FLOSSY O’REILLY AND OSCAR wilde lifted and turned their heads in unison, heavy eyes blinking to make out the shadow moving behind the screen door.
She quickly opened The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume V that had fallen shut in front of her and pulled her shoulders back. She didn’t like being caught dozing.
“Ah, it’s you. Come in, come in,” she said, pulling herself up straight and swinging her legs out from under the table. Jimmy O’Reilly was already pushing the door in with his shoulder.
“Little pair of mackerels there for you and Mealie, for supper,” he said, bustling past her and dropping the fish wrapped in newspaper into the sink. Jimmy never bothered to say hello. “Looks like Bessy’s car in over at Lottie’s this morning,” he added, motioning up the street with his head before wiping fishy hands on Flossy’s clean towel. “Passed the Grue lad there going up the road like a bat outta Helsinki.”
With Flossy’s declining hearing, Jimmy had worked out his own way of talking to her with a series of barked nouns and verbs. Three or four mornings a week he lumbered into her kitchen like this, letting anything that fluttered through his mind run right out of his mouth. He knew everyone along both shores who was dying, gravely ill, chronically ill or mildly under the weather and with each visit he provided an update.
From where she stood on one side of her brother, Flossy watched a brown line of fish blood gather along the edge of the Truro News and drip into the drain. She swallowed and looked away. “That’ll suit me fine. Thank you Jimmy,” she smiled.
“I don’t see Bunny Patriquin getting through the night,” he said, scratching the back of his neck. “The daughter’s back, anyway. So.”
Mealie had already gone off to the studio, leaving the newspaper neatly folded on the table. She liked Jimmy well enough, in small doses, but liked him even better when she missed his morning rounds.
“He’s a dear man who fills my head with noise,” she said of him, in confidence, her half glasses swinging from a chain not unlike the one that kept track of Flossy’s bathtub plug. “And it’s about as memorable as the inside of a bottom drawer.” She didn’t have to tell Flossy. Mealie went to some lengths to protect the noise in her head and Flossy admired it. She often felt like airing her own brain out on the clothesline beside the sour dishcloth after her brother left. It wasn’t that his chatter was malicious or hurtful; he drew his own line there. Rather, it was simply peppered with the borrowed troubles of people up and down the shore or things not worth thinking about by tomorrow morning. Enough. Surely she had enough scratching at the back door of her mind without adding the arthritic joints and gas pains of half of Colchester County. She had Marjory and Ruth — on their way through New Brunswick by now; Richard Archibald — who she dare not even think about; and scarcely one hundred pages left in the last of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. She could already see the clouds gathering, Bloomsbury disintegrating, Lytton’s death, and then Roger’s not two years later.
She pulled her thoughts back to Jimmy standing in the middle of her kitchen. Flossy would take the mackerel over to Mealie later. She wished Jimmy would think to drop it off himself but he was about as routinized as a Holstein cow. It would never dawn on him in a month of Sundays, though he’d drive by the house twice.
Pulling his green John Deere hat back from his forehead with one hand and his glasses off with the other, Jimmy O’Reilly wiped the sweat gathering on his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s a steamer out there,” he puffed. “I’m sweatin’ like a hen hauling hay. You’ll wanna get y’r errands finished up early.” He pushed the glasses back in place and hung the hat over the handle of the door.
There was a time when Flossy’s brother would have had to take the hat off just to get through the doorway. He’d been a barrel of a man in his younger days but he was much smaller now. His wife Noreen had put him on some new diet but instead of looking better for the fifty-two pounds he’d shed, Flossy thought her brother looked rather pinched. The centre of gravity of this smaller Jimmy had somehow shifted so that he led less with the chest and a little more with his head sunk into stooped shoulders as if he were some old sweater left on a coat rack for three weeks. Everything about him was shrinking, with the exception of his nose and earlobes, and when she caught him thinking these days she noticed he’d developed a habit of chewing his tongue on the left side of his mouth.
“Cars on the bridge …” He was talking again.
“On the …?”
“Bridge.”
She shook her head.
“Tourist, yesterday from New Brunswick thought it was a two-lane.” They’d seen this before. The steel bridge that crossed the Great Village River in the centre of town gave the right of way to traffic coming from Glenholme but every now and again a vehicle from the other direction, impatient or distracted, ignored the yield sign and bolted across.
“And?” She waited.
“Bumper crunch,” he said. “Tow-truck took the one away, so it did.”
She shook her head. “Nobody’s a minute to spare.”
He shuffled a couple of steps in one direction as he spoke and a couple in another. Flossy sat down. Fifty-two pounds lighter or not, her brother still had the agility of a juvenile elephant in her kitchen. She pulled her feet in.
Jimmy was her only other regular visitor. Often, like today, he brought along the catch of the weir he still kept out on Cobequid Bay or sometimes the abundance of a kitchen garden he cultivated behind the retirement bungalow he’d built on the edge of the O’Reilly farm where they’d grown up together. Each year he put in enough vegetables to feed two shifts of Stanfield’s underwear factory right through to November and, though he and his wife Noreen were the only two sharing the house now, Jimmy couldn’t give up what he’d done every year for the better part of fifty years. Consequently, he spent his late-summer days carting Sobeys bags full of onions, beans, tomatoes and cucumbers to her and all his neighbours.
Once in the spring and again in the fall, for about a week at a time, Mealie and Jimmy would arrive in Flossy’s kitchen simultaneously, he marshalled by the clock and she entirely by the sun. She imagined the threshold of her house as an equator across which these two great planets passed. Flossy much preferred them one at a time. Jimmy was as predictable as Mealie was not. Taking her leave this morning, not twenty minutes before Jimmy pulled into the laneway, Flossy had noticed Mealie’s ankle red and swollen as she walked out the door, though she wasn’t limping. It was on the tip of her tongue to call her back, but once again Flossy’d been snagged by the past and her thoughts tangled like fishing line.
In that instant, it was her mother’s ankle she’d seen, the exact same one, the left, thickly inflamed like that. It so surprised her to have the memory douse her concentration, even to realize she’d entirely forgotten her mother’s feet, that Mealie was already halfway home before she’d had her wits about her. Was it phlebitis? Why hadn’t she said something?
“They’re saying Bertie’s burn pile caught fire at Old Barns on Tuesday,” Jimmy interrupted her thoughts. “Two fire trucks to put it out. Was I telling ya?”
He had told her. Twice. On Wednesday. She held up two fingers.
“Heh, heh.” Jimmy looked down. He didn’t mind being caught out by her. There was a seven-year gap between them and while it hadn’t meant a lot for a lot of years in the middle of their lives, you can bet they were each aware of it now. The fact was, Jimmy wasn’t losing much more than any of the rest of them. They were all quite capable of launching entire conversations these days without offering the listener the sliver of a clue as to what they were talking about.
“You know that guy who played alongside the other one in the movie with the woman who always had the hair? Oh, you remember him.” That was Verna Fisher when they’d bumped into each other at the general store last Wednesday, badgering Flossy as if the lapse had somehow been hers. She looked back at Jimmy prattling on.
“Fire department doesn’t take kindly to old farmers setting fires without a permit,” he said.
“And old farmers don’t see why they need a permit to do what they’ve always done.”
He nodded. “You know, he’s bad crippled with the arthritis.” Jimmy stroked his chin. “Couldn’t chase a fire if it was warming his tea.”
“What in heaven’s name is anybody setting a fire for in this heat?” She heard the crimp of impatience in her own voice. Her hearing wasn’t all that bad — she had a perfectly good set of hearing aids collecting dust on the top of the refrigerator. There just didn’t seem to be much of interest to listen to anymore.
Jimmy didn’t answer, just raised his eyebrows and nodded his head.
“They’re getting showers into New Brunswick today but it’s not likely to get this far. Crops’r gonna be … useless,” he muttered, as much fret as report. He pushed his glasses back against his face.
Her brother had belatedly taken to wearing those glasses and for some reason didn’t think to buy the light, fashionable wire frames. He’d got the heavy Onassis-black that blared out in front of his sun-browned face and white hair. These he worried away at, constantly pulling them off and shoving them back on again so that they were always hopelessly smudged with fingerprints and seldom sitting squarely on his face.
“Nothin’ in the forecast,” chuffed out of him. Jimmy didn’t have any crops in, now that his daughter and her husband were working the farm. Regardless, he followed the weather reports and market updates scrupulously and never could get over worrying about other people’s corn grown barely to his shoulder, browning from the hot winds, that should have been towering green and gold-tasselled by now.
Flossy watched her brother fumble with the glasses while getting himself a cup of coffee. She kept an eye on him to capture the crumbs of conversation. He took a mug from the draining rack by the sink, instead of the cupboard. To be sure it was clean, he yanked the glasses off his face, clutching one lens and using the other as a magnifying glass.
“Sandpipers are back,” he said, over his shoulder. “Golly, they’re a spectacle.”
The coffee poured, he made for the table, slopping some over the side of the cup that he smeared across the floor with his boot. More dribbled onto the table that Flossy tried to ignore as he wiped at it with the side of his hand. He tipped the back of the chair up slightly so that Oscar Wilde plopped to the floor, sat down, hunched over his coffee and began to stir.
Ka-klink, pause. Ka-klink, pause. Ka-klink, Jimmy could sit and stir for half an hour uninterrupted, staring into space. It was the only thing that quieted him.
She waited. The clock ticked on the wall above his head to the rhythm of the spoon. Ka-klink, tick. Ka-klink, tick. Here they sat across from each other, the last of the O’Reillys, the survivors of an entire generation washed to the narrows of the twenty-first century, without a thing of any substance to say.
Jimmy shuffled his feet under the table. She tucked hers beneath the chair. He took a sip of his coffee, reached for the sugar bowl and placed most of a heaping teaspoon into his mug. What fell to the table he scooped to the floor then stirred some more. She glanced at the clock; it was eight ten on a Friday morning and he was still sitting in her kitchen. Must be something on his mind. Flossy waited. She always waited. The minute she asked him a question, Jimmy’d clam up.
Maybe Noreen was after him again about settling up the farm, which their mother had left to the two of them. He had never been able to buy Flossy out and she’d never wanted him to. She had no need of the farm now anyway, had her own little house in town and was perfectly comfortable. Though she had given him every assurance that her half would go to his girls after she was gone, Noreen wanted the property signed over to Jimmy instead. That way they, that is to say she, could decide who would get what. Every now and again, when her sister-in-law couldn’t find anything else to natter about, Jimmy’d be dispatched to “talk some sense into that sister of yours.”
This morning, she had quite enough on her plate. Besides, she didn’t like Noreen hurrying her out one bit. It was on the tip of her tongue to say “George and Fred’ll be looking for you,” but she didn’t want him to take offence. Not now. Especially not now when she might be on her own last legs.
Noreen made no bones about their daughters being a contest of disappointments, would go long spells not talking to one or the other of them. It had occurred to Flossy more than once that Jimmy was secretly pleased about the way she’d set out her affairs. He couldn’t be seen to disagree with Noreen — knowing full well which side his bread was buttered on — but he’d always leaned towards even-handedness where the girls were concerned and never put all that much effort into changing Flossy’s mind.
“Green-eyed monster,” Mealie’d declare from behind the Chronicle Herald when Flossy’d express bewilderment over Noreen. With the bright quick eyes of a small bird, Mealie Marsh missed absolutely nothing. For sure, Flossy’s sister-in-law didn’t approve of Jimmy’s morning visits. She put up with them because she was a late riser and grateful to have that stirring-spoon as far away from her own kitchen as possible. He was one of those men who, if they ever stopped working, would have little to occupy their days except to tag along behind their wives.
This week Noreen was in the Valley, had gone after lunch on Wednesday to help move an older brother into an apartment. She seldom left Jimmy alone for more than the time it took to make a trip into Truro. In her absence, Jimmy was going a bit to seed. His white hair was a tatty bird’s nest at the back of his head, his shirtfront flecked with food and a slightly sour smell was just beginning to reach Flossy’s shores. She had a foreboding that he was hoping to tag along behind her today. That was all she needed with beds to be made, groceries to get and catastrophelooming.
He scratched the lug of his ear. “When was it mother died there?”
“Mother?” Flossy cocked her head. Had she heard?
“Yuh, mother. When’d she die?”
Jimmy arrived punctually at seven forty-five each morning and was gone again before the eight o’clock news, which he listened to in his truck as he drove to the general store. There he’d warm the counter with a couple of other regulars trading news like schoolboys’ marbles. Not today. George and Fred would be craning their necks up the road looking for him.
“Fifty-two,” she said.
“Fifty-two, was it? I see.” From some distant corridor of his mind he clutched at a memory of that day. He pulled the glasses off and set them on the table. “I remember it was some cold. January …”
“February, Jimmy. The tenth.”
“I should write this …” He tucked his chin in and from the left pocket of his brown-checked shirt pulled out a wad of papers half an inch thick. This was Jimmy’s filing cabinet. Twenty years ago he carried a pack of Export ‘A’ cigarettes there and before that a pouch of Daily Mail tobacco. Now it was a bundle of folded, bent and ragged bits of paper, receipts and business cards he never took the time to sort. With his head stretched back he shuffled the papers, holding them at a distance to catch the sunlight that reached in over his left shoulder. The glasses sat on the table in front of him.
“What about Thomas?” he asked, pulling one hip forward and plunging his hand into the pocket of his pants.
“Come again?”
With his crooked index finger, he poked through a fistful of twine, bolts, nails and chaff in the other hand. Flossy watched various loose bits drift to the floor as Jimmy paused to look up at her. “Thomas,” he repeated, before extracting a stub of yellow pencil from the jumble that he tucked away again. He began to write on the back of a business card.
“What about Thomas?” she asked.
“When was it he got away from us?” He scratched the inside of his ear with the pointed end of the pencil.
“Mighty sakes, Jimmy, what are you wanting all this for?”
He pulled the pencil out and wiped it on his trousers. “Oh, it’s Becky’s asking. They had me for dinner last night,” he said, scribbling something onto the paper. “She wants to know when we all died.”
Flossy shook her head. Dear Lord. Becky was the new wife of Jimmy’s grandson, his second run at marital blitz, as Mealie was so fond of saying. (The first hadn’t got out of the starting gate.) She was a bouncy addition to the family, girlish for a twenty-five year old, with teddy bears dangling from her purse, who was making a point of “getting to know all the family.” Flossy wasn’t the least bit interested in being known by Becky.
“Was it fifty-two? Thomas?”
“The first time or the second?” she asked.
“The which?”
“First or second time?”
He looked at her. His mouth was slightly open and he pulled his bottom lip in and swallowed before answering, “Last …”
“Eighth of September, fifty-one. Do you not remember any of these things?”
He shook his head before writing the date carefully on the card. Noticing the glasses, he picked them up and put them on. “What was it got him?”
“Pneumonia.”
“Pneu … monia,” he repeated as he wrote. “How old? ” he slurped his coffee.
“Forty. What’s Becky want with all this anyway?” she grumbled.
“Oh, I can’t be sure, ee-unh …” Jimmy stalled. She watched him pull on the isthmus of skin between his nostrils, his sky-blue eyes staring off. The glasses were tilted towards his right eyebrow.
“Jimmy?” she said softly, after a couple of minutes.
“Eh?” He pulled the hand away from his face and looked over at her.
“You were saying?”
“You which?”
“Becky …”
“Yeah, yeah, she wants to do the family history.” He went back to stirring his coffee.
What Jimmy could have said and didn’t was that Becky should let sleeping dogs lie. He ran the back of his fingers along a patchily shaven face after another few minutes of stirring and looked directly at his sister. “Don’t know what good it’ll do. So.”
Flossy smiled sadly. She understood. You could get too far along your own dark road to want to slog through any part of the past again. These two never talked about it. What for? Even if they’d grown up under the same roof and shared a long stretch of misery, they’d hardly sit around and chat about it now. Who among their friends sat yammering of the good old Depression? Of course, Jimmy’d gone off to the war and, no doubt, had a whole lot more he wasn’t interested in chatting about.
Becky wasn’t from those parts, hadn’t a clue what surface she was scratching. Her new husband, Jimmy’s grandson, was barely able to scrabble through the occasional dust-up with his own parents, much less the demons of an earlier generation. Besides, Becky wasn’t interested in detail, and dates were simple enough to give, really. Dates were only squares on the calendar that spoke not at all of the clutter of affliction bunched up behind them. All Becky wanted was to make a chart of dates to frame and give back to them all at Christmas. Give Becky a date and she’d find a match in her mental storehouse, “Hey, that’s my sister’s birthday,” she’d beam, a whisker short of jumping up and licking Flossy’s face.
She glanced out the window. September 8, the day Thomas died, for the last time. Those sweet anonymous days that flutter by year-on-end, then once they’re smudged with death, you can’t pass another one carefree for trying. She looked back across at her brother. He was gazing at the table. She thought of her own vivid recollection catching her, not an hour earlier, of the day Thomas went to bed. Jimmy hadn’t even asked about their father and she didn’t offer. They never spoke of the day the date, month or year of their father’s death. It was their secret, a solemn pact between brother and sister that stretched back nearly seventy years. Did he ever let his stirring-mind stray back to those times, step back inside the events of those few dates etched on the O’Reilly granite out there in the Mahon cemetery?
“Get the goddamn into the goddamned boat.” Her father’s voice could clutch like an undertow. She held still, resisting, the memory seemingly alive beneath her skin. She saw the face twisted with rage, his hair blown like a rag in the wind, and little Jimmy shivering in the waiting boat. Did Jimmy ever have that face rise up from his early morning dreams? Her chest thumped. She pushed her cup and the memory away, turning instead to her brother stirring his coffee in a stupor across the table.
Ka-klink, pause. Ka-klink, pause. She had an urge to ask him, “What is it you think about all day, Jimmy?” Maybe he had no real memory of their father — he’d only been six when William died. Did Jimmy ever think of their mother, Thomas, all the water under their family’s sorry bridge?
“Don’t worry, Jimmy,” she said to him. “Becky’ll be on to something else next week, quilting or candles.” If there was one thing she could count on, it was the short attention span of these young things. “We’ll send her one of those calligraphy sets they have with all the pens, anonymously. That should do it.”
“I told her she should come talk to you,” he said, half a grin curling up his face.
“Thanks a bunch.”
Without warning he scraped the chair across the floor and was on his feet. He tucked the papers into his pocket, drank back the rest of his well-stirred coffee in three long gulps. She followed him to the door, gave him a reassuring pat on the arm.
“We’ll just do like Mealie,” she said to him as he punched his fist into the round of his cap. “She says a little bit of dementia cango a long way at our age.”
He gave a chuckle, turned and, with a hand on the latch, looked back.
“Say, you won’t guess who I seen yesterday over in Dickies.”
“Who was that?”
“Bubba McKeen. Ya ’member her?”
It took Flossy a second. “Bubba. Yes, yes, of course.”
“She’s down in Parrsboro. Married a Trenholm from Amherst way. She ended up a schoolteacher too. They’ve a little place down there. She’s put on a few stone since she lived in these parts, so she has.” Jimmy tumbled on.
“I haven’t thought of Barbara McKeen in years,” Flossy said wistfully. Jimmy would think this news would please her. She folded her arms across her chest.
“I was buying chicken feed and she spoke to me,” Jimmy said.“I’d never have recognized her. Funny, eh?” he snapped his fingers, “turn up just like that after so many years?” as he stepped outside and let the door close behind him. Flossy stood and watched her brother through the screen hobble down the steps. Logie, his little sheepdog, was bouncing from window to window in the truck. Jimmy was stiff this morning, no doubt his arthritis was acting up though he never complained. He put his hat back on, rocking it on his head a couple of times to scratch or get it in just the right spot, as he gazed out over Hustler’s Hill towards the church steeple before climbing slowly into his black pickup. He backed the truck onto the grass. His head turned slowly towards her, he tipped a finger above the steering wheel and drove off.
Barbara McKeen. Didn’t she have enough on her mind? Shewatched her brother disappear down the road. He hit the pot-hole in front of Mealie’s. Jimmy never watched the road. A cloud passed between her and the sun. What if this were her last chance to say something to him? She had an impulse to step out and wave. He’d never see.
They’d always called her Bubba. As a little girl, unable to master all the syllables of her name, it was what she’d called herself. Bubba, Patricia and Flossy were inseparable throughout school.
“You knew,” Bubba flung the words at Flossy. It was the last thing she’d ever said to her.
Yes, she’d known. All Great Village had known. All but Bubba.
Sometimes Jimmy had an uncanny way of rubbing salt into a wound. Here she was with Richard Archibald thrumming her conscience, Marjory and the girl on their way, Virginia Woolf splintering apart and Jimmy turns Bubba McKeen up in her soup. Of course, Jimmy would have been too much younger to know of the falling out, the unique cruelties of schoolgirls. Why did people not believe that these things were none of Flossy’s business? She did not make the secrets. She’d only kept them.
Well, there wasn’t much she could do about Bubba. That was a long time ago. You could spend the entire second half of a life turning over the mistakes of the first if you thought there was any use in it or you had nothing better to do. Besides, Bubba hadn’tstopped talking to the entire village; she’d singled Flossy out for that.
But what was she going to do about Richard? Should she call him, try to explain? And would she just leave Jimmy like that? There’d be no time to talk with the youngster here, three full weeks of someone under her feet. Did Flossy have three weeks left? It seemed too long a time to wait on the one hand, but far too short to sort out the messes of eighty-two years. She looked at the clock.
“Ridiculous,” her Queen Mab voice blurted out loud. “Save your breath to cool your porridge.” This voice — which sounded altogether too much like her mother’s — had served Flossy well over the years, helped her sift the utterly useless from the faintly possible in her many decades of teaching and dealing with unreasonable parents. Queen Mab may even be serving her right now but Flossy was more acutely aware that she might be using up ends, her remaining few days and hours. She couldn’t fritter them away. Would she go without a last word to Jimmy?
On balance, he’d been a good brother. She could say that with sincerity. It was no small thing to take his sister’s part over Noreen. There wasn’t a lick of malice to him. Lots couldn’t say that about their brothers. Perhaps Jimmy was the kind of man never able to say the soft word but always longing to hear it.
She watched the taillights of his truck flash at the intersection as he touched the brakes and rolled around the corner onto the highway.
Queen Mab reminded her that Jimmy, like so many others she knew, much preferred to talk about everyone else’s troubles. Flossy looked at the clock again. She should take Mealie’s fish to her, though she didn’t like to interrupt her studio time. She’d leave her a note. Maybe go find Jimmy. After. And Richard? She must call him. On the back of the envelope for the electricity bill she wrote:
Lady Partridge,
Jimmy left a mackerel for you. I’ve put it in the fridge. His Lordship Wilde is still in my kitchen.
Q.Mab
SHE UNWRAPPED THE FISH AND placed Mealie’s in a plastic bag. At the last minute, she put hers in as well. She dearly wished Jimmy’s weir would be washed away in a rip-roaring storm; she was so tired of fish. Mealie’d be grateful enough; she was fond of mackerel and could eat twice as much as Flossy. As she walked down the hill towards her friend’s house, she noticed Mr. McNutt’s blinds all down, wisely hunkered in against the heat.
Inside Mealie’s kitchen the air conditioner blew cold air from a box propped in the window and stuffed around the edges with cardboard. It made it harder for her eyes to adjust in the dark room. She put the fish in the fridge and tucked the envelope beneath a teapot on the counter among numerous pots and pans, dirty dishes, jars filled with paint brushes, empty bottles, milk containers, squeezed tea bags and cans. There was something sticky beneath her foot. Without thinking, she lifted the lid of the teapot. Inside, a bag floated on brown liquid with a thumbnail-sized patch of mould attached.
Flossy stilled an impulse to rinse the pot and tidy the counter. Mealie, after all, lived as she wanted. A binge cleaner, she’d tidy between spurts of artistic inspiration, going at the mess at five some morning and having it all cleared out, the floors polished, by noon. Flossy’s own tolerance for chaos was much lower. A crumb-sweeper, she did a little every day, enough to keep the kitchen tidy at least. The rest she hardly noticed.
She could smell fresh paint and something else she couldn’t put a finger on. As she turned to go, her eyes traced the wainscot and counters for Mealie’s mouse.
“Oh,” she stopped. Taking hesitant steps towards a canvas that sat propped against the wall atop a small cabinet, Flossy reached a hand out. This was new. She leaned closer, near enough to touch the picture’s upper edge. She lifted her glasses to look closer still. Mealie had said she was working in acrylic and wax but Flossy hadn’t seen the results.
The painting was an earthy abstract of olive and burnt sienna dragged and pitted across two-thirds of the canvas, with a suggestion of turquoise and peach peering from beneath. A red-orange horizon brightened the upper left-hand corner, then farther into the picture’s maw was a volcanic energy, aswirl with smears of orange, ochre and blood-red paint. The olive reached into it, followed by a stippling of purple-blue. Flossy walked around to the other side. Mealie was calling these canvases her “Remnants.” From every direction the painting was textured beauty, the kind of picture she thought a person could live with in one room for the better part of a lifetime. Her hand longed to stroke it like the irresistible head of a child.
She should go. Mealie hadn’t shown her this one yet and Flossy felt intrusive, as if she’d been reading her friend’s diary left open on the kitchen table, though the two women had come and gone from each other’s house over the years as freely as Oscar Wilde. She stared at the picture. Mealie was working at fever pitch thesedays, getting ready for a show in October. She never talked aboutthe actual work but she’d mentioned yesterday that several pictures had been hung out to dry. Always a good sign.
Stepping back outside, the heat was twice as oppressive, the light too white for the eyes. She watched the ground walking back to her own place. Beneath her feet the grass felt brittle, as if life itself had contracted and was simply waiting out the heat. Surely it would break soon.
She collected her things from the house and drove the slim stretch of road to the highway watching for Jimmy. Mealie’s picture, still in her mind, brightened her mood, gave her that extra dash of optimism to go find him.
Stopped, waiting for a car at the intersection, she could see that Jimmy’s truck was already gone. He’d be on his way home or down at the weir, depending on the tide. Her guests would arrive in about nine hours. She decided to go to Truro first, get all her errands out of the way, and try him at the shore later in the day. No point in chasing him now with so much to do. He might be there later. Then she’d call Richard. Get everything in order. It would be a relief by the water. She could always think at the shore.