AUDREY

It was a funny feeling, moving into someone else’s house. The only other time she ever did it, she was twenty and so many things were different: new husband, new country, new life. Leaving her parents’ home for the first time to move in with Harry and his parents in Louisiana had been a huge change, but she could hardly remember being the girl who made that journey. Now she made this shorter journey: three blocks from her house to Richard’s.

“That man has the patience of Job,” Ellen used to say about Richard Cadwell. “It’s not like I got a gun to his head,” was Audrey’s usual response. Privately she had to admit her mother was right. A good-looking divorced man with a house of his own and a nice little pension; he wouldn’t have had a hard time finding someone to marry him if another wife was what he was looking for. But when Audrey turned him down, over and over, he kept coming around.

“I know you’re used to having your own space,” he said over a late supper. Audrey had shown up on his doorstep at nine o’clock the night of Frankie’s arrest carrying a single overnight bag, and told him she hadn’t even eaten yet. He heated up the leftovers of his own supper and opened a bottle of wine. “You can keep your things in the spare bedroom if you want, but you’re more than welcome in my room. Just because you’re staying here, don’t worry, there’ll be no talk of weddings or anything like that.”

“I think we’re both past all that now,” Audrey said. She hung up the few clothes she had brought in the spare-room closet when supper was over, and then sat down with Richard to watch The National. At least with that there was no fear of them covering a story about a drug bust in a St. John’s corner store. The national news had bigger fish to fry.

Bedtime, then, and she wasn’t sure what to do. Richard got up and took Audrey’s hand to help her to her feet. He held it a minute longer. “Come on, girl. Come in my room for the night. Unless you can’t stand hearing me snore.”

“If it gets too loud I can always go back in the spare room,” Audrey said.

Richard went with her went back to the house the next day to pack more of her clothes. She took her case of CDs as well—Henry and Rachel and Larry had finally got her to switch over to CDs, although she’d kept all the old records too. But there was only a CD player at Richard’s place and if she was settling in she’d have to have her music with her. Two suitcases full of clothes, some CDs, a few framed pictures of the family—it didn’t take long to pack up her life.

Going back to her own place wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be; this was St. John’s after all. It wasn’t as if there were news teams camped outside the shop shoving microphones in her face as soon as she went in or out. Henry and Rachel had already said “No comment” to reporters from both the CBC and NTV, and after that they seemed to have lost interest. There were the neighbours to think about, of course. Audrey came downstairs to find Lorraine Penney banging on the door of the shop. “Oh, you’re not opening up today are you? When do you think you’ll be open again?”

“I got no idea,” Audrey told her, standing in the doorway, jingling the keys in her hand. Richard waited behind her with her suitcases.

“Are the police still in there?”

“If they were, I’d hardly tell the whole street, would I? Anyway, I got no thoughts of opening up anytime soon, so you can go on buying your smokes at Shopper’s where you been buying them this five years.”

“No, there’s no need to get saucy with an old friend, Audrey.”

Audrey wanted to push her old friend right off the step but instead she said, “I’m sure you can imagine this is a bit of shock, Lorraine. All any of us wants is to be left in peace.”

Lorraine left then, and Henry followed them downstairs, carrying a few bags of his mother’s odds and ends. “You don’t mind staying here alone?” she asked him as he put the bags in the trunk of her car.

“Hell no, I’ve slept in worse places,” Henry laughed. “Anyway somebody got to be here. You can’t have the place standing empty. The windows would be beat out of it.”

Audrey looked at her son, standing under that big stupid Pizza Presto! sign. “What would you do if I sold the place?” It was the first time she had said the words out loud like they were a real possibility.

“Oh, don’t you worry about me. I’d land on my feet. I got a gift for that.”

Audrey had never seen a scrap of evidence to suggest Henry had that gift. But she was sixty-six years old and her son was forty-five. It made no sense at this point to be lying awake nights wondering how her youngster was going to make out.

When Henry dropped over the next day he brought Audrey and Richard up to date on the latest news about Frankie. He had been charged, but it would be months before his trial. The police had decided nobody but Frankie would be charged, and the lawyer said if Frankie had the sense to plead guilty he would avoid a trial and probably have to serve less than a year in jail. “And I hope he does have the sense to take it, because if he does, none of us are going to have to go through testifying. But if there’s a trial, who knows who they might call?”

“Frank must be heartbroke over this,” Richard said. “It’s no easy thing, to see your son up on charges like that—I know our Butch was tore right up when Nicky got sent up to Dorchester for five years.” And the Holloways weren’t used to it like the Cadwells were, he didn’t bother to add.

“It’s no easy thing, for sure. Frank haven’t shown his face since it all happened, and Uncle Alf never seen him either. You heard anything from him, Mom?”

“Not hide nor hair of him,” said Audrey. “I’m not surprised. Frank got to know me and Alf are pissed off at Frankie, and we got every right to be.”

Later, when Audrey looked back on those weeks after Frankie’s arrest, it seemed like her life was nothing but one meeting after another. Giving statements to the police. Meeting the lawyer. Long, awkward conversations with Alf and Frank—Frank couldn’t avoid his family forever—about what was going to happen to the business. All the while, young Frankie cooled his heels, laying about at his father’s place, waiting for his court date. Audrey stayed at Richard’s, and Henry stayed on alone in the rooms over the closed-up shop.

She talked with Richard, with Marilyn, with Henry about what to do about the house and the shop, which was still closed. Finally she talked to Rachel, who looked thoughtful and said she would go home and talk it over with Larry.

“The house is fully paid off,” Audrey reminded her. “That place you’re in on Gower Street wouldn’t be paid off for twenty-five years even if you bought it tomorrow.”

“We couldn’t afford to buy a house,” Rachel said. “We’re both musicians. We’ll never be able to own a house.”

“Unless I makes my house over to you,” Audrey said.

“Then you get nothing out of it.”

“I wouldn’t get all that much if I sold it,” Audrey replied, “not in this market.” Houses in the centre of St. John’s were sitting on the market for months, their prices knocked down over and over again.

“Is she thinking about taking the house, do you think?” Richard asked Audrey after Rachel left that evening.

“She might be. It’s the best deal she’ll ever get. And I don’t know that I’ll ever want to live there again.”

“You don’t have to.”

Audrey looked up at him. “Are you sure? You’re not sick of having me here yet?” All these years she had thought it was better that she and Richard lived apart, that they were two old people so set in their ways they’d never be able to manage under the one roof. She’d been at his place six weeks now and the strangest part was she wasn’t thinking of it as his place anymore. It felt like her place. She caught herself asking Marilyn to drive her home, and meaning Richard’s house.

“Not sick of you yet, girl,” he said. “Why don’t I borrow Eddie’s van and we’ll move the rest of your stuff over here on Saturday?”