Waiting for Joe (7 page)

But Laurie’s bleeding didn’t stop and they lost their baby. And soon after that she lost her uterus, and the question: What kind of mother would she have been, had been answered for her. Oh ye of little faith. The Lewises were a constant reminder of her failure, and she was relieved when they left Winnipeg.

She returns the sundress to the closet without trying it on, then slips into a sweater and jeans, thinking that they’ll soon need to find a laundromat. When she goes into the bathroom, the air is heavy with the incriminating smell of hair colour. She’d meant to take out the garbage after clearing it from the bed, and forgot. She reminds herself to do so now as she fills the sink with water, then dabs gingerly at her face, yearning for a stream of hot water against her skin. She’s craving protein; perhaps if Joe is on to more lucrative work, dinner tonight will be more substantial. Seafood, or a thick rare steak at Montana’s. Perhaps they’ll celebrate with a bottle of their house wine, the Australian shiraz.

She unhooks the key lanyard from the drawer knob in the kitchen and loops it about her neck, carries the garbage can outside, weaving among the parked vehicles and over to the barrel set against the light standard. The lot is almost full now and like a circus the way people hurry toward the mall as though afraid they’ll miss something. She takes the garbage can back inside, thinking that although Joe has his own set of keys, she doesn’t want to go far, or for long. She’ll browse her way through Walmart to the mall and to the food court, where she’ll read.

She follows the people streaming toward the entrance, entire families, she notes, and realizes that it’s Friday. There’s a sudden pounding of feet behind her and several young men go galloping past, whooping loudly, all of them wearing tank tops and shorts, their flailing limbs startlingly white. Several people around her laugh, and she shivers for the half-dressed young men. She stops to feed coins into a newspaper box at one side of the entrance and tucks the
Globe and Mail
into her tote. Moments later the doors swing open before her to a collage of colour, a welcoming draft of heated air, and the tall white-haired greeter vibrating in a red vest and cobalt blue shirt.

“Welcome to Walmart,” he calls out.

“Thanks,” she says knowing that she’s not expected to reply, but she likes the way his mouth turns up at the corners when she does, and is surprised now when he doesn’t smile.

He sounds less chirpy too, as though he knows that she’s come with no intention to buy anything. Rather she intends to wander among the aisles and continue to be disconcerted by the low cost of various items, and the fact that the quality seems to be almost as good as what she often paid twice as much for elsewhere.

“Are you returning something today?” The greeter has stepped directly into her path and holds up a little gun with a roll of green stickers attached. She sees his watery eyes are intently fixed on the tote bag at her side.

“No,” she says. He’s clearly reluctant to let her pass without being able to peer inside it, but he calls out, “Have a good day,” as she goes past him. The words are like a finger counting the vertebrae in her spine.

Soon after, she’s in the food court and feeling fortunate to have gained a table under the skylight, given the crowd. She sips at a smoothie. The long mid-morning sleep left her feeling wobbly inside and she’s hoping the potassium in the banana smoothie will balance her electrolytes. She takes her notebook from the tote bag and writes:
Smoothie, $5.25. Newspaper 2.00. Picture frame $7.99. Glue $2.95
.

She bought the picture frame and squeeze bottle of white glue believing she would make a collage of the postcards to give to Alfred when she sees him. It will add colour to his otherwise drab and small room. When next she sees him. Which may be never.

I
will
make a collage, Laurie vows, even as she admits to herself that likely she will not. It’s not something Alfred would want, and yet he’d make a big show over it, knowing that she was hungry for his approval. She looks up at a loud sizzling and sees the cloud of steam rising from the grill at Edo, the people there lined up waiting to order food. Saliva fills her mouth. While the smoothie is filling, she craves the saltiness of a bowl of hot yakisoba noodles.

She sees the woman from the parking lot then, with the girl in pink. The woman moves away from the lineup at Edo carrying a tray of food, looking out of place in the dark head scarf, which narrows her features and turns her complexion sallow. When she reaches the edge of the food court, she hesitates as she looks about for a place to sit. The young girl darts off and quickly finds a vacant table and calls out to her mother, her voice sharp like a sparrow’s, piercing the din of adult voices. When she sees a couple hovering nearby, intent on gaining the same table,
she scrambles up onto one of the seats, leans forward and spreads her arms across the table, leaving no question that she’s claimed the space.

An outburst of laughter draws Laurie’s attention to a group of people across the food court. Seniors, she realizes, people years older than the woman who has parked her cleaning cart on the periphery and goes among them, clearing and wiping tables. In comparison, the seniors look youthful with their winter tans. Snowbirds. They’ve just returned from Arizona and Texas and are reconnecting now in the food court. Joe’s clientele included people like them, women who often possessed a self-congratulatory air at having made it to their retirement with their health, marriage and funds intact.

She takes the newspaper from her bag and unfolds it. A square-jawed and sullen man glares at her from the front page. A pedophile, with a record of sexual assault on boys. Police in both Manitoba and Saskatchewan are hunting him, hoping to apprehend him before he harms the boy he’s abducted. He’s had the poor kid for two days now. Don’t go there. She doesn’t need to stick her nose in excrement to know how awful it smells.

“That’s gross,” she hears someone exclaim loudly.

“I know, but I can’t help it,” another person moans.

Laurie turns to see a couple of teenage girls nearby, colas and cartons of NY fries in front of them. Their attention is fixed on the hands one of them has spread across the table.

“If you don’t do something about them, I’m not going out with you tonight. That’s obscene.”

The girl with the hands moans again. “Don’t be mean. It happened before I knew what I was doing.”

“You’ve got to go to the Nail Place and see if you can get in,” the scolder says. “If you can’t, I’m not going to be seen with you. That is, like, just so gross.”

Laurie notes their low-rise jeans, the expanse of exposed skin, the wide studded belts that make them look as broad as hippopotamuses. One day they’ll be going through pictures of themselves and screaming, how could we?

Beyond them, the woman wearing the hijab has been joined by other women similarly dressed, although their tunics are more colourful and of a lighter material. The woman is animated now as the women lean toward one another, gesturing as they talk, jostling small dark-haired babies on their laps. Behind them is the security office, where a uniformed man in the doorway speaks into a radio while he looks across the food court in the direction of the Dollardrama Store.

Laurie follows his gaze and sees Pete, the man Joe is working with at Canadian Tire, the man he was supposed to have gone off with on a job. Another security man in the Dollardrama is hustling him over to the counter where Pete opens the store bag wide and holds it up so the clerk can look inside. Then he plunks it down hard on the counter to free his hands, fumbles in his vest pocket and brings out a bagel, unwraps it and makes a point of taking a huge bite, as though to prove that indeed, it is a bagel, before stuffing it back into his pocket. He then produces what is likely a sales slip from another pocket. The security man studies it, then indicates with a stiff smile and wave that Pete is free to go.

Pete stalks away angrily toward the rear entrance of the mall. Laurie rises quickly and follows him. “Pete,” she calls
and again, louder. He turns and she receives the full brunt of his scowl. “You’re Pete, right? You work with Joe, my husband?”

Pete’s anger turns to disgust. “Not any more, I don’t. And as if I haven’t got enough trouble, those bastards are always on my case. I can’t come into this place without being accused of something.” The gap between his teeth causes his
s
sounds to whistle.

“I was at Robin’s Donuts,” Laurie says with a placating gesture. “They said Joe was there with you. Do you know where he went?”

“He took off. One minute we’re at Home Depot and the next he’s gone,” Pete says. “When you see him, tell him I said he’s a jerk.” He turns, pushes through the doors and into the parking lot.

Laurie doesn’t know what to think. She retraces her steps through the mall, weaves her way among the people milling about, passes by the lit-up shops without glancing inside, only dimly aware of the woman greeter in the mall entrance to Walmart, a small frizzy-white-haired woman whose sore-looking eyes are too large for her face, and weepy looking, like the eyes of an aging cocker spaniel.

She sees herself on the video screen, a tall woman with tangled hair on top of her head, walking with purpose, a tote bag swinging at her side. A woman with anxious eyes.

She goes across the parking lot, thinking of Joe. She hurries across a traffic lane, aware of a red car with a crumpled front fender coming toward her, thinking vaguely that she’s seen it before, that she is beginning to see the same people over and over. The entire city of two hundred thousand
cheerful people must pass through the doors of Walmart each and every day of the week.

She locks the door of the motorhome behind her, knowing immediately that Joe hasn’t been there in her absence. The premonition she had in Clara’s Boutique was real. Joe’s gone.

J
OE STOPS TO UNZIP HIS JACKET
and in that brief pause brings his eyes up from the ground to the far distance where the ridge of blue hills begins to take shape. It’s almost noon and warm now, the morning cloud cover having moved off to the northeast where it rims the horizon in a band of pearl white. Released by the rush of air against his body, he continues to walk, keeping that faint elevation of land in sight.

When he’d hailed a taxi going past Home Depot, he’d felt as though he’d just punched his way out of a box. He paid the driver twenty dollars to take him as far as the money would go and after the taxi dropped him, he began to walk, needing to move, to wear himself down. Although his frustration is almost spent, he hasn’t yet reached the point where he feels he has no choice but to turn round. He keeps close to the rim of the ditch, a trough of moisture greening with vegetation, and away from the sporadic charge of traffic whose drivers speed up as they pass by, as
though to point out that he is on foot and they are not.

Moments later his thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a motor and he becomes aware of the farmhouse in the near distance, a well-kept two-storey house where a woman struggles to rototill a strip of earth that borders the gravel lane leading to the highway. He notes her awkwardness; the khaki parka that reaches her knees, likely a man’s, and too large, judging from the way the sleeves are bunched up. It makes her look like a kid who’s taken on a job beyond her capabilities.

She sees him now and stops working, then stoops over the machine and shuts it off. She straightens and pushes the parka hood down onto her shoulders, as though this will give her a better look at him. When he sees the wedge of dark bangs on her forehead, the way her short hair sticks out at the sides, he can’t take his eyes from her. Grim determination, Alfred sometimes said when Verna tore into a job a man usually did to keep a house and yard going, including turning over the earth in the small backyard garden every autumn and again in spring. Alfred’s faulty Hong Kong heart, the result of incarceration in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, prevented him from doing anything strenuous. At any moment it might stop ticking. But Alfred was into his ninety-fifth year now, while Verna had been the one to die.

He guesses the woman is calculating the distance between them, the amount of time she has to get to the house, should she need to. If he hesitated in his pace, she’d turn and run for it. There’s no traffic and the silence is so complete, it’s a ringing in his ears. As he crosses the lane, the loose gravel shifts beneath his feet and he has to work
to keep his balance, and he sees himself as the woman might see him, a middle-aged man walking along the highway, someone who has likely gone looking for trouble and found it. A moment later the Rototiller starts up; its whine follows him along the ditch like a dog sniffing at his pant legs.

He passes by a dug-out pond at the edge of the next field, its viscous surface wobbling with light. A row of wind-shaped trees border the field, their nude branches all crooked to the east and cradling scores of abandoned nests. Large egg-shaped stones are piled along the fenceline here and there, beige stones worn by the weather, porous and riddled with soil.

He stops for a moment to turn and take in the city behind him, which now looks like a chain of boxcars parked close to the sky. Laurie is worried, likely, and he’s surprised to discover that the thought leaves him untouched.

He goes down into the ditch and up the other side and over to one of the piles of stones, leans into it, its heat radiating into the small of his back. He closes his eyes and listens to himself breathe. There were times when he was younger, out in the country, that he’d imagined he felt the nearness of God. Times like when he’d be lying in the grass as darkness came on, after a day of duck hunting, sunlight a faint jiggle of pink on the slough. He’d thought this was like paradise, a marshy place, the reeds alive with water animals and birds crying out at the end of the day. He lay watching the orange autumn moon rise up over his knees and thought, feed me, oh breath of God.

Our father, our father, our father
, he breathes now, and opens his eyes when he realizes that he is trying to pray,
something he stopped doing years ago when he heard his prayers rebounding off the inside of his skull.