Annabel - Kathleen Winter [122]
When she had finished cutting the seed potatoes, she left them in the sun to dry their surfaces so mould could not attack them before they began to grow, then she went to the sink to wash the ingrained dirt out of her hands and wrists and nails. She scrubbed until her skin tingled and then she decided to take a bath and change her clothes. Treadway had to go in the truck to Goose Bay to replace some of his drill bits in order to repair his Ski-Doo, and she asked if she could go with him. She stood in the Mealy Mountain Outfitters’ Co-op while he spoke with the owner. She smelled the oakum and canvas and metal dust from the key-cutting machine, and she asked him how he felt about going in to Mom’s Home Cooking for some fries and a couple of hot dogs and a cup of coffee. Treadway liked onions on his hot dogs, and Mom’s Home Cooking was the only place in Goose Bay where they had a bowl of chopped onions on the counter beside the ketchup, mustard, and relish, because that was what Americans working on the base liked, and Georgina Hounsell had paid attention.
Treadway said, “I haven’t been in there for a long time.” He saw she had been looking at fancy gardening gloves hanging on a display rack with a sale price on them, left over from Mothers’ Day. He had his drill bits in his hand along with a box of cotton work gloves and a packet of sandpaper. “Do you want me to buy you a pair of those?”
“No.”
“They have nice flowers on them.”
“I don’t like flowers on gardening gloves. If I’m going to work in the garden I want plain work gloves like those you’ve got there.” His work gloves were white cotton and a box of twenty pairs cost the same as one pair of the ladies’ gardening gloves. He had known this about Jacinta, that she liked using his plain white gloves, and he had always liked the fact, but it was one of the things he had forgotten.
“I don’t need all these,” he said. “You can take half.” He remembered as he said this that sharing a box of gloves was a thing they had done often, but not in recent years. Another thing they had done was eat in a restaurant on an outing to Goose Bay but ask the waitress to give them their coffee in paper cups after they had eaten. They would take the coffees in the truck and drive to the lookout on the highway back to Croydon Harbour and stop the truck and drink their coffee while looking out at the Mealy Mountains. Today after their hot dogs at Mom’s Home Cooking they did this again, and it felt very good to them both, so that when they arrived home, Treadway said, “I don’t have to go into the bush yet. The shingles on the old part of the house are gone, and while I’m up on the roof I might as well have a look at the flashing.”
Jacinta put on the work gloves, got her small-bladed shovel out of the shed, and turned the garden over to get it ready for the potatoes. She brushed her hair and put on a red dress and her green wool coat and her shoes instead of her winter boots, and she walked to the Hudson’s Bay store to buy carrot and parsnip seeds and snow peas and, while she was at it, sweet peas, which she grew not for any pea but for their frilled flowers that grew six feet high if you knew where to put them. None of this could be planted for another two weeks, but it was nice to spend that fortnight with the