Annabel - Kathleen Winter [76]
“The price might have changed,” she warned him. “This is last year’s catalogue. We keep asking them to send us the new one as soon as it comes out. But we can’t control everything.”
Treadway wrote Albert J. Breton a letter ordering a copy of “Cantique de Jean Racine” by Gabriel Fauré. He phoned the Croydon Harbour post office and got the number of Gerald and Ann Michelin’s mailbox.
Over the next week Treadway cleaned and reassembled his Ski-Doo. He filled his sled box and his reading case. He packed his Collected Works of Robert Frost.
“Sometimes,” Jacinta told Wayne, “you looked at me like you knew.”
“But I didn’t!”
“I imagined you did. People think all kinds of things when they are alone with a secret. They think what they want to think. Maybe I imagined the whole look.”
Treadway wrapped fourteen extra pounds of flour and cornmeal, and he hoped the woods would be lovely, dark and deep.
There was a tiny travel agency on the main road in Goose Bay. Thomasina thought of it as a hidden gate. The agent, Miriam Penashue, had spent all her summers in the bush near the Quebec border and had not finished high school. Miriam had not even finished grade six, and she had no plans of ever going to school again until she found out that if you took the travel agent course at the community college in Goose Bay, the government would pay for you to see six travel destinations. Once she had seen them, Miriam Penashue was no ordinary travel agent. She did not put up posters of Dominican Republic resorts or offer deals to Disney World. Her shop had one handbill on the door; Miriam Penashue had made it herself. It read, COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.
After the Labrador East School Board sent Thomasina its letter of suspension, something about Miriam Penashue’s sign appeared so unpretentious and so promising, she went in. She was carrying a bag from Happy Valley Northmart with six grapefruit in it that she wished were better grapefruit. They would be all right once she had sliced their membranes down to the drupes, but in their trip from California a layer of air had developed between the rinds and the fruit. When you have received a letter that says you have not acted in the best interests of the children you are teaching, it is hard not to feel ashamed. Thomasina felt ashamed and angry at the same time: ashamed because she should have done things differently. She could have been more discreet, more patient, instead of getting all righteous and hauling Wayne to the hospital in a way that attracted the attention of people who had no sympathy. People like Mr. Henry, who had caught wind of the hospital trip and had made a point of inquiring about it at the school office. The principal herself, Victoria Huskins, with her white pants and her intercom.
“There are two reasons I have no choice but to have you disciplined,” Victoria Huskins had said. “Taking a child off school property without adherence to a single one of the regulations we have in place. And lesser, but pretty important to me as someone who has to keep a semblance of order here, publicly ridiculing my reprimand of the child who wilfully left poo on the washroom floor. Filth. You should know better, Thomasina Baikie. For the children’s sake. People are going to think we don’t care about the children. I can’t have that at my school.”
Shame was what Thomasina felt the day she noticed Miriam Penashue’s handbill. It was undeserved shame, but it did its job nevertheless. It dampened her heart, then burnt its edges so she was left with a mess of charcoal and saddened fire. From Miriam Penashue’s handbill came a puff of freedom: COME IN AND TALK TO MIRIAM PENASHUE ABOUT WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.
Miriam Penashue was halfway between the ages of Thomasina and her grade seven students. She wore her hair in a bob and kept bubblegum in her mouth and had a coffee mug that said GRENFELL HUSKIES. She hired no one and her office was painted with turquoise paint left