Five Roses (8 page)

Claire! she called. Because there was Claire's parka tossed on the sofa, arms wide like a cartoon splat. It was her only winter coat. She had to be there.
Claire!

Dirty dishes soaked in dirty water. Claire never washed them until there were no clean ones left. There were three full bottles of olive oil on the counter. On the table lay an income tax form, partly filled out and open.

Later, whenever Fara recalled Claire's kitchen, she hated how specific the details were. Three
bottles of olive oil. Why buy three unless you meant to use them? Why bother with income tax if you were planning to die? Which led to the inevitable thought: maybe Claire hadn't meant to kill herself. Not
for real
. Maybe she was only … pretending? Experimenting? Which meant that Fara, who had a key to her apartment and was supposed to have found her, got there too late.

Over the years, Fara had gone from berating herself to trying to imagine how Claire felt and what she was thinking as she waited to die. Or waited for Fara to find her. The end was always the same. Fara hadn't. Claire had. She was dead. And once she was dead, what did the questions matter?

More stuff heaped on the sidewalk, some of it still-good furniture he could have used if his dad had bothered to pick up the phone and call him.

He climbed the three steps and tried the door, but it was locked. He groped in his pocket for the key. It didn't fit. What the hell? Had his dad changed the lock?

He walked to the end of the street and around the corner to the alley. The back fence was too high to see over the top, but the weathered boards had shrunk with age. He could see through the gaps.

Someone was standing by the window — not his dad but a bigger man. And a lady pointing at the wall. Who were they? Had his dad decided to rent the house only half-renovated?

He was watching so hard he didn't hear the scrape of footsteps and the knock of the cane until old Coady said, “How about that? Your dad sold the house.”

He pretended he hadn't heard, but the words ricocheted in his head. Sold? Sold?
Câlisse de shit de merde!

Old Coady, the wizened turd, horked and said it again.

He shrugged as if he already knew and didn't care. He stepped past Coady and strode away.

Maddy and Yushi always arrived at the market within moments of each other. One would cruise to the bike stand as the other was locking up. Today Maddy had already locked her bike and Yushi still hadn't appeared. Maddy scanned the bike path along the canal and the bridge that crossed it. A man cycled toward her, the hem of his trousers tucked in his socks. A woman walked briskly in a filmy blue dress and running shoes. People were cycling or walking to their jobs downtown — which from this perspective, below the hill of Montreal, was uptown.

Still no Yushi. Not good. Maddy jogged to the back of the indoor market, down the stairs to the basement. She slung her knapsack into her locker and grabbed a white apron from the starched and spotless stack. The staff were supposed to change their apron
tout de suite
if it became at all flecked or stained, though Madame Petitpois would then grill them. If one were handling desserts with care, each of the said desserts inside a fluted cup or cellophane band, how did one manage to get
crème aux framboises
on one's apron?
Hmm, how?

As Maddy tied the strings of the apron behind her back, she glanced at the schedule posted on the wall. Yushi and Geneviève were on breads today. She was on pastries with Cécile. Cécile had to wear shirts with sleeves below her elbows to hide her tattoo of a skeleton. Cécile called Madame Petitpois “Pettypoo.” Any more anal, Cécile said, and her hole would close.

The patisserie was among the best in a city where patisseries were competitive and highly vaunted. The dessert counter, where Maddy waited for a woman to finish conferring on her cellphone, was resplendent with concoctions of puff pastry, genoise, whipped cream, mousse, and marzipan.
“Du chocolat?”
the woman murmured.
“Ou plutôt des fruits?”
The woman could have made the call while she'd stood in line. Now that she was being served, she made everyone behind her wait. Bibbed apron taut across her breasts, clear plastic gloves on, Maddy had to wait, too. Haste was unseemly. Of course, once the woman decided, Maddy was expected to spring into whip-quick action. Urban fact #16: people who made you wait did not like to wait.

Past the dessert counter were the deep wooden shelves stacked with bread. Round, narrow, oblong, square, and braided; rolled, studded, and filled with nuts, seeds, olives, herbs, cheese, and dried fruit. Yushi hadn't arrived yet, and Geneviève still worked alone, shaking open bags, grasping loaves, tugging free her gloves each time to handle the cash. Maddy had heard Geneviève in the morning repeating the names of the breads to herself. She was a pretty young woman with a dimpled chin, the niece of one of the pastry chefs, but too timid to be working with an impatient public. Her cheeks bright with frustration, she'd just tried to shove a round
miche
into a baguette bag. More than a dozen people were waiting to buy bread, shifting their stance, looking past shoulders, checking the time on their phones. There was only a lazy queue of three people at the dessert counter.

“I'm going to help Geneviève,” Maddy told Cécile.

“Pettypoo will kill you.”

“She's downstairs.” Maddy had worked at the patisserie longer than Madame Petitpois. Relations between them were cool but mannerly. Petitpois granted that Madeleine was the oldest and most experienced of her girls. One day Maddy was going to tell her that, at forty-three, she was no longer a girl. Also that Maddy was short for Madzeija. Her name was Polish — no relation to Proust's tea-soaked biscuits. She hadn't told Petitpois yet, because she liked feeling Petitpois was a fool, blinkered by ignorance and outdated values.

The next man in line for breads already held the exact change for a baguette pinched between thumb and finger. Maddy slid an olive
fougasse
into a bag and waited for the bread slicer to judder through a loaf of rye.

Beside her, Geneviève stammered when a customer asked if the flour in their breads was genetically modified.

“No,” Maddy said. “Our flour is milled from heritage grain.” She waved an imaginary wand across the rustic loaves, the rugged crusts.

Then Yushi's slender brown arm with its silver bangle reached across hers for a seed-encrusted bread, and there wasn't enough room for all three of them in the narrow space, added to which Madame Petitpois had appeared, solid and disapproving.

“Excuse me.” Maddy manoeuvred behind Geneviève to return to the dessert counter.

When Maddy was younger, she'd despaired at her bottom-heavy hips and thighs she couldn't cram into jeans. Now she felt comfortable with — and comforted by — her padding. She liked the swirl of skirts around her thighs.
She
wasn't ever going to fall and break her hips. Though walking next to Yushi, she felt like a bowl next to a single-flower vase.

They were heading toward a picnic table beside the canal. When they'd passed the last fruit stall Pierre-Paul, who always winked and joked with Maddy, had flourished two peaches and bowed to present them. Obviously, his wife wasn't working today.

“What did Petitpois say?” Maddy asked. Yushi had been late because the pedals of her bike had stopped turning. Something with the mechanism inside had broken. She'd had to walk to the nearest subway station, which was nowhere near the bike path. Just before break time Petitpois had jerked a commanding finger at Yushi to follow her to the stairway.

Yushi bit into her peach. “Mmm … Pierre-Paul knows his fruit.”

“He's married.” Maddy had played that game often enough. Whatever married men promised, for better or worse they stayed with their wives.

She sat on the picnic table bench as Yushi swung onto the tabletop. Both faced the water, where two teenage girls laughed as they steered a paddleboat in crazy zigzags.

“Petitpois?” Maddy prompted.

“My place of employment could not be expected to accommodate my personal mishaps.” Yushi's tone was even. Only the spiked antennae of her hair radiated annoyance.

“Could not be expected to accommodate?” Maddy scoffed. “That's overkill. You've never been late before.”

“She wanted to be sure that I understood never to be late again.” Yushi leaned forward to eat her peach, juice dripping from her fingers.

“Petitpois is way too strict with you. Where does she get off ?”

Yushi grimaced. “I'd better go back.”

“Already? We just sat down.”

“Pettypoo suggested I make up for my lateness by taking short breaks for a while.”

“How long is a while?” Maddy pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe her fingers.

“Who knows?” Yushi hopped off the table and headed across the grass. Peg-leg jeans and green sneakers. She was so slender she looked frail — until she moved. She had a toughness to her gait and narrow hips. A strange mix of reticence and temerity.

Yesterday, during a lull, Petitpois had tried to give them lessons on how to modulate their voices when pronouncing the names of the desserts.
Tartelettes aux fraises. Lingots. Pavé au chocolat.

Yushi had stretched her lips and bared her teeth in a vicious grin. Ganache, she said with perfect enunciation and emphasis. Then added, Anyone with a bowl and a whisk can make ganache.

Petitpois flushed. She'd hired Yushi to slide baguettes into paper bags and set pastries in boxes, not to show off expertise Petitpois didn't have.

When customers asked about the pastries, Yushi could explain in detail. The genoise was moist because it had been drizzled with syrup.
Crème pâtissière
wasn't made with cream but milk and eggs. One day, when they weren't busy, Yushi had sliced a lump of pink marzipan into discs she flattened and curled like petals, one around the other, fashioning a rose. With skills like that, why was she employed as counter help, letting an officious snob like Petitpois bully her?

Maddy looked at her watch. Another minute and she should get back to work. Her eyes had been following the crazy trajectory of the girls in the paddleboat. Both had blond hair to their shoulders, but she saw now that one was older. Were they mother and daughter, having fun together? She watched, wondering what that felt like.

She sighed and glanced at her watch again.
Okay. Now. Move. Go.

She sauntered back to the market.

“Enjoy the peaches?” Pierre-Paul called from behind his tables heaped high with berries and fruit.

She smiled her thanks but kept walking. He had a weathered tan as if he'd been in the fields, rototilling soil and watering crops. Undo a couple of buttons on his shirt, and she bet the skin beneath was pale and soft.

Stop that.
She mentally slapped her hand.
No more married men.

There was a shorter route home, but Maddy liked cycling along the canal. The water glimmered a rippled reflection of sky. The cluster of picnic tables where the embankment widened had a new batch of origami in bright red. In the spring, when the miniature centrepieces had first appeared, she'd ridden across the grass to see what they were. Someone had poked intricately folded paper between the slats. Grasshoppers, flowers, butterflies with antennae, stiff paper crowns. Maddy wondered if the artist was a man or a woman, young or old. Decorating picnic tables was such a sweet task. Good in itself.

She turned off the canal path, down a low hill to the Pointe, cycled past the side-by-side English and French Catholic churches, angled right at the hockey arena where people voted on election and referendum days. At Wellington she cruised to a stop at the lights. A hooker, her skinny buttocks moulded in a tight skirt, harassed the man on his kitchen chair outside the
dépanneur
. “A cigarette,
tabernac
! Give me a cigarette!” He perched at a tilt, as if his body had been rattled and the bones reset all wrong. She screeched at him and jerked her arm in the air. Maddy would be stoned, too, if she had to stick her face in strange crotches.

Across Wellington she turned into the alley and up ahead saw a man at her fence. Boy, oh boy! If that was one of the guys from the rooming house taking a piss, was she going to yell! How often had she told them the alley wasn't their personal, private latrine?

At the crunch of stones under her tires, the man began to walk away, his bandy legs stepping fast. Maddy slowed, recognizing the older of the boys who used to live in the house next door. What was his name? Ben. She'd been at the outdoor tap, rinsing a bucket, when he'd staggered onto the back deck carrying his brother, whose arms hung like deadweights, head lolling. She'd shouted, What happened? What's wrong? He hadn't answered and then she couldn't see what he was doing, because he'd stooped to the deck with the fence between them. Ben! she'd called, Ben! Sirens were howling down the street, careening to a stop before their houses.

She stood at her gate now, not sure if she should cycle after Ben to ask how he was. She hadn't seen him since the funeral a year ago. She wondered how he felt about his father selling the house. After the suicide, his father had moved away, leaving the house empty. People had assumed he would eventually return — or give the house to Ben.

That day, when she'd seen the couple on the sidewalk, she'd had no idea they were visiting the house. There was never a For Sale sign. Everyone along the street was surprised when they saw a stranger hauling bags and furniture onto the sidewalk, dumping out the house. Even if Ben's father had needed the money and Ben couldn't afford to buy the house upfront, families usually came to an arrangement.

Poor Ben, she thought. Exiled to the alley. How he must resent the new neighbours for living in the house that should have been his. How he must hate them.

She watched him walk to the end of the alley, unlocked her gate, and wheeled her bike into the yard.

Maddy woke, blinking at the slit of light between the curtains she hadn't fully closed last night. A bird was twittering in the tree outside her window and a car drove past, but the house sounded empty. No running water, no footsteps. Even though it was still early on a Saturday, Bronislav and Andrei must already have left. She didn't know if they'd gone to work or if they'd only stepped out. She belted her robe over the T-shirt she wore to sleep. If they came home, she would dress. In the meantime, this was her day off.

Coffee in hand, she ambled out to the deck. Many seasons of sun and rain had made the wicker chair swell and shrink, and the rattan creaked as she sat. The chair was still comfortable, still her favourite chair, but the armrest was wobbly, so she kept her fingers on the mug.

Jim was in the grass, a long-haired orange tom doing his sphinx act. Shoulders and spine regal, he kept his gaze on the distant horizon — which was, however, blocked by the wood fence.

“Jim,” she said. A stone sphinx, he ignored her.

Saturday off … what a treat. The air was warm, the sky a rich blue with fluffy, storybook clouds. A light breeze made the towering trees along the alley rustle. From inside the new neighbours' house, she heard, “Frédéric, come here!”

Maddy imagined him stopping what he was doing to see what she wanted. Six feet tall and obedient.

Again she heard, “Fred!”

Ah … not so obedient. It would be a change, having a couple living in the house everyone along the street had gotten used to thinking was abandoned.
Abandoned
felt fitting after a suicide. Who would even want to live in a house where there had been a suicide? She hoped the real estate agent had told the new people.

In the grass Jim had grown yet more still. His ears were alert. A squirrel had scrabbled under the gate with a curve of bagel it now sat upright to nibble. The fur on Jim's back rippled the instant before he charged. The squirrel pounced up the fence, scampered a few bounds, and pivoted to scold the nasty cat for making it drop its piece of bagel.

“Jim,” Maddy said.

He blinked at the dahlias, miffed that she'd witnessed his hunting interruptus.