THREE DAYS LATER, after streets had been ploughed, sidewalks cleared, cars jump-started and windows scraped, I arrived home from school and found an envelope on the dresser addressed to us in Mom’s hand. I held it to the light, smelled it, picking up a faint musty odour. Maybe this would be the letter telling us when she would come to get us and where we would go. Jenny hoped Mom would rent us a house in Williams Lake, or even an apartment in the building near Safeway. I wanted to go somewhere else, far from here. I couldn’t wait for Jenny to get back from work, so I opened the letter. A twenty-dollar bill fell out. I held the letter to my nose, too. Nothing familiar.
Dear girls,
The $20 is for Maggie’s birthday. I can’t believe you’re 12! I hope you’ll buy something practical like new jeans. You needed them in the summer. You would like it here. The other night when the moon was full, a whole pack of wolves sat on a hill above the lake and sang all night long. One night I even saw a wolf down at the lake. He was crossing the ice and so was I. Jenny, I’ll send you some $$ before Christmas. I hope you like Williams Lake. Be good!
Love Mom
You need practice to be able to handle disappointment, and I didn’t have enough of it yet. I lay down on my bed and tried to breathe past the crushing heaviness on my chest. For some reason, I thought of Vern, pictured his lean brown hand as he held the lit match to our teepee of sticks. A flicker of comfort flared deep in my chest and was gone again.
It took about fifteen minutes for the disappointment to brew into anger.
“Do you have any scraps of denim?” I asked Bea. She was lying on the couch with her glasses resting precariously on her forehead. An open National Geographic lay across her chest. I didn’t care if she was sleeping. Today I didn’t fear her wrath.
She opened her eyes. “Denim? What for?”
“I need it to patch my jeans.”
“I think I have some.” She pushed herself upright with a groan. I would never get old the way she was, I thought. “Would you like embroidery thread?”
Bea found the denim and a sewing case with twelve colours of bright embroidery thread, still in their paper wrappers.
“This shows you how to do different stitches,” she said, handing me an old book.
From the denim, I cut out oval patches for the knees of my jeans and over the next few days, I stitched my own design: a campfire of orange and yellow flames, brown logs and white stars of snowflakes falling above it. Bea came by once in a while to watch over my shoulder, even saying once, “You picked that up pretty quickly.” As I stitched, my anger flared and sputtered and flared again, and finally formed into a kind of plan. If she wouldn’t come back to us, then we had to go and find her.
This time, I found the outside envelope from Mom’s letter by accident. It was lying in the kitchen garbage can and it caught my eye as I threw some orange peels in. I smoothed it and looked closely. Again there was the cancelled stamp from Kleena Kleene, but nothing else.
The first day I wore my jeans with the new patches to school, I went and sat on the swing next to Vern at recess.
“You going anywhere for Christmas?” he asked.
“No. You?”
“Maybe. I might go see my mom.”
“Cool. Where does she live?”
“Nistsun Lake. Know where that is?”
I nodded. We swung in lazy half circles, our feet on the frozen ground.
“What’s that on your knee?” he asked, leaning over. He didn’t say anything, just tapped my knee twice with his finger and, as the bell rang, headed back to school.
After school I had two things to do. I walked over to the bank and opened an account. My first deposit was twenty dollars. Next, I went to the Esso station on the highway. Inside, there was a man on his knees arranging quarts of oil on a shelf.
“Are you the manager?” I asked.
“Who’s asking?”
“Me. I’m looking for a job. I can pump gas and work the cash register and I know how to check oil and top up radiators.”
“Hand me that box, will you?” He gestured to a box on the counter and I lifted it down for him.
He took a jackknife from his shirt pocket and slit open the top. “Can I trust you?”
“I billet in town here and I’m very responsible,” I said.
“How old are you?”
“I’m thirteen,” I lied.
He pushed himself to his feet. He had a round paunch under his Esso shirt. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Bob,” he said and we shook. “I could use some help over Christmas. How about I try you out? I’ll give you two weeks to show me what you can do.”
“Two weeks is great!” I nodded. “I can start today if you want.”
Bob looked around the store. It smelled of motor oil and chocolate bars. “Don’t you have to let someone know where you are?”
Just then the gas bell rang. Bob looked out at the pumps where a long Chrysler had just pulled up.
“Okay,” he said. “You can start with this guy. He’ll only get a couple dollars of gas but he’ll want his oil checked, windshields washed, front and rear, and he might even ask you to check the air in his tires.”
Vern’s uncle worked for the highways and stopped at the gas station about twice a week. The first time I met him, I was filling up his tank and peered over the edge of his truck into the back. He had some bags of sand, a large folded-up tarp, rope, axes in a bucket, a shovel, a spare tire and a large wooden box locked with a latch and padlock.
“You’re Maggie, aren’t you?” he said, as he climbed out of the cab. Two long braids hung down the front of his plaid jacket, tapering to neat, skinny ends.
“Yes.”
“I’m Leslie. Uncle Leslie, Vern’s uncle. He’s told me about you.”
I smiled and hung up the nozzle and tightened the gas cap.
“Want me to check your oil?”
“Good idea,” he said. “He says you come from Duchess Creek.”
I nodded.
“Come up to the trailer sometime for dinner. I’m a good cook.”
“Okay,” I said. I checked the dipstick. “You’re down about half a quart.”
Now that I was earning my own money, I started buying some of my own food. I used the excuse that I didn’t want to inconvenience Bea when I got home from work after suppertime. I stopped at Safeway and picked up canned stew, instant mashed potatoes, tins of devilled ham, and oranges. As I put the food in my basket, I liked to imagine that I was outfitting for a wilderness trip. I would need some packets of instant oatmeal and some sugar and tea. But I wouldn’t buy those just yet because Bea would ask questions.
At the checkout one day someone behind me said, “Real potatoes are just about as fast.” It was Uncle Leslie. He had a cart full: a big bag of flour, oats, potatoes, onions, fresh carrots, tomatoes.
“You were going to come for supper. I guess I’ve got to give you a day. How about tomorrow?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Come with Vern after school. Make sure you ask Mrs. Edwards first.”
The next day it was snowing as Vern and I walked up the hill to the trailer park. Big flakes floated in the air, caught on the wind, and seemed not to land at all.
“Uncle Leslie thinks you must be homesick,” Vern said. “He’s making deer stew.”
“Really?” I said, so eagerly I felt embarrassed. I tried to reclaim a casual tone. “Yeah, we used to have deer stew a lot.”
“Ever go hunting?”
“Not really. Not with a gun, I mean. You?”
“Yeah. But I don’t really like it. I mean I like everything but the killing part. And that’s supposed to be the point, right?”
The trailer was a neat white one with a bay window on one end. There was a cedar porch with two wooden loungers on it, dusted in snow.
“Come on in,” said Uncle Leslie when Vern opened the door. “Leave your boots there and I’ll give you a pair of moccasins to wear. The floor gets a bit cold.”
The trailer smelled of stew and a hint of wood smoke. A stack of wood was piled beside a black woodstove.
“Will these fit?” Uncle Leslie held a moccasin next to my foot. “Looks about right.”
I put them on. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”
The only trailers I’d been in were the kind you pulled behind a car. This one seemed bigger than the Edwards’ house.
Uncle Leslie made three mugs of hot chocolate from some packets and water from a kettle that was steaming on the little woodstove. Then he washed the spoon, dried it and put it away. I caught a glimpse of the inside of his cupboard, neatly loaded with food, boxes on one shelf, cans on another, jars of canned fruit and salmon on another. A pair of oven mitts hung on a rack by the stove, along with a ladle, spatula, slotted spoon, long fork and different-sized frying pans in a row. The knives were ranged in a block of wood on the counter, from large to small, and beside that were big jars of flour, rice, sugar, tea and coffee, all neatly labelled. On a dishtowel spread on the counter, various sizes of jars and lids, washed and with their labels removed, sat drying. On the window ledge above the sink were four potted plants. I recognized one as parsley. My eyes went to the drawers alongside the fridge. I was tempted to look inside them. The neatness, all the order and organization, was as appealing here as it was claustrophobic and repulsive at the Edwards’s.
Uncle Leslie sat with us as we drank our hot chocolate. He got up once to stoke the stove.
“I got this deer we’re about to eat right around Duchess Creek in the fall,” he said.
I nodded and we sipped.
“Well, no rest for the wicked.” He stood and carried his dirty cup to the sink.
Vern and I played cards as the smell of baking buns filled the trailer. A pungent scent of deer stew wafted up each time Uncle Leslie opened the lid of the pot. I glanced over at him, clad in an apron, with his braids tucked inside his shirt. He whistled and rattled pots and pans busily. Something sweet floated below the savoury smells.
When supper was almost ready, he called Vern to set the table.
“I’ll help,” I said.
“Okay, because it’s a lot of work,” Vern said, smiling.
Uncle Leslie set down the pot of stew, a steaming dish of spinach, roasted potatoes, a basket of fresh buns and a saucer of butter.
“Uncle Leslie thinks you eat too much junk,” Vern said.
“Girls your age need iron,” Uncle Leslie said. “Now take spinach, for instance. There’s lots of iron in that.”
“My mom used to make stinging nettle,” I said.
“Oh yeah, that’s even better. Takes a bit of work to get it, though.”
“I used my Dad’s work gloves.”
“Then you need to boil it twice to get the sting out.”
“Mrs. Edwards won’t eat any of that kind of thing. ‘Weeds,’ she says. ‘They could be poisonous.’ ”
Uncle Leslie laughed at my imitation of her voice.
“Sure,” said Vern. “You’ll wind up dead and then who’s going to take out the garbage?”
When we were done the stew, Leslie put bowls of apple crumble and vanilla ice cream down in front of us. “I wonder what you two sound like when you imitate me,” he said.