Fire in the Firefly (25 page)
Read Fire in the Firefly Online
Authors: Scott Gardiner
Roebuck signals for the bill. The last of his
full-time
staff have now left the building. He's just waiting for the waiter to bring him back his credit card.
“I just said that,” Lily says.
“What?”
“I'm not really meeting anybody.”
“Oh.”
He is not the sharpest today. Roebuck rubs his eyes. “Did you just quote William Blake?”
“
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
Lily's eyes crinkle. “My corruption progresses.”
Here's another way to see itâfrom the flip sideâfrom the perspective of
forgiveness
. Forgiveness is best defined as the cancellation of debt. What
forgiveness
represents, in other words, is the absolution of grievance. On the surface you would think that this is the last thing we'd want. Imagine the economy if all that debt was written off! But forgiveness is a powerful motivator. We can't afford to ignore it. Instead, what we want to do is leverage.
Who do we want our consumer to forgive? Herself, of course!
Forgiveness, therefore, is our final
co-efficient
.
Now let's pull it all together.
Our aim is to assure our customer that she has every reason to forgive herself because her grievance is legitimate. It justifies the
compensation
she will award herself by purchasing our product.
That, my young friends, is the virtuous circle of
twenty-first
-century marketing. Within that cycle, the function of advertising is to provide the spark, the catalystâthe push that gets the wheel turning.
Now then, whose shoulder do we put to the wheel?
Roebuck sleeps ten hours.
He has never woken up before in Lily's bed, and it's a shock.
“You conked out.”
“
What time is it?”
“Early. I've been poking at you.” A red sun is coming through the window straight into his eyes.
“How early?”
“
Dawn-ish
.”
“What time?”
“A little before six. You passed out sooner than I hoped.”
Roebuck is still
half-asleep
, but remembers a certain level of activity. “Did I disappoint?” He yawns.
“You never disappoint. On the other hand, you didn't stay awake very long.”
She has slipped out of bed and wrapped herself in a blinding white robe. “Iâll make coffee,” she says handing him his phone.
Roebuck dials the moment she has left the room. No messages. He sinks back into the pillow. Lily reappears with two mugs of coffee and a plate of buttered scones.
“I get you for another hour,” she says. “Then you are allowed to go.”
There's a new message blinking on the home phone. Anne's voice. “Hello! Hey! Pick up.” A few beats of silence. “You must be in the shower. Call before you leave.”
Anne assumesâcorrectlyâthat because she and the kids are awake before 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning, her husband will also be up. Roebuck dials the cottage number. He knows she has her cellphone, but it's tradition to use the ancient bakelite unit that in former times connected to a party line. She doesn't ask him why he didn't answer earlier.
“I was in the shower,” Roebuck says.
“I called half an hour ago.”
Anne tells him to pick up a bottle of Ripasso. She forgot to do that and the liquor store in town is useless. Roebuck reminds her that even in the city, most liquor stores don't open until ten.
“Then you'll be here by lunch. That's fine.”
After such an earnest sleep, Roebuck isn't tired but parts of him still ache. There was traffic in the city, but now it's moving along. He pulls into a Tim Hortons and treats himself to a vat of
double-double
and a little stretching walk around the parking lot. It's funny, almost, but Lily and Yasmin have cramped the same muscles. The weather is fine; northbound traffic light. Roebuck switches off the sound and passes the miles in contemplation of
need
, that keenly verbal noun
.
He stops in town to buy the promised Chelsea buns and a dozen butter tarts. All the handy parking spots are taken; he has a fair walk down to the landing. He should have called Anne from the bakery.
“I'm here,” he says. “So are the bugs.”
“Yes.”
He contemplates retreating up the hill to wait in the car, but decides to tough it out. By the time he spots them rounding the mouth of the bay, Roebuck is wishing he'd stayed in the car. Zach is standing next to Anne on the passenger seat, gripping the windshield like a maniac.
Roebuck hands his son the bakery boxes and tosses his
carry-on
into the stern. “Where are the girls?”
“Making pancakes.” Anne's tone makes it clear they should be getting back as rapidly as possible.
“I bought Chelsea buns,” he says, slapping his hundredth mosquito.
“Get in.”
It's a short ride to the island. The bugs are blown away once the boat is up to plane. Anne's cottage is perched on the highest point of land; almost always there's a breeze. Mosquitoes this time of year are not normally much of a concern. Roebuck wonders about global warming.
“Did you get the wine?”
“I did.”
The kitchen is a disaster; the stove is
cherry-red
, though nothing is actually aflame. Katie greets her father passionately. “Morgan broke
all
the eggs!”
“I have Chelsea buns!” says Roebuck.
Anne begins to sweep away the flour he has tracked across the floorboards. “I was going to have you barbecue a rack of lamb,” she says, “but I think the bugs are going to be a problem.” She considers. “Maybe I'll upgrade the kids' spaghetti into something more Bolognese, and we'll all have that. Yes,” she says, deciding. “That still goes with the wine.”
“It's just bugs,” Roebuck tells her. “The smoke will keep them off.”
He will have cause, come evening, to regret this bravado.
Meanwhile, the day passes normally for a weekend at this juncture of the season. The lake is still warm enough for swimming, but the mosquitoes, though fairly mild until the sun goes down, remain a presence. A few chores need seeing to down around the dock, some leaves need raking, but for the most part it's an indoors stay. The kids watch videos until the television is shut off, forbidden, and replaced with board games, after which the acrimony rises sharply. Morgan and her violin are sent off to practice in the sleeping cabin. Anne and Roebuck monitor their emails. “Yasmin thinks we'll get the Silverstein contract,” Anne says, busy at her keyboard. “She ran into Belinda Silverstein yesterday on Cumberland.”
“Getting her nails done?”
“What's it to you?”
“You're right. Sorry. Excellent news,” he says, “about the Silverstein job.”
Sure enough, when the sun begins to sink, the mosquitoes rise in humming waves. Roebuck is committed to the lamb. He bundles up, tucks his pants into his socks, rolls down his shirtsleeves and methodically buttons cuffs. He has doused himself in bug repellent, but they find a way in anyway. Each time he tries escaping back indoors, a cloud of insects follows. Roebuck is told either stay in or stay out, but not to let the bugs into the house.
Notwithstanding, the lamb makes it to the table in a perfect
state of doneness. The Ripasso is a flawless match; Roebuck in his wisdom has produced a second bottle. The kids are quietly content with their spaghetti. It's a relief to all of them that Morgan has packed her instrument back into its case.
“I'm glad you're here,” Anne says.
“Me too.” Roebuck fingers the swelling on his neck.
He endures a new attack at bedtime while lighting the children's way to the bunkie, flashlight in one hand, a jug of drinking water in the other. It's ridiculously uncomfortable having no hands free to swat. They spend the next ten minutes sowing bloody vengeance on every last mosquito trapped inside.
Unlike Anne, Roebuck has never acquired an immunity. As far as he's concerned it's because the bugs target him and leave her beâand maybe there's some truth to thatâbut even when she does get bitten, Anne never swells or itches. Roebuck does. Fortunately, this time, there's nothing too serious on the visible parts of his face, but his fingers comes away with smears of pink when he probes the back of his neck.
“Don't scratch,” Anne says. “I'll get the lotion. Kids okay?”
“I told them they had to have the lights out by
nine-thirty
or I'd cut the power. The good news, though, is that the bugs will keep them penned in until morning. I'll go check on them later,” he says dabbing his neck.
“You're a good dad. Don't scratch.”
Anne has put on a bathrobe and got herself ready for bed before administering his ointment. “Take your shirt off.”
Roebuck examines himself in the mirror. The parts he can see don't seem so bad.
“Your back looks sore. Lie down.”
He stretches out face down as instructed. “A couple of bad ones here,” Anne says, tracing a finger down the cleft between his shoulders. “You'll live.” He hears the sound of the bottle being shaken, then the coolness of the lotion on his skin. The bed moves as Anne shifts position. “Hold still. I'm getting some Kleenex.” The mattress bumps, and then bumps again when she returns. She has climbed on top, her legs on either side of him.
“You did say the kids were asleep?”
It takes him a few seconds to understand that his wife is no longer in her robe.
“Turn over,” Anne says.
It has been so long, between them, that it feels for Roebuck almost like being with another woman. On the other hand it is extraordinarily, inherently familiar; that grace that comes with years. “Mmm,” she says a little later. “Why did we stop doing that?”