An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [16]
For the first few months after I arrived in Newfoundland, Tatie called almost daily to talk about her news, local news, international news, no news. “I only wanted to say hello,” she’d say. “Is it all right to call you at work? Are you busy?” I was never too busy to talk to her. Mostly, she talked. I listened. “I hope you’ll be moving back to this side of the world soon...” Some days the calls went on for a very long time. “I told the man at the market I would never pay that price for aubergines, not if I was a millionaire but...” I was glad to hear that she was taking an interest in what was going on in their village. “Maximillian’s wife had her surgery. She’s doing well...”
Tatie worried about me. She worried about Papa too. Especially about his memory. She told me about an incident when he was making rice. He boiled the kettle, then dropped the bouillon cube inside. Tatie warned him he’d spoil the kettle if he dissolved the cube in there. He ignored her. Months later, he was making a dish that called for bouillon cube. She held out the kettle to him.
“I’m not going to put the cube in there,” he said. “That will ruin the kettle. What’s wrong with you, Georgette?” When she argued with him, he told her she was losing her mind.
Tatie never had any children of her own. Papa said it was because the French weren’t meant to mate with the English. When her English husband Philip left her, she clung to me like I was the last child on earth. Even when I was no longer a child, she insisted that I stay with her. “You can’t leave me alone. You’re all I have.” When I turned thirty, she decided it was time for me to move out. “Find a wife,” she told me. I was almost forty by the time that happened.
I brought photos of them with me to Newfoundland on my laptop. Elsa was in nearly all of them including those with Tatie and Papa. I had taken hundreds of shots of her during our trip to Egypt. There were before and after renovation pictures of our flat. I also had various photos of her important moments: at her third-place road race win, first day on the job at the travel agency, posing with her guru yoga teacher.
When Mercedes realized I had photos of my life in France, England and Norway, she wanted to see them. I started with the Tatie-Papa photos. Next, we looked at some photos of Elsa. After about fifty, Mercedes said she had something to show me. She hurried off to another room while I sat back on the La-Z-Boy and watched the local news with Cyril. She returned during a Central Dairies commercial.
“Let me help you with those,” I told her.
She unloaded the albums into my arms. It didn’t take her long to find the photo she was searching for. “That’s my friend Nancy,” she said. “She’s a nurse too. There’s tons of fish in the ocean, you know.” After that incident, whenever they invited me for supper there’d be another woman sitting by my side. First there was Nancy, then Sharon, Heather, same Nancy, Patricia, Carol, Nancy again.
For New Year’s, I went with Mercedes and Cyril to the harbour-front. It was so jammed with people that I lost sight of the two of them not long after we arrived. The revellers huddled together under a sky with a shiny black marble finish. The clock ticked down, people chanted five, four, three... fireworks exploded. The ships’ horns blasted and echoed off the surrounding hills. People I didn’t know hugged me, shook my hand or shoved against me. Then, someone grabbed me from behind. It was Mercedes. She wrapped her arms around me. “We’re some glad you’re with us,” she said. Cyril gave me a friendly smack on the shoulder.
“Now’s the time for resolutions,” Mercedes announced. Cyril resolved to finish installing the clapboard on the house, Mercedes resolved to not nag him anymore about the clapboard, and, for lack of a better idea, I resolved to do more fishing. Mercedes winked at me.
Cyril said, “I was thinking we should rent us a place up in Terra Nova National Park for that May 24th weekend and...”
I’d never felt a wind