Cool Water (12 page)

She glances at Shiloh, who hasn't said anything the whole way to town. He's eating cookies and Vicki sees no sign of the teenage defiance she heard when she first called him to get up.
Their moods are all over the place,
she thinks, and then she notices with a sideways glance how much he looks like his father. She wonders how long it will be before he talks, and if she should say anything about the rude way he spoke to her earlier.

In the end, she doesn't have to. As they turn off the highway, Shiloh folds down the top of the cookie bag and zips up his backpack and says, “Well, anyway, you should have knocked.”

She takes it as an apology. “You're right,” she says.

She wonders where she should begin her search for blanchers and whether she should take the time to get a few groceries. These things are necessary, she thinks, just as necessary as, say, tractor parts. No farmer would consider frivolous a trip to town for parts. When there's a breakdown, a wife is expected to drop whatever she's doing and head to the dealership to collect some crucial pin or belt or drive chain that she's never heard of, and try to explain to the parts manager what she needs when she doesn't exactly know, and get home again as quickly as possible so the work can resume, and if she's lucky she won't have to make another trip because she's brought home the wrong part. A trip for blanchers and groceries is the same, inconvenient but necessary.

“Ha,” she says out loud, congratulating herself for her brilliant logic. The kids all look at her. “Just part of the job, isn't it,” she says.

Vicki turns up the street toward Karla Norman's house so she can get Lucille's hair fixed, the first of the quick stops.

There's lots of time in a day, she assures herself.

The Theatre

Norval opens his eyes to see Lila, hands on her hips, staring down at him. He can tell by the look on her face that he's done something wrong, but his head is fuzzy and he can't quite think what it is. As he slowly comes awake his misdemeanours begin to line up: he's on the couch (
Norval, why
didn't you just come back to bed?
); the TV is still on (
How can
you sleep with that sound blaring, for heaven's sake?
); the light is on in the kitchen (
The power bill keeps going up, I wonder
why.
) And then there's the meat loaf, a crumb of which is lying in plain view on the white carpet. Norval watches as Lila bends to pick it up and examines it closely before giving him a glaring look of admonition. He watches her carry the crumb between two painted fingernails toward the kitchen, holding it out in front of her as though it's the most distasteful bit of evidence of Norval's domestic inadequacy.

“I am housebroken, you know,” he says in his defence, although not really loud enough for Lila to hear him.

He sits up and switches off the weather lady with the remote control. Through the arched doorway to the kitchen he can see Lila obsessing with neatness, wiping the counter and the sink before anyone has even had a chance to mess them up, her green satin dressing gown swishing as she moves. He thinks of the TV commercial that makes fun of sea-foam green bridesmaid dresses and thinks,
Lila's dressing
gown is sea-foam green.
What does that mean? he wonders. It can't mean that she has bad taste, for Lila is well known for her sense of style. Perhaps that her taste is of another era, although she wouldn't be pleased at the notion that she might be, heaven forbid, a fashion relic. Not that Norval has anything against Lila's style, which he has always appreciated as long as he doesn't have to be the other half of a matched set.

“Sometimes I just wonder,” Lila says, and Norval thinks,
Sometimes I wonder too.
How he got into all this.

He and Lila met in the city when he was in the last semester of his commerce degree and she was beginning a degree in acting. Norval was working part time as a junior teller at the small bank where Lila had her account. It was in an older working-class neighbourhood, and not one in which university students generally lived. Lila was staying with relatives while she went to school, and she and Norval struck up a friendship over her careful managing of her money, which Norval couldn't help but notice. They ran into each other on campus one day, and Norval invited Lila to go for a beer in the campus pub. They played pool— Lila was surprisingly good and beat him in several games until coyness got the better of her and she backed off and let him win. As they played, she entertained him with stories about her adventures as a theatre student, making them sound more adventurous than they really were. In truth, Lila was a small-town girl who was having trouble fitting in with the trendy and sometimes ruthless theatre students who already had years of experience in high school productions and summer drama camps and improv competitions, none of which had been available to a student like Lila with her simple dream of being on stage.

At the end of the term, Norval went to see her in the theatre department's production of a Shakespearean play —he can't remember which one; he just remembers that he didn't have a clue what was going on and couldn't understand a word anyone was saying. Lila had a small part and was angry that the director hadn't selected her for one of the starring roles. Norval went backstage after the performance as Lila had directed him to do. There was to be a party, at which she would introduce him to the rest of the cast. But when he arrived in the green room after making his way down a dark, mouldy-smelling corridor in the bowels of the theatre building, she grabbed his arm and dragged him outside, still in her stage makeup, and when they were away from the building and on their way to his car, she burst into tears, because the cast were going to a party at someone's house and they hadn't invited her. She swore the slight was intentional. They didn't like her, she said, because she had talent and they didn't, and one of them in a mean fit had told her that she should try cosmetology for a career. It was a jab at the fact that Lila never went anywhere without
Cosmo
-girl lipstick and eye makeup, while the other theatre girls were experimenting with the Cleopatra look. Either that or going au naturel, blank slates to be made up as their roles demanded.

Norval held Lila in the parking lot, mascara running down her cheeks, his feathers all puffed up because it was clear that Lila needed him. She was quitting school, she said. She couldn't study theatre at this two-bit university, and she would work for a while and then go to a bigger university where they had a good theatre department and graduates got jobs in television commercials and even movies. Norval hadn't actually thought she was very good on stage, but that didn't matter because he believed studying theatre was pointless anyway and what was wrong with cosmetology, although he knew enough not to say this, at least not at that moment. Instead he suggested that they get married.

Lila quickly forgot about the tragedy of her theatre school experience, and became completely engrossed in getting married and the prospects of setting up house with Norval and following him wherever the bank sent him on his climb up through the corporation. Someday, she told him, they would live in, say, Calgary, and he would work at a big main branch, or perhaps head office, and they would build a new house in a new subdivision and their kids would play basketball and the violin, and they would have season tickets to the symphony and Lila would find an agent who would get her work at a real theatre. Norval wasn't sure about that whole scenario, but he was happy with the thought of marrying Lila. For one thing, there was the prospect of frequent sex (right now sex was not nearly frequent enough with Lila living with relatives and Norval sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates). He admired her looks, and her taste in clothes, and she was outgoing and fun. He was happy to turn himself over to her certainty about how marriage should work, because he didn't have a clue.

Well, he knows how it works now. Lila's wish is pretty much his command. Not that he's complaining, not really. What is marriage in middle age but a living arrangement, a contract for comfort, and they have a comfortable home in Juliet, and a partnership with quite a lot of time and money invested in it. Investments of any kind Norval does not take or leave lightly.

This memory of Lila's past in theatre leads him to look at Rachelle's upcoming wedding in a new way. These demands for renovations to the church are really instructions for building a set. It all begins to look like a production in which Rachelle is the star and Lila is the director with a cameo as mother of the bride. And this leads Norval to feel just a little sorry for her, and to think that maybe he has failed her in some way by not being ambitious enough in his own career, by being satisfied with small-town banking, and by not aiming for jobs in progressively larger towns and cities. Norval knows himself well enough to admit that he hasn't really had the desire to be any more successful than he is. He makes a vow to participate more willingly, for Lila's sake, in the orchestration of her wedding production.

He lifts himself off the couch and makes his way to the kitchen, where Lila has his heart-smart breakfast waiting for him. Another reason he should be more generous in his feelings: if it weren't for Lila he'd fill up on bacon and put whipping cream in his coffee. Instead, he has a bowl of colourful fruit salad, followed by bran flakes with skim milk. He's learned to drink his coffee black. Lila eats only the fruit salad. She follows some kind of diet that doesn't allow you to eat anything but fruit before noon.

The two of them sit in the breakfast nook overlooking the backyard and just as Norval takes his first good sip of his morning coffee, Lila looks out the window and says, “Oh my God.”

Norval looks. Under the maple tree is Kyle. Norval's resolve to change his attitude about the wedding quickly dissipates when he sees his daughter's fiancé sleeping or—more accurately—passed out, sprawled on his back on the lawn. Kyle's fly is undone and his pants are not quite as far up on his hips as they should be, as though he relieved himself in the bushes and then just keeled over backwards. Luckily, his boxers are all that Norval can see hanging out, although he's not sure that wouldn't change if he went outside and looked more closely.

“What should we do?” says Lila.

“What should we do,” sighs Norval. “Well, we could bring him inside and lock him in the furnace room and keep him there without food or water until he promises to go away.”

“I'm serious, Norval,” Lila says. “We can't leave him there in broad daylight.”

Norval has to agree.

“Go out and talk to him,” Lila says.

“I have a better idea,” Norval says.

He pushes himself away from the table and climbs the stairs to Rachelle's room. She can do the talking, he thinks, and besides, it wouldn't hurt for her to see her future husband in all his post-binge glory. Not that he expects Rachelle to be in much better shape, but at least she's had the sense to come in and not make a spectacle of herself in the backyard.

He knocks on Rachelle's door and gets no answer. When he pushes the door open he sees that she isn't there. The covers are thrown back on the bed, but no Rachelle. He checks the bathroom, but she isn't there either.

“Oh hell,” he says to himself as he goes back downstairs. He'd dealt with the two of them last night with quite a lot of patience, he thinks, but he's about at the end of it.

“She's not there,” he tells Lila.

He goes through the sun doors to the deck and down the steps and across the yard to where Kyle is sleeping. He pokes him with his bare foot.

“Wake up,” he says, and when Kyle doesn't, he pokes him harder. You might even call it a kick.

Kyle opens his eyes and a look of almost-terror crosses his face when he realizes where he is, and that his fiancée's father is staring down at him. He jumps to his feet, grabbing at his pants when he realizes he's about to lose them. He turns his back to Norval as he zips himself up, and then he takes a deep breath and faces him again. His ball cap is lying on the lawn and he picks it up and adjusts it on his head.

“Don't say anything,” Norval says, “unless you know where my daughter is.”

Norval can see Kyle struggling to remember the night before. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again.

“In her room?” Kyle finally says, hopefully but without much confidence.

Norval shakes his head.

“Have you checked the truck?” Kyle asks.

“No,” says Norval. “How about you make yourself useful and do that?”

He watches Kyle walk around the side of the house, and he waits for him to come back. When he does, Kyle stands at the corner of the house without coming all the way into the backyard and says, “She's not there,” and then he says, “Actually, my truck's not there either.”

“Oh for Christ sake,” Norval says. He turns and goes back in the house, leaving Kyle outside. “You know this marriage is doomed to failure, don't you?” he says to Lila.

Lila looks as though she might cry. Norval doesn't care.

“I'm not kidding. Think about the baby. The poor kid doesn't have a chance.”

She says, “I know they're young—”

Norval interrupts. “Some young people are responsible, Lila. Face it, these two aren't. Neither one of them. The baby would be better off raised by wolves.”

Now Lila is angry. Norval can see he's gone too far.

“You listen here,” she says. She aims one of her manicured fingernails in his direction to help make her point. “I know as well as you this is not a perfect situation. But that baby is our flesh and blood and I'm not going to let it go to be raised by strangers. Besides that, I read an article—in
Chatelaine
, Norval, that's a credible magazine—and girls who give up their babies almost always regret it later. So you'd better make the best of this, because they're getting married and Rachelle is giving the baby up over my dead body.”