Cool Water (25 page)

Vicki wonders where Martin got the word
trousers,
what a funny word for a child to use. She glances at Mrs. Jackson and, yes, she has paint on the hem of her beige pants, and on her shoes as well. It's a disaster. She feels so bad but she doesn't know what to do, and she doesn't know whether Daisy is really hurt or just crying because she's afraid she'll catch heck for spilling the paint. There are no bones sticking out, but still, something could be broken in there. She decides she'd better get Daisy to the Health Centre and have her arm checked by the doctor. Mrs. Jackson thinks so too. Vicki doesn't have a clue what to do about the paint.

“What a mess,” is all she can think of to say.

Mrs. Jackson is thinking the same thing, but she hustles the family to the front of the store, saying, “Never mind that. Just get her to the Centre. Poor little thing, I hope the doctor is in.” There's only one doctor, and he covers the health centres in three communities. Vicki says that she'll come back to clean up the paint, and Mrs. Jackson thinks, what a circus that would be, Vicki and her kids cleaning up all that enamel paint.

“Don't give it another thought,” Mrs. Jackson says. She's hoping the appliances aren't damaged. If they are, she certainly can't ask Vicki and Blaine to contribute to their repair; from what she's heard, it's a wonder Vicki can afford to buy a blancher. Anyway, how can she be angry when the little girl is crying so hard she can't catch her breath? How can one little girl make so much noise? It's causing her ears to ring. If all the Dolson kids screamed at once, the whole town would go deaf.

“Drive carefully,” Mrs. Jackson says as Vicki hurries the kids to the car.

“If you happen to see Shiloh,” Vicki calls to her, “tell him to wait here on Main Street. I'll come back for him.”

Mrs. Jackson has no idea who Shiloh is. Another of the many children, she supposes. She can still hear Daisy screaming as Vicki turns off Main Street at the corner. Mrs. Jackson thanks her lucky stars that she and Mr. Jackson weren't blessed with children. She just could not have stood it.

“Daisy,” Vicki says as they turn the corner and head toward the Health Centre. “I know you're hurt but you're going to cause me to get in an accident.”

“I'm the one who was in an accident,” Daisy manages to say between wails. “It was an accident, I promise.” Then crying again.

“I know it was an accident,” Vicki says. And before she can stop herself, “Everything that happens to us is a bloody accident.”

“You said
bloody
,” says one of the twins. He has to shout to be heard over Daisy's crying. “I'm telling Dad.”

“Nobody tell Dad anything,” Vicki says. “Leave that to me, if you don't mind.” She doesn't know what she'll tell him about today. One thing for sure, he'll be furious.

“What's bloody?” Lucille asks, her tiny voice a squeal as she tries to raise it above the racket. “Is Daisy's arm bloody?”

“All of you,” Vicki says, raising her own voice. “Shut up. Shut the bloody hell up right now.”

The silence in the car is instant. Even Daisy stops. Vicki never yells. The children look at her in shock.

There are at least ten seconds of blissful quiet before Daisy starts up again. With renewed vigour.

Temptation

When Blaine's crew shuts down for the day, Blaine sits in his truck, parked in the ditch, and watches the rest of the men get into their vehicles and leave the construction site. He can see that Justine is doing the same thing he is, sitting in her car, waiting. When they're the only two left, he watches as she tries to start her car, to no avail. He navigates his truck up out of the ditch and pulls alongside Justine, the vehicles facing and the open driver windows side by side.

“Problem with the car?” Blaine asks.

“It always does this,” she says.

“Want me to have a look?”

“That's okay. It'll start eventually. You have to ask just right.”

“Must be a woman, then,” Blaine says.

“Ha ha,” Justine says.

There's an awkward silence, and then Blaine says, “Hop in if you don't feel like waiting around. I'll give you a lift into town. If you're sure you don't want me to have a look.”

Justine rolls up the windows in her car before getting out and into Blaine's truck.

“It'll still be here tomorrow,” she says. “You can look then. Or maybe someone will steal it, which would actually be great.”

Blaine backs off the approach, puts the truck in gear and guns it. They fishtail along the unfinished stretch of highway.

“Yahoo, cowboy,” says Justine, laughing.

Blaine tries to think what he can talk to her about, now that they're alone together. He wonders if there's any chance she engineered this ride to town with him, and the possibility makes him nervous, and eager at the same time. Maybe too eager. He stands a chance of making a fool of himself.

“So, how's the job?” he asks.

“Kind of boring,” she says. “But a job's a job.”

“The guys treat you all right? Some of them are a little rough.”

“They're all talk,” she says. “Anyway, I'm just the flag girl. Not much of a threat. Might be different if I was the foreman. That might not go over.”

Blaine laughs. “You're right about that,” he says. “I'd have a little trouble with you as the foreman myself.”

“Well, I'd do a better job than the alcoholic hobbit,” she says. “He's so pathetic.” Her tone is completely dismissive. “Anyway, someday I
could
be the foreman of a crew like this. Then they'd have to watch their own asses instead of mine.”

Such confidence, Blaine thinks. Only the young. They reach the end of the construction and Blaine angles the truck around the barricade and onto the pavement.

“Do you want to grab a cold beer somewhere?” Justine asks, as though they were old friends.

Well, they are, sort of, he supposes. Still, he doesn't know what the suggestion means. She might be playing with him. He decides to ignore the question.

“So you're a university student,” he says. “How'd you end up in Juliet?”

“I applied on that government Web site for summer jobs and this is what I got. I don't mind. I'm staying with a pretty nice family. Room and board.”

Blaine asks her what she's studying and she tells him engineering.

“No kidding,” he says.

“There are girls in engineering these days, you know,” she says. “I heard they have a quota, but I'm not sure if that's true.”

“Hey,” Blaine says. “You're in Juliet. It's going to take us a while to catch up, guys like me anyway.” He adds, “Old guys like me,” with emphasis on the word
old.

He half waits for her to tell him he's not old, but then is glad when she doesn't.

She says something else, though, that makes him doubt his own hearing. She says, “We should just keep on driving. Or maybe head south. We could go across the border into Montana for a beer.”

“Why would we want to do that?” Blaine asks. Carefully. Something is coming back to him here, some knowledge of a game he hasn't played since he started dating Vicki. There's a skill to checking out a situation like this without committing yourself.

“No reason,” says Justine. “Just for something to do. Something crazy.”

Blaine looks at Justine and thinks how young and pretty she is. She's wearing lightweight coveralls with her white T-shirt underneath, stretched tight across her small breasts. The T-shirt is so white it's practically luminescent even though it's dusty from her day on the highway. Is she young enough to be his daughter? He calculates. Yes, she's that young. Or he's that old, depending which way you look at it. If she's genuinely asking him to take off down the road with her—and she appears to be—he's in the middle of a serious wet dream. Either that or a beer commercial.

“I'm a married man, Justine,” he says.

“I know that,” she says. “I asked around. Kids too. Anyway, I've seen your wife and kids in town. You're lucky.”

Blaine snorts, he can't help it. “If you think I'm lucky, you've got a shingle flapping on the roof. If I were lucky I'd have a million dollars instead of a pile of debt.”

“Oh,” Justine says. “I see. Well, I'm pretty lucky. You can hang around with me for a while and see if it rubs off.”

When they get to Juliet, Blaine turns onto the access road into town.

“Where do you want dropped off?” he asks.

“So we're not going to Montana, I guess,” Justine says. “Too bad. You can drop me at the post office, then. I'll pop in and get my mail. That will have to be fun enough for today. Maybe I'll have a letter from my boyfriend.”

“You have a boyfriend?”

“Wouldn't you like to know,” she says, and then, “No, of course not.”

Blaine doesn't know what
of course not
means, why she said that. He angle parks in front of the post office and turns off the ignition. Justine makes no move to get out. It's like they're teenagers parked out in the country on a side road, only they're in the middle of downtown Juliet. Blaine gets self-conscious, sitting on Main Street in full view of the world with Justine sitting next to him. If she stays in the truck, it's more than just a ride. To anyone walking by, there's something going on.

Justine says, “It's just that you're the only one out there who seems to have a soul. The others are all about, well, you know, watching my ass.”

All Blaine can think of to say is “You'd better get out. People talk.” He doesn't mean to sound rude but it does sound that way, at least to him.

Justine opens the door to get out and she's half in and half out of his truck, looking at him with her big dark eyes, and she says, “You were serious, I guess, about being married.” There's a moment, then, when he knows that he is capable of making a bad decision, comes so close. He wants to slide across the bench seat and grab her, pull her to him and take a break from his life of attachment and worry and, yes, if he could forget all that he might feel good again. Never mind that he's too old for her. Never mind that her interest in him makes no sense. What she's offering, from his perspective anyway, is escape—if only momentary—and he would so badly like to accept.

But he doesn't. He's lost almost everything, but he still has a family and he knows for certain that Vicki would never, ever betray him with another man. “Forget about married men, girl. You can do way better than the likes of me.”

“That's honourable,” she says. “But I'm not sure about that. Anyway, see you tomorrow. Same as always.”

Blaine watches as she goes into the post office and then comes out again flipping through several envelopes. He wonders who they could be from. Not her girlfriends, in this age of e-mail and text messaging. She crosses the street and takes the first right onto a block of new houses, split-levels with double garages and landscaping. He doesn't want to know where she lives, but he can still see her and so he watches as she turns up the walk of the second house from the corner.

She was just playing with me
, he thinks. Now that she's gone, it's as clear as day.

Blaine steps out of the truck and goes into the post office to pick up his own mail. He gets out his key, opens the stainless steel mailbox, and finds it empty. Just then Mrs. Bulin walks by and sees the open box.

“Hi there, Blaine,” her voice says from behind the wall of boxes. “Vicki was already in for your mail. Do you think we'll get rain anytime soon?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Blaine says under his breath. “When was Vicki in?” he asks Mrs. Bulin.

“Quite a while ago,” Mrs. Bulin says. “Before noon, I think. Did you hear they had rain north of the river? Andy Patterson was to a sale at Elrose on Wednesday and he said they had three-tenths up there. He said it's too late for the crops but a good rain might help the pastures. I didn't think Andy looked too well. He probably shouldn't be running around the country to sales.”

Jesus Murphy, that woman never shuts up,
he thinks. He slams the mailbox shut and goes back to his truck, fuming. Not about Mrs. Bulin's chatter, but about her eyewitness report that Vicki was on the move. As usual.

Penance

In the late-afternoon heat of the Juliet school staff room, Norval waits—along with the principal and the director of education, who are both dressed in golf attire—for their job applicant to show up for her interview. “She probably got lost,” Norval offers by way of explanation. He once again peruses her letter of application, thankful that her qualifications trump Mrs. Baxter's. He can't understand why the other two on the hiring committee are so unconcerned about Mrs. Baxter's campaign to weasel her way into this job, despite the fact that she has never been to anything remotely like a teachers college and would surely force the girls of Juliet into a time warp marked by crocheted toilet-roll covers and family-values rhetoric as outdated as Elvis Presley.

He checks his watch. Their candidate is now twenty minutes late. Half an hour passes, the director and the principal obviously impatient for their golf game, forty minutes, and finally they are forced to give up. There is no discussion about Mrs. Baxter. They all know the consequence of this no-show. The director gets his car keys out of his pocket and says to the principal, “Tee time, then,” and to Norval, “One of these days you're going to join us and discover the pleasures of golf.”

Once they're gone, he tosses the candidate's resumé in the bin for shredding and considers resigning from the school board.

The staff room phone rings. Norval hopes against hope that it's the late job applicant calling with a good excuse, but it's Lila.

“Good,” she says, “I'm glad I caught you. Your cell phone is turned off, you know.”