SEPTEMBER 1996
Elodie pulls up in front of Maggie’s store on Rue Principale, and the first thing she notices is the name change. The store is no longer called Semences Supérieures/Superior Seeds; the new sign says CENTRE DE JARDINAGE COWANSVILLE GARDEN CENTER. Staring up at it, Elodie is reminded how estranged she’s become from her mother since joining the Duplessis orphans. Maggie never even mentioned she was changing the name of the business. It would have been a big decision, given that her father founded Superior Seeds more than sixty years ago. Maggie has always resisted making major changes, right down to the back wall of antique wooden seed drawers that have been there since the thirties. James and Stephanie have been telling her for years to modernize, but Maggie always says she doesn’t want to lose the charm of her father’s original shop and turn it into another version of Canadian Tire or Home Depot.
Elodie gets out of the car with some trepidation. Maggie isn’t expecting her. Their last conversation was a rather stilted one about her plans for Thanksgiving. “You’re coming, right?” Maggie said. “James is bringing his new girlfriend.”
“I was thinking of going out east to see Nancy.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not sure yet,” Elodie said, ambivalent.
She has no interest in meeting James’s new girlfriend, an English woman from Westmount who teaches at a private all-girls school. Elodie couldn’t possibly have less in common with her.
“Can’t Nancy come to us?” Maggie suggested. “So we can all be together?”
“She won’t want to. She works on weekends.”
Maggie was quiet, obviously hurt. Elodie doesn’t mean to hurt her, but she’s still processing all this anger that’s coming up. She needs time.
The store will be closing soon. Maggie will send her employees home and beg Elodie to come home with her for dinner, to catch up over a bottle of wine and sleep over. Elodie used to fantasize about moments like that with her mother, and for a long time after they were reunited, she used to cherish them. These days, it’s like they’re starting over from scratch.
She hesitates a moment outside the door, on which Maggie has stenciled: OPEN YEAR-ROUND, 6 DAYS A WEEK, WITH THE EXCEPTION OF NEW YEAR’S DAY, EASTER, AND CHRISTMAS DAY. The bell jingles as she enters. The store smells earthy and moist, with a strong scent of sweet peas. Nothing much has changed inside. It’s still homey and overflowing with houseplants and planters, outdoor accessories, tools, garden-care products, and the old wooden seed drawers still labeled in Maggie’s father’s handwriting. There are homemade signs with arrows pointing to THE LARGEST SELECTION OF ANNUALS, PERENNIALS, BULBS, AND SPECIALTY PLANTS IN THE AREA and sandwich-style chalkboards advertising terrarium workshops and orchid workshops. An antique pine table in the center of the store is piled with gardening books and candles, gift cards and handcrafted vases. “We don’t just serve farmers anymore,” Maggie said when she started adding gift items and offering workshops. “The retail landscape is changing,” she explained. “I’m competing with box stores now.”
Elodie doesn’t really understand her mother’s excitement over such things. To Elodie, it’s all just work. A middle-aged man behind the counter looks up and smiles. He’s new. Elodie doesn’t recognize him. “Can I help you?” he asks, setting aside a pile of invoices.
“I’m here to see Maggie,” she says.
“Elo!” Maggie cries, emerging from her office. “Luc, this is my daughter, Elodie.” Maggie rushes over to Elodie and pulls her into her arms. She smells of soil. “What are you doing here, mon amour? This is the best surprise!”
Maggie is still beautiful. She’s over sixty and yet her hair is as black and soft as it was when they first met. She colors the roots, but it never gets dry or wiry. Her skin is barely lined, her teeth all her own. She looks more like Elodie’s sister than her mother, but then Elodie is the opposite. She looks older than she is. Feels much older, too. The aches and pains from all the old injuries are getting worse every year.
“You’ll come for dinner and sleep over? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? I would have bought groceries.”
“I can’t sleep over,” Elodie says. “I have to work tomorrow, but we can have dinner. We can go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. You don’t have to cook.”
“We’re not going to Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Maggie says. “I have leftover shepherd’s pie in the fridge. Steph is back at school, so it’ll be just the two of us. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Is something wrong?”
Elodie shrugs.
“Are you sick?”
“No. It’s nothing like that.”
Maggie looks relieved. “I have to help Luc with the closing,” she says. “I’m still training him.”
“It’s fine. I can meet you at home.”
Maggie squeezes her hand before turning away and disappearing inside her office.
Stepping into her parents’ house always feels like a homecoming. This is the place where she first met them, where they welcomed her into their lives. She will forever associate its smells and design features and mementos with her very first experience of belonging. It was here that she celebrated her first Christmas, had her first Easter egg hunt, her first birthday cake with candles that she got to blow out. Even though she was already in her twenties, they tried to give her all the things they would have given her had she grown up with them. They used to pretend it was all for Nancy, but Elodie knew everything was meant for her. She wasn’t even embarrassed scavenging the house for Laura Secord chocolate bunnies or having her own patchwork stocking on Christmas morning. Maggie made her one out of red and green gingham remnants, with her name embroidered at the top. It hung on the mantel alongside James’s and Stephanie’s, as though she’d always been there.
She passes by the framed picture of Gabriel on the refurbished antique dry sink in the foyer and stops to look at it. He’s on his boat, holding up his fishing rod with a perch hanging by its mouth. The photo was taken the summer before he died. He looks so happy. She misses Gabriel. If he were alive, she can’t imagine being angry with him the way she is with Maggie all the time. Loving Gabriel always felt less complicated.
The house feels more and more like Maggie’s now. There’s a little less Gabriel every time she visits. His things are surreptitiously vanishing. It’s only Maggie’s knickknacks that remain, her coats and shoes, the smell of all the meals she’s cooked for the week mixed with her lavender sachets; the piles of her papers and catalogues, her gardening and self-help books strewn on various surfaces. Elodie has to look hard for Gabriel these days, the way she once searched for Easter treasures in all the house’s hidden places.
In the kitchen, she lights a smoke and turns on the oven. May as well warm up the shepherd’s pie. She reaches for the lopsided ceramic ashtray Stephanie made years ago in art class. Even as she flicks her ashes into it, she experiences that familiar prickle of jealousy. Stop feeling sorry for yourself—it’s just a goddamn ashtray.
She makes coffee, shoves the casserole dish into the oven, and sets the table. When she’s done, she sits down at the table to wait for Maggie. When she finally hears the front door open, she stares down into the ashtray and realizes she’s smoked six cigarettes, one after the other. The timer on the oven starts to buzz just as Maggie enters the kitchen. “Oh, good, you’ve already warmed it up,” Maggie says. “I’m starving.”
She makes a move to stand, but Maggie waves her hand. “Sit,” she says, putting on oven mitts and removing the shepherd’s pie. She sets it down in the center of the table and then grabs a bottle of Pepsi from the fridge. “Ketchup?”
“Please.”
“Should I defrost a baguette?”
“I’m fine,” Elodie says.
Maggie joins her at the table and smiles. “This is nice.”
Elodie doesn’t say anything.
“Remember when I taught you how to make shepherd’s pie?”
There was a time when they spent every Sunday together, cooking in Maggie’s kitchen. Maggie tried to teach her everything she knew, from the basics—spaghetti, roast chicken, stew—to the traditional family dishes like tourtière and pea soup. Elodie was a total failure at cooking. Even Maggie finally had to concede that it was more an innate lack of talent than a lack of training. But they had fun.
“Remember I left you alone for fifteen minutes and you mashed the ground beef with the electric mixer instead of mashing the potatoes?”
“When Gabriel came home, there was ground beef all over the ceiling and the walls.”
“And in your hair, too.”
They both laugh.
“Maybe we should start again.”
“No way,” Elodie says. “I’m no good at cooking. Besides, I don’t really enjoy it.”
“What about a trip together?” Maggie suggests, always strategizing how she can make it up to Elodie. “It would be good for us to spend some time together again. What about somewhere warm?”
“It’s warm here.”
“Now it is,” Maggie says. “But in two months it won’t be. Wouldn’t a trip be nice? I’m sure you could use it. You’ve had a tough year.”
Elodie mashes her shepherd’s pie with a fork until it’s a thick paste.
“We had so much fun when we went to Vermont for your fortieth,” Maggie goes on. “I could book that bed-and-breakfast in Woodstock again.”
“I prefer to be home.”
“I thought you loved it there.”
“I’m not in the same place right now.”
“What place do you have to be in to go on holiday?”
“I have to want to spend time with you.”
Maggie’s eyes immediately fill with tears. She sets down her fork and gets up from the table, turning her back to Elodie. “Ever since you found the Duplessis orphans, you’ve been pulling away from me.”
“A lot of stuff has resurfaced.”
“Maybe that’s not such a good thing,” Maggie says. “You just keep getting angrier. You’re stuck in your anger. After so many good years, all of a sudden, you don’t want me in your life anymore.”
“Of course I want you in my life.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.” Maggie rips a strip of paper towel from the roll next to the sink and blows her nose.
“Why didn’t you marry Gabriel and raise me together?” Elodie asks, needing to hear it again. “You loved each other.”
Maggie goes to the fridge and removes a bottle of white wine plugged with tinfoil. She pours herself a glass. “I was fifteen,” she says, sitting down. “I was terrified to get married and lose my family. It was 1950, and they were prepared to disown me. What else could I do?”
She reaches for one of Elodie’s cigarettes and puts it between her lips. “I feel like we’ve had this exact same conversation a thousand times,” she says wearily, the cigarette bobbing as she speaks. She lights it and expels a cloud of smoke with her eyes closed. “Obviously you don’t believe I was as powerless as I was.”
“It’s just that I know how much Gabriel loved you when you got pregnant with me. I know he wanted to marry you. Why didn’t you just tell him you were pregnant?”
“I wish I had, Elo. You know that. But I wasn’t ready. Not at fifteen.” Maggie gulps her wine, puffs her cigarette. “I never felt like I had a choice. I guess I wasn’t brave enough.”
“I accepted that at one point.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. The more invested I am with the Duplessis orphans, the more conflicted I feel.”
“But you are getting somewhere,” Maggie says. “You got an apology from the doctor.”
“His letter helped a bit,” Elodie admits. “But not the way an apology from the nuns would, or some kind of financial compensation. Money would help.”
“Would it?”
“Hell yes. My back problems are so bad I won’t be able to work soon. Then what?”
Maggie looks away.
“I’m angry,” she says. “But maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the anger has to come up so I can get stronger. And I do feel stronger.”
“I guess it’s my job to bear the brunt of it,” Maggie says, resigned.
Elodie can’t tell if she’s mad or merely stating a fact. “I don’t want to be angry with you,” Elodie tells her. “You’re the one I love the most. I want it to be how it used to be between us as much as you do, before the Duplessis orphans. But right now, this is where I am.”
Maggie reaches for Elodie’s hand and holds it across the table. Neither of them has touched their supper. “What can I do?”
“Let me be.”
Maggie doesn’t say anything. She releases Elodie’s hand, and the effort seems to leak out of her like air. She just sits there smoking, staring out at nothing. After a while, she says, “What did you come here to tell me?” Suddenly remembering there was some reason for the visit.
“They’re tearing down St. Nazarius Hospital next spring.”
“Thank God,” Maggie says, brightening. “I hope that old bitch Sister Ignatia goes down with it.”
“I want to go and see it before it’s demolished.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“I need to go,” Elodie says. “And I want you to come with me.”
“Because you need my support or because you want me to see how bad it is?”
The answer is both, but Elodie doesn’t answer the question.