Any Day Now (3 page)

I left Boris with another friend of Luba's, came home and talked my head off — shrinks, social workers, my surprised friends. I went over my story so many times it was like Luba and her car story, Luba and her stove story. Most said it was about rejection. I'd been rejected by my father and then by my ex-husband. Blah, blah.

Luba, I have to say, didn't fly out of my life like a tiny, doomed helicopter. To her, troubled people were interesting people. Every now and then, I would say something about babies and she'd just say, “No.” That's all. I came to know my place. Sometimes I dreamed about Yaroslavl, its domes, that room with the tambourine, those children, all those children.

“I love kids,” I tell Luba. She's buttoning up her coat now.

“I know,” says Luba.

“I want that story, the one with Boris.”

“You are an optimist,” says Luba. “That is the difference between us.”

“Oh, you Russians.”

“What have I done?” says Luba, looking alarmed.

“You wear your pessimism like…”

“Like you wore that poor, deluded old coat?” Luba asks. “Or rather wore him
out
. Talk about Russian drama.”

“I would like another chance,” I say.

Luba waves to the counter boy for our cheque, though it's clear we're supposed to pay at the cash. “Are you ready?” she asks.

“I am,” I say, because I so much want to be.

Luba stands, stretches, reaches her arms up, and the movement itself gives me hope.

Mac and cheese. A dusty can of Chef Boyardee. What would those people know anyway? Alexandrine reached deeper into the Lazy Susan, catching her shoulder on the cabinet frame —
Tabernuche! —
and pulled out a heavy can of something sloshy. Stewed tomatoes. Was there an expiry date on these things? Well, if you don't have money you can't afford to be choosy.

“Food for the poor!” she said again, louder than before, but Benoit, standing at the kitchen door, gazing out, six plastic bags at his feet, still said nothing. He looked positively beatific this morning. God-blessed man, spending his retirement cheque on after-dinner mints and sparkling cranberry juice. Just give them peanut butter and graham crackers, some Minute Rice, Alexandrine had urged him, but no, he said, it was
their
holiday, too.

“My holiday is sizably reduced this year, thanks to you and your big bleeding heart,” Alexandrine had said.

“Al,” he'd answered, his eyes uncomprehending and innocent in that new way. “Al, we enjoy an abundant Christmas every year. We're blessed.”

So they went to Florida every January. So what? So did lots of people. Though not everyone stayed right on the beach, instead of one of those blocks-away condos. Theirs was a nice, clean place with a separate bedroom and fully equipped kitchen, even maid service if they wanted. And last Christmas, Benoit had given her that string of freshwater pearls, the one she'd mentioned a few times. He was good with the girls, too. Jacinthe had moved home last summer with little Joey for a month until she'd gotten another job, and he'd said, of course, where else is a daughter supposed to go? And when Chantal and Roger needed help with a down payment, all he'd said was, Get me my chequebook. He expected the three boys to mind for themselves more, but if someone needed help putting a deck up or to borrow the snow blower, well, he wouldn't say no.

A good man. But crazy, too. The crazy part was new. And it was keeping Alexandrine up nights. Of course, she could be thankful he wasn't keeping her up at night the way he once did. Lovin', he'd called it. I'm just lovin' you, darlin', words he must have gotten from some country song but which had jack shit to do with his panting and shoving. He'd told her decades and decades ago that sometime soon she'd come to want it as much as he did. Once, right after Mathieu, the youngest, was born, Alexandrine had felt flutters down there, little butterfly flutters almost like when the babies would begin to move, but down lower, down
there
. She hadn't told Benoit, just felt it, surprised, embarrassed, and it hadn't happened again.

But with his new-found religion (though that wasn't the right word because Benoit had always been a daily-mass kind of man) he wasn't so interested. She didn't miss it — how can you miss what you don't like? — but it left a space in the nights somehow. She crocheted more now, watched those late-night guys more. Time had expanded. Golden years, what a crock o' shit. Alexandrine talked to herself a lot like this: holy shit, crock o' shit, jack shit, shit for brains. She didn't use the f-word at least. But she did like those shit expressions. They helped. Lord, they helped.

“Well, unless I make a separate, special trip to Big Y right now, which is not possible since I'm serving at mass today and you're a greeter, in case you forgot, that's it,
finis!”
and Alexandrine hauled herself from the inner sanctum of her kitchen cupboard, a dented box of Kraft Dinner in hand, to face the angel of light himself. Benoit smiled. “Oh, well,” he said.

By the time they'd driven the seven blocks to St. Mary's, he'd come up with another plan.“I'll just drop you off…and look, there's Hervé!” — a little man in a long, wool winter coat, a Sunday coat, a coat that marked him as first generation, waved at them from the church steps. “He's always happy to help, a good greeter, too.” Alexandrine stared at Benoit as he talked faster, “I'll run to Big Y, pick up a few extra items for the collection and be back in time for the Gospel.” He kept smiling at her, so bright.

She'd learned over the years not to begin arguing straight off because then Benoit, in his agreeable way, dug his heels in deeper. Not just his heel, his whole friggin' foot. Alexandrine waited. She breathed, deeply but not too dramatically.

“I think we've bought enough food already.
You
have bought enough food,” she corrected herself. “This is not a competition, you know.”

Hervé was walking toward them now and Benoit rolled down the window, letting in a gust that raised the top layer of her freshly sprayed hair.

“Ça va?”
said Hervé, coming close, bending to the window. “Freezing, eh?”

“How's Adèle?” asked Benoit.

“Oh, you know,” said Hervé.

“Give her our love,” said Benoit.

“I'll do that,” said Hervé.

“Hervé?” said Benoit.

“Quoi?”
said Hervé, and it was all settled, so that Alexandrine found herself walking up the church steps with Hervé, her own badly balanced plastic bag dragging down the wrist of her fur coat.

“Just a few more things,” Benoit had explained to Hervé before driving off. He would bring his six bags in when he came back. “So you don't have to trouble yourself,” he told Alexandrine. He hadn't even the decency to flash her the cute guilty grin that had so often greased his way.

“That Benoit, heart of gold,” said Hervé, opening the church door for her.

“Yeah?” said Alexandrine, trying to make it a statement and not a question, and thinking load of shit, crock of shit, pure and simple shit.

The back wall of the church was stacked with so many bags that you could have set up a small Big Y right there. “Food for the poor!” said Alexandrine and plunked her bag down on top of a crate-size box. Someone had bought a half-dozen tins of those good, expensive Swedish butter cookies. “Look,” she said to Hervé. “Top quality!”

First reading, second reading, Gospel reading, no Benoit. Father Bruce talked in his bad French about the spirit of the season. About giving and the spirit of giving and more friggin' giving. Why hadn't his parents spoken French to him at home? Alexandrine wondered, not for the first time. Unlike
her
parents who, bless their dear, departed, French-Canadian souls, never did quite get the hang of English, Father Bruce's parents had been way too eager to get American. Look at the name they'd given him, though they still couldn't say it without rolling the “r.”

Still, folks liked Father Bruce, liked him in spite of his faulty French, his stooping to the level of some of the parish young people just so they'd get involved. He actually liked that rap music, he said. He listened to people, tried to give them what they wanted, like this French mass because he knew some of the
mémés
and
pépés
still loved all the
seigneur
s and
Bon Dieu
s. Another good man. The world was full of good men and their good intentions.

She kept checking for Benoit, but it wasn't until the offertory that she heard the back doors of the church creak. There was Benoit struggling to keep them open while he shoved through a box the size of a small appliance. She watched as Denis and François-Xavier, Hervé's grown sons, jumped up to help him. They made noise back there. Something clunked and Alexandrine heard plastic bags being disturbed.

“Well, look who's among us,” said Father Bruce from the altar, switching into English — he could do French only if it was written down and rehearsed — and raising his arm toward the back of the church. Everyone in the Advent-packed pews turned to behold a small man holding a large box.

“What do you have there, Benoit?” boomed Father Bruce into his mic.

“A toaster oven,” said Benoit.

“And who is it for?” asked Father Bruce.

“For someone who might need it, Father,” said Benoit, his voice getting surprisingly loud and sure. Hervé's boys hovered, on stand-by.

“Well, my dear brothers and sisters, what can I say?” asked Father Bruce. “I could talk all season about the need for us to share our wealth, our good fortune, our abundance, but it wouldn't have half the impact of seeing our own Benoit Lachance standing there with that box of love in his hands. Benoit, my good friend, you are living out the words of Isaiah… ‘If you give your bread to the hungry, and relief to the oppressed, your light will rise in the darkness, and your shadows become like noon.'”

“I could have died,” Alexandrine informed Benoit on the ride home.

“Ah, Al,” he sad. “You don't mean that.”

“I do,” she said. “Oh, I really do.”

“I was there in the Big Y, Al, all that food, and I thought, people need a way to cook that food. So I walked over to BJ's. They were on special. It wasn't expensive. It was cheaper than the toaster oven I bought you last year.”

“This has gotten way out of hand,” said Alexandrine.

“I bought three,” said Benoit. “I thought I'd give one to the homeless shelter and one to the Midnight Mission. You know, Father Gilbert's place.”

“You need help,” said Alexandrine.

Benoit didn't defend himself, but after a suitable, respectful pause began singing under his breath. She knew that idiot song.

Bonjour le maître et la maitresse,

Et tous les gens de la maison,

Nous acquittons, cela nous presse,

Notre devoir de la saison.

Une fois l'an, c'est raisonable,

Ce n'est pas trop.

En ces temps de la bonne table

Du bon fricot…

That Guignolée shit! Pierre Lafleur had roped Benoit into it last Christmas. Some old custom from the old country, the country their parents had left behind forty years ago. Le Québec,
La belle province
. And for what? So they could go around like fools, singing off-key, ringing doorbells, dressed in Santa suits, asking neighbours for handouts so they could give it to some poor Puerto Ricans. Nobody had helped
their
families when they'd come south, leaving family farms to start a new life in the U.S. of A., building up these little western Massachusetts mill towns with their nice, big, Catholic families. No, they came, got jobs, worked their asses off, never asked for shit. Somebody should clue those black people and P.R.s in. Because they clearly had no clue about hard work. And face it, no clue when it was time to stop doing it and provide for the babies they already had.

“La Guignolée is a beautiful tradition,” Benoit had tried to explain last Christmas, after giving up on her coming out with them. “We need to think about the needy, Al. Especially at this blessed time of year.”

C'est raisonable. Ce n'est pas trop
. It wasn't reasonable and it was too much. God didn't want people to go overboard. He wanted them to be good, yes, but not driving-their-wives-crazy good. He wanted them to be moderate, though Alexandrine couldn't at the moment think of any of the old catechism that actually came out and said this. Moderation sounded more like a Protestant kind of idea. And
les Protestants
, as her mother always said, they didn't know much.

Where was Maman now? Where was she to ask: Ma, what's a woman to do with a man like this? A man who doesn't know any more who comes first. A man giving their hard-earned life away like so many bags of clothes to Goodwill.

Benoit went straight into the kitchen when they got home. He liked cooking now, after all those years when he used to come in the door at 5:30 and ask, “So what's on?” Alexandrine let him have his new little hobby. Chef Benoitdee, she called him. He wasn't that good at it, but then neither was she. “Face it, Ma, you're a lousy cook,” Jacinthe had said after last year's Easter ham came out raw on the inside, black and blistered on the outside.

But what she was really bad at — she knew this, she'd done a little self-looking, a little work with a counselor at church the winter three of the five kids moved out and she had suddenly fewer to care for and complain about — what she was really, really bad at was letting things go. She knew this, she knew this in that moment before striking.
Mais tabernuche!
A woman has to have her say.“Did you buy more food, too?” she asked as Benoit pulled out what looked like the ingredients for cornbread.

“Couple of things,” said Benoit.

“Your couple of things were probably many, many things,” said Alexandrine.

Benoit said nothing, went to the fridge and took out two eggs and a carton of buttermilk.

Her mother had never really approved of Benoit, not completely. “He's not good looking,” she'd told Alexandrine after she brought him home the first time. “His eyes, they're too close together. He'll have no hair, just wisps, by the time he's thirty.”“What do you want from me? He's a good, decent, French-Canadian Catholic. You want him to be handsome, too?” Alexandrine had yelled. It was a funny line they'd walked in her family. You obeyed, you knuckled under, but you could be as sarcastic as you dared. Snarky, they called it nowadays.

There were two kinds of people in Maman's world. Catholics and everyone else. Except, of course, there were Catholics and then there were Catholics. The best Catholics — Cat-o-lique, as Maman pronounced it — the
only
Catholics she knew, for that matter, were white and French Canadian, not too uppity, but not too poor either. They were people like them: former Quebecers, now Americans, regulars at mass, homeowners, proud of their roots but grateful for the New World's possibilities.

No one had ever seriously overturned Ma's take on things. A couple of grandkids rebelled, like little Christina marrying that born-again Baptist, and then going off to work with Africans. And her nephew Gérard had dated a Jewish girl in junior college, but then Alexandrine's sister, Claudine, had put the kibosh on that. It works better is all, Alexandrine had explained to her own sons and daughters. Too many spices spoil the soup. A little salt, hold the pepper, you're just fine, she said.
Marry your own.
And they'd listened for the most part. The fact that two of the five still weren't married — even adorable Mathieu — and that Chantal's marriage to Roger seemed to be busting up, and that Jacinthe, the oldest, was well and truly divorced, didn't have anything to do with not being good Catholics. Bad things happened even to good Catholics. This was, sadly, a fact. But did that mean you stopped being proud of who you were and what you stood for?