Mud Girl (4 page)

She falters. “The pale pink – the blackberry flowers.” She points to them.

“I'm not picking those. They're full of thorns. Besides,” and Abi heads back toward the house – suddenly she doesn't want to be anywhere near the greenhouse – “besides, I like to
eat
blackberries. If we pick the flowers, there'll be no berries.”

Rhodes exhales. “Well…” She looks toward the field. “There must be some interesting grasses…” she begins.

“Yeah, sure,” Abi says. She can hear Rhodes clicking behind her, then an abrupt snapping sound.

“Oh my!”

Abi turns around to realize Rhodes has lost a heel between two boards. “They're my favourites,” the woman says, looking close to tears.

“Why would you wear them here then?”

She looks confused. “They're my favourites – I wear them everywhere.”

Abi thinks of her mother's wedding shoes, worn once and still in their box in the back of the closet. Abi likes to think that she would have taken them if she'd remembered where they were. Good as new, they are.

Abi walks over to where Rhodes is, wraps her fingers around the heel and pulls hard. “Here.” She hands it to her.

“Oh, thank you,” she says gratefully. “Maybe we could sit and have a cup of tea.”

Tea. Abi can't remember anyone having a cup of tea in this house. “We just ran out,” Abi tells her, and realizes that Rhodes can't tell when she lies. So she embellishes: “My father usually drinks…Earl Bray, I think it is.”
Wrong word
, her brain screams, but she tosses her head to let Rhodes know she doesn't care.

But Rhodes is puzzling. “Earl Bray?” she asks slowly. “Don't you mean Earl Grey?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

A hurt look comes over her face. Really, you could knock this woman over with a down feather!

“We called it that when I was a little kid.” Okay, this is absolute manufacture-on-the-spot. “Dad used to pretend he was a donkey, and I used to ride on his back.”

Then Abi can't believe it:
this
is not made up. It's a memory with the top coming off. She'd forgotten. It's coming into full view now. “He used to throw his head back and bray like a donkey,” she says. “He used to make me laugh.” Rhodes probably can't even hear that last bit. But she seems to have, because she responds.

“Really?” she says. “He used to laugh…” she begins, but Abi doesn't wait to hear whatever it is that this woman wants to say about Dad in his chair. Now Abi's angry. Here she is feeling like she's going to cry or something. How dare Rhodes do that? Why would she cry for him? He doesn't cry for anyone.

“Let's go for that walk,” Abi says. It would be good to move.

Rhodes looks down at her shoe.

“Maybe another day then,” Abi says, and slams the screen door behind her as she goes into the house.
Just go away.

Abi hears her uneven steps out to where her car is parked. Car door opens. Trip, trip to the front door.
Don't knock.
Then her footsteps back to the car and the engine roars off.

Abi opens the door to find a brown paper bag, crumpled. What's this? Inside are two metal pointed things…okay, she's not that stupid. She knows they're knitting needles, but she can't remember having held one of them in her hands. Yarn. Fuzzy pink. Rhodes isn't serious about knitting, is she? If she only knew how very un-pink Abi is. A
Knitting For Beginners
book. She can tell by the photos it's for right-handed people. Lotta good it'll do her.

Red & White

T
he first Sunday of summer holidays.

Dad's spent the night in his chair again. Abi wakes up to the drone of
CBC
television, off the air at this time of day and with bright stripes on the screen. Moments later, Dad wakes for his cue of “O Canada” and the morning animation of across-the-country, sea to sea: a seagull wheeling over the Atlantic; quaint buildings two hundred years older than she's ever seen; the cn tower; prairies; and last, the Rocky Mountains that keep her part of the country away from the rest. Finally to the West coast, just in time to catch the last bars of the anthem. Makes her feel funny somehow, being at the end like that, as if she's missed it all.

She steals a glance at Dad. His eyes have opened, but no other part of him has moved. Was he like this before? Before Mum left? Before his job came to an end? She wishes she could remember, wishes they had photographs – albums and scrapbooks of pictures, like normal people have. There aren't even wedding photos. There was some problem with the film, Mum told her once. There's just one photo that Abi has seen – a fuzzy unfocussed picture. No white dress, just Mum in a flowered dress, Dad in a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck.

“That was on our honeymoon,” Mum had said, looking over Abi's shoulder when she found the picture. That was all she said.

Yes, maybe photographs could remind Abi how it had been. Her memories are growing more and more hazy, and really she's not sure she trusts them. Some seem to have changed over time, but how can that be? And some fit too well into the puzzle-shaped holes deep in her spirit.

It's important to remember, she thinks, because she really needs to know, and because if Dad was like this before – this dead person – then she might have another piece of the answer to why Mum left.

There's a reminder from the tv: it's Canada Day. It's going to be a hot one. In the fridge, the milk is sour.

There used to be an insulated bag around, a lunch bag. It'll keep the milk cold as she walks home. She finds it stashed
under the sink, throws it in her knapsack and heads off towards the Industrial Park. Away down River Road, and a bus hurtles past, almost pushes her off the gravel at the side. She looks after the bus, but knows Horace can't be on it: he's been a driver long enough not to work holidays. And he wouldn't have driven that close, not on this side with the river so near. She has a sudden image of him playing with his trains, and her steps quicken. In fifteen minutes, she reaches the convenience store: a small store that services the few scattered homes as well as the mill employees and others. There's always a small table with produce in rehearsal for its leftover stage.

Abi buys milk, more cereal, a big plastic bottle of ginger ale, and a small piece of cut watermelon. The clerk hands her a paper flag. “Happy Canada Day!” she says.

“You too,” Abi says. She holds the bag close. “Are you looking for anyone to work here?”

The clerk doesn't take her eyes off the till. “I dunno. You'd have to talk with the manager.”

Of course. I should have known.
Abi feels a warmth spread over her face, and leaves.

The way home is dry and the dust rises with the traffic. The cedar being milled burns in her nose, and she imagines that that's where he works –
My Boy
 – and he goes home with the smell. He's old enough to live on his own, young
enough to live with a mum and dad, a brother or sister, someone who welcomes him with a cheery shout when he pushes the door open. Someone who asks how he is, and cares about the answer.

The stench of the river mud at low tide puts a stopper in her thoughts. Mud Girl and her Prince.
Bah. Humbug.

A pickup truck kicks gravel over her knees, and she looks up to see a
HELP WANTED
sign in the window of the paint store – “Hood's Paint, Family-Owned Since 1954.” So. She'll have to go and talk with the owner or the manager soon, and try not to ask a stupid or obvious question.

At home, she empties the ginger ale into a juice pitcher and puts it in the fridge. The green plastic bottle she rinses and dries. She sets it on a dented tray that must have belonged to Uncle Bernard, along with paper and a pen, and then she cuts the small piece of watermelon into halves – pyramids on rockers. She sticks a spoon and the paper flag into one, all red and white, and sets it on the tray too, then puts it on the
TV
table by Dad. She takes her own piece out to the greenhouse.

Cyan

A
new word.
Cyan
. Never heard it, never seen it before.
A greenish-blue colour
. The word sounds pretty. Something Rhodesy might like. Abi wonders exactly what colour it is; there are no pictures in the dictionary. The colour of jade? Of a glacier lake? She's seen pictures of those.

She should go to Hood's Paints. She pulls on overalls and her cleanest sneaks.

There's a sound from Dad's chair as she opens the door.

“Pardon?”

“Where're you goin'?” he mumbles. He reaches for his glasses on the table beside him. She's noticed this past year that sometimes his glasses are still sitting in the same place they were when she left in the morning, and she's wondered
how he's gone through entire days without them. He turns to look at her through them just for a moment before he turns back to the television.

Stops her cold; maybe he liked the watermelon or has a plan for the bottle. Maybe he's already begun to write one of his messages. It's been a long time. Not that she'd know, really. Her dad has felt like a stranger these few days since school finished. Will he begin to talk with her again now?

“I'm going to the paint store,” she says, and waits for a response, but there's none. She shouldn't expect one.

She leaves for the dusty road to the paint store.

Cyan
. The word pulls her through the door.
Got any…

“Hi!” He's grinning at her.
My Boy
. His voice is everything she's imagined – even just with one word, she knows.

“You work here.” She feels as if her lungs are collapsing. And there it is: a stupid thing to say.

“I work here.” His chuckle is something to curl up in. He never seemed that tall sitting out in the field with his lunch.

“There's a
HELP WANTED
sign out front,” she says, rescuing a bit of bravery.

“Yeah,” he says. His eyes are almost black. “That's been filled.” He goes to the window, takes down the sign. “You don't want to work here, do you?” That grin's back, behind his words. He's not taking her seriously.

“I do…” she begins.

“No,” he says smoothly. “You don't. I know you don't. I've seen you,” he says.

Abi feels embarrassed when he says this.

“You have better things to do,” he goes on.

How can he say that?

“What was it you really came for today?”

For a half moment she can't think what.

“Cyan,” she says then. “The colour. What is it?”

He studies her for a moment, then pulls a paintbrush – an artist's brush – from the side pocket of his cargo pants and brushes it lightly across her cheekbone. “You know the colour; it's in your eyes.”

It's like one of those old movies that Dad leaves on early in the morning: she's the weak-kneed heroine and she has to reach out for the edge of the counter. Into her head flashes an image of Mary Rhodes. She'd appreciate this. She probably stays up late to see those old things, or maybe she has her own shelf-full to watch over and over, says the lines with the actors. But who's mush-kneed-Abi to laugh at her?

He studies the soft hair of the brush for a moment before putting it away. “Same eye colour as Dyl,” he says, reaching into another pocket for his wallet. He flips it open, pulls out a photograph, soft at the edges and missing a corner. “This is Dyl,” he says. Abi feels his eyes on her as she takes the picture: a very young child. “My son,” he adds.

I still don't know your name.

“He lives with me and my mother.” He plucks the photo from her fingers, slips it back into place, wallet away. “His mother left.” He gazes out the window momentarily, then looks at her squarely.

I know how that feels.
But she says nothing, just looks back at him and feels miserable. Is this what he knows about her? Is this what he's observed at her house? God-Rest-Her-Feet leaving, and her dad never leaving, and Abi wanting to?