A party was going on at the other end of Providence Avenue. Grub—actually George, but even he rarely thought of himself by his given name—Linderman could hear music, the happy chatter of a crowd. Earlier he’d seen Rene LaPierre and his father, Henri, cordoning off three blocks with some orange cones. They hadn’t seen him watching, people rarely did.
Someone had stuck an envelope behind his front screen door yesterday. Come One, Come All the invitation from Boundary Realty had said. But what people said and what they meant were usually different, often to the point of being opposite.
Grub sat on his front stoop and soaked up the celebratory atmosphere. Everyone in town was thrilled that the lockdowns were finally over. But his lockdown had begun at birth and would never end.
His home—a modest three-room cabin—marked the official end (or beginning?) of Providence Avenue. The street dead-ended here. Behind him was provincial land, a forest, and the beginning of a hiking network, including a short path to the Boundary River Cemetery where he’d worked as a caretaker since he’d left high school.
After the fire.
Grub figured he knew the people under the ground in Tangle Falls better than he knew the living. For sure he liked them better. When he rode the mower along the neat rows and columns of headstones and markers, he didn’t need to read the names, dates, and epitaphs anymore. They were etched in his mind, a precious few in his heart. These people represented the history of Tangle Falls, and he knew their stories better than he knew his own.
The work was routine and comforting to him. The digging of a new grave—the most rare and important of his duties—was a solemn ritual to him. Mostly he preferred to do that work in the early morning when the chance of being interrupted was slight. He didn’t think it was proper to engage in casual chitchat when he was preparing a grave.
Most of his work involved groundskeeping—mowing and trimming and weeding in the summer and pruning trees and clearing snow in the winter. Not just at the cemetery, but for other town buildings and properties as well. He enjoyed taking care of the parks. And got a lot of satisfaction from clearing snow in the winter. But his favorite was the cemetery. He always made sure it was at its best for the weekend, which was when most people came to visit.
Not that there were many visitors.
A lot of the people buried here no longer had living relatives in town. Even those who did generally only got a few visits a year.
Grub didn’t get it. His family was one of the reasons he had taken this job. It allowed him to be close to them in the only way that was possible. And it had been a good decision. He couldn’t imagine any work that would suit him better. He loved the quiet, peaceful setting, the routine but exacting nature of the tasks.
In summer he could listen to the birds and feel the sunshine warm against his shoulders. Winter offered the magic of snow days, hoarfrost glittering on tree branches. And no matter what the season it was always a relief to come home to his cabin, the one place he felt safe, where he could indulge his habits which he knew most would consider infantile.
Sundays, he took his lunch with his family. A sandwich and a thermos of cocoa in the winter, iced tea in the summer. He always brought a camp chair so he could sit and be comfortable. Then he would close his eyes, just a few moments, to remember them from before.
Thanks to his dad’s lazy eye and his mother’s speech impediment (she’d stuttered) the kids at school had said his family was slow and stupid. They said he was slow and stupid too. And dirty. That was because of the smell from the barn, where his dad raised turkeys. His mom would dry their clothes on the line and the smell would cling to them.
“Doesn’t your mother give you a bath?” his grade two teacher had asked him once, before—in disgust—taking him to the teachers’ bathroom to wash his face, hands, neck, and ears with rough paper toweling.
“Grubby” the other kids started calling him. Which was eventually shortened to “Grub.” Even his teachers called him that—all except Mrs. G—including the local businesspeople, even Stella who owned the diner where he sometimes ate lunch and she was generally quite kind, in a gruff sort of way. His name was said with a smile now, instead of the jeer the kids had used, as if it was an endearing pet name.
But there was nothing endearing about a name like Grub. Just as there was nothing endearing about him as a person. He was just someone who did menial jobs around town, jobs that were too unskilled and boring for anyone else to want to do.
Someone had left the party and was walking up the avenue in this direction, pushing a stroller. Though it was after nine o’clock, and the sun had recently set, it wasn’t yet dark. So he could see the person as they drew closer.
He worked out the sex first: female. She was thin, medium height, with subtle but unmistakable curves and a lot of hair—long and blonde and very pretty. She reminded him of a girl he’d gone to school with.
And then she was close enough for him to be sure. She was a girl he’d gone to school with. She’d left town during their last year of high school, so he hadn’t seen her in a long time, but he still recognized her.
Hadley Hooper. One of the cool kids. Perhaps the coolest.
He stood up and turned, obeying his instinct to retreat to the safety of his cabin.
“George, wait.”
Surprised by the sound of his Christian name, he grabbed the wooden railing next to him, and paused.
“Can I talk to you a minute?”
She was wearing a flowery skirt and sandals and up close her face was as pretty as he remembered, but she looked tired and kind of…sad. There was a young child asleep in the stroller. A butterfly princess girl. He glanced back at Hadley.
She didn’t look threatening. Or mean. Or angry.
So, he waited.
“It’s been a long time. Do you remember me?”
He nodded.
She paused, as if expecting him to say more. When he didn’t, she pointed at his cabin. “Is that your home?”
He nodded again.
“Mrs. G tells me you’re the caretaker at the cemetery.” She waited for his third nod. “I was wondering if you could show me where my mother is buried. I mean, if you know.”
The muscles in his shoulders and neck relaxed. “I know.” He turned to go inside his house, but she called out again.
“Hang on, I thought you were going to help me?”
“I’m getting a flashlight. It’s going to be dark soon.” The sound of his own voice always surprised him. He spoke so rarely, he expected his voice would be thin and whispery, like an old man who was about to die. But his voice was actually a strong and deep one. He could tell it startled Hadley too.
“Good thinking,” she said.
His flashlight was in a basket by the door, so it didn’t take long to retrieve. After shutting and locking the door behind himself he joined Hadley on the sidewalk. In his mind questions were spinning. He’d heard Hadley had a baby, so the child in the stroller wasn’t a surprise. But why was Hadley in Tangle Falls? And why pick the night of a big party to visit her mother’s grave?
“Want to walk the long way up Church Avenue?” he asked.
“My stroller should be okay on the shortcut.” She nodded at the path through the forest.
“Okay.”
There was still enough light he didn’t need the flashlight. Hadley walked beside him, pushing the stroller along the earth-packed trail. For a few minutes they were both quiet, listening only to the evening calls of the robins and the squeaking from the stroller.
Hadley spoke first. “Did you hear about Dean Kavanaugh?”
“Yes.” He didn’t have a TV or cable, but sometimes he listened to the news on the radio when he was driving. “Sounded strange to me. Dean has fished all his life. I don’t understand how he could drown.”
“I guess you haven’t heard the latest. He didn’t die from drowning but from a blow to his head. The RCMP are investigating.”
“They think he was murdered?”
“Hard to believe, right? He was such a happy-go-lucky kind of guy.”
George didn’t comment. His own opinion of Dean wasn’t nearly so favorable.
Without missing a beat Hadley skipped from Dean’s death to those of his family. “Mom told me what happened to your family, that Halloween night when we were seventeen. I’m so sorry George.”
It had been twenty years now. People rarely spoke about it anymore. “Thanks. And sorry about your mom too. She was pretty young.”
“Yes. It’s hard being in our house without her. Feels all wrong.”
He nodded. Everything about life had felt all wrong to him for years after his family died.
At the gate, he lifted the latch and let her go first.
“Thank you.”
In twilight the cemetery was a gloomy, some would say eerie, place. The trees were inky shadows against the dark indigo sky and the tombstones looked like ghosts emerging from their graves for the night. George wished that they were. He would like to talk to these people. Not just his family, there were so many people here with interesting stories.
Like Mr. and Mrs. Tamaka who had been deported from Salt Spring Island during World War II. Unlike most of the Japanese men Mr. Tamaka hadn’t been forced to one of the road and railway camps in the interior. Instead, he’d been allowed to open a barber shop, which eventually included pool tables, and became a social hub of Tangle Falls.
George turned on the flashlight and trained the beam on one of the wide gravel paths. “This way.”
Again, Hadley maneuvered the stroller so she could step along side of him.
“I didn’t do a proper funeral for Mom. I think she wanted one, but there were all the covid protocols to contend with. Besides, church isn’t really my thing.”
Church wasn’t his thing either. His mother had gone regularly and had insisted that he and his sister go too. From those supposedly “Christian” people they had suffered so many slights and condescending comments. Hadn’t his mother noticed that no one bought her contribution to the regular bake sales? That people avoided sitting in the same pew with them unless there was no choice, in which case they left a wider than normal gap between them?
Conversations would wither when his mother approached a group of women after the service. Polite smiles would appear and trite, cold phrases. “How are you, Jean? It was a nice sermon today, wasn’t it?”
The kids in Sunday school had been just as mean as the kids in regular school. Grub had done his best to fade into the background. Avoid eye contact. Be quiet. Doodle in his notebook, so it looked like he was busy.
“Though if I’m honest, it’s not the church so much as the congregation. I couldn’t face Mom’s friends, knowing what a terrible daughter I’d been. It sucks when you figure life out too late.”
Grub was befuddled. The way she was talking, you’d think the two of them were friends or had been at one time. They hadn’t. In the past fifteen minutes, she’d said more to him than she had for all the years they’d gone to school together.
“Here it is.” He stopped at an engraved marker. Denise Bombini Hooper b January 18, 1964, d November 13, 2021, Beloved Wife, Mother & Friend. She’d been buried next to her husband who had died in an accident on the oil rigs when Hadley was a baby.
He backed off, giving Hadley some privacy. “I can wait until you’re ready to leave. So you don’t have to walk back in the dark.”
“Thanks George. I won’t be long this time. I just wanted to know where to find her.” She opened the bag she had slung over her shoulder and pulled out a posy of flowers. He could tell they’d been professionally arranged, their stems bound together with that thick green tape that florists used. Gently Hadley set the flowers next to the marker.
On the walk back Hadley asked him if he wanted to join the party.
“There’s a band. They’re not too bad. And some good food and punch. Everything is free.”
“That’s okay. I’m not the party type.”
Hadley gave him a probing look. It made him uncomfortable. He wasn’t used to people paying so much attention.
“Maybe you would be. If you gave it a chance.”
“I don’t think so.” They were back on Providence Avenue again. He said a quick goodbye and turned to leave.
“George?”
Slowly he turned.
“I’m sorry I was such a jerk when we were kids.”
The Hadley he’d known from school days never said she was sorry, not even when she was clearly in the wrong. Especially when she was clearly in the wrong.
“You were never a jerk to me,” he said, which was technically true.
“I was never a friend, either. I wish I had been.”
He accepted this with a nod. Her apology changed nothing in his life. Still, it was a validation that he existed. That he mattered. He didn’t get those very often.
“Are you sure you don’t want to join the party?”
“Thanks, but I’d rather go home.”
He’d given the people of Tangle Falls too many chances already. He’d given them a chance when he’d sent invitations to his first birthday party to everyone in his class and not a soul had said yes. They’d picked him last for team sports. Only sent him valentines if the teacher made them. Bullied him and picked fights with him. And maybe, worst of all, ignored him.
After the fire a few people had reached out. Mrs. G for one. Stella at the café. In his new solitude he’d considered moving, trying a fresh start in some other town. But he figured the people in other towns would probably be just like the people in this one. At least in Tangle Falls he knew who to avoid, how to stay out of trouble. Most compelling of all, his family was here.
If he left, who would bring them flowers? Who would come to visit and talk to them? Who would remember they’d been people? Good people. With feelings as tender as the shy morning glory that only opens in the sun.