One Year in Coal Harbor (6 page)

“Or doesn’t pronounce the
t
in
often
,” I added.

“Oh yeah, that makes me crazy too,” said Miss Bowzer, lighting a cigarette and puffing the smoke at the ceiling.

I felt better already.

“Anyhow, I get it,” said Miss Bowzer contemplatively. “When I was a teenager I thought I was never going to have a boyfriend. All my friends had boyfriends but
me. I thought it meant I was ugly or had a rotten personality or something. Or there was something wrong with my femaleness. Like maybe the other girls had natural female wiles I lacked and everyone knew it. Then I ended up with the most sought-after guy in town.”

“Is it anyone I know?” I couldn’t imagine Miss Bowzer with anyone but Uncle Jack.

“Oh, he’s long gone now. I don’t know what he’s doing. His family moved down to Duncan when he turned seventeen. So he didn’t even graduate with us. His name was Dan Sneild.”

“That sounds like a made-up villain’s name.”

“Yes,” she said, stopping her chopping, stubbing out her cigarette and pondering it. “He looked like a villain too. That was probably a lot of his appeal. He drove around town on a motorcycle, revving the engine. It was like a mating call. It brought girls out to the street. But he wasn’t looking for them, he was looking for me.”

She gazed back through time with a satisfied glow.

“You’re so beautiful! You must have been
really
beautiful back then,” I exclaimed without thinking and then realized how it sounded and my face got warm. But Miss Bowzer didn’t mind. She looked at my pink cheeks and laughed and suddenly it was all right between us again.

“Anyhow, he made an excellent first boyfriend. He was romantic in the way girls are romantic, which back then I figured was what romance was supposed to be. He used
to buy me used books of poetry and any flowers he could get at the general store. He had a job weekends at the cannery, where his dad was a supervisor. But he never smelled like fish. And he was the only boy in town who didn’t smell like Hai Karate. He smelled like the sea.” She smiled again. “Not fish. The sea, you know?”

I nodded. My dad comes home at night smelling like salt and the wind. “What was Hai Karate?”

“Oh, a kind of aftershave favored by sixteen-year-old boys when I was growing up. School dances were nearly unbearable because of it. We’d ride all over the back roads in springtime on that motorcycle. We used to go into the B and B your mom works at. It was empty and abandoned then. Just a big old abandoned wilderness farm and we’d sit on the front porch and pretend all we surveyed was ours: the B and B, all the surrounding hills and mountains, all the quiet. I thought, Wouldn’t it be something to be part of that great stillness? Like no matter how busy I got, I would be surrounded by and protected by and inside of it and it would be in me too then so I would always have it. Dan didn’t get that part when I rattled on about it but he said it would be cool to own some cows. He used to say he was going to make a lot of money and come back and buy it for us someday and we’d talk about the rooms and what would be where and I used to decorate it in my head. I didn’t see how we’d have space to run a B and B, what with all the children we’d be having.
I planned on twelve. Ha!” she barked, and for a moment looked sad. “My mother had decorating magazines and I’d pore over them. I loved the idea of it so much, I really thought it would happen. I had every room decorated in my mind. I could tell you in detail how they looked. Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I lie in bed and go over them, detail by detail. But anyhow, now Miss Clarice owns it and that’s that,” she finished abruptly, and wiped her hands on her apron briskly as if wiping off such nonsense and went back to cutting up potatoes.

We chopped companionably for a bit and then she said, “Anyhow, that’s water under the bridge. The point I was trying to make was that everyone makes a friend eventually, Primrose.”

But like most good conversations we had strayed so far from the original point that trying to return to it was superfluous.

“Maybe,” I said noncommittally.

“Just wait, friends come from unlikely places. Just when you think you’re alone, one shows up.”

I nodded. “Oh, by the way, Uncle Jack said the
boeuf bourguignon
was tasty but probably a one-dish wonder. That the real test would be how you did a
croque monsieur
.” This was the only other French recipe I could think of off the top of my head.

Miss Bowzer dropped her dreamy look and slammed her knife down sideways on the cutting board. “
CROQUE
MONSIEUR?
He doesn’t think I can handle a
croque monsieur
? Doesn’t he know that’s a grilled cheese sandwich? No, of course he doesn’t know. And he thinks he can open a high-end restaurant to rival me?”

“I don’t think he wants to be your rival—” I began.

“Where is he? Where is he right now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sliding off my stool and making for the door. “Probably across the street working on his restaurant.”

“You go over there right now and tell him supper is on the way.”

I ran happily across the street. Inside his new place, Uncle Jack was covered in plaster dust as usual.

“Miss Bowzer is making you a
croque monsieur
for dinner and bringing it over,” I said.

“What? I just had lunch two hours ago. Why is she making me a, what did you call it?”

“
Croque monsieur
. It’s a grilled cheese sandwich. I think it’s awfully nice of her, busy as she is.”

“Well, of course it’s
nice
,” said Uncle Jack. “I just don’t understand why she’s suddenly …”

But I was out the door before he could finish that thought. Let him ask her himself.

I went home and was lying on my bed, listening to the ticking of the clock in the empty house, staring at the ceiling and wishing one of my parents would come back, when the phone rang. It was Evie.

“Primrose, I have the best surprise for you. Remember we said we had a surprise but it kind of got forgotten what with …”

“Yes,” I said. I was happy to hear some life in Evie again.

“Well, the surprise comes tomorrow. At least it’s supposed to. Can you come over after school and then go to dinner at The Girl on the Red Swing with us?”

“That would be GREAT,” I said. I was going to tell her about how I could no longer take another afternoon of Eleanor or the echoing emptiness of our house after school. But she rattled on excitedly and I could tell she wasn’t paying attention to my end of the conversation.

“
Guess
who is—”

“EVIE!” I heard Bert say in the background. “You’re gonna give it away.”

“You’re right, Bert. Never mind,” said Evie, and hung up.

I
WAS VERY EXCITED
the next day and couldn’t wait for school to let out. I wondered if the surprise was a new dog, although it seemed a little
soon
. I had to go home and walk Mallomar and feed and water her and do homework and I threw together a casserole and put it in the oven for my mom as a surprise. Miss Clarice gives my mother all the jobs that involve heavy grunt work and she gets home pretty tired. Then finally, done with everything, I more or less ran all the way to Bert and Evie’s.

I knocked on their door and as it opened I instinctively looked down, searching for a cockapoo. Instead I saw a pair of enormous tennis shoes. When my eyes traveled back up I found they belonged to a huge teenage boy. Bert and Evie’d gotten a new foster child! I was so pleased
for them. I knew they had worried they wouldn’t be given any, living all the way out in the sticks.

He was about twice as tall as Bert and Evie and had a strange face. It was too flat and his eyes were a bit too wide apart and the bridge of his nose, like the planes of his face, was a little too flat. It gave him the look of someone who had been hit head-on by a frying pan. He also looked like he was about to cry and at first I thought I’d come at a bad time, but later, when he kept looking exactly the same, I realized it was just the configuration of his features. I thought this was unfortunate for him until I realized it might work in his favor among people who are quick to pity. I wondered if a kindly universe had taken this into consideration upon his birth and declared, He will have a childhood that sucks, but he will be given a face that inspires pity even among foster parents not given to feeling it often. By now I knew that I had lucked out, having Bert and Evie as foster parents. That not all foster parents were kind and generous. Sometimes people took kids in for the money the government gave them for doing so and the kids suffered for it, being the unwanted houseguests attached to the monthly check. Bert and Evie had explained this to me and that they had to be especially careful and sensitive when they took someone in because some kids had not only had a harrowing home life with their real families but subsequently with foster families and had become like feral dogs that feel
they must be wary and protective of their space at all times. It made Bert and Evie twice as nurturing. Although Evie had told me once that “you don’t want to burden a kid with this, neither. Because not all of them can handle more than they got served up on their plate already. You just got to keep your expansive feelings in check and see what you can do for them that don’t require them having to respond more than they want. And sometimes you don’t get them but for a few weeks anyhow, so you don’t want to burden them with attachments they won’t be allowed or even want to keep. Some have learned to look only forward because looking back hasn’t been real productive for them. It’s a fine line between nurturing and burdening. Like overwatering a houseplant. You don’t want to do that or let it dry up, either.”

I was looking blankly at this boy now, wondering what category he would fall into, the nurtured or burdened by our attention. Then Evie burst into the room, running with her short little wobbly steps on her ever-present high heels.

“Is that Primrose?” she squealed. “Oh, Primrose, look who arrived this afternoon!”

“Hi,” I said finally, because this boy and I had been staring at each other as if we were on opposite sides of a window without benefit of sound.

“Hi,” he said back.

“IT’S KED!” screamed Evie.

“Don’t scream, Evie, you’re going to frighten him,” said Bert, shuffling in from the den.

“I’m just so excited,” said Evie. “Primrose, this is Ked Schneider.”

And Ked looked down and gave her the kindliest possible smile. It’s amazing, I thought, how some people come through such things with their kindliness intact. He didn’t look like you might expect, sullen or snappish or feral.

“Now let’s go sit and have some iced tea,” said Evie. “I’ve told Ked all about you.”

“Mostly you’re what she’s talked about since I got here,” said Ked shyly. “You were in foster care too.”

“Yep,” I said, but I was thinking, Well, I was in
Evie’s and Bert’s
care. It was almost impossible to think of them generically.

We all sat down but we couldn’t think of anything to say next. Bert rescued the situation by hauling me to the bathroom and showing me how he’d started to recaulk the bathtub. I could see he was doing a very good job of it and keeping a straight line, which, he explained, is hard to do. There was a small bedroom that was Ked’s now and I noticed that the door was closed and I was betting that Bert or Evie had closed it to give him the dignity of a private room that people didn’t go barging into uninvited. They had done the same for me when I’d lived with them in Nanaimo.

After I’d complimented Bert on the caulking we went back to the living room with our iced tea. Everyone’s glasses were sweating because Evie kept the heat up pretty high in the double-wide. The glasses were dripping a bit and I had to keep putting mine down on the napkin provided. I could tell that Ked was worrying about leaving rings on the coffee table because he kept picking his up and surreptitiously wiping where it had been with his napkin. It showed he had been with somebody who had taken the trouble to teach him not to leave wet rings on other people’s furniture. Finally his napkin was all wet and he took the corner of his hoodie and wiped the table, making it look like he was just reaching his hand to his glass and the hoodie happened to follow. I wanted to put him out of his misery by letting him know the table wasn’t real wood but I couldn’t think how to say anything without calling attention to the whole thing and making it worse and Evie was in a state of high excitement and didn’t notice and Bert had gone to the kitchen to get some pretzels.