Beer in hand, sitting on the step of the trailer he shared with three other Seaway workers, Darren stared at the moon and the moon stared back. A bright eye hovering over the water, asking him when he was going home and what did he think he was doing? And who for the love of God was that girl? What had he done?
On April 1, 1956, the day Trudy was born, her father, Darren Robertson, had thought, God help her. She is beautiful. So small, so perfect. His first baby. And not with his wife.
Said wife, Michelle, was not only childless but also — for the time being — husbandless. Back in Brownsville, New Brunswick, staying with her parents. Waiting for him to return with enough money to get their own place, maybe have some kids, to start a life. He said he had to go where the work was. Twenty thousand men were needed, and they would take anyone who could swing a hammer or drive a truck. The project was ridiculous. Whole villages would be flooded, displacing thousands of people. There were dams to build and miles upon miles of channels to dig. The giant St. Lawrence River would be backed up, diverted, then let loose. Washing the old towns away. New roads, new towns would be built.
It could go on for years, this project. It could, Darren thought, go on forever.
Of course, there were jobs back in Brownsville, or at least close enough to Brownsville to allow him to stay where he belonged. The truth was that he had run away, scared to death, feeling like nobody should count on him for anything. He had run far away, but somehow he had managed to create exactly what he had been running from. It was as if it had followed him here: adulthood.
Little Michelle. Only five feet tall, nineteen years old. But cranky as hell. Bossy. Mean, sometimes. She had held on to him so tightly the morning he left, he couldn’t draw a full breath. Crushing him. Wetly snuffling into his chest. He had walked out to his truck in the freezing cold early morning air, resisting the impulse to run, to skip and jump, to speed away, his foot to the floor. This was true. Though, he did love her — in a protective, rough-and-tumble, bickering kind of way. And it scared him. He was only twenty-one, had only ever been fifty miles from home. He had believed that he was going away to find himself, to be among men, to settle down enough to settle down.
He hadn’t gone looking for trouble.
But trouble found him alright.
Gorgeous trouble, half-drunk and teetering on cheap pink high heels.