Annabel - Kathleen Winter [45]
Wayne saw the neatly stacked two-by-fours and did not realize where they had come from. He saw the jar of screws and did not recognize those either. He walked into the house, looked around, and wondered where everyone was. His father was not home, and neither was his mother, and there was no cooking, which was unusual, because at five o’clock there was always something sizzling in the cast iron pan or cooking in the boiler. So he went outside and looked around the back, and then he knew the two-by-fours were from his bridge, and he knew it had not been destroyed by an animal or by wind or by anything accidental. He ran inside and saw the string, untangled and carefully wound, hanging on a chair. He went out the back door and looked at the creek with its naked posts that he and his father had taken weeks to pour and set. The creek frilled around reeds and stones. The creek was not thinking of him. It had left him alone.
Treadway walked into the house carrying a mandarin orange box that held a golden Lab puppy on a piece of brocade from the bridge. He laid the box by the woodstove, and Wayne knew what he had done.
Wayne had never felt two such conflicting feelings in his body: devotion for the puppy, who whimpered and tried to peer over the side of the box, and an utter, bereft betrayal. Treadway looked at Wayne for a second, then at the puppy. The puppy was a safe place to look. You could look at the puppy all day and your feelings could sink into the puppy, and the puppy would not reproach you.
Wayne could not ask Treadway about the bridge, and Treadway said nothing. It was five o’clock, and Jacinta came in the door with a bag from Eliza. It contained a hot loaf. Eliza had rubbed the crust with butter until it glittered and cracked. Jacinta laid it on the table. She got butter out, and a tin of oysters, and corned beef, and some mustard, and an onion which she sliced thin, and some milk and pickled beet, and she opened the tins and sliced the corned beef, and no one mentioned the puppy.
Wayne went upstairs and looked out his window, where he could see the back corner of Wally’s house, and he guessed he would have to go down in the morning and see her. He could not believe his father had gone out and found a puppy to make up for what he had destroyed. It gave Wayne a new insight into the character of his father, one he regretted knowing with all his heart. It would have been better, he thought, if his father had just done what he wanted to do and not tried to pay for it. It was the paying, with a live puppy, that Wayne found unforgivable.
At six in the morning Wally Michelin knocked on the back door and Treadway opened it, his kipper with Keen’s mustard steaming on the table. He thought Wally looked like a strong little person on his step, her hair making her face narrower, her pale skin and thousand freckles. She was starting to grow tall and she was bony; her shoulder blades stuck out, and she marched around with her head a little bit forward like someone forever ducking raindrops. She had watched him dismantle the bridge from her bathroom window and had come for the most important thing in it.
“It’s twelve pages. The paper is yellow.”
“I don’t remember it.” Treadway was honestly mystified. He remembered his son’s Hilroy scribbler. He had saved that. It sat now on the chair visitors used. Wally’s green diary was under it and she took it, and looked around to see if her “Cantique de Jean Racine” was sticking out from under the TV guide or wedged behind the toaster.
“It was with this.” She held up her diary, which still had its key. “Did you read my diary?”
Treadway had searched for what she might have written about Wayne. He hated himself for doing it, especially when most of the parts he read were about music. They were about the northern lights; how she had sung to them and they had sung back to her; and about how she had found out the name of something that happened to her but did not happen to any of the friends she had asked, including Wayne. It was called phantom music: some