SUSAN CALDER
Rick’s hand slides under her nightie and strokes her thigh. His body curls around hers, spoon-style. Carol shrugs her husband off. He rolls over and starts snoring. The bedside clock reads four a.m. Perimenopause, the doctor says, is making her restless. If it worsens, he’ll prescribe pills. Carol slips out of bed. Rick shudders and returns to his deep, even breathing.
She tiptoes downstairs. Her nostrils prickle at the fresh paint smell. In the den, she turns on the desk lamp, illuminating the birthday cards on the window ledge. She picks up the one from her younger daughter, away at university.
WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT TURNING FIFTY?
She opens the card.
NOTHING.
Ha. Ha. She returns the card to the ledge. Might as well use these lost hours for work. At her desk, she opens her computer to review the Ashe file.
Harvey Ashe swallowed a mouse in his beer. Or so he alleges. His nuisance claim against the brewery Carol’s company insures is worth three thousand dollars, tops. Instead of settling quickly, the novice adjuster had dithered. If she retains a lawyer, the company could face demands for lost wages, uninsured medical expenses, and pain and suffering totalling a quarter million dollars. She hopes she’s taken over the claim in time for damage control.
She logs Ashe’s address into her GPS and reaches for the handcrafted card from her girlfriend, Patti. Last fall, Patti chucked her Calgary oil company job and drove to Yellowknife, NWT. What she’s doing up there isn’t clear.
“Stuff,” Patti says when Carol asks.
“What stuff?” Nice to be single and do whatever the hell you want.
“The scenery is amazing. Sky like you wouldn’t believe. Come up and see it some time.”
On the front of the card, Patti drew a girl with long hair, sitting cross-legged on an empty road, one hand resting on a backpack, the other hand raised, thumb up. Above the sketch she printed: Carol Before. A depiction of their hitchhiking trip from Calgary to Newfoundland, thirty summers ago. The card’s inside page contains only the words: Carol After?
Carol Between would be the years of normal, adult life. Marriage to Rick. Mother of two children. Insurance adjuster promoted to claims manager.
She sneezes. Rick’s renovations haven’t reached the den yet, but the dust has penetrated the whole house. His next project, now that both daughters have moved out, is to turn the cubbyhole rooms upstairs into a master bedroom loft. Another sneeze. Carol grabs a Kleenex. She shouldn’t gripe about the dust. Ripping their house apart keeps Rick occupied since his company bridged him to early retirement. No doubt she’ll enjoy their updated rooms if he ever gets around to finishing them.
Meanwhile, she’s eager to meet Harvey Ashe this afternoon. In management, she misses the daily head-to-head dealings with claimants, unscrupulous or sympathetic. Does Ashe have plans for his insurance windfall? Given his machinist’s income, he must be viewing this bottled mouse as a winning lottery ticket.
A HandiBus rumbles past Harvey Ashe’s house, which looks in desperate need of new siding. Carol clacks up the sidewalk and uneven front steps. If she falls, she’ll file a countersuit against the Ashes. She scans the chipped paint for a doorbell. This is the porch where the mouse-swallowing incident occurred. On that warm August evening, Ashe and his son-in-law brought beers out here, planning to relax.
With her knock, the door jerks open. A short man appears.
“Mr. Ashe?” She extends her hand.
His palm is velvety and delicate. Harvey Ashe’s bald head lines up with her nose. He wears a checked shirt tucked into his jeans and a belt buckle decorated with a swirling H.A.
She follows him through the entrance cluttered with shoes and cowboy boots to the living room. A sofa, draped with a mauve throw, faces the front window and console TV. In the far corner, there’s an armchair covered with a pumpkin and rust afghan. An upright piano stands against the wall.
It’s only on second glance that Carol notices the lady on the La-Z-Boy chair by the doorway. Her hair is wispy, white. A shawl encloses her narrow shoulders. This can’t be Mrs. Ashe. According to the reports, she is only sixty, ten years older than Carol.
Mr. Ashe introduces his wife, Bertha. “Call me Harvey,” he tells Carol. “Can I get you coffee? Tea? Juice?”
“A glass of water is fine.” She edges toward the sofa. The wall behind it is covered with children’s portraits. “You have a large family.”
Bertha’s eyes water. She blinks.
Carol raises her voice. “Are those all your—?”
“We have three children.” Bertha’s voice is deep and startlingly clear. “Some of the pictures are of the grandkids.”
Carol lays her briefcase on the sofa. “Nice-looking bunch.”
Trite but true. Their skin tones range from freckled snow to teak, their hair shades from platinum to carrot to raven. Harvey’s face has the ruddiness common to redheads.
Carol slides her fingernail into the throw’s crocheted spider-web weave. “Did you make this?”
Bertha nods and cranks the recliner footrest, propping up her scuffed slipper soles. Harvey returns with a tray topped with two glasses of water, a glass of orange juice, and a plate of oatmeal cookies. He sets the tray on the coffee table and crosses the room to the armchair.
Carol sinks into the sofa, moves to the highest cushion, but still looks up at both claimants. Not a strong bargaining position.
After she and Harvey chat about this year’s unusually hot July weather, Carol suggests he begin by recounting his experience. “I don’t suppose you like remembering,” she adds to show support.
“It don’t bother me to talk of it.” Harvey’s glance passes from his wife to the porch visible through the window. “It was almost a year ago. Last August, me and Tareq — that’s my daughter’s husband — spent the day repairing the back patio. By afternoon, we were sweating. We got some cold ones from the fridge and went out to the shaded front porch. The beer tasted good and was going down easy.”
She picks up her pen and steno pad to take notes in case Harvey contradicts his original statement.
“All of a sudden, something solid hit my tongue,” he says. “I tried to spit, you know, by reflex. Part of it slithered down my throat.”
Carol shudders. “Part?”
Harvey looks at Bertha. “The mouse’s top end went down. The backside hung from my mouth. Its tail tickled my chin. I watched the butt disintegrate and yanked the tail. That creature was brewed, most likely caught in a vat, but I grew up on a farm and know a mouse’s hindquarters when I seen it.”
Her hand goes weak, but she manages to keep scribbling.
“I held the remains up to Tareq.” Harvey raises his left hand, his fine fingers mimicking the action. “I dangled it back and forth. Tareq says, ‘That’ll teach you not to drink so much, Dad.’ And you know that mouse put me off beer for a solid month, which wasn’t such a terrible thing.” He pats the buckle on his slim waist.
“That’s why you didn’t report the claim immediately?”
Harvey nods. “I figured I’d eaten worse. Us kids used to roast gophers, so what’s the difference?”
“I wouldn’t care much for gopher.”
“Neither does Bertha, but I forgot that and carried the mouse into the kitchen, figuring she and my daughter would get a kick out of it. At first they thought it was a piece of string, but I explained.” Harvey pauses for a drink of water. “Bertha backed into the sink. My daughter said, ‘Dad, throw that disgusting thing in the trash — not under the sink — out in the lane.’ Which I did, destroying the evidence, your adjuster who visited us says. At the time, I didn’t think.”
Harvey finishes his water. Carol’s mind drifts to the summer she and Rick rented a cottage at Mara Lake, when their daughters were little. Patti and her then boyfriend came for a few days. While the men were out somewhere, a bat flew down the chimney into the wood stove. Carol scurried out of the kitchen. Patti thrust a badminton racket into the stove, scooped out the bat and circled the racket toward the shrieking kids. Carol had forced herself to peek at the sooty, winged rat.
She wriggles her shoulders to brush off the recollection. The steno pad is on the coffee table where she placed it. “Wouldn’t a dead mouse be bloated from the brewing process and, when you tipped the beer back to drink, lodge in the bottle neck?”
“You’d think so.” Harvey gets up. “Must have been a baby. Starting to decompose.”
Carol fumbles for a water glass. Harvey offers her the cookie plate. She shakes her head. He holds out the orange juice to Bertha, who recoils into the recliner. The son-in-law’s statement in the report jibed with Harvey’s, which it would if the Ashes are good scammers.
Harvey takes two cookies for himself and returns to his chair. “The day after I ate it, I figured Bertha was joking when she jumped away from me and said, ‘Don’t touch me with that thing inside you.’ I laughed, but Bertha knows a mouse’s head is meat and would be absorbed into my system, instead of passing clear through me, like a penny, for instance.” He munches a cookie while his wife cranks down the La-Z-Boy footrest. “Bertha started sleeping in my daughter’s bedroom and a few months later couldn’t drag herself to work. Our doctor sent her to a psychologist. He’s tried everything — pills, different therapies. It’s all in your reports.”
Bertha’s shrink concluded that her husband’s mouse swallowing triggered a childhood trauma too buried for therapy to reach. The resulting depression forced her to quit her factory job five years short of retirement. In addition to lost income, there would be a reduced pension.
Carol turns to Bertha. “I understand you’re also unable to do housework?”
Bertha rises. Her shawl slips down her fleece top.
“I don’t mind handling those chores.” Harvey mumbles while chewing. “Washing dishes and clothes and such gives me something to do. I lost my job this past winter.”
“You were laid off?”
Bertha shuffles from the room.
“It wasn’t mouse related,” Harvey says. “Just a normal downsizing.”
Such honesty would impress a judge or jury, if the case went to court. Most claimants would try to link the rodent swallowing to the layoff. With both spouses unemployed, a lawyer would add substantial figures for lost medical and dental benefits.
Harvey glances down the hallway, runs his index finger up his empty glass. “For me, the main problem is losing Bertha. I don’t care particularly about her cooking and paycheque. I expect Bertha misses her music and crochet.” His finger rests on the glass rim. “But for me, it’s her looking over and smiling while she mashes potatoes for dinner. Us going for walks up the hill to see the sunset. Sleeping together, her crowding my side of the bed.” Harvey pauses. His finger circles the rim. “About the bed—”
Loss of consortium, the lawyer would add to Harvey’s claim. Carol notes this on the steno pad, wondering how much consorting is normal for a couple their age. A couple not much older than her and Rick, who haven’t consorted for several weeks, and when was the last time she did it with genuine interest?
“By bed,” Harvey says, “I don’t mean so much the excitement, although that was always good.” His expression softens as he stares at the vacant recliner chair. “I mainly liked being with her. You know?”
I don’t know, at least I haven’t known in years, Carol thinks as she drives past downtown towers. Why stop at her office to process claims that will only re-emerge in new form tomorrow and the day after that until she retires. Or, like her husband and Harvey Ashe, is declared redundant. She crosses the bridge to her neighbourhood, enters her lane and bumps over gravel to the shed Rick plans to replace with a double garage. In their backyard, she treads the paving stones that bisect the re-sodded grass. A year from now, the path will lead to a terraced deck, but today she takes a giant step up to the kitchen.
“Rick?” she calls.
Silence. He must be out, probably shopping for supplies for the upstairs renovations. She removes her high heels, pads from cool ceramic tile to living room hardwood to worn Berber carpet, plunks her briefcase on the den desk and sneezes. She squints at the window. Will they ever be rid of sawdust hanging in sunbeams? She closes the Venetian blind, stopping it halfway so it doesn’t jostle the birthday cards. The blind slips; a corner nudges a card. It wavers and falls onto Patti’s card, which knocks down the next and the next.
She tries to right the cards. They keep tumbling. Shit. The hell with them all.
Turning fifty is crap, but at least she still has a job, one she’s good at. She opens her laptop to the Ashe file. What can she reasonably settle the claim for?
She calculates figures for lost wages, lost pension, and lost dental and medical benefits, and adds amounts for pain and suffering and loss of consortium. The total stares out at her from the computer screen, way too much for what should have been a nuisance claim. She pictures Bertha shuffling from her chair.
Carol adds an extra five thousand for pain, suffering, and loss. The number is ridiculous. If she recommends this to the company, the vice-presidents will freak.
Although, she could insist it’s the minimum the Ashes will accept before consulting a lawyer. With her twenty-eight years in the business, the VPs would believe her.
Noise rumbles from the street. She pushes the blind up. Her husband’s van draws to a stop at the curb. Rick gets out, goes to raise the tailgate, and yanks out plywood. He staggers as he adjusts the awkward load.
She reaches for Patti’s birthday card. Carol Before hitches a ride on a highway. The breeze billows her hair. She opens the card. Carol After? She could tell Rick, “I need a vacation. We’re not going anywhere this summer. I’ve never been to Yellowknife and Patti says the scenery’s amazing.”
Rick will say he’ll miss her. He might feebly suggest he tag along. In the end, he’ll appreciate not having her around so he can work like crazy creating the loft upstairs. Carol will go to Yellowknife alone.
She’ll return to a revamped master bedroom.
Or not.