I WAS STILL puzzling over this as I drove away. Aunt Penny doesn’t believe in coddling people, least of all me. She usually lets me have it with both barrels when she’s mad at me. Something had spooked her. Something she’d decided I shouldn’t know. Why? Years ago when she refused to talk about my father, I’d figured she was protecting my mother—or even my father, if he was a married guy in town. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe she was protecting me.
But I’m a grown man now, not a grief-stricken teenager. Does she still think I can’t handle the truth? What’s so terrible that I have to be protected from it? Someone else in the town must know. Someone who wouldn’t care about protecting me.
Steve had given me some money for extra groceries, which I’d bought under Aunt Penny’s disapproving stare. Now I had to pick up more beer. He went through more beer in a day than I did in a month. As I drove down the main street toward the beer store, I thought about who I could ask. I know almost everyone in the village, but I’ve never been good at small talk. So this was going to be awkward. Plus, my mother, like me, was a dreamer and a loner, and she didn’t have many friends for me to talk to. I was going through the very short list when I spotted Nancy’s Garage up ahead.
Nancy’s Garage used to be Gus’s Service Station and Garage, sitting on a dusty lot at the edge of the village. But times change. When a fancy new Esso opened up on the main highway, Gus lost his gas customers and had to close the pumps down. He ran the repair shop until he developed cancer and couldn’t even stand up. Nancy has always been a better mechanic than her husband. But he still sits in his wheelchair in the back office, bossing her around and trying to claim all the credit. They fight like a pair of old cats. Out of spite, Nancy renamed the place Nancy’s Garage.
Nancy and I go back years. My truck is twenty years old. I can fix most of the things that go wrong with it, but she can do magic. When I rolled it into the creek a couple of years ago, everyone else said it was done for. Nancy found the parts to patch it together and get it back on the road. People laughed, but I had my truck back!
I rattled that truck into the yard and climbed down. I found Nancy in the service bay, underneath Jack Ripley’s old Chevy. She scooted out, smudged with oil and rust, and tried not to groan as she stood up. Like Aunt Penny, Nancy’s been around forever, and I don’t know how old she is. Probably way past the age when you can start to collect a pension.
I started into my story about my friend from Calgary. Right away she waved toward the office.
“Let’s go inside for a coffee, Rick. I could use one, and Gus could use the company. He’s like a bear this morning, but if anyone can put a smile on the old bastard’s face, it’s you.”
Gus looked even worse than I remembered. I could tell it wouldn’t be long. His skin hung on him like a suit that was too big, and the yellow color had spread to his eyes. But a half-empty bottle of rye sat on the table beside him, and a cigarette glowed in the metal lid he used as an ashtray. Nancy shrugged, like she’d given up trying.
Gus spouted jokes about the weather, the crops and the terrible state of the bridge down near my place. Finally I got to my story. I told them I had a friend staying with me from Calgary, and he was trying to trace his father. Did they know anybody who’d come east from Calgary?
Gus was squinting at a stack of oilcans in the corner. “When?”
“Mid-eighties?”
“Well, your uncle Tommy was out west for a time. When was that, Nance?”
Nancy nodded. “Early eighties. When the oil boom was on.”
That was news to me. I’d thought my mother’s brother had worked construction around here all his life. “He didn’t last long,” Gus added. “But you should ask him about this fella. You never know.”
Before I could think of an answer, Nancy jumped like she’d seen a ghost. “Wait a minute! Remember that fella froze to death up in the bush that winter? Wasn’t he from Calgary?”
I felt a chill. It was a story I’d grown up with. Parents told it to scare kids off joyriding on the snowmobile trails. I’d always figured it was fake. “When was this?”
Gus was nodding. Still staring at the oilcans. “It was the year we built the new garage. Maybe…”
“Nineteen eighty-five,” Nancy said. “There you go.”
The chill crawled up my spine. That was the year of Steve’s letter. The year I was born. “What happened?”
Nancy shrugged. “It was kept pretty hush-hush. Folks made up what they didn’t know. All I remember was it was the dead of winter, and there’d been a huge snowstorm. They didn’t find the body for near a week, not until the coyotes and crows got at it.”
I tried to keep my voice calm. “What was his name?”
Nancy was on a roll, enjoying the tale. Gus still stared at the cans. “Police never said. Someone from Calgary, was all we heard.”
“What was he doing here? Working?”
“Holiday,” Nancy said. “He wasn’t here long. I think he came for some ice fishing and snowmobiling. We never heard anything more, so we figured the body was shipped west to his family. You could ask at the funeral home.”
Gus’s wrinkles cleared. He looked up from his oilcans. “Wait. The police investigated. They should have a file at the station. That’s the place for you to ask at.”