Annabel - Kathleen Winter [92]
But she was not at her apartment. He stood on the landing of the four-unit building and looked out at the small parking lot, where Kit Kat wrappers and Hostess chip bags blew against the chain-link fence that bordered the shortcut between Goose High and the main road. The three other doors had nameplates but the door to apartment four did not. He knocked on the other doors but no one answered. The building had a dead feeling, and he was disappointed. He went to the liquor store and bought a case of El Dorado for the members of the House of Assembly. It was three o’clock. He decided to go over to the school and wait in the parking lot. At three ten he watched all the high school students pour out the main doors. He felt much older than them though he had been in high school only a year ago. He waited until they had filed into their school buses then he continued to watch the door. But maybe she would come out another door. He stopped idling the truck and he went in. The office was at the head of the corridor, near the wall with the hockey and basketball trophies, and he went in.
“Is Thomasina Baikie teaching here today?”
“Who?” the secretary said. But a man, a young teacher, had seen her.
“She was in yesterday. She’s a substitute. I didn’t see her today.” He was trying to get jammed paper out of the photocopier. The principal’s office door was open but no one was inside. Teachers rushed in and out looking for staplers and the new grade eleven map of the world. Had his own high school felt this disorganized? Wayne felt he had walked into a world where people barely noticed each other. They sped around, resentful that they had to be there at all, and could not find the simplest things, like the three-hole punch that was supposed to be fixed to the front desk by a chain.
“Can I use the phone?” Wayne asked the secretary.
“There’s a pay phone in the lobby.”
“Have you got change for this?”
“The lunch money’s gone down to Beaver Foods and I’ve been asking for Pay Records to set up petty cash for six days now.” She handed him the receiver from a fixed telephone. The cord was short but he pulled at it. “What number?”
Wayne gave her Nelson Meese Junior’s number and she dialled it, but it kept ringing. When he got back to his truck, someone had broken the window and the case of El Dorado was gone. A hundred and thirty-seven dollars. I should have stopped looking before now, he thought. I should have known in the apartment building that I wasn’t going to find her today.
He went on the Rigolet trip with the members of the House of Assembly and almost lost one of them in the marsh. The men liked to think they had gone into the wilderness without Wayne. They liked to ignore everything he told them, so that when they returned to the House of Assembly they could tell their colleagues they had caught the fish by their own ingenuity. This time there was a story in the St. John’s Telegram about how one of them had had a brush with death. There was no mention that Wayne had saved his life. If the life had been lost, Wayne would certainly have been mentioned. He had built a web of black spruce boughs and flattened himself on it and hauled the member of the House of Assembly to safety, but the Telegram article implied that the member had called upon the same resources that made him such a wonderful minister of fisheries. Everyone said wilderness outfitting was one of the big new Labrador jobs. A real opportunity for anyone who wanted it. Wayne wasn’t so sure.
When he got back to Croydon Harbour, the utility bills lay stacked against the toaster. Among them was a letter from Thomasina, from Bucharest, but it was not for Wayne. The letter was addressed to Treadway.
“You don’t want to open it?” Wayne asked his mother. She had not opened the bills either. Wayne opened bills and he dealt with them in the months his father was in the bush. His mother would not look at the letter. She did not want to look at anything these days except As the World Turns on channel six, which she had always told him was pathetic.