Annabel - Kathleen Winter [103]
“Okay.”
“And I have to protect myself. I have to act like I’m a person in charge of taking care of Gracie Watts, and do things that will make sure she’s okay. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I guess.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound all right. Have you made any friends? And what about money?”
“That’s what I’m saying. I’m hoping to work with the van.”
“I can’t talk about vans, Wayne. Not right now. Did you call your mother?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you should. She phoned my mother at one o’clock in the morning looking for your address. My mother says she didn’t realize what time it was.”
“I sent her my address.”
“Well, she must have lost it. My mother said she shouldn’t be left alone, Wayne. She said she was carrying a bag of potatoes from the store on Saturday in her summer dress. It was freezing and she had no coat on.”
“My mother doesn’t need potatoes. She has a whole root cellar full of blue potatoes for boiling and Yukon Golds for French fries.”
“Well, she bought a twenty-pound bag on Saturday and carried it home in her bare arms. Maybe you had better call her.”
Wayne called his mother’s number but there was no answer. He ate a Mars bar and looked out the window at the van. He thought about it some more on one of his walks to the edge of the city. By the fifth mile of a walk like that you forgot where you were and how you had got there. If you had the right boots and clothes, it could rain and you could still walk and think and work out where your life should go, now that you had left things behind that confused you, that defined you as a man when you weren’t a man. Not the son your dad wanted. Not a son who kept up family traditions. Not a Labrador trapper, strong mettled and well read, solitary but knowing how to lead a pack. Instead you were ambiguous, feminine, undecided. You had even had a baby beginning to grow inside you, and you kept wondering to what size it had grown before it died, and thinking about its eyes. Wayne was glad Gracie had not tried to stay on the phone. Glad she was stronger than him, though he suspected she had forced herself to say she did not want to talk to him.
Walking miles through the city, past the downtown neighbourhoods, beyond Rennies Mill River, up Kenmount Road to the neon signs, the car dealerships, the sound barriers, the chain restaurants selling ribs by the bucket and coleslaw by the pound, you could decide how to make a living in a new town where no one knew you. This was one of the ways in which he thought like his father. Treadway had influenced him early with the idea that you had to be self-sufficient. Wayne passed lines hung with blue and silver flags snapping in the wind. Chevrolet, GM, Ford. Used or new. You were independent if you had a van. You could sell something out of it.
Wayne ended up in places no walker should attempt. This drainage ditch between the Wonder Bread factory on O’Leary Avenue and the Avalon Mall. This was more than a ditch, it was a whole system of wasteland, chain-link fences, yards filled with lumber awaiting construction, unidentifiable boxes, Quonset huts, coils of insulated wire, landfill, piles of asphalt, and sinister-looking rubble. Wayne walked through this waste-scape and into Donovan’s Industrial Park, where he found Frank King, who was looking for a driver to sell hams, ground beef, pork roasts, racks of lamb, and a scattered cod fillet door to door among the big houses downtown. Frank’s warehouse door was open; Frank shouted through it at men lifting pallets of chocolate-covered cherries. A poster on the door advertised Tunnock’s Teacakes. Puddles all over the parking lot reflected a robin’s-egg sky with puffy clouds moving fast. A couple of tractor trailers idled and the air stank of diesel.
“Wayne Blake. You have your own vehicle?” Frank King’s office was the colour of ballpark mustard.
“Yeah.”
“Where?” Frank looked at Wayne’s head, shirt, pants, and boots. He looked closely at Wayne’s face, as if it were odd, and Wayne wondered what Frank King saw. Frank King did not appear to be the