Juliet in August (16 page)

Norval walks around to the front of his desk and picks up the fallen bookend. One of the horse's ears is chipped off. This makes the horse look sad, defeated. Like some of his clients, he thinks. And then a picture of the Dolson family pops into his head. A man, his wife, a bunch of kids, all lined up, sad, defeated, and humiliated. Norval blinks, trying to rid himself of the sorry image. What is wrong with him? Not all of his clients are in the red, for Christ's sake. Look at young Lee Torgeson. Norval had worried about what might happen with the old pair gone, but Lee appears to be doing fine. Why can't he think more about the Lee Torgesons in the community, and less about clients like the Dolsons? And Juliet certainly has its share of prosperous businesspeople. It's not like the whole town is on a fast track to destitution.

He calls to Marsha, rather more abruptly than he ever speaks to his staff, and when she comes to the door, he says, “Clean up this mess. I'm going to the café for coffee.” Then he adds the word
please
, ashamed of himself.

He steps outside and walks toward the entrance of the Maple Leaf Café, which used to be the Double Happiness before the Chinese family that owned it moved on. As he passes the street-level window, he looks inside and sees a cap that might be Dale's. And even if it isn't Dale's, he thinks, it's likely the cap of someone else whose finances he knows intimately. He passes the restaurant by. Even though he would love a cup of fresh coffee, he doesn't want to see any of his clients, no matter what their financial situation.

He decides to walk around the block before returning to the bank, grab some air, even though it's already hot. As he passes the garbage stand behind the hotel, a stray dog trying to break into a trash can lifts his head and stares at him. He doesn't recognize the dog, wonders where it came from.

By the time he gets back, the bank is open and Belinda, the part-time teller—or more officially, customer care representative—is in place behind the counter. From the look she gives Norval, he knows that Marsha has filled her in on the morning so far. He apologizes to Marsha for being less than polite when he asked her to pick up the books.

“Oh, you never mind, Norval,” Marsha says. “Dale Patterson can do that to a person. You're entitled. What happened to him, anyway? He looked like the lion with a thorn in his paw, that one from the Bible. Was it Daniel who took the thorn out?”

“Saint Jerome,” says Norval. “Daniel got thrown to the lions. None of them had thorns that I know of.”

“Don't you just know your Bible inside out?” says Marsha.

“Not really,” says Norval. “Just the lion parts.”

“So what did he do to his arm?” Marsha asks again.

“I have no idea. He doesn't tell me his secrets. I'm only his banker.”

At that moment, a woman that he doesn't recognize and her young son come into the bank. Norval tries to switch on his most affable bank manager persona.

“Good morning,” he says. “Welcome. Nice summer day, isn't it?”

The woman looks at Norval, suspicious of his friendly manner. He directs her to Belinda and returns to his office and sits at his desk, on which the books are once again neatly ordered. He sees that Marsha even glued the horse's ear back on. He wipes Rachelle's photograph with a tissue and then puts it in its proper spot.

Through his open door Norval can hear the woman telling Belinda at the teller's counter that her son has seven dollars in pennies and he'd like to open a bank account.

“Seven hundred pennies,” Belinda says to the boy. “What a lot of money. I wonder if you'd like to take your pennies home and wrap them for me in these paper wrappers. That would be fun, wouldn't it?”

“If it's all the same to you,” the mother says, “we'd rather not.”

“But I really can't take all those pennies if they're not wrapped,” Belinda says. “I'm sorry, but that's our policy.”

“Well then,” the woman says, “I'd like to speak to the manager about that policy.”

The manager. That's him, Norval Birch. Norval sighs so loudly, he worries that Marsha and Belinda and the woman and her son can hear him. What is wrong with him, he wonders, this feeling that he's not
handling things
? He'd blame it on Dale Patterson, or Kyle passed out in the backyard, or Lila and her list, except that this feeling has been here from the moment he woke up in the dark with thoughts of a tree falling on the house.

Or maybe it began five years ago when he and Marsha were spread-eagled on the bank floor, the smell of floor wax in his nostrils, his eye fixed on a toothpick that someone had dropped, and he'd marveled at the workmanship, the smooth surface and the perfect points on each end, all that work for something you get free from the counter of any coffee shop. What a crazy thing to think about while you're being robbed.

Or maybe the feeling set in before that—long before—when he stood with Lila in a parking lot in the city, his chest swelling with the thought of himself as her savior. He'd brazenly led her to believe that he was capable, that he had a road map to their future, and that he knew how to read it. Twenty-five years ago that was. Such foolish confidence. Now long gone—and what has replaced it? Nothing. A gaping hole for the wind and sand to blow through.

She's in his doorway now, the woman with the penny complaint. She doesn't wait for an invitation to speak.

“We have a problem, Mr. Birch,” she says.

Crush

Through the waves of heat rising from the surface of the packed roadbed, Blaine Dolson studies Justine, the flag girl. He sees her scan down the road for traffic, and when none appears to be coming, she heads for the portable john. She's supposed to wait for the scheduled breaks, but the foreman appears to be dozing in the cab of his truck. Blaine watches as she leans her flag against the bright blue biffy and steps inside and closes the door.

It's ridiculous, this obsession he has with Justine, but he tells himself it's a fatherly kind of concern. She's the only female on the crew. The other flagman is a boy so shy you can hardly get a word out of him. Blaine doesn't know which of the two gets it worse: Justine because she's a girl, or the other kid because he's so timid. He doesn't care about the boy's whereabouts, though, just Justine's. He watches her
all the time
. When the packer is facing east, she's there in front of him, and when he has to go the other direction, he anticipates the end of the stretch so he can turn his rig around and get her in his line of sight again, her white T-shirt catching the sun. It's as though he's thirteen years old with a crush, only she's not much older than Shiloh and he's definitely old enough to know better.

Where Justine is concerned, Blaine doesn't trust the intentions of a single man on this crew (with the exception of the shy kid, and maybe not even him). Every one of them leers openly at her. Blaine thinks of his wife, and his daughters when they get to be Justine's age. If these men acted the way they talked, they'd all be in jail. And because they've noticed that Justine is friendly toward Blaine, they've taken to making vulgar suggestions in his presence about what she
really wants
. He ignores them as best he can. He doesn't like any of these men, but he knows enough not to let that show. Justine needs a guardian out here—at least that's what he tells himself.

The foreman is no help. A committed alcoholic, he spends most of the time in the cab of his truck either not-so-secretly drinking or trying to recover from the night before. Every once in a while he crawls out and gets ugly with someone who looks at him the wrong way through the cab window. He's downright cruel to the timid kid, and he tore a strip off Justine a few days ago for being late. She'd had car trouble and the foreman himself had got stuck holding the yellow
SLOW
sign for half an hour. When Justine pulled up, the rest of the crew—at least those close enough—waited to see what would happen, getting some kind of sadistic pleasure out of watching the foreman's angry posture, imagining amid the roar of machinery the words he was shouting at Justine, anticipating her humiliation and the tears that were bound to come. But Blaine, who was nearby on the packer, saw Justine's chin go up and her back straighten, and he saw that she was actually taller than the foreman. She didn't seem fazed by whatever it was he said to her, and later at lunch she told Blaine—looking right at the foreman holed up in his truck alone—that she felt sorry for him because he was so short and a pathetic alcoholic to boot. The foreman would have fired her on the spot if he'd overheard that.

Blaine admires Justine's spunk. She's completely different from Vicki, who was so innocent and naive at Justine's age. Vicki even liked to be tickled—still does—and reminded Blaine of a little girl. He remembers the day they were married in the United church in Juliet, how an overwhelming feeling of protectiveness for Vicki sprang out of nowhere as he watched her walk toward him up the aisle in her long white dress. She was not especially delicate, but she was small and she had blue eyes and a mass of curly blond hair. In those days, the way she deferred to him on everything made him feel like marriage was the best medicine going for a man's ego, and that he was doing his job as her husband. He remembers the time shortly after the wedding that she had a flat tire three miles from home and she sat by the side of the road in her car and waited for him to come looking for her, even though she could have walked home in less time than it took for him to realize she was missing. He'd thought it was funny, and told the story often. It was an example of how Vicki
liked
to need him, and he liked to look after her. But as the children came, Shiloh and then the others, he felt the same feeling of protectiveness for them, and as more children arrived there was less and less of it to go around, and he began to grow irritated with Vicki. Sometimes she actually seemed incompetent as the house gathered dust and supper was late and the dishes piled up in the sink until she felt like doing them. Her innocence began to look like an act, a pretense that he thought she should give up.

So why, Blaine wonders, with the sounds of heavy machinery droning through his protective headphones, if he wants Vicki to be more independent, does he not want her to get a job in town? He has nothing against women working. He admires Justine's ability to stand out here in the sun all day and deal with this crew of men who don't really believe in her right to be here. Would he want Vicki working as a flag girl on a road crew? Definitely not. But why not as a clerk in the grocery store, or a receptionist in the insurance office? These are both possibilities that she's raised with him. He uses the kids as his excuse for not being in favor of her working, and it's a legitimate excuse when you consider the cost of babysitting. But the kids aren't the real reason he's so opposed. It all goes back to the responsibility he accepted when they were married, his promise to look after Vicki and whatever family they might have, and his inability to admit that he's failed, that he can't look after them anymore, and that he needs his wife to help put the food on the table.

What would his father think if he were still alive? Blaine knew his father was in the dark ages long after a lot of men had crawled out, but he'd always told Blaine that a woman working was a sure sign of a weak husband. Blaine can well imagine what his father would say about the situation he's in today. He doesn't know himself how he got here, except that he'd let the debt accumulate in good years and was stuck with it when the times turned. Even when Blaine first took over the farm, his father had been there every day telling him he was doing things wrong if Blaine attempted to change anything at all. If he were alive, he'd have his proof. Blaine knows it's not that simple, you can't keep doing things the same way forever, but even if his father was wrong in the nature of his criticisms, Blaine obviously had done
something
wrong to get so far under. It kills him that there's nothing left for his sons, especially Shiloh. He knows he acts sometimes as though Vicki is to blame, like this morning when he was so impatient with her, but he also knows she's not responsible. The real blame goes to culprits so abstract he can't put a face to them—trade agreements and government subsidies and corporate monopolies. He's no economist, and that's what you have to be these days to understand what's going on.

There is one real face to all this, though. It was Norval Birch who froze Blaine's line of credit, and it was Norval who turned down Blaine's refinancing plan, even as he had earlier approved—encouraged—Blaine's accumulation of debt as a modern-day farming practice. Now the banks are making huge profits as Blaine goes broke, and who represents the bank in Juliet if not Norval? Blaine can just see him sitting behind his desk, his salary assured no matter what is happening with his loan clients. When Blaine wakes in the night and Vicki is trying to snuggle up in her flannelette nightie, reminding him of his failed promise to look after her and the kids, he seethes with anger, and he thinks of Norval. He thinks of him in a night-vision of angry colors, blood red and midnight blue. He's always angry these days as the sun burns his neck and he smells the heat and tar and hears the rumble and whine of heavy machinery, and he thinks he's working in the flames of hell, paying for sins he doesn't remember committing. He's angry with people he knows he shouldn't be angry with, confused about men and women and what makes a good husband. Vicki tells him he
is
a good husband in spite of all that's happened, but she's fooling herself.

From his perch on the packer, Blaine can see a car approaching, going fast. Justine's flag is still leaning against the blue biffy. The car doesn't appear to be slowing, and it passes the crew at a dangerous speed. The foreman jumps out of his truck, first shaking a fist after the car, and then apparently looking for Justine and shouting “Where the hell is she?” impossible for anyone to hear amid the construction noise. The biffy door opens and Justine steps out and notices the ranting foreman coming toward her. She picks up her flag and shouts something back, Blaine can't hear what. The foreman is still yelling, stepping toward Justine, just a few feet from her now, with his arms waving and his dwarfish body bouncing with anger. There is no other crew around, Blaine is the closest, and he wonders if he should jump down and intervene.