Annabel - Kathleen Winter [123]
Roland Shiwack had borrowed Treadway’s wheelbarrow the previous autumn and had not returned it. Now, when Treadway went to ask for it back, Roland mentioned that he had noticed Jacinta out turning over soil to prepare the garden.
“Now that is something,” Roland said, “my own wife will never do. I admire that you have a woman who can work hard like that and still look nice.” Roland had seen Jacinta in her green coat and shoes. He did not know where the wheelbarrow was, and Treadway could not understand that. He could not understand why a grown man would borrow another man’s wheelbarrow in the first place instead of getting one of his own, and he could understand less how anyone could lose a whole wheelbarrow and not know where it had gone. There was something, moreover, in the way that Roland Shiwack had said Treadway’s wife looked nice that Treadway did not like. It was as if Roland had voiced something Treadway felt too shy to say out loud himself, and Jacinta was his own wife. If Treadway was married to her and could not say it, how did Roland Shiwack summon the nerve to pass a comment on Jacinta’s looks? And what was wrong with Roland’s own wife’s looks? Melba Shiwack looked like a normal woman. There was nothing bad looking about her. She was unremarkable, as far as Treadway could see, and he did not know why Roland had now decided to remark on Treadway’s own wife.
Treadway would not have called these passing thoughts jealousy, but he did think, on his return home, that it was a good thing he had decided not to go back into the bush just yet.
Jacinta did a laundry in which she washed as many of her filmy nightdresses as she could fit in the washing machine, the ones that had unconsciously reminded Treadway of misty stars while he was reading the book of Job in his hunting cabin. She hung them on the line, where the late May breeze made them dance over the mix of newly dug garden and what was left of the snow.
30
The Makeup Artist
STEVE KEATING SHOWED UP at Wayne’s apartment door on Forest Road, the picture of remorse. He looked, Wayne thought, like someone who was twelve years old instead of fifteen, and he presented Wayne with a lunch from Caines Grocery.
“It’s a cold plate.” Steve handed Wayne the bag and Wayne took out a paper plate covered in plastic wrap and laden with the kind of food Mr. Caines’s regular customers bought for their husbands on Saturdays before they left their kitchens for the bingo hall. Two slices of boiled ham, two of turkey, some coleslaw and macaroni salad, a bread roll, and potato salad dyed purple with pickled beet juice and triggered out of an ice cream scoop.
“I told you,” Steve said.
“You told me what?”
“That if you really got to know me you wouldn’t like me.”
“You never told me that.”
“I did.”
“I don’t think you did, Steve.”
“Well, I thought it then. If only I had kept my mouth shut. I never meant to blab about you to Warford, honest to God I didn’t. My mother says I can’t keep my mouth shut, and she said she wouldn’t be surprised if you tore the head off me after what I done.”
Wayne had not gone to work in the days that had passed since his attack. He had a cut near his eye and he had injuries that Derek Warford and his gang had inflicted when they were experimenting with his body, but he had not gone to a doctor and he had not told anyone what had happened. At the drugstore he bought ointment whose label said it was cooling and healing and you could use it on babies’ skin, and he put that on himself in all the places that were hurt and that he could reach. When Steve came to the door with the lunch, Wayne was hungry. He had nothing in his fridge but half a tin of beans and some bread. When he called in sick, Frank King had told him not to stay off the job too long or he would be replaced, and now he was afraid to go in because he knew he did not look well, and he also knew Frank King would soon say something about his appearance. On Signal Hill Derek Warford had kept referring