15

Stacey learned to swim. Not proficiently, but she could do the dog paddle and tread water, and that satisfied Molly the Nose who knew better than most the importance of such a skill. Learning had less to do with her next-door neighbour than it did with Amber’s parents who went to Surveyors Lake every summer, and the summer before grade eight, she came home with severe sunburn and had to spend most of a week in the shade of the backyard with a tube of aloe vera cream, which didn’t bother her much because she was reading the Flowers in the Attic series by V.C. Andrews. Amber was reading them too, and they spent hours of impassioned discussion on events that carried them through the summer. The books contained all sorts of family troubles, including the main character, Cathy Dollanganger, falling in love with her brother after he rapes her.

I don’t see how that could happen, Amber said. My brother is two years older than me, and I can’t stand him. Cathy must have had a mental problem.

They all have mental problems, Stacey said. I guess I can imagine it happening if the conditions were right. I mean, look at the house they’re living in. The family is nuts. Besides, it’s what’s called a broken family, and that means the people in it are broken.

Reading about the Dollangangers made most of what Stacey had to put up with tolerable. Sage fabricated a reason to be miserable and foul-tempered every few weeks, and she held more hope of changing the Fernie weather patterns than of adjusting his tirades. It was Amber’s family Stacey idolized. They had two parents and two children, and that seemed right. When she went somewhere with Amber and her older brother wasn’t there, she pretended to be Amber’s sister, living in a normal family. Amber’s father referred to them as “you girls,” and Stacey thought that a father with two daughters would say that. He would lump them together as part of the puzzle, inseparable.

Most of the time, Stacey’s mother and father got along, but once a month, as if it were an event marked on the calendar, they would fight about something that resulted in either Della taking refuge in her bedroom or Sage heading out late at night to the pub, sometimes both. The next day, everything would be back to normal, and Stacey could forget the battle had ensued, but as the conflicts repeated themselves, over time she developed an air of wariness, an expectation that at any time Sage could run mad. A couple of years earlier, when she had just started grade six, her father came home late from work and had stopped off at the pub with Emery first. Della and Stacey had finished their dinner, as Della for several years had stopped waiting for him if he didn’t come through the door by six, and Sage sat at the kitchen table, eating alone. When he finished, he joined them in the living room and watched Della get her weekly fix of Dallas, with Stacey keeping her company.

Sage wasn’t interested in the show because he said it wasn’t realistic. He waited until an ad came on, then said, Have you two had the talk yet?

What talk? Della said. What are you talking about?

The talk. You know. The birds and the bees. Emery says they teach them everything they need to know in grade six. I wondered if you’d filled her in yet.

Well, we talk all the time, Stacey and I. I’m sure she’ll be prepared.

Big changes are coming, Sage said. He turned away from his wife and focused on Stacey. You’ll menstruate before you get to junior high, that’s a given. Your breasts will grow, and before you know it, you’ll have to hold them up with a bra. Then what will happen—

That’s enough, Della said. Stacey knows what’s in front of her. You don’t need to make it sound vulgar. She’ll become a woman in her own time. A beautiful woman I might add.

Stacey sat inert, staring at her mother and regarding her dad skeptically in her peripheral vision. She thought about the hefty episode that would make its way into Della’s journal later that night.

That’s what I’m saying. She’ll be beautiful, and that’s when the action starts.

Stacey took the book she had been half reading, went to her bedroom and closed the door.

What was that all about? Della had said. We were having a perfectly relaxed evening watching TV, and you come and spoil everything.

Excuse me for asking a question. I guess you’ve thought of everything. There’s no need for me to think anymore.

Since that night, Stacey had felt a new separation between her and her father. Every room in the house felt one way when he was in it and another way when he was not. If she had a point of view about something, he would enter the room and her idea would vanish. It felt eerie to her that, just as Sage had predicted, she had her first period before grade eight began, as if he had willed it to happen, and that part felt abnormal. Many of her friends, including Amber, had been complaining about their plight for almost a year, and where they once held ties as children, they were now bound in the mysterious journey of adolescence, through more than physical changes. Stacey and Amber now wove their way through the world with knowledge of something new and startling, and although it didn’t have a label, they had become members of a vulnerable species. Teachers looked at them differently, or so it seemed. They did look at them differently, didn’t they? This they discussed over and over, and boys, particularly older boys they had known for years who had tried to avoid contact at all cost, now suggested games like tag football that would be fun to play together. The grade nines had three sock hops a year, and the grades eights were invited to the last one of the year, in June. Most of the girls and some boys couldn’t wait. Stacey wasn’t so sure. She thought about what Sage had said about this being when the action started. Sage did so much that was infuriating, but while he acted like a dumb ass most of the time, he might be smarter than she thought.

Unless she could come up with a good excuse not to, Stacey was responsible for cooking on Monday nights, and Della said this was good preparation because when she left home, she knew how to boil water and scramble eggs and not much more. Stacey often fried sausages because it was the one meal Sage never complained about, but sometimes she would cook fish if he came home with any on the weekend. Della encouraged Stacey when she could and reiterated that learning to cook was an important part of becoming an adult. When Sage joined in the discussion, he talked about the real world and how Stacey had no clue what a chore life would be.

On sausage night, no fish in sight, Della had taken the two kids she was babysitting to the park for exercise and a Popsicle on the way home. A year earlier, Stacey might have joined them if she had nothing going on, but now she yearned for time alone, and one way to accomplish being alone was to announce she wanted a bath. Today she had the house to herself, and with no announcement needed, she shed every stitch of clothing and put them in the hamper, then laid out a comfortable pair of shorts and a top for when she finished. She started the water running and stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The contents of the bathroom cabinet had changed over the years. She now used Wild Madagascar Vanilla body wash and Grapefruit Scented Dead Sea bath salts on alternate days in her bath water, and she always coated her skin with ultra shea body lotion when she got out. Her breasts had changed but were still not much more than bloated nipples. She liked to examine their progress before her bath and again after, convinced they got puffier after every bath, and some days she thought the one on her right side had gotten a head start. She owned a training bra she wore with certain outfits, but the training consisted mostly of learning how to put it on and take it off. Amber owned two bras and was lucky enough to need them.

A solid hour in which to submerge herself in warm, soapy water and finish If There Be Thorns felt like such luxury that making dinner and doing the dishes after would be easy.

Stacey had slept in so she had forgotten that her dad had taken one week of his holidays and had gone off fishing early in the morning. She knew he had entered the house because no one else made that much noise. Della? he yelled, but Della wasn’t home to answer. He assumed she was off with the kids somewhere and opened a beer from the fridge, plunked it down on the kitchen table and stormed his way into the bathroom.

Hey, Stacey yelled, trying her best to use her paperback as a shield.

I didn’t know you were in here, he said.

Well, I am, so please leave.

Sage stared at his daughter squirming in a foot of water, book in hand. It looked as though he were about to explain something, or apologize for the circumstance, but he stood there and said nothing, and the six or eight seconds that followed felt like hours to Stacey.

I’ll take a piss in the backyard then, he said, and turned to leave. If you don’t want this to happen, you should lock the door next time.

She pulled herself from the bathtub and locked the door. Unsure whether she could dry herself off in time to make it to the bedroom, she climbed back into the tub. She didn’t feel like reading anymore. She would wait. If she dried herself off and wrapped herself in her bath towel, then made her way to the bedroom, she would pass the kitchen where Sage would be sitting at the table drinking a beer and reading the newspaper. He may be waiting for her to do just that, but she would hold on. Her mother would make her way home, and she would bring her clothes to the bathroom. It felt like he’d taken everything in while he stood there pretending to be stunned, but maybe he only saw her book and her face, her knees above water. She would cook sausages for supper as usual, and he would have nothing but good things to say about that.

Molly the Nose had stopped babysitting after three years. Della always had more kids to look after than she did, and after a while, it felt like the effort wasn’t worth it anymore. She had enjoyed the extra money, but it left so little time in the day for doing things she wanted to do. After she stopped, they had about the same amount of money because once Sage’s Mary Jane stash ran out, he told Hart about the business proposition, and since then the two of them took a one-day business trip to Argenta every September. Sage said he didn’t want to run around dealing like he had in the past (he knew it would be an ongoing battle with Della if he did), so in exchange for a personal year’s supply, he passed the bundle on to Hart who now had plenty of storage in Fort Whoop. Anyone in town interested in buying dropped by in the afternoon and asked for a tour of the fort, and in the small version of the fort’s original Indian room, the dealings took place. Not much had changed from the early days of Fort Whoop-Up, except that they traded in weed instead of whiskey.

Not once did Molly the Nose question how they had enough money to get by. She had an idea that Hart was up to something, with so many people eager to visit the fort in the backyard, but if a more detailed explanation existed, she didn’t want to know. Besides, she made her own financial contribution with petit point, a tedious and exacting fine needle art form that sometimes took months to complete. She finished a rural scene titled Glade Creek Grist Mill first. She liked it because the scene could be viewed around Fernie. She kept this picture framed and mounted on the feature wall of their living room. Hart didn’t say much, only that it looked good. In her first year, she finished three similar pictures and took them to a gallery and sold them for four hundred dollars each. She still preferred to work on scene projects, but petit point designs that adorned purses sold better, and they took less than half the time.

For the first few years after the Howards moved to Fernie, it was Molly who poked her nose around the neighbourhood, while Hart sold insurance or hunkered down inside the house watching movies. Now, Molly didn’t get much sun, and as if they’d traded places, Hart was always outside working on something to do with his fort. Some logs had settled over the years, and the caulking kept him busy, plus one window had cracked due to the shifting logs and needed replacing. Every Wednesday Della hosted a bible study group, and Sage and Hart held a meeting of their own at Fort Whoop.

Hart loved country music, but he couldn’t play a single tune on the guitar he’d owned for a decade. Sage had been in a rock band that did a lot of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, so with Hart’s persuasion he would play, and the two of them would sing a few songs badly. Hart loved “I Walk the Line,” and Sage learned it, though the song felt like a lie. He much preferred “Oh Lonesome Me” and “King of the Road.”

If I don’t get a management job soon, I’m going to quit, Sage said. The two of them had finished smoking, and now Sage cracked open one of the two beers he had brought with him. When he wasn’t drinking, he set the bottle down on top of the Bible that Molly insisted Hart keep in the fort because, historically, forts housed an ongoing battle between the word of God and a thirst for whiskey. Sage thought it worked fine as a coaster.

What would you do then?

Don’t have a clue. This is the longest I’ve worked anywhere. I hate staying in one place.

Not many good paying jobs in this town, Hart said.

I know. There are other towns, though.

If I could do one thing over, Hart said, I would have bought property outside of town. Something near the river maybe, so I could expand my fort. I can’t make it any bigger the way it is now. I feel trapped with what I got.

When the two of them sat together, long periods of silence punctuated their conversation, and this was one of them. They often thought about what had been said or what to say next, but sometimes they simply enjoyed the opportunity to think without someone in the house wondering why they weren’t talking. Hart sported a long mustache, wild at the sides, that he’d grown after completing the fort, and it occupied the ends of his fingers.

At least you’ve got your daughter to raise, Hart said. That’s something at least.

Sage said nothing back. He knew his thinking about that, and he knew what Hart was thinking, and they shared the same thought. Sage knew he and Della wouldn’t be raising her much longer. Stacey was growing up fast. Too fast.