Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (33 page)

He remembered her as a woman who spent much of her time planning diets of one sort or another: the grapefruit-only diet, the no-bread diet, the sugar-free diet, and various others with no particular name. All of them defined by a lack. She’d never been a great cook, but she always made sure there was food on the table for Dan and Leyla. Her specialty was peas in gravy on white bread, with greasy ground beef mixed in. Her version of a balanced meal, no doubt. Some days there might be mashed potatoes instead of the sliced bread with its tan leathery borders. Afterwards, orange fat lay congealed at the bottom of the electric frying pan — her one frivolity — until its rounded corners slid under the iridescent soap bubbles in the sink. Most of her days were spent in silence, which was just as well because when she spoke people looked in fright at the sound of her voice, like a whoopee cushion on Prozac. But more than anything, he remembered her as a woman who had taken in another woman’s child to raise as her own.

Someone — probably Leyla — had propped a chair in the corner. He dragged it close and sat next to her. Here she was, his aunt who had always been kind, always accepting. His aunt, who had spent thirty years selling tickets at the movie theatre before retiring on a government pension. Goodbye and thanks for a job well done. When she was younger she’d dreamed of reinventing herself by opening the classifieds to see what fascinating job she could apply for that might just blow her horizons wide open and make all her dreams come true. What’ll it be next: waitress at Kresge’s Red Grill or counter help at Herb’s Bowl-a-Rama? Another time it was a day cashier at Woolworth’s followed by a stint as stock clerk at Zeller’s. The options were stupefying. Maybe she thought they’d go on forever, but one day they ran out and she ended up where she began, dying of emphysema, her life and choices behind her forever.

Dan leaned over the bed, taking care not to bump the fat green cylinder that pumped itself out via the long thin tube attached over her head and feeding into her nostrils. Her skin was wrinkled and translucent, as if, oxygen-starved, her body had subsisted on a diet of light. Her hands were swollen like pudgy starfish.

Here, then, was the salt of the earth. It didn’t get any better or purer.

Eyelids flickered open, eyes cornflower blue. “Hello, Danny,” she said, as though she’d seen him only a short while before.

“Hello, Auntie.”

“My goodness, you look awfully good. Handsome as ever. It’s so nice to see you home again.”

The sentence must have exceeded her lung capacity, because Dan heard the intake of breath, the sharp rasp behind the words.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. “Is Leyla doing a good job of looking after you?”

She spoke a little slower, pacing herself. “Oh, don’t you worry — she’s doing a good job. You know what she’s like.” She took a long pull on her oxygen.

There was a peaceful sound to her voice. Or maybe it was resignation — he’d never known her to be a fighter. She would just as easily go along with whatever Death had in store for her as a request for supper to be made for visitors. Compliance — her greatest virtue — was one and the same with her.

They spoke for ten minutes before Dan felt her tiring. She wouldn’t let him go, hanging onto him as long as she could. “I’ll come back again tomorrow,” he promised.

She shook her head. She needed more of him right now. “Will you go out to visit his grave while you’re here?” she asked, squeezing his hand as though encouraging a small boy about to tackle a very big task.

“Sure.” He turned his eyes to hers. He hadn’t intended to go to the cemetery and knew he probably wouldn’t keep his word, but she wanted him to say yes. “And maybe hers, too.”

“You haven’t been out for a long time,” she said, heaping on the reasons to go now that she’d got him to say he would, just as she’d once made him promise never to drink, smoke, or swear.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

“You weren’t so lucky when it came to parents,” she said.

“I had you,” Dan said, resting his hand on her arm.

“Still do.” Her eyes teared up a little. “He loved you too, you know. Even though you thought he didn’t.” She took another pull on the oxygen.

Dan shook his head. “I don’t know.”

With all the presence she could summon, she gazed directly at him. “He did,” she insisted.

Dan smiled indulgently. “Maybe I didn’t understand him. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now.”

“Doesn’t it matter to you?” she asked. She was silent for a while. “I think you’re right. Maybe you never understood your father.” Her eyes carried a look of well-worn sorrow.

“You knew him better than I did,” Dan managed.
Don’t,
he told himself.
Don’t argue with a dying woman
.

“It broke his heart when you left.” She smiled pityingly, as though she knew she would hurt him by saying this. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

Dan went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “I had to go. He always seemed so angry. I never knew why. At the time, I thought he hated me.”

“Yes,” his aunt said, her eyes a long way off. “He was an angry man. But it wasn’t you he hated.” She sniffled. “She was no angel either. Your mum, I mean. She went out and drank and hung around with god knows who half the night. No, she was no angel herself. You wouldn’t remember — you were just a little kid, Daniel.”

Something boomed in the distance, a prelude to doom, that well-worn fiddler’s march to the scaffold. There was a worn quality to her voice, water rushing against a shore. The memories were returning, like some half-forgotten love affair. Only the story ended in death — the first by pneumonia, the other through self-destruction.

“It broke my heart watching him drink himself to death. Though for a few years he tried hard not to — for you.” Dan gave her a sharp look, but she caught him. “Yes, for you. Maybe to make it up to her, too,” she allowed. “But you can’t change the past. I just wish you’d known he loved you, no matter what he felt about himself. No — it wasn’t you he hated. It was only himself.”

Her voice had gone quiet. Dan leaned in to hear her better. He saw his father as a thoughtless man who destroyed the things he loved. Then he saw himself kicking at Ralph and screaming at Ked in his impatience, wondering again what drove him to do those things.

“They were arguing over you,” she said. “He said, ‘Christine, you shouldn’t be going out with a small child in the house.’ And him working till all hours, and it being Christmas too, but your mum was drunk and he couldn’t stop her.” She paused for a long time before she continued. “She went out somewhere — the bar probably — we never found out. But she went out. He locked the door, as he did every night, and went to bed. I guess he thought she had a key. Or maybe he thought he’d wake up and let her in, but he didn’t hear her … if she knocked.” She was looking off now, not talking to him but to the past, the people she saw there. “We found her nearly froze to death on the doorstep in the morning. He was never the same after she died. Never the same.”

Dan could hardly breathe. The dream came back to him, the one with the Christmas ornament and the glittery tree and the strange scratching sound at the door. The door his father had locked when his mother left and not opened for her in time. He looked at his aunt folded into the covers, vanishing before his eyes, into sleep, into time. “He locked her out? In the cold?”

Her eyes turned to him. “He locked her out of the house. Maybe he thought she’d go and stay with her sister, but she didn’t.”

She finished her tale of old sorrow and lay back on the pillow, eyes pleading with him to let her be, as though she’d finally done her work and might now go to a much-deserved sleep, forever to forget what she had told him.

Dan glanced up at the dancing neon of girls kicking up their legs and waving top hats while a floating martini poured itself endlessly onto the sidewalk. He’d promised his aunt he’d visit his father’s grave, and perhaps this was it. He caught his breath and ducked inside.

The interior smelled of litter and broken hearts. It was a commoner’s pub, but the noise was an uncommon racket. As taverns went, the Colson lay between a back alley asylum for life’s unwanted-unwashed and one of those annoying modern-day wonders bent on fusing good cheer, good times, and good friends by invoking the holy trinity of Darts, Karaoke, and Trivia, with quizzes about dead Motown artists and quick-time sports statistics that interested no one but the poor sods who surprised themselves silly by knowing the answers in real time:
Hey, Bernie! Next round’s on me!

This one was a simple watering hole for the working men and women looking for a chance to put up their feet, catch their breath, recount the day’s troubles and have a cold one, two, four or more, to help shorten the hours as best they could. The camaraderie was cheap, and for the most part you got what you paid for. As for gizmos and gadgets, the condom dispenser outside the “Gents” took first prize over the ATM affixed to the “Ladies.”

Jukeboxes had gone out of style long before the compact disc killed vinyl, but this one boasted an impressive relic, an antique by any standards, sitting over in the darkened corner behind an unused bar. Now and then, one of the faithful would walk over with a confident smile —
This one’s for all the boys in shaft number 3!
— fish around in his pockets and toss in a slug, punching the litany of numbers like Moses transcribing the stone tablets for God’s Chosen. Good old Sudbury, thirty years on and still happily awash in the cat-gut twang of Freddy Fender and Conway Twitty, second only to the power chords of Bachman Turner Overdrive. Three minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure golden oldie pleasure. Just another Sudbury Saturday night. Old Tom and his PEI stompers had it right: Inco, bingo, and getting stinko was pretty much all there was on the menu.

Dan took a seat in the shadows. He was too late for day prices, but that was probably just as well — he wasn’t planning on staying long. A drink or two at most. He looked around the room where his father had spent so many hours. How many drinks had it taken him to reach that place where it all stopped mattering, and the wife he’d killed without meaning to appeared before him with a smile and a forgiving kiss?

The bartender stood behind his dispensary, a dry cloth over one shoulder, pouring drink with the tireless faith of a priest in the confessional keeping watch over his flock by night. On the countertop a tray overflowed with dimpled beer steins, gold up to here, white froth above the cut, and all for a tinker’s dam. He added one to the count and pulled another.

Behind Dan, a fat blonde laughed a high glossy trill, her table covered in empty glasses. Her look said trash but her saucy eyes said she could see the cheque good at any bank. Her smile was a retina-blinding flash of good times and fun company, and maybe more if you played your cards her way. She reached for a cigarette, lit up, and tossed the deadened stick into a tray overflowing with burnt match ends and bent stubs like charnel house bones.
What No Smoking sign was that, dearie?

A grubby one-armed man looked over at the blonde, calculating the moves in her direction. He paused, Casanova on the steps of the Vatican considering coming out of retirement to try his hand at eternal beauty one last time. A maturer man now, holding back a moment where once he would have pounced.

And suddenly Dan saw her, floating between tables, tray raised in a silent blessing. The Angel of Mercy who never spilled a drop as she poured her beatitude from one vessel to another: Marilyn’s cleavage, but with Maggie Smith’s face, and aware to the penny how much every inch was worth. A smile extended long enough to hear his request and return to the bar. Time for niceties later, if required.

He could still recall his last visit: he’d been thirteen, not quite fourteen. The doorman loomed like a refugee from a disreputable sideshow, looking him up and down before pronouncing Dan invisible and turning away in boredom. The whole time he was inside Dan waited for someone to tell him to leave, if not to pick him up by his scruff and toss him freeform through the door, while he scoured the room for a sign of the old man.

This was after his father had taken to drink again following the years of uneasy sobriety — the effects of a strike that had gone on past being amusing, the pleasures of idle afternoons long since worn thin. In their place, a bone-wearying boredom had set in along with occasional flashes of rage at “the man” — sometimes elevated to “the fucking man” — exacerbated by the bottle he talked to day and night. It had taken Dan a while to understand that his father wasn’t referring to a specific man, but a collective one composed of bosses and managers and mine owners who “day after frigging day” conspired to keep him from his rightful place of employment under the ground.

No matter that he cursed the very same man just as thoroughly when there was no strike on. What the young Dan suspected, and eventually understood, was that his father hated things as much when they went smoothly as when they didn’t. And when it came down to it, he pretty much hated all things equally, no questions asked.

That night, he’d found his father sitting alone in a corner nursing a whiskey on a table that held three empty glasses and a plastic-framed menu boasting that
The Best Eat Here!
A morose man, weaned in silence and hard times, sipping at his drink without a word. Now that Dan thought about it, it might have been around the anniversary of his mother’s death, probably why his aunt had been even more insistent than usual that he find his father and bring him home.

That night Dan found him wrapped in his all-weather coat, a no-colour garment that smelled of tar and fish, with rips along the seam where the insulation had fallen out, like something bludgeoned to death with a tire iron. Loneliness was never pretty, even when it dressed up for a Saturday night, and it was seldom inviting to anyone on the outside.

When Dan tried to coax him home, his father looked murder at him. To Stuart Sharp, home was never where the heart lay, no matter how dark and stormy the world outside. When Dan asked why he wanted to sit there drinking alone, his father replied with all the silence in the world. It was what he did best, after all.