CHAPTER 2

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VIVIAN DRINKS COFFEE that is too bitter. The first sip always makes her squint. She admires sharpness in tastes, in people. Cutting through the blandness that surrounds her. They are conspiring against her. Whispering in the kitchen corner. Her husband and her son. But they won’t win. She always wins.

“Vivian, are you ready to go?”

Her husband. Todd. He sidles up to her and rests his weary old hand on the back of an oak chair. Sometimes she calls him Tom or Tim as though she has forgotten his name. When he corrects her, the wrinkles on his forehead mat together like tangled threads.

She has forgotten his name, really forgotten it, once or twice. A patch of white appeared where it had been, obliterating even the familiar letters. She chose not to blame herself. It is his own fault for being such a pointless human being. She had admired him once, but that was a very long time ago.

“Why do you insist on being so early?” she asks him. “I haven’t finished my coffee.”

“It’s a council meeting. There are procedures.”

“Procedures are only for show. You know that.”

Todd slowly exhales his frustration. Stuart, wisely, stays out of it, hovering closer to the door, waiting for his opportunity to make an escape.

Stuart has become quite stocky with age while his father has remained sinewy, but the thick curls he inherited from Vivian will last much longer than Todd’s hair, thinned enough to reveal the freckles on his scalp. The boy takes after his father in nature if not in looks; reticent, has to be pushed to act. He can’t even leave without seeking her permission.

Vivian hasn’t allowed her natural curls or colour to frame her face since her youth. Grey hair on an older woman invites doubts around her competency. Curls are too soft. She keeps her hair short and medium blonde, straight or with a sophisticated wave.

Todd checks his Rolex.

“Do the seconds move more slowly when you watch them?” She can’t resist baiting him.

“Please, Vivian, let’s not hold everything up.”

“But I do hold everything up. That’s the point. I have to hold up some very dense walls.” She glances across at her son. “Stuart, you would be amazed by the sheer lack of ability in Stapleton nowadays. There’s simply no talent here anymore.”

“No one can meet your standards, Mom.”

Vivian checks her charcoal grey blouse and ivory pants for creases. No pearls; she must remember to put those on.

Todd continues to admire his precious timepiece, a notso-subtle declaration to the world that he had done well for himself. She, of course, was the one who’d done well for them. Their magazine-page home—with its custom cabinetry, marble countertops, high end appliances and heated bathroom floors—is a drop in the ocean of her success. The crystals on the watch face scatter light across the wall as he checks it again.

“You know I think I admire that watch more than I admire you,” she says. “It could sink a few hundred metres and keep ticking, whereas you would just stop.”

“Thank you, dear. It’s nice to know I’m valued.”

Stuart’s phone buzzes. He leaps to that thing like a love-struck teenager. If he had any backbone, she’d suspect him of having an affair. She wouldn’t judge him for it. His wife is a horror.

Vivian glares at her son. “We could drown that device in a teacup, couldn’t we?”

“This is business nowadays, Mom. You would have been glued to yours if they’d been around back then.”

She shakes her head and returns to her slow sips of coffee, each one sure to infuriate her husband a little more. These simple pleasures are what keep her going these days.

“Well, it’s time I got on the road,” Stuart announces finally.

He kisses her on the cheek and she holds his hand tightly before releasing him. Todd follows him to the front door as if he needs escorting. Vivian has been playing the hard-of-hearing card for years, so she catches clearly their softly-spoken words.

“She seems like her normal self, Dad.”

Vivian doesn’t need to look at them to know Todd’s reaction. A little shake of the head and a furrowing of wrinkles. “Sometimes she’s fine. Sometimes she isn’t. If you saw her more often ...”

Their voices fade, until Stuart utters a dishonest “see you soon” and Todd sends him on his way with best wishes to his family, who they see even less frequently than Stuart. His wife and daughters have no interest in visiting little old Stapleton.

The councillors have waited, as they should. Vivian enlisted every one of them; handpicked them for their malleability, coached them and ran their campaigns.

Mayor Kirk George, 65, is the youngest of the group. He owns the gas station. “Business First” was the slogan she chose for him. Not that it mattered. No one else stood for the position, so he won by acclamation. He’s slurping his diet coke as Vivian enters but puts it down the second he spots her. He glances pointedly at Hazel.

Councillor Hazel Carter, aged 76 (who has been having an affair with her neighbour’s husband since 1997), dabs the corner of her eye with a tissue. “I only just found out,” she mumbles as Vivian and Todd take their seats across the table.

Vivian straightens her brass nameplate and looks at Todd. “Frank,” he says, as though that is an adequate explanation. Whatever is going on between Hazel and Frank is presumably a personal matter that Todd can update her on after the meeting.

Beside Hazel, Councillor Gerry Martin, 71 (former dealer to the restless youth in his rural Saskatchewan hometown) has a dead look in his eyes, but that is nothing new. Vivian places a hand on her collarbone to touch her pearls, the one constant in all the council meetings she has attended over the years and discovers they aren’t there.

The room is stifling and the start of the meeting is delayed while windows are opened and attendees hit the water cooler before shuffling back to their seats. The large ceiling fan was declared unfixable several years back and deemed unnecessary for replacement. Stapleton’s financial situation is precarious, to say the least. Potholes have to become sinkholes before a discussion arises about dipping into the minuscule maintenance budget.

Vivian and Todd Lennox, both now in their eighties, are the oldest councillors and undoubtedly the wealthiest people in town but Vivian has always strongly resisted Todd’s wish to provide the community with any form of financial relief. “A community cannot survive on handouts,” she always tells him. “We could at least replace the fan in the council chamber, Vivian.” He returns to this point only because of his own personal discomfort during the Monday night meetings. He sweats like a man three times his body weight, even in lightweight chinos and a short-sleeved shirt.

No. One thing leads to another.

Vivian will give back to Stapleton in a much more meaningful way. She can see it as clearly as if it has already come into being. Open doors on Main Street. Contemporary store-front signage with eye-catching window displays. Customers coming and going and chit chatting. A café with a patio and decent coffee. Before she dies, she will turn around the fortunes of this community, not by replacing an old ceiling fan but by once again bringing back industry and jobs to the town. That will be her legacy, as it was always meant to be.

Nonetheless, she can’t deny that it’s overly warm on this particular evening. The heat creeps into her old body and sticks to her brow. Discomfort turns to drowsiness, and the chattering of the room morphs into indistinct background noise.

Kirk clears his throat and addresses the handful of residents in the public seating area, the predominantly white-haired councillors, the village administrator, the minute-taker and the journalist who is there every week representing the Stapleton Herald (est. 1901). The journalist has gone down in Vivian’s estimation since developing the irritating habit of taking notes on a laptop, her manicured fingernails harassing the keys every thirty seconds. Very distracting, particularly for someone like Vivian, who is not nearly as deaf as she pretends to be.

“Before we get into this week’s meeting, I would like to say something on a personal note.” Kirk clears his throat for a second time. Vivian’s jaw clenches. She hasn’t been briefed on this little detour.

“We are all deeply saddened by the death of Frank Buchanan who lost his fight with cancer. We would like to send our heartfelt condolences to his family. He has left quite a mark on our community and he won’t be forgotten.”

Frank isn’t ... he can’t be.

Hazel sniffles loudly. He can’t have died. Vivian would’ve heard. She clears her throat and reaches for her absent pearls, casting her eyes across the room. Heads lowered in respectful silence. She will not let them see her shock. That is one thing she can control. Why did no one tell her?

She visited Frank at the hospital. He was hollow-cheeked and hairless from the failed treatments. A tear fell from her eye. “The ice queen is melting,” he said. Then he turned on her, the man who would rather lie with a smile on his face than give an honest opinion. “You’ll suffer too, Vivian. Your time is coming.” She didn’t visit him again.

Kirk moves the meeting along and words bounce around the table—leftovers from the last session, motions to be dealt with—so-and-so’s concerns. More keyboard tapping as minutes are recorded. She can’t seem to focus. Frank is dead. Did he hate her, in the end?

“All in favour?” Kirk asks.

Vivian hasn’t the slightest idea what she’s voting on. She mimics her husband because she will have briefed him carefully beforehand. Sweat prickles her brow. Her throat is dry. The mundane decisions of a typical Monday night are suddenly too much.

Her thoughts of Frank are clear. His sharp green eyes set against his narrow face. Body odour and dirt clinging to his t-shirts. Jeans with worn-out knees. A rule breaker who could be relied upon, most of the time.

They weren’t colleagues, not exactly. Nobody in the town would’ve described them as friends, though few people knew her as well as he did. Frank was much younger but they were both Stapletonians born and raised. It was what they went through, the two of them, that brought them together and then broke them apart.

They would all hate her if they ever found out. They wouldn’t understand that everything she did was for their own good. Frank hadn’t forgiven her, but at least he understood the difference between what is right morally, theoretically, and what is right in a particular moment in time.