The Birthday Lunch (23 page)

Hal wasn’t blind—he saw them coming, the Young Turks who took over the pharmaceutical business and changed the rules. Out went the casual, friendly approach. The Young Turks were competitive, cool, clinical. With their science degrees, they might have just as well worn lab coats over their pin-striped suits, the way they set up charts and other paraphernalia in hotel meeting rooms where they gave lectures while waiters served a meal. Hal couldn’t compete with their self-possession and authority. Ambushed by change that left him far behind, he was ashamed to go home and spent weekends drinking in one grubby motel after another, sleeping off the hangover in a single bed.

Lily finally brought this charade—as she called it—to a stop. She told Hal if he didn’t come to his senses, she would leave him. Matt was in law school and she and Claudia would move to Halifax and stay with her nursing-school friend, Beryl Saunders, until she found a job in a doctor’s office. Squank O’Donnell would provide a reference. At the mention of Squank, Hal saw his reputation, such as it was, going down the drain. Reputation had never mattered to his father but it mattered to Grace who had brought up her sons to make a good impression and guard their reputations. Putting up a good front was what it came down to, no matter how much disappointment and disgrace curdled your life.

When Hal asked if she was leaving him because Merck had let him go, Lily told him No, she was leaving him because she was tired of propping him up and it was time Hal cut the
motel binges, stopped feeling sorry for himself and found another job. Hal pulled himself together: he passed the real estate exams, set up a brokerage business at Fox Hill and began selling rural properties. There wasn’t much money to be made but there was enough to pay the bills and there was no more talk of Lily moving to Halifax. When Grace McNab died and the estate was settled, Hal quit real estate and used his inheritance to buy Ernie Thompson’s store; a year later Lou Pritchard died and the sisters used their inheritance to buy the Old Steadman House.

Hal knows that if it hadn’t been for these two windfalls, he and Lily might have gone their separate ways and missed their chance to rebuild their life together.

D
awn brings a clear sky and the translucent crescent of a waning moon. The air is cool and mist hovers above the creeks flowing through the town. Streets are silent and empty; doors shut and curtains drawn. No one sees the marmalade cat on the window sill, ears twitching as it watches a robin pluck a worm on the lawn of the Old Steadman House and carry it to her nest in the blue spruce behind the garage.

Claudia hears the Catholic Church bell tolling parishioners to early Mass but she does not open her eyes. She dreads the hours ahead. It has been the longest week in her life and although she has fulfilled the duties on her list, it is still an effort to accept the fact that her mother is dead. The worst thing is that there was no warning. If her mother had been seriously ill, their family would have been warned that soon
she would die. Instead her death was unexpected and there was no time to prepare. A mercy, Dr. O’Donnell had said. He meant a mercy for her mother who, having seen patients suffer, would have chosen a swift death.

In time Claudia will find solace in Squank O’Donnell’s words but not now, not yet. Now the word she is struggling with is
gone
. The visits to the funeral home, the flowers of condolence, the ashes inside the ditty box have not convinced Claudia that her mother is gone. And what is the meaning of
gone
? Literally
gone
means “vanished” but for Claudia
gone
means something else. It means pain, the particular pain known as grief, a pain that blasts a hole through the heart that is keeping her alive.

Hal was dreaming about Lily when the church bell pulled him out of a moment he cannot reclaim. He rarely remembers his dreams but Lily remembered hers and often told them to Hal when she awoke. Her dreams were colourful, scary and bizarre and she enjoyed trying to figure them out.

Hal forgets his dreams but he will never forget the nightmare of Lily, pale and blue and broken lying on the road and each time he sees her, it is the startled expression in her eyes and the pink ice cream melting into the pavement that comforts him. The startled eyes reassure him that the truck caught Lily by surprise. And the ice cream tells him—though he will never be certain—that the moment before she was killed, Lily was enjoying herself.

——

Wakened by the splash of cold water, Laverne looks at the woman in the bathroom mirror, the woman who is wearing the white silk blouse and black suit that she laid on the bedroom chair before she went to bed. Disquieted by the fact that she dressed herself without knowing, Laverne hurries to the kitchen and makes herself a cup of strong coffee, which she drinks standing up, balancing the cup between trembling hands.

Laverne has sleepwalked before. The night her mother died, Laverne got out of the bed opposite her sleeping sister, put on her bathrobe and slippers and followed her father down the stairs, through the open doorway and over the flagstone path to the sidewalk, where she stood beside Lou in the summer night and watched the hearse drive her mother away. It was years before her father told Laverne this story, told her that her eyes were open and remained open while he carried her upstairs to bed. Lou also told Laverne that by his mother’s account he had been a sleepwalker as a boy, turning on the lights upstairs and down, unlocking and relocking the front and back doors, scrambling books so that none were in alphabetical order.

Because Lou did not remember being a sleepwalker as a boy, he might have assumed that his daughter did not remember being a sleepwalker as a girl either, and it wasn’t until Laverne was teaching school and he and Eunice were married and preparing for the transfer from Bridgewater to Saskatoon that he got around to telling her what happened the night her mother died. Lou told the sleepwalking story in a jocular, lighthearted tone, expecting perhaps, that Laverne would be
amused. But Laverne was not amused. She was upset not to have been told the story before. It made her uneasy to think there was a story about her she didn’t know.

The year before her father died of a heart attack, Laverne sleepwalked again. It was June, two days before the end of the school year. Intending to slip away from Middle Musquodoboit without notice, Laverne went to bed early and immediately fell asleep. When she woke herself early the next morning by splashing cold water on her face, she was astonished to see that not only was she wearing the clothes she had laid out the night before, she had emptied the tiny fridge, boxed the food, packed her suitcases and set out her breakfast. Frightened that she had accomplished all this without her knowledge, Laverne stowed the boxes and suitcases in the Volkswagen, locked the trailer, got into the car and drove away without closing the cattle gate. If she had taken the time to close the gate she might have seen her landlord watching from the upstairs window, but neither Arthur Folger nor the school principal, Bruce Pattimore, had been told that Laverne was leaving Musquodoboit Rural High School and would never return.

Neither had her sister been told. Hearing the crunch of car wheels in the Fox Hill driveway, Lily looked out the kitchen window and was astonished to see Laverne emerge from the Volkswagen. Before Lily could ask what had happened, Laverne announced that she would be staying for a week or more, that if a teaching position was available at the Composite High School, she would have her trailer moved to Sussex.

Lily said, “I thought you liked teaching in Middle Musquodoboit.”

“Yes, I did,” Laverne said. “But I thought it was time I moved closer to you and, as you know, Sussex Composite High School is a rural as well as a town school, which is what I prefer.”

Laverne never owned up to the fact that her abrupt departure from Middle Musquodoboit was the result of having disgraced herself with Thomas Kimble.

Tousle-haired, ruddy-cheeked Thomas Kimble. Her brightest student and university bound. It was mid-June and exams had been written and marked when Thomas unexpectedly knocked on the trailer door. He told her he was leaving the next day to begin a summer job aboard a seismic ship off the coast of Newfoundland and wanted to return her copy of
Larousse
. Laverne invited him inside but eager to be on his way, Thomas did not budge from the doorway. Laverne set the dictionary on the table and took his hand. “I will miss you, Thomas,” she said and throwing propriety and decorum to the wind, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him full on the lips. Because her eyes were closed, Laverne did not see his startled eyes until Thomas pulled away. “Goodbye, Miss Pritchard,” he said and backed out the doorway, allowing Laverne a clear view of a Grade
11
student, Glenda Ross, watching from inside the truck.

Shocked by her rash behaviour, Laverne covered her face with both hands. Oh, the disgrace, the shame, the misfortune of what she had done! She was almost three times Thomas’s age. Why had she kissed him? She had kissed him because she loved him, and habituated to keeping her feelings in check, she had not admitted even to herself that she loved him until it was too late. Thomas would not tell anyone what Laverne
had done, but Glenda would tell someone, who would tell someone else. Middle Musquodoboit was a small place and the scandal would reach the school principal and Laverne would be called to his office. There would be questions, embarrassing questions she could never answer, and her contract would be terminated. There was no other choice except to escape.

Laverne isn’t hungry but she forces herself to eat a slice of toast and a boiled egg. It will be a long day and she needs her strength if she is to watch Lily’s ashes being buried and afterwards to endure the sympathy of strangers gathered at Adair’s. Laverne has already told Claudia she will not speak at the reception, she will not speak because she cannot say what is on her mind, which is that Lily was her only family and without her she has no family. She cannot say that she will never recover from the loss of her sister, that as long as she lives, she will never recover.

Upstairs on the enclosed porch, Matt is organizing what he will say at the reception. He intends to speak off the cuff and has already drawn balloons and inside each one written a cluster of words. Lily would not want a speech and he will use anecdotes that will show the kind of mother she was. It is all he can do.

In two hours the family will drive to Kirk Hill where a small grave will have been prepared for Lily’s burial. Claudia
has already relayed Alan Harrington’s telephone message that a family member will place the ashes in the grave. Will his father be up to placing the ditty box in the grave? If not, Matt will do it. The custodian will have left a pile of earth and a shovel beside the grave where it can be passed from hand to hand. There will be no service but Alan will say a prayer of thanks for Lily’s life and encourage the family to do the same.

Matt hears children’s voices and glancing through the porch windows he watches the carefree sisters doing cartwheels on the grass. Across the street, the Baptist Church bell gives its final ring. Eleven o’clock and still Welland hasn’t called. Did his uncle change his mind about coming? Hal and Welland weren’t close but Hal will be disappointed if for some reason his brother does not come. Matt telephones Adair’s and asks the woman at the desk if a Welland McNab has checked in. It’s a relief to hear her say yes, that Dr. McNab arrived sometime during the night. She offers to call the doctor’s room. The telephone rings four times and Matt is about to hang up when a groggy voice answers.

“Welland, this is Matt.”

“Matthew.”

“Yes, Matthew. We were expecting to hear from you last night. What happened?”

“The Newark flight arrived in Halifax too late to make the connection,” Welland says, “so I rented a car and drove.” Matt hasn’t seen his uncle since he was ten or eleven and if he knew him better he would ask why he didn’t telephone them from Halifax. Instead he asks what time he arrived in town.

“Sometime between two-thirty and three o’clock.”

Matt tells his uncle that the family will be leaving the house in an hour and a half and will pick him up on the way to the cemetery.

“No, no,” Welland says, “I’ll come to the house. Give me directions and I will be there by noon.”

Claudia is waiting for Hal to finish using the bathroom. Since the accident her meticulous father has let himself go, neglecting to shave and shower, wearing the same rumpled clothes day after day. She has laid a dry-cleaned suit, shirt, tie, socks, clean underwear on the bed. “Dad!” she calls through the bathroom door. “Matt spoke to Welland. He’ll be here within an hour.” No answer. “Are you finished in there?”

“I’m finished.”

“Because I have to use the bathroom before Trish and I take the flowers to Adair’s.”

“Well, I don’t have my bathrobe and I’m not coming out while you’re standing there.”

“All right. I laid your clothes on the bed.”

Claudia and Trish carry six floral arrangements from the garage to the Honda, placing four on the floor behind the front seats and two at Trish’s feet.

Crossing the railway tracks, the Honda passes a red Mustang convertible and Claudia glances at the driver and back again. Is that her uncle? She cannot be certain but the man behind the wheel reminds her of Welland perhaps because the
last time she saw him, Welland was driving a red car. It was late afternoon on a blistering Sunday in July when exhausted trees stooped over sidewalks and chugging sprinklers flung water onto lawns. Matt was working in St. Andrews, her father was attending a sales meeting in Truro, her best friends were either at the beach or at their lake cottages and until her uncle unexpectedly showed up, for sixteen-year-old Claudia it was the loneliest day of the year. Her mother was there, of course, she was always there but as usual she had her nose in a book and out of desperation Claudia biked to Sussex Corner for a swim, passing closed stores and deserted streets. Two hours later she arrived at the rented house on George Street to find her mother had vanished. But she had left a note,
Back Soon
, in the kitchen, which Claudia noticed when she was making herself a peanut butter sandwich. She heard a horn tooting and when she looked through the front door screen, she saw Lily waving at her from the passenger seat of a red convertible. “Say hello to Welland,” her mother called. Although Claudia hadn’t seen her uncle since her family moved from Dartmouth, she managed a shy hello. She watched her uncle get out of the car, open her mother’s door and the two of them climbed the veranda steps. “We’ve been playing golf!” her mother said, flushed and excited.