? Ell, ditching her wife with a newborn on an island, taking their only boat. Come Monday, Logan and Ajax would surely be gone, and what if, at that point, something went awry? What if the baby got whooping cough or an allergy, or god forbid Joe became too ill to feed her, and the landline went dead? This was how jeopardized she now was.

She could hear Ell's voice in her head:
You catastrophize. None of that will happen. You're giving yourself horror movies
. Her wail in response:
But it could!
She had to plan for the possibility, remote as it was. Apparently, no one else was planning for her welfare.

If Elliot wouldn't, didn't, couldn't—even so, their welfare still mattered. They still needed income, a home, food. She had tremors from the weight of her vulnerability.

Surely it was just a case of horniness—Elliot's clit pointing
like a retriever in some hunter's field? She'd come back home, she would!

By noon, the sun had long since boiled the maple syrup that had spilled on the patio stones. Maybe Joe should pack—ask Logan to help—go back to the city, to their house in the Beaches, to lick her wounds and be where she had friends, family, support? She looked around the cottage that Elliot and Logan had built pretty much by hand. The plush couches, the crude pine dining table, the worn Persian rugs, the chandeliers. She'd thought it was hers. Wasn't it hers? Scout had been born here. The birthing tub was still up against the wall in the guest room.

She thought back to Logan and Elliot's breakup. How had that come down? Elliot had been draconian, hurtful, parsimonious, had kept the cottage that Logan'd helped to build. Logan sued, succeeded in getting half the island, but that was all. It was different then; in the bad old pre-rights days, Logan had been lucky to get that much recognition. But now queers had rights and obligations. Elliot would have to split things fifty-fifty.

Joe,
thought Joe,
you are extrapolating. Do you know a single thing about separation?
She didn't. When she and Dree split, Joe walked away, period.

What Joe had loved had just turned to dust.

Every time Scout sent up a whimper, it jolted Joe, whose mind was madly calculating money and how much she had access to, even on charge cards, and when she could go back to work, and who would watch Scout, and whether Elliot was going to be a shit—a
shit
—with the divorce.
Divorce.
No. Divorce? She
meant separation. She would never divorce Elliot. She believed in Elliot, believed she'd do the generous and right thing without a fight. Elliot was honourable. Wasn't she?

Maybe Elliot had confided in Logan?

Nearly supper time, and she didn't know where the day had gone. Joe's stomach growled, and there wasn't any Elliot around to dish out food. Scout was soaked and poopy, from the smell of things—had Joe even changed her today? Somehow Joe had turned on the air conditioning, and now she shivered. What had just happened?
I kissed Elliot here
, she thought.
Elliot and I wrestled here
.
This is where Elliot proposed.
Joe left the baby shrieking in her cradle and walked outside—aimlessly, in a fog—through the ants and wasps into the flowers wishing they were opium poppies strong enough to put her to sleep.

Logan and Ajax were fucking on the dock—it sent her back inside. Goddamned love.

Back inside, she examined Scout as she changed her. Elliot in her lips, her nose. “I'm so sorry, Scout. I'm so sorry,” she whispered. Joe had already let her daughter, not a week old, down.
You have another mother, Scout, but she doesn't live with us.
There had to be another woman! When did Elliot meet her, and why hadn't Joe suspected or noticed?

She'd wanted to bring their daughter into a good world, a world where avarice and greed and hatred didn't win, where corporations weren't gods, where icebergs weren't melting, where climate change wasn't alarming, where at least, at least, her parents were good at heart. But maybe it was cruel to have a
baby at all in this garbage globe. She hadn't thought much about that, had she, when the procreation hunger swept over her?

They said you couldn't know the fullness of love until you had a baby. She got inklings of that now, this love for which she would lay down her life.

Would Elliot really fight for this baby?

Joe could go to Logan's, barge in, say,
Hey, Elliot left me.

Oh god, she could not.

She could not intrude on a romantic weekend with this news. She rambled into the kitchen and boiled instant noodles and ate them out of the colander at the sink. She checked her phone, but Ell hadn't called.

She walked the house, opening closets.
Coat, still here
. She wrenched open Elliot's underwear drawer:
All new
. She ransacked the drawers of Elliot's dresser, in which half the clothing was new, still creased.
What the fuck?
She shook drawers onto the floor. Receipts tumbled in a paper rainstorm. Receipts, she saw, for flowers (she hadn't received), for dinners at restaurants (she hadn't gone to), for jewellery (she didn't own). Twenty receipts, thirty, forty. And a wad of cash, fresh twenties and fifties. Ticket stubs for concerts (she hadn't gone to). Tickets for museums and art fairs (she hadn't attended). Then an e-ticket for a trip to Rome. Upcoming in November. No mention of a co-traveller.

She went to check Elliot's Facebook, but she'd been blocked. Elliot's email, but the password was changed. Elliot's desktop—but there seemed to be no clues.

Wow
, she thought.
Wow.

It wasn't a dream. This was really happening. Tectonic plates had been shifting, and Joe had been stupidly oblivious. Elliot had moved from love and admiration and a sense that it was the two of them against the world into … whatever this was, estrangement. Hatred, maybe.

Shouldn't there have been an earthquake first?