The Cat

Hank Trass is dozing in the warm cab of his truck with his mouth wide open and his head jammed into the corner between the seatback and the window, which is rolled up against the mosquitoes. His cowboy hat is beside him on the seat, his takeout coffee spilled on the floor at his feet where he’d accidentally kicked it over. The day before, he’d travelled to a town just west of Winnipeg to pick up a used stock trailer he’d found on the Internet, but then he hadn’t bought the trailer after all because it was covered in rust that suspiciously had not been evident in the pictures the owner had sent. Then Hank’s truck had broken down and he’d waited several hours for a mechanic to get him on the road again, and he’d tried to make it home by driving all night but caught himself nodding off and ended up grabbing a few hours’ sleep in the campground just east of Juliet. Hank knows from past experience that when he starts to fall asleep at the wheel, he’d better pull over, pronto. He rolled his truck once, trying to drive through a sleepy spell with the window down, gulping air to keep himself awake. It hadn’t worked. He’d totalled the truck, but somehow emerged with only a few bruises.

When he pulled into the campground, he’d planned to sleep for only an hour or so, but the sun wakes him and when he looks at his watch he realizes he’s slept for a good four hours. He can hear the steady sound of semi-trailers passing on the highway a quarter-mile to the south. His neck is so stiff he can hardly turn it. His wife Lynn is always trying to get him to do exercises—she herself does yoga that she learned from a DVD—and for once, in desperation, he thinks it might possibly do some good. He opens the truck door and wills his uncooperative body to unfold itself and step out into the early morning. The campground, pretty much empty, is just an open field with a half-dozen barbecue stands and picnic tables, a water tap and a pair of pit toilets. In the campsite next to his is a little red car with two mountain bikes on top. A young couple is sleeping in a pup tent with the front door unzipped and the top halves of their bodies out in the open air. Their hides must be tougher than his, Hank thinks, to sleep like that with a swarm of mosquitoes at them all night. Across the field next to the fence is a truck towing a small stock trailer just like the one he’d looked at in Manitoba only not as rusty, with several bales of hay in a rack on top. Another pup tent is pitched by a picnic table a few hundred feet from the rig. If there were a horse in the trailer he’d know why the tent was so far away from it, having spent more than a few nights next to a horse making a racket, but the door is wide open and there’s no sign of a horse tied inside or out.

Hank visits the nearest toilet without checking to see if it says gents or ladies on the door, then goes to the tap and splashes cold water on his face. The act of bending to the stream of water is painful, and then straightening up again is even worse, so he tries to picture some of the stretching exercises Lynn has shown him, thinking he can’t get back in the truck until he’s limbered up a little. There’s one she calls the cat, he recalls, where she gets down on her hands and knees and arches her back and then lets it sink toward the floor. Well, he’s not getting down on his hands and knees, he’d never make it up, so he improvises and does the exercise standing on his feet, bent forward at the waist. The stretch feels surprisingly good. He remembers Lynn doing something else, standing against the wall and sliding down and then up again, so he does this against the cab of the truck. The down part is easy enough, but to get back up he has to push himself with his hands on his thighs. Still, this one feels pretty good too. He won’t let Lynn know, but maybe he’ll find a way to do this once in a while when she’s not looking. He closes his eyes, puts his hands on his hips and turns his head slowly, one way and then the other. Each time he manages to turn it a little farther. When he opens his eyes, he sees the girl in the pup tent watching him. He thinks he must make quite a picture to a young girl like that—a rickety old cowboy trying to stretch out his aching body, what hair he has left on his head sticking out all over. He reaches up to smooth it down and then gets his hat off the seat of the cab and puts it on. When he looks toward the tent again, the girl and her friend have moved inside. He sees the tent flaps being pulled together by a male hand with some kind of colourful woven bracelet on the wrist.

Hank’s stomach growls and he checks the time once again. The early morning regulars will be arriving at the Oasis for breakfast just about now. Lynn will be there, baking the pies she’s become famous for, serving her customers, keeping her sharp eye on the time so she can start phoning if whatever high school girl she’s got working for her today doesn’t show up when she’s supposed to. Lynn has turned out to be a shrewd and successful businesswoman. When she bought the restaurant six years ago Hank wasn’t convinced it was a good idea, but he’s convinced now. He’s had to do without his best hand thanks to Lynn’s entrepreneurial success, but he gets by with the help of neighbours like young Lee Torgeson, and when he has to, he hires a local kid to drive a tractor for him.

Just as Hank is about to get in his truck and hit the road, he sees a red-haired woman in bright pink pyjama bottoms, an oversized T-shirt and bright green running shoes walking into the campground along the access road. He watches her with interest as she approaches, wondering where in the world she might have come from. As she gets closer he sees that she is not young—approaching sixty if she’s a day—and the red hair is definitely a bottle job.

“Morning,” Hank says when she gets close enough to hear.

She stops and looks down at her pyjama bottoms.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I haven’t escaped from anywhere.” She walks over to Hank’s truck and asks, “You haven’t by any chance seen a grey Arab horse?”

Hank looks over at the trailer with its open doors.

“Yeah,” she says. “He’s done a runner. I guess I forgot to latch the door. Idiot. Me, I mean, not the horse.”

“I haven’t seen a horse,” says Hank. “It was dark when I pulled in, so I can’t say whether there was one about then or not.”

“He shows up pretty good in the moonlight.”

Hank shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “Where you from?” He’s already noted the Manitoba plates on her rig.

“I’m not really from anywhere at the moment. Kind of between places. Damn it anyway. Should have pitched my tent closer but I wanted to get some sleep. He bangs around in there like a bull in a pipe factory. Well, I guess I’ll talk to the locals. I can’t think what else to do.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Hank says. “You could put in a call to the RCMP. And there’s a restaurant up the road. The Oasis. Maybe tack a notice on the billboard.”

“Damn it all to hell,” she says.

“Arab horse, you say. You know we’ve got the sand hills to the west. Maybe he’ll head thataway, hang out with the camels there.” When she doesn’t respond, Hank says, “More likely he’ll stick to where the grass is good.”

He can tell she’s not really listening to him. She’s staring at the trailer, her mind on her problem, thinking about her horse making tracks and how much trouble this day is going to be.

“That horse has been nothing but a bother,” she says. Then she points to the Coleman stove sitting on the picnic table by her tent. She asks Hank if he wants some coffee. She can make coffee in a hurry, she says.

He should get home, but a fresh coffee would really hit the spot. “Don’t mind if I do,” he says.

They walk across the campground, and Hank settles himself at her picnic table while she scoops coffee into the basket of a stainless steel percolator and fills the pot with water from a plastic jug. He can see from here that the crew cab of her truck is filled with household items (he can make out a lampshade) and the box is loaded with suitcases, plastic storage bins, a bicycle, and what could be a La-Z-Boy recliner wrapped in plastic. She’s obviously not just out on a weekend horse-camping trip.

“So where’re you off to?” he asks casually.

“I’m supposed to be moving to Peace River. Ever been there?”

“Nope,” Hank says.

“Neither have I. My daughter lives there. She took her father’s side in the divorce, decided she hated me and went to live with him. No contact at all. This was years ago. Then out of the blue she calls me and suggests we meet for the weekend in Edmonton, and now here I am, moving to Peace River. Funny how your life can change, just like that. Not sure how it will work out, but we’ll see. She’s got two kids I didn’t know about. Both boys, just a year apart. My grand–children. Hard to believe.”

“That’s quite a story,” Hank says.

“Yeah. Just hope it works out. Nothing to lose, I guess. Other than the damned horse. I’ve got pictures.” She rummages in her purse and pulls out an envelope with school pictures in it. Two smiling boys with missing front teeth. “Good-looking little rascals,” Hank says.

She nods and returns the pictures to her purse.

Hank finds himself scanning the horizon. It’s possible the horse is close by, but more than likely he’s spooked himself with his freedom and gone for a good run. Hank hopes he hasn’t run into wire, or found a pile of grain in a field.

“The horse is going to Peace River with you?” he asks.

“Presumably,” the woman says, “although it’s all a bit of folly on my part. My daughter lives on a farm up there at Peace River, one of those hippie farms I imagine. I asked her if her kids had a pony, all kids want a pony, right, and she said, no, they don’t have any animals except a budgie. She’s a single parent, not much disposable income. So I’m on the highway passing the auction mart a few weeks ago and I see a sign that says horse auction. So I stop, just to look. Just to see how much ponies cost. And there’s a guy there buying up a whole bunch of horses and the man next to me tells me the guy’s a meat buyer. The horse in the sale ring at the time was this pretty grey horse that had such a gentle look to it and the meat buyer started to bid and I couldn’t stand it. Up went my hand. So that’s it. I bought my grandkids a pony. Only I have no idea if he’s a kids’ horse. I’ve never ridden a horse in my life.”

The coffee is percolating away on the Coleman and Hank thinks the woman is lucky she hasn’t been hurt, hauling a horse around with no experience at all. And the daughter is likely not going to be all that happy when her mother shows up with a trailer full of horse trouble, not to mention a money pit, and once the kids see the horse it’s going to be hard to say no, but Hank keeps quiet, none of his business.

“My status as a mother is still pretty tentative. You go a little crazy when you get a call from the daughter you thought was gone from your life forever. And grandchildren . . . well, whoever would have guessed?” She pauses, then says, “She needs help with the kids. She wouldn’t have called me if she didn’t need help.”

The coffee is ready and she pours Hank a cup and hands him a tin of milk. “Hope you don’t take sugar,” she says. She gets a tray of doughnuts from her cooler but Hank turns them down. He knows Lynn will have something for him, and he should really drink up and be on his way. He takes a gulp of the coffee and burns his throat.

“Have you got kids?” she asks.

Hank nods. “Two daughters. Grown up and gone to the city. No grandkids. Working on their careers, I suppose.”

“So you think I should get in touch with the RCMP about this horse, do you?”

“That’s what I’d do,” Hank says. “And talk to the locals, like you said. That can’t hurt.”

At that moment the girl from the pup tent crawls out pulling her jeans up over her tanned legs. The boy’s hand reaches out and grabs her by the ankle and she shrieks and dances away. Hank turns his head, embarrassed. “Oh to be young, eh,” he says.

“Younger and smarter,” the woman says. “But those two things don’t tend to go together.”

Hank finishes his coffee and says he’d best be going. “I should have been home yesterday,” he says. “I might find myself in the doghouse.” He winks. He’s not sure why. Old habit. The woman raises an eyebrow, but Hank doesn’t elaborate. The story of his truck breakdown isn’t as interesting as what she might be thinking. He asks if she’s got a contact number just in case he sees or hears something, and she heads over to her truck for a piece of paper. He watches her comical pink rear end as she leans across the seat and rummages in the glove box. She writes on a scrap of paper and brings it back to him.

“My cell number,” she says.

He glances at her name—Joni—and the number, and shoves the paper in his back pocket. He warns her that cell phone coverage comes and goes in this country, and then he wishes her luck with her move to Peace River, and luck finding her horse, and gets in his truck to make his way back to the highway.

It’s another cloudless morning, the usual breeze from the west already hot, and he decides he’ll pick up hay bales from the ditches today. There wasn’t much to hay this year, but he’d been taught by his father to accept whatever nature offered because next year she might not offer anything at all. Maybe he’ll call young Torgeson and see if he could use a hand. Hank hasn’t checked on him in a while, and Lynn will have some baking she’ll send with him. She has a soft spot for Lee, and they both figure the kid must get lonely there on his own. He’s not like you were at that age, Lynn has pointed out to Hank a couple of times, still able to make him feel guilty after all these years.

Ten minutes later, he passes the bullet-riddled sign— welcome to juliet, population 1,011—and pulls onto the Oasis approach. He can just taste the slice of blueberry pie he’ll have for breakfast, unless Lynn gets on a healthy rant and makes him have something else, like bran flakes or oatmeal. A Greyhound bus is in the parking lot, ready to pull out, and Hank notices that one of its cargo flaps is still open. He honks to the driver, trying to catch his attention, but it’s too late. The bus pulls away and a cardboard box tumbles to the parking lot. It bursts as it hits the pavement, and paper— hundreds of small pieces of bright yellow paper—are caught by the bus’s tailwind and blow outward and upward, all over the parking lot. One of them slaps itself to his windshield and he sees that it’s a flyer. He can read what it says: The end is near. It gives a date, which is, indeed, just around the corner. He watches the Greyhound bus through the flurry of paper to see if anything else falls out, anything that he should retrieve and take inside for the next bus that comes through, but nothing does, so he parks and turns off the engine. He gets out and pulls the flyer from his windshield. He examines it for more information, but there is none. As far as Hank can tell, it’s just an announcement, a headline. No advice on what to do.

“Huh,” he says out loud. “‘The end.’ Well, that’s a bugger.”

He shoves the flyer in his pocket along with Joni’s phone number and walks through the storm of paper to his wife’s restaurant.

Sweetheart

Vicki Dolson always says of herself that she is not really capable of understanding great unhappiness. On the worst of days she sees, or at least tries to see, the best. With the exception of something having to do with the kids, like one of them getting childhood leukemia, she can’t think of anything that would make her mope for longer than an hour or two. It’s the way she was raised. So it’s hard for her to understand Blaine and the dark lens through which he sees the world these days. Not that she doesn’t understand the gravity of their situation and the extreme actions Blaine has been forced to take. He’d first sold off his herd of Charolais-Hereford cross cattle, and then the bank had insisted on the dispersal of his machinery, and then the sale of all his land except the home quarter. But Vicki’s position is that they should be thankful they still have their house and they can rent out the pasture for a bit of income, every dollar helps. The bank did allow Blaine to keep an old stock trailer and one saddle horse—although not the good mare who would go all day for you, and Blaine claims the horse he kept requires an instruction manual to operate—so at least he can still drive up to Allan Tallman’s place on a Sunday for a little team roping. There you go, Vicki says to Blaine on occasion, it’s not all bad. Even as she knows this drives him crazy.

Most mornings, Blaine is up well before Vicki. This morning he sleeps right through the radio alarm and Vicki decides to let him rest for a few more minutes. She’s lying there listening to a voice tell her that a heritage building in Regina is slated for demolition and there’s a petition circulating, when she hears Blaine say, “My whole life has been slated for demolition and no one is organizing petitions about that.”

She turns to him and says, “Good morning, you.” She can see right away that she’s annoyed him. He hates it when she talks to him as though he’s one of the kids.

She throws back the covers and both she and Blaine notice that she’s wearing jeans under her nightie.

“Oh,” Vicki says, “that’s odd.” She has a sudden memory of the plane, how she thought she was going to have to go out and look for it.

“Did you hear me get up in the night?”

“No,” Blaine says. “How the hell can you sleep with all those clothes on? It’s still hot in here from yesterday, for Christ sake.”

“I heard a plane,” Vicki says. “It seemed pretty real but I guess it was the dream.” She steps out of bed and slips her feet into her flip-flops.

Blaine gets up too, hurrying now. He prides himself on arriving at the job site ahead of most of the other men, including the foreman.

“Are you going to do those beans today?” he asks as he pulls on his jeans and tucks in a grey T-shirt.

Not the beans already, Vicki thinks, but she says, “Yes, Blaine. I’m going to do the beans. I’ve set aside the whole day.”

“You’re not planning to go into town, then?”

“Why? Did you want me to pick something up for you?” She’s teasing, trying to turn Blaine’s already-bad mood.

“No,” Blaine says. “I want you to do the beans.”

She goes to the kitchen, still in her nightie, to perk Blaine’s coffee for his thermos. She discovers that there’s hardly any coffee left—just enough for half a pot.

“Sorry, hon,” she says when Blaine arrives in the kitchen a few minutes later. “We’re all out of coffee. I forgot my list when I picked up groceries last week.”

“Never mind,” Blaine says. “I’ll drink water.”

As Vicki half fills the coffee pot, she can’t keep her mind off the dreaded beans and what a pain in the neck a garden is. She makes a commitment to herself to get the beans done, if for no other reason than to get them out of her head. And Blaine is right, they won’t keep long sitting in tubs in the basement, where they’ve been for the two days since she and Shiloh picked them off, sweating in the hot sun, because Blaine had said, “God dammit, Vicki, if you don’t pick those beans today I’m taking away your car keys. We’ll see how far you get without a car.”

“We can at least wait for a cooler day,” she’d protested. “Anyway, I’d be happy to give them away. I could put up a sign in the café.”

Blaine had given her one of his looks and she’d felt instantly sorry for being flippant. She doesn’t know what she has against the idea of preserving garden produce. Maybe it’s the work, when it’s so easy to buy frozen vegetables. Or maybe she’s just trying to let Blaine know that she’s not his mother and never will be. Whatever the reason, they go through this every year—Blaine harping about the garden and Vicki putting off the freezing and canning for as long as possible.

When she sees Blaine’s lunchbox on the counter, she realizes she forgot to make his sandwiches the night before. There’s no ham—Blaine’s favourite—so she grabs a jar of jam and slaps together some sandwiches and pours the half pot of coffee into Blaine’s thermos as the kids begin to wander into the kitchen for breakfast. Blaine grabs the lunch pail from her as soon as she closes the lid.

“I’m not kidding,” he says as he heads for the door. “We can live on jam for a few days. Don’t go getting any ideas. You get those beans done or else.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Vicki says. “You’re talking to me like I’m the hired help.”

“Pretty bloody useless hired help,” Blaine says.

She stands in the porch with the door open and watches Blaine cross the yard to his truck. It won’t start. He gets out, fiddles with something under the hood, then slams the hood down. He gets back in the truck, starts it, then leans out the window and yells, “Don’t you dare go to town today, Vicki.”

She blows him a kiss. “And don’t you take any wooden nickels,” she calls, she doesn’t even know why.

Seven-year-old Daisy has come to stand beside her. “What does that mean,” Daisy wants to know, “‘Don’t take any wooden nickels’?”

“Nothing,” Vicki says. “It’s just a silly thing to say, like ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’”

Blaine fishtails out of the yard, driving too fast, and Vicki and Daisy sit on the step and watch his trail of dust. The morning sky in front of them is pink.

“Look at that sky,” Vicki says to Daisy. “Aren’t we lucky to live where we can see that right out our door, every single morning if we want. It’s better than a movie, don’t you think?”

Daisy starts to list all the movies that it’s not better than.

“Okay, okay,” Vicki says. “I get it. But you have to admit, it’s pretty.”

“We should spray Bucko for flies,” Daisy says.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, look at him.”

Vicki looks. Blaine’s horse is kicking at his belly as though he’s got a horsefly biting him.

“You’re right,” she says. “After breakfast. You remind me.” She can see the spray bottle hanging on the fence. “I guess we can’t sit here all day, can we,” she says. “We’d better get at those beans.”

When she returns to the kitchen she finds four of her six kids sitting at the table eating jam on bread: nine-year-old Martin, little Lucille (the youngest, at three and a half), and the five-year-old twin boys, who look so much alike that even she has a hard time telling them apart. Shiloh isn’t up yet. He must be enjoying his new room, Vicki thinks.

The children look at her.

“Daddy doesn’t really like jam,” Lucille says.

“Well, it’s not his favourite, that’s for sure,” Vicki says. “But you can’t always have your favourite, can you.”

“Are we going to town for ham?” Daisy asks.

“Not today. We have a big job to get done.”

“I need a fudge sundae,” Daisy says.

“You don’t need a fudge sundae,” Vicki says. “You might want one but you don’t need one. Anyway, they’re too expensive.”

“I heard Dad say we aren’t supposed to go to town today,” Martin says.

“That’s right,” Vicki says. “At least not until we get the beans done, and that’s going to take all day.”

“Fudge sundaes aren’t that expensive,” Daisy says. “Don’t tell me we’re so poor we can’t even buy ice cream.” She sticks her lip out and sniffles.

“Oh, stop it,” Vicki says. “Those aren’t even real tears. Those are crocodile tears if I ever saw them. You’ve been watching too much TV.”

While the kids are finishing their breakfast, Vicki gets herself dressed and then, there’s no way around it, she might as well get started. She kneels on the floor in front of her kitchen cupboards and fishes around for her two blanching pots. Pots and lids clatter as she drags them out and sets them on the floor. After the kids pile their breakfast dishes on the counter she decides she has to wash them up to make more room for the whole ordeal of doing the beans. Once that’s done, she takes a final swipe with the tea towel at a few wet spots on the counter, and as she does so she notices just how white the towel is. It’s amazing, like fresh snow in bright sunlight. The tea towel is like a pep talk, and as she looks at it she thinks, I’m not such a bad homemaker, just look at how white that towel is. She lays it on the counter and goes downstairs for the plastic tubs full of beans.

At first she tries to be quiet in the basement, but then she thinks Shiloh could be a help, so she crosses the cement floor to his new room and parts the curtains. She notices that the light is on, and she smiles to herself at the thought of her big boy Shiloh being afraid to sleep alone, in the dark. He’s not grown up yet, she thinks as she switches off the light and says, “Wakey, wakey.” When Shiloh opens his eyes she says, “So, Mr. Man. What did you think of your first night in the royal chamber?”

As soon as she’s said it and sees the look that crosses his face, she knows she’s made a mistake, just like when she said, Good morning, you to Blaine. Everything she says to either of them is wrong these days. She probably shouldn’t have called Shiloh Mr. Man.

“You should knock before you come in,” Shiloh says.

So that’s it. The new room is to be private. Well, that makes sense. She’d wanted privacy when she was a teenager, although she’d never gotten it.

“You’re right,” she says. “Sorry.” She steps back outside the bedspread curtains and says, “There’s no place to knock.” Then she stamps her feet on the cement floor. “Wakey, wakey,” she says again.

Shiloh says, “If you weren’t so useless you’d go away and leave me alone.”

Vicki is shocked. Shiloh has been sullen lately, but he’s never said anything like that to her. She isn’t sure what to do. Is this just typical teenage behaviour? she wonders. She can’t help but feel hurt by what he’s said, but on the other hand she remembers saying a few rude things to her mother and then immediately feeling bad. She imagines Shiloh already regretting what he’s said, but being unable to apologize because he doesn’t know how. She decides to ignore the outburst. She leaves him in bed, gets a tub of beans and carries it upstairs to the kitchen. Then she retrieves the other two and sets them on the kitchen floor with the first tub.

She looks at the two little blanching pots and the three huge tubs of beans. She tries to imagine how many beans she will have to snap, how many times she will load the beans into the pots, time them, cool them in cold water, bag them, carry them down the basement steps to the freezer. The thought is unbearable. She prays that she’ll be out of freezer bags, but, of course, when she looks in the cupboard, there are plenty. Years’ worth. Every year she makes a special trip to town for more freezer bags. Her ability to maintain a positive attitude is being sorely challenged.

Vicki picks up a handful of beans, hoping there’ll be something wrong with them, but there isn’t. There’s nothing to do but put them up. She looks at her stove. It has four burners. If she had two more blanchers she could cut in half the time she’ll need to do the beans. She could borrow from a neighbour, but if she’s going to load the kids in the car to go and borrow blanchers, she might as well drive to town and buy another two, and then she’ll have them for next year. It will only take an hour or so.

“Come on, kids,” she says. “We’re going to make a quick trip to town. A quick one, mind you. In and out of the hardware store, that’s it. And no fudge sundaes, Daisy. Don’t even ask. And no crying about it, either. We’re in too much of a hurry.”

“But Dad said—” begins Martin.

“Never mind that,” Vicki says. “Dad means well, but he doesn’t know anything about freezing vegetables.”

She calls down the stairs to Shiloh that they’re going to town and to hurry up if he wants to come with them. Five minutes, she says, and within the five minutes he comes up the stairs with his hair all over the place. He doesn’t say anything but makes a quick trip to the bathroom and then grabs a bag of Oreo cookies from the cupboard.

“That’s not much of a breakfast,” Vicki says. She almost adds “Mr. Man,” but catches herself.

At the last minute she tells the kids to get their bathing suits, maybe there’ll be time to stop for a quick swim at the pool since it’s supposed to be such a hot day. She unzips a huge gym bag and they all shove their suits in, all but Shiloh. Vicki adds a half dozen old towels.

“Shiloh, don’t you want to go for a swim?” she asks. “It’s going to be hot.”

He ignores the question and heads out to the car, jamming the cookie bag in his backpack. Vicki and the rest of the kids follow, and they all pile into her old Cutlass Supreme. Shiloh says, “Shotgun,” and gets into the front seat, and none of the kids argues with him. Vicki is about to start the car when he says, “Wait,” and he runs back into the house.

Vicki looks absently out the car window and sees Blaine’s buckskin horse standing in the shade and is so thankful that they’ve been able to hang onto him even if no one but Blaine can ride him. The horse has his head around and is kicking at something on his flank, and Vicki remembers that she and Daisy were going to spray him. It would only take a minute, but then again, they’ll be back home before the heat of day when the flies are at their worst and she can do it then. Anyway, Blaine never sprayed the horses when he had more than one. It was too expensive.

Shiloh comes back out with his hair combed, wearing a different T-shirt.

Daisy notices and says, “Shiloh’s going to see a girl.”

“Shut up, stupid,” he says.

“No one in this family is stupid,” Vicki says.

On the way to town, Lucille finds someone’s lost ball of bubblegum on the floor in the back seat and chews it up and then sticks it in her hair. The twins watch her do it, and when Vicki hears them giggling she turns to look and sees the mess.

“I decorated it,” Lucille says.

“Oh my God,” Vicki says. “How am I ever going to get that out? We’ll have to go and see Karla, and all I can say is, it’s a good thing for you we had to go to town today.” She tells Martin to keep an eye on Lucille and make sure she doesn’t get gum all over the back seat. “You keep your hands away from your hair, Lucille,” she says. “Or Martin will tell me and there’ll be no candy for a week. Do you hear me?”

Vicki drives south along the grid road and just as they get to the railway tracks she sees at least forty head of yearling calves strung out to the west, grazing along the tracks. She assumes they’re Hank Trass’s calves and makes a note to call him from somewhere and let him know. She used to have a cell phone, but Blaine wouldn’t let her renew her contract because of the money. She tried to argue that it was her way to get in touch with him in an emergency, but he said that if she’d stay home there wouldn’t be any emergencies, and if there were she could use the perfectly good land line in the house.

She glances at Shiloh, who hasn’t said anything the whole way to town. He’s eating cookies and Vicki sees no sign of the teenage defiance she heard when she first called him to get up. Their moods are all over the place, she thinks, and then she notices with a sideways glance how much he looks like his father. She wonders how long it will be before he talks, and if she should say anything about the rude way he spoke to her earlier.

In the end, she doesn’t have to. As they turn off the highway, Shiloh folds down the top of the cookie bag and zips up his backpack and says, “Well, anyway, you should have knocked.”

She takes it as an apology. “You’re right,” she says.

She wonders where she should begin her search for blanchers and whether she should take the time to get a few groceries. These things are necessary, she thinks, just as necessary as, say, tractor parts. No farmer would consider frivolous a trip to town for parts. When there’s a breakdown, a wife is expected to drop whatever she’s doing and head to the dealership to collect some crucial pin or belt or drive chain that she’s never heard of, and try to explain to the parts manager what she needs when she doesn’t exactly know, and get home again as quickly as possible so the work can resume, and if she’s lucky she won’t have to make another trip because she’s brought home the wrong part. A trip for blanchers and groceries is the same, inconvenient but necessary.

“Ha,” she says out loud, congratulating herself for her brilliant logic. The kids all look at her. “Just part of the job, isn’t it,” she says.

Vicki turns up the street toward Karla Norman’s house so she can get Lucille’s hair fixed, the first of the quick stops.

There’s lots of time in a day, she assures herself.

The Theatre

Norval opens his eyes to see Lila, hands on her hips, staring down at him. He can tell by the look on her face that he’s done something wrong, but his head is fuzzy and he can’t quite think what it is. As he slowly comes awake his misdemeanours begin to line up: he’s on the couch (Norval, why didn’t you just come back to bed?); the TV is still on (How can you sleep with that sound blaring, for heaven’s sake?); the light is on in the kitchen (The power bill keeps going up, I wonder why.) And then there’s the meat loaf, a crumb of which is lying in plain view on the white carpet. Norval watches as Lila bends to pick it up and examines it closely before giving him a glaring look of admonition. He watches her carry the crumb between two painted fingernails toward the kitchen, holding it out in front of her as though it’s the most distasteful bit of evidence of Norval’s domestic inadequacy.

“I am housebroken, you know,” he says in his defence, although not really loud enough for Lila to hear him.

He sits up and switches off the weather lady with the remote control. Through the arched doorway to the kitchen he can see Lila obsessing with neatness, wiping the counter and the sink before anyone has even had a chance to mess them up, her green satin dressing gown swishing as she moves. He thinks of the TV commercial that makes fun of sea-foam green bridesmaid dresses and thinks, Lila’s dressing gown is sea-foam green. What does that mean? he wonders. It can’t mean that she has bad taste, for Lila is well known for her sense of style. Perhaps that her taste is of another era, although she wouldn’t be pleased at the notion that she might be, heaven forbid, a fashion relic. Not that Norval has anything against Lila’s style, which he has always appreciated as long as he doesn’t have to be the other half of a matched set.

“Sometimes I just wonder,” Lila says, and Norval thinks, Sometimes I wonder too. How he got into all this.

He and Lila met in the city when he was in the last semester of his commerce degree and she was beginning a degree in acting. Norval was working part time as a junior teller at the small bank where Lila had her account. It was in an older working-class neighbourhood, and not one in which university students generally lived. Lila was staying with relatives while she went to school, and she and Norval struck up a friendship over her careful managing of her money, which Norval couldn’t help but notice. They ran into each other on campus one day, and Norval invited Lila to go for a beer in the campus pub. They played pool— Lila was surprisingly good and beat him in several games until coyness got the better of her and she backed off and let him win. As they played, she entertained him with stories about her adventures as a theatre student, making them sound more adventurous than they really were. In truth, Lila was a small-town girl who was having trouble fitting in with the trendy and sometimes ruthless theatre students who already had years of experience in high school productions and summer drama camps and improv competitions, none of which had been available to a student like Lila with her simple dream of being on stage.

At the end of the term, Norval went to see her in the theatre department’s production of a Shakespearean play —he can’t remember which one; he just remembers that he didn’t have a clue what was going on and couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Lila had a small part and was angry that the director hadn’t selected her for one of the starring roles. Norval went backstage after the performance as Lila had directed him to do. There was to be a party, at which she would introduce him to the rest of the cast. But when he arrived in the green room after making his way down a dark, mouldy-smelling corridor in the bowels of the theatre building, she grabbed his arm and dragged him outside, still in her stage makeup, and when they were away from the building and on their way to his car, she burst into tears, because the cast were going to a party at someone’s house and they hadn’t invited her. She swore the slight was intentional. They didn’t like her, she said, because she had talent and they didn’t, and one of them in a mean fit had told her that she should try cosmetology for a career. It was a jab at the fact that Lila never went anywhere without Cosmo-girl lipstick and eye makeup, while the other theatre girls were experimenting with the Cleopatra look. Either that or going au naturel, blank slates to be made up as their roles demanded.

Norval held Lila in the parking lot, mascara running down her cheeks, his feathers all puffed up because it was clear that Lila needed him. She was quitting school, she said. She couldn’t study theatre at this two-bit university, and she would work for a while and then go to a bigger university where they had a good theatre department and graduates got jobs in television commercials and even movies. Norval hadn’t actually thought she was very good on stage, but that didn’t matter because he believed studying theatre was pointless anyway and what was wrong with cosmetology, although he knew enough not to say this, at least not at that moment. Instead he suggested that they get married.

Lila quickly forgot about the tragedy of her theatre school experience, and became completely engrossed in getting married and the prospects of setting up house with Norval and following him wherever the bank sent him on his climb up through the corporation. Someday, she told him, they would live in, say, Calgary, and he would work at a big main branch, or perhaps head office, and they would build a new house in a new subdivision and their kids would play basketball and the violin, and they would have season tickets to the symphony and Lila would find an agent who would get her work at a real theatre. Norval wasn’t sure about that whole scenario, but he was happy with the thought of marrying Lila. For one thing, there was the prospect of frequent sex (right now sex was not nearly frequent enough with Lila living with relatives and Norval sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates). He admired her looks, and her taste in clothes, and she was outgoing and fun. He was happy to turn himself over to her certainty about how marriage should work, because he didn’t have a clue.

Well, he knows how it works now. Lila’s wish is pretty much his command. Not that he’s complaining, not really. What is marriage in middle age but a living arrangement, a contract for comfort, and they have a comfortable home in Juliet, and a partnership with quite a lot of time and money invested in it. Investments of any kind Norval does not take or leave lightly.

This memory of Lila’s past in theatre leads him to look at Rachelle’s upcoming wedding in a new way. These demands for renovations to the church are really instructions for building a set. It all begins to look like a production in which Rachelle is the star and Lila is the director with a cameo as mother of the bride. And this leads Norval to feel just a little sorry for her, and to think that maybe he has failed her in some way by not being ambitious enough in his own career, by being satisfied with small-town banking, and by not aiming for jobs in progressively larger towns and cities. Norval knows himself well enough to admit that he hasn’t really had the desire to be any more successful than he is. He makes a vow to participate more willingly, for Lila’s sake, in the orchestration of her wedding production.

He lifts himself off the couch and makes his way to the kitchen, where Lila has his heart-smart breakfast waiting for him. Another reason he should be more generous in his feelings: if it weren’t for Lila he’d fill up on bacon and put whipping cream in his coffee. Instead, he has a bowl of colourful fruit salad, followed by bran flakes with skim milk. He’s learned to drink his coffee black. Lila eats only the fruit salad. She follows some kind of diet that doesn’t allow you to eat anything but fruit before noon.

The two of them sit in the breakfast nook overlooking the backyard and just as Norval takes his first good sip of his morning coffee, Lila looks out the window and says, “Oh my God.”

Norval looks. Under the maple tree is Kyle. Norval’s resolve to change his attitude about the wedding quickly dissipates when he sees his daughter’s fiancé sleeping or—more accurately—passed out, sprawled on his back on the lawn. Kyle’s fly is undone and his pants are not quite as far up on his hips as they should be, as though he relieved himself in the bushes and then just keeled over backwards. Luckily, his boxers are all that Norval can see hanging out, although he’s not sure that wouldn’t change if he went outside and looked more closely.

“What should we do?” says Lila.

“What should we do,” sighs Norval. “Well, we could bring him inside and lock him in the furnace room and keep him there without food or water until he promises to go away.”

“I’m serious, Norval,” Lila says. “We can’t leave him there in broad daylight.”

Norval has to agree.

“Go out and talk to him,” Lila says.

“I have a better idea,” Norval says.

He pushes himself away from the table and climbs the stairs to Rachelle’s room. She can do the talking, he thinks, and besides, it wouldn’t hurt for her to see her future husband in all his post-binge glory. Not that he expects Rachelle to be in much better shape, but at least she’s had the sense to come in and not make a spectacle of herself in the backyard.

He knocks on Rachelle’s door and gets no answer. When he pushes the door open he sees that she isn’t there. The covers are thrown back on the bed, but no Rachelle. He checks the bathroom, but she isn’t there either.

“Oh hell,” he says to himself as he goes back downstairs. He’d dealt with the two of them last night with quite a lot of patience, he thinks, but he’s about at the end of it.

“She’s not there,” he tells Lila.

He goes through the sun doors to the deck and down the steps and across the yard to where Kyle is sleeping. He pokes him with his bare foot.

“Wake up,” he says, and when Kyle doesn’t, he pokes him harder. You might even call it a kick.

Kyle opens his eyes and a look of almost-terror crosses his face when he realizes where he is, and that his fiancée’s father is staring down at him. He jumps to his feet, grabbing at his pants when he realizes he’s about to lose them. He turns his back to Norval as he zips himself up, and then he takes a deep breath and faces him again. His ball cap is lying on the lawn and he picks it up and adjusts it on his head.

“Don’t say anything,” Norval says, “unless you know where my daughter is.”

Norval can see Kyle struggling to remember the night before. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again.

“In her room?” Kyle finally says, hopefully but without much confidence.

Norval shakes his head.

“Have you checked the truck?” Kyle asks.

“No,” says Norval. “How about you make yourself useful and do that?”

He watches Kyle walk around the side of the house, and he waits for him to come back. When he does, Kyle stands at the corner of the house without coming all the way into the backyard and says, “She’s not there,” and then he says, “Actually, my truck’s not there either.”

“Oh for Christ sake,” Norval says. He turns and goes back in the house, leaving Kyle outside. “You know this marriage is doomed to failure, don’t you?” he says to Lila.

Lila looks as though she might cry. Norval doesn’t care.

“I’m not kidding. Think about the baby. The poor kid doesn’t have a chance.”

She says, “I know they’re young—”

Norval interrupts. “Some young people are responsible, Lila. Face it, these two aren’t. Neither one of them. The baby would be better off raised by wolves.”

Now Lila is angry. Norval can see he’s gone too far.

“You listen here,” she says. She aims one of her manicured fingernails in his direction to help make her point. “I know as well as you this is not a perfect situation. But that baby is our flesh and blood and I’m not going to let it go to be raised by strangers. Besides that, I read an article—in Chatelaine, Norval, that’s a credible magazine—and girls who give up their babies almost always regret it later. So you’d better make the best of this, because they’re getting married and Rachelle is giving the baby up over my dead body.”

It dawns on Norval that Lila has had quite a bit to do with Rachelle’s decision to get married, and not just so she can stage-manage a big production. He hadn’t realized she felt so strongly about this. Maybe she’s right. What does he know about these things?

“I’m going to work,” he says.

“I hope you’re planning to get dressed first.”

Norval is surprised by the sarcasm. Lila hardly ever uses sarcasm—that’s been his domain.

He goes upstairs and dresses (Lila has his clothes laid out, summer-weight khaki pants, a blue shirt, a tie and a lightweight sports jacket), and before he leaves he says to her, “You’re probably right, Lila. I don’t know anything about this business of teenage motherhood. But surely you can see why I’m worried.”

“Of course I can,” Lila says. “But you just let me take care of Rachelle. Here’s what you can do.” She hands Norval a piece of notepaper with cheerful-looking purple flowers across the top.

“What’s this?” he asks.

“It’s the list, Norval. The things we discussed last night, the church renovations. You just take care of the list and I’ll handle the other. Rachelle is likely at Kristen’s. I’ll track her down and we’ll have a talk.”

Norval folds the notepaper in half and puts it in the pocket of his khaki pants.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” Lila asks. “You might have questions. Points of clarification.”

“Maybe Rachelle and Kyle could get some counselling,” Norval says.

“They don’t need counselling,” Lila says. “They just need to grow up a little.”

A little, Norval thinks, will not do it, but he’s said all he can say.

He steps out the front door and finds Kyle sitting dejected on the top step. Kyle looks up and is about to say something, but Norval beats him to it and says, “Let me give you a bit of advice, Kyle. A wise man knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

Norval heads down the sidewalk toward Main Street and the bank, resisting the temptation to look back. He knows that he would feel some sympathy for Kyle and God knows he doesn’t want sympathy entering into this whole situation. Not unless it’s for himself.

Small Talk

When morning finally comes, Willard Shoenfeld goes inside to the kitchen and Marian is there, as always, with the coffee perking on the stove and the frying pan ready for his eggs. He thinks back to the pre-Marian days when he and Ed ate cornflakes every morning and burned themselves a couple of pieces of toast.

“How do you want them this morning?” Marian asks, and Willard says, “Over easy, I guess.”

The eggs are ready in minutes and Marian slides them onto a plate, adds two slices of perfectly browned toast, then hands Willard his breakfast. He’s in a bit of a stupor. Marian asks if something is wrong.

Willard can’t get the picture of her in her nightgown out of his mind, the way she opened his bedroom door, and he wonders if he should just say, It’s okay, you know. You do what’s best for you. But he can’t; he’s paralyzed. He says, “No, nothing,” and he dips a corner of his toast in the deep yellow egg yolk. “You’ve eaten?” he asks, just as he asks every morning.

She nods, as always, in response to his question.

He takes a bite of his toast, expecting pain to shoot from a lower molar up into his face because of his toothache dream the night before, which still seems real. No pain, though. He savours the perfect over-easy eggs, eating one piece of toast with the eggs and saving one to slather with raspberry jam.

Marian is now standing at the sink with her back to him, leafing through a cookbook.

Perhaps if I start a conversation, Willard thinks. About anything at all. Try, he thinks. Try to say something.

“I do enjoy my breakfast,” he says.

Marian turns to look at him. He fears he’s said something stupid.

“Do you?” she says. “So do I.” Then she returns to her recipes.

Well, that’s it. Willard can’t think of anything else to say. He spreads some of Marian’s homemade freezer jam on his remaining slice of toast and tries to plan his day. There’s the new movie to pick up at the bus, and a few repairs he should make to the fence. Some kids tried to light fire to it one night a few weeks ago. They’d barely got the kindling organized and the match lit when the barking dog had awoken Willard. He’d looked out his bedroom window and seen just enough to know what was going on. He pulled on his pants and when he got to the living room he saw that Marian was already up, looking out the picture window.

“I think they’ve started a fire,” she said. “The fence on the east side.”

“Damn kids,” Willard said.

He kept a fire extinguisher handy for times like this and he’d grabbed it while Marian flicked the yardlights on. The drive-in was flooded with light and, sure enough, about half a dozen kids jumped in a truck, some into the cab and some the box, and roared off down the access road. The dog was going crazy by now, running in circles and barking wildly in the middle of the sandy drive-in lot.

Willard hopped on his ATV and drove, the dog running along behind, to where the fire was trying hard to get started. When they got there, flames were licking up the sides of one fence panel, but they were quickly squelched when Willard turned the fire extinguisher on them. The fence was still standing, but he’d have to replace three or four boards. The dry grass was burned to the ground along the fence. This was the real danger, with section after section of dry grassy pastureland running to the north. “Damn stupid kids,” Willard said again, and then he told the dog once more what a good dog he was. He’d gone back to the garage for a shovel, and then he’d spent an hour shovelling sand onto the grass along the fence to make sure the fire didn’t flare up again.

When he returned to the house at three in the morning, Marian was still up, watching through the window. She wanted him to call the RCMP in Swift Current, but Willard figured that was pointless. The kids were long gone and he wouldn’t be able to give any kind of useful description. Marian made a pot of tea and put a plate of cookies on the table. At three-thirty, they’d gone back to bed.

Willard is getting plenty tired of this nonsense. He’s of the conviction that the kids of Juliet don’t know the value of either work or money, and don’t have enough to do, especially in the summer when school’s out. He’d like to think the town kids are the main culprits because surely the country kids know the dangers of a prairie fire. The land is tinder dry and a small fire wouldn’t stay small for long. It’s not just the drive-in they’d be burning down. He’s amazed by their stupidity, whoever it is that’s doing this. Maybe it’s drugs.

When Willard has finished his breakfast, he takes his plate to the sink. Marian is at the counter, assembling ingredients to bake something.

“Willard,” she says.

He stops, his hand holding the plate in mid-air above the sink. Here it comes, he thinks.

Marian picks up a measuring cup and then puts it down again.

“I just want to say that I know for a fact you are a kind and generous man,” she says.

Willard waits for more; that was the good news, now comes the bad. But Marian picks up the measuring cup again and dips it into a canister of flour, and then pours the flour into her big mixing bowl. She begins to hum. That appears to be all she’s going to say, at least for now.

Willard carefully sets his plate among the cups and cutlery already in the sink.

“Well then,” he says, and goes outside to begin his fence repairs.