October
Ray had his head in the oven, checking on the bacon. He closed the oven door and turned to where Lynne Redmond sat at his kitchen table. The first light of morning was coming through the window over the sink and it brightened her face on one side, leaving the other in shadow. She’d brushed her hair and pulled it back so that the streaks of white ran back from her hairline against steel grey and black. She lowered her face into the steam from her coffee and inhaled the smell of it in a slow, deep breath, like a meditation.
“Ray, I think you’d be making a mistake to bring this up with her,” she said.
Ray had not touched his own coffee yet, but he was jittery and unsettled, opening and closing cupboard doors, wiping the spotless counter with a rag.
For one thing, he was awkward about having Lynne there first thing in the morning. It was the first time she’d come to Hubtown and spent the night. She’d tacked a couple of vacation days onto the weekend and taken the Maritime Bus from Sydney. Ray had gasped when she told him the price of the round-trip ticket, but she’d waved a dismissive hand at his offer to pay half. It was wonderful that she’d come. He felt wanted in a way he had not felt in a long time. And looking at her unadorned beauty now, there was a certain giddy feeling he remembered having in his early twenties, those first few magic times he’d been lucky enough to have shared a bed with a woman and to still be with her in the morning.
But it was a school day, and it was embarrassing knowing that Patricia was about to come into the kitchen with him and Lynne in it. It was hard enough to figure out, after all this time, how to have a sex life. Even harder was going to be the gaze of a needy teenager, to whom he’d only shown the outermost shell of himself.
Ray had picked up Sam at school recently, and when she’d come out the front door, she’d been talking to someone Ray would rather have not seen her with. It was the kid who lived at the bad end of Lemon Street with a mother people said was at the far end of alcoholic decline. Ray knew the kid had just spent a year in youth prison. For manslaughter. Everyone in town knew it.
And Patricia was not simply talking to the kid. She was smiling in a way that Ray was not used to seeing. She was carrying an instrument case that she handed to the kid from Lemon Street, and she waved a cute little wave as she walked toward Ray’s car.
Part of Ray felt happy for the girl. After all she’d been through, she’d obviously trusted someone enough to befriend them. But mostly he felt concerned. And he’d been holding in his misgivings for days. He’d not said a word to the girl, but he’d been having trouble sleeping. His stomach was hooked up in knots.
When Lynne had landed last night, he’d let it all spill out to her. He’d even choked back tears, he felt so upset, so afraid of the weight of his responsibility to the girl and her mother. And he’d told Lynne he planned to talk to the girl about it today. She needed to know about the boy she’d befriended.
Ray could still hear the shower going, so he knew there was some time before the girl would be coming into the kitchen.
“Come here, Ray,” Lynne said gently. She stretched out a hand and motioned with a nudge of her head for him to sit across the table.
“Sit down. Here.” She wiggled her fingers and when he did sit down across the table from her, she insisted he put his hand in hers. When she saw him look over his shoulder at the doorway to the hall, she laughed and said, “Don’t worry. When I hear her coming, I’ll give you your hand back.”
He put his hand in hers, and it did feel better that way. He felt bolstered, confident. A little calmer.
“What is it, exactly, that you want to say to her?”
“What I told you last night.” Ray felt angry suddenly. Why was she making him say this when she knew?
“What? About the boy you saw her with?”
“Oh nothing really. Just that he killed someone. Pleaded guilty and got sent away for it.”
“I just think you’d be taking an awful chance, Ray. Telling her.”
“It feels like an awful chance not telling her.”
Lynn squeezed his hand and brought his fingers to her lips, kissed them. “I understand that. But look at you, Ray. You’re so wound up over this. If you do this wrong, it could damage the most important relationship in the girl’s life right now. Her relationship with you.”
Ray felt his eyes well up. He’d never thought of things in those terms. That what he’d done by taking in Eleanor’s girl was to start a relationship with her. And that the relationship was the most important one the girl currently had.
The smell of bacon suddenly became overpowering and Ray stood up from the table and switched on the fan in the stove hood. When he opened the oven door, Lynne said, “Good lord, Ray. What have you got in there?”
“It’s a bacon weave.” He gripped one of three squares of woven bacon strips in a set of tongs and held it up proudly as he turned it over on the cast iron sheet. “In fact, it’s three bacon weaves.”
Lynne’s eyebrows went up and she appeared to recoil slightly. She inhaled a short breath as though to speak, but there was a long pause before she said, “Seems like a lot of bacon.”
Ray had worked on perfecting his bacon weave, figuring out which brand and cut of bacon to use, how tight to weave it raw, what the optimum oven temperature was. He’d made one for Lynne before. At her place in Sydney. He’d brought his own bacon for that. She’d said she’d liked it, and it irked him now that Lynne seemed put off by it.
“For one thing, there’s no way she does not already know,” Lynne said.
Ray nodded. They’d gone through this last night.
“It’s a big school. And who knows what kids are saying about this boy. But they’re saying something. And Sam has heard them say it. She’s been there over a month.”
Lynne, of course, had no trouble with the girl’s new name. It was the only one she’d ever known.
“Do you think this boy is a danger to her?”
Ray found himself shaking his head before he even had a chance to think about the question. From what he’d heard, the death of the other boy…Mancomb, he thought the name was, was more of an accident than anything else. It was a teenaged fist fight gone bad.
“Not really. I just…I’m responsible for her well-being while she’s here. She’s been to hell and back.”
“If you really want to make sure she knows, get someone else to tell her. Someone she can afford to damage her relationship with. I’d do it, but she’d see me telling her as just another way of you telling her. Is there a social worker who can do this? A teacher? A school counsellor?”
The sound of the shower had long let up, and they both got quiet as footsteps approached the kitchen.
“Lynne! I didn’t know you were here!” The girl opened her arms and Lynne stood up into them. The two of them hugged and their embrace became like a secret handshake that transformed Ray’s kitchen into Woman World, a space where he suddenly barely belonged.
“My bus got in late. You were already in bed. Sam, that top looks so pretty on you,” Lynne said. Even calling the shirt a top felt like a way of locking him out. He looked at the shirt and tried to see what was pretty about it, but it just looked like a shirt to him.
Lynne was wrapped in a housecoat she’d brought with her, and that’s what he’d imagined would be the biggest source of awkwardness, the way the housecoat was linked to the bedroom, the way the bedroom was linked to sex. But there was a conspiratorial look in both Lynne’s and the girl’s eyes that, though it irritated him because he did not understand what it was about, was also a great relief because it was not about Lynne and Ray having sex.
“Ray, what are you doing with all these eggs?” Lynne looked into the mixing bowl where Ray had beaten a dozen eggs into a froth. The bacon weaves were finished, and he’d stacked them on a paper-towel-covered plate beside the stove.
“Bacon weave omelette,” Patricia said. She had a smirk on her face that she was unsuccessfully fighting off. “A good day begins with a proper breakfast.” She was no longer fighting the smirk. And the line was simply something he himself was fond of saying. So this part of the mockery he understood.
“You two are making fun of me,” Ray said in a voice he hoped expressed some anger, but not too much.
“No we’re n—” the girl began to say, but Lynne cut her off with, “Yes, we are,” and the two of them laughed.