Annabel - Kathleen Winter [91]
“I didn’t know Carol Rich was pregnant.”
“Well, she is. She’s five months. That’s why her father and his brothers have her and Archie’s house half built behind the marsh. They have to have it done by the time the baby gets born next January. What did you think they were building it for?”
“I didn’t know is all.”
“And don’t think Carol Rich got pregnant by accident. And don’t think for a second that that’s what I want. I told you, I’m going to earn my own money, and I’m not going to have a baby until I’m at least twenty-five. That’s not for another six years.”
But how, he wondered, did she plan to spend those six years? He had noticed she kept the lid of her hope chest open. He could not help thinking it looked like an open mouth, hungry. He responded to her physical touch but it was her mental hunger that frightened him, and he did not know how he was going to escape from it. He felt compassion every time he looked at Gracie, with her fierce little statements about how she would staunch blood and bandage trauma victims in her ambulance. She would have a transmitter that announced urgencies in the night: wounds, heart failure, poisoning. Gracie had told him she would love this. She would love triage, emergency cauterization, administering oxygen. She wanted to be the capable one amid panic or crisis: the one needed, the one who saved. That would be her work and then she would come home, where there would be peace and quiet. This idea of peace and quiet bothered Wayne. In his fear of domestic stasis he was more like his father than he knew.
Now he watched Gracie turn to page seventeen and underline electric carving knife number A00C94. Why did the moths have to be so loathsome? The darkness around their orange bodies pressed against the window. Gracie turned the pages slowly and underlined an iron and a little vacuum cleaner with a canister you could snap in and out.
“You know what I like? That there are no bags in this model. I hate vacuum cleaner bags. You can never find the right one. My mother has been looking for an Electrolux size four bag for fifteen years, and she hasn’t found it yet. There’s no way I intend to let that happen to me.”
20
Willow Ptarmigan
THOMASINA'S POSTCARD FROM LONDON took only two weeks to arrive.
“I guess there comes a point,” it said, “when your feet just say they don’t care to do it any more. They don’t want to do the lonesome trek. I had to go to a Boots chemist shop and buy myself a couple of donuts. You put them in the heel of your shoes. London is my favourite of all the places I’ve been, Wayne, as a place to live. But very expensive. I can’t get over the fact that when you sit on a bench in Kensington Gardens, a man in a uniform comes and asks you for ten pence. You have to pay to sit in the park. It looks like I’ve got to make a bit more money if I don’t want to be like George Orwell, living on tea and bread and margarine. The school board has told me I can substitute at Goose High. I arrive in Goose Bay on September sixteenth, and Nelson Meese is on the lookout for an apartment I can rent for the winter. Did your father get the letter I sent him from Bucharest? When I gave it to the postmistress, she threw it in a container that looked like it came out of the Dark Ages.”
It was already September thirtieth. The Labrador telephone book was six by eight inches and less than half an inch thick, including the yellow pages. Wayne decided to phone Nelson Meese Junior. but he should have phoned the other Nelson Meese.
“It’s my father,” said Nelson Meese Junior. “But I know who you’re talking about. He took her over there on Thursday. She’s over at Daniel Lavallee’s apartments on Michelin Street.”
Wayne got in his father’s truck. He was supposed to be packing bait and supplies for three members of the House of Assembly to go fishing in Rigolet. They liked locally cured meat and they did not like to run out of alcohol. He needed to go to Roland Shiwack’s to buy caribou sausage, but he needed to go to Goose Bay for rum as well. He would visit