One Year in Coal Harbor (2 page)

“We couldn’t figure out what had happened to it. Evie left it on the counter in the bowl while she hung up clothes on the line.”

No one said anything.

“When she got in, it was gone.”

I felt like I should say something to keep Bert company but I couldn’t think of anything. I was busy watching Evie. And I thought it must be especially hard for her to let Quincehead go anywhere by himself when she had always been there to take care of him.

“That’s how we found out Quincehead could climb stepladders,” said Bert. “Because that’s how he got up on the table to eat the salad.”

It was only Bert and pauses now. It gave the time waiting a kind of strange staccato effect. It had the same rhythm as a sports announcer doing a play-by-play.

“He’s always been a smart dog. That’s why he could figure out that stepladder.”

“We’ve had Quincehead a long time. Fourteen years.”

“I think he had a good life.”

“But it’s not long enough. No dog’s life is long enough.”

“Not long enough with
us
. It couldn’t
be
long enough with us. But it was a good life, Evie.”

She nodded.

“He certainly had some good meals.”

“He liked the salade Niçoise with mini marshmallows, that’s for sure.”

“That’s how we found out Quincehead liked marshmallows.”

“But marshmallows didn’t like him.”

In the next pause we heard a car pull into the gravel drive of the trailer park.

“I don’t know if I can stand it,” said Bert, “when it comes down to it. Do you mind if I go to the bedroom now?”

“You go, Bert,” said Evie. “There isn’t any other place I
could
be.”

“You’re awful brave, Evie. You always were.”

“No, people is different, is all,” said Evie. “What we can stand is different. I couldn’t stand
not
being here.”

Bert didn’t say anything else but we watched his slow shuffle into the bedroom. He didn’t even turn around to close the door.

“It can be a cruel world for the gentle creatures. Sometimes there ain’t nothing you can do. Not even for the things you love best. Not even for the things that trust you to care for them,” said Evie.

And then the vet came.

I
DIDN
’
T GO TO
Evie and Bert’s for a while after that because I knew they needed breathing room to grieve. It seems sometimes that if you worry about something enough or are upset enough, it should change the outcome. All your worry should be able to be traded in for a good result. I know that’s superstitious but somehow I can’t help thinking I can save the things I love with the force of my feelings. But none of us had saved Quincehead. And I knew Evie felt this was a great betrayal. That the unspoken promise she had made and believed in was that she would keep him safe forever. That nothing bad would happen to him as long as she was there. But something had.

Now I was a little worried about Bert and Evie because I was no longer living with them and neither was
Quincehead and they had no little creature on whom to exert their generous natures.

I hoped they were doing okay but when I ran into Bert in town he told me that Evie was just flattened with loss and not up to visitors. He looked pretty flattened himself but still he took Mallomar for a walk down the beach with me and smiled as he watched Mallomar chase seagulls and then come to us for praise over and over. After that, Mallomar and I walked Bert back to the trailer park. He invited me in but at that second Mallomar had to pee, so I walked her around the corner of the trailer just as Evie came racing to the door and pulled Bert inside.

“Guess who was on the phone?” she asked. “Come get some freeziolla and I’ll tell you.”

The door closed behind them. I waited a couple of minutes outside but Bert didn’t come out so I guessed he forgot me in whatever excitement was going on, and I started to leave. I was glad that Evie sounded so excited again about something. As I got to the entrance to the trailer park, I heard their door open and Evie yelled from the top step, “Primrose, come in and have some freeziolla! Bert just remembered you were out here!”

“I have to go home!” I called back. “But call me with the recipe! I want it for my notebook!”

She nodded and waved and closed the door. She looked a little better but I knew there would be a gaping
hole in her heart for a while. You can’t replace one dog with another any more than you can replace one person with another, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t get more dogs and people in your life. Even though no one you love is replaceable, you need a dog for the dog place in the heart, I decided, and a child for the child place, if you have a child place in your heart, not everyone does, or a dog place, either, I guess. I’ve known people who have a ferret place, to which I can only say I am thankful I was not born with one of
those
. A best friend is probably only replaced with a best friend, although I wouldn’t know because through circumstances beyond my control I have never had one. I wondered dispiritedly if I ever would.

It is a terrible thing to have pockets of emptiness where something or someone should be. I felt it when my parents were missing. Now that I saw them every night, that pocket was filled, but after-school time could be a bit barren. The house was empty in a particularly echoey way after school. My mother used to always be there, except for the year when she was on a deserted island. Since being rescued, my parents had found themselves short of cash. My mom needed a job. Luckily that was when Miss Clarice arrived in Coal Harbor all the way from Duncan, opened her B and B and hired my mom. Jobs in Coal Harbor are hard to come by and my mom probably couldn’t have found one if Miss Clarice hadn’t opened her B and B. I was happy for her but it meant I came
home to an empty house. Miss Clarice told my mother there would be no set hours for her, which at first made my mother feel it would all be relaxed and informal and charming, but it turned out what Miss Clarice meant was that she would pay my mother a set fee, for which she would work her as much as she needed, which turned out to be always. My mother didn’t feel she could complain. They both knew there were a lot of people in town who would be more than happy to take her job.

Sometimes after school I got lonely, and then usually I either went to Evie and Bert’s or helped Miss Bowzer out at The Girl on the Red Swing. She was teaching me how to cook and I was trying to move the romance along between her and my uncle Jack.

When my parents had returned from being lost at sea it had looked as if a full-scale romance was about to blossom between Miss Bowzer and Uncle Jack but instead they had just drifted along as usual. He, coming in and making remarks about her menu, which he thought she should spruce up for the new element moving into his town houses; and she, studying him with the same detached disdain she reserved for people who didn’t quite live up to her standards. I knew she didn’t like his line of work. He was a developer in a town that didn’t particularly want developing, but other than that he was a fine man. I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t be so picky, people’s professions don’t say
everything
about them. I
wanted to tell him that maybe he should shut up about the menu. He was usually the soul of tact but I think he enjoyed tweaking Miss Bowzer and watching her reaction and didn’t seem to notice that it wasn’t making her like him any better. Nevertheless I could see why he did it. She was really lovely when angry. It made her green eyes flash. It was as if you could see in that flash the storm within her. As if her eyes, like lightning beneath a thunderhead, became the jewel-like advertisement for the power of the storm. I didn’t give either of them any helpful behavioral hints, of course. Even I recognize what someone else might think is none of my business. Once in a state of despair at some offhanded insult Uncle Jack had just made, I did mention when I got him alone that if you’re courting someone, insulting them is probably not a good place to start. I tried to make this sound like a general observation and nothing I had noticed anyone I was related to doing lately, but he seemed to see through this and looked startled. Then he said, “I’m not courting her. Courtship implies marriage and I’m not the marrying kind, Primrose. And clearly neither is Miss Bowzer. Some folks are and some aren’t.”

This kind of took the wind out of my sails, and anyhow I disagreed. If anyone was the marrying sort, it seemed to me it was Uncle Jack. And as for Miss Bowzer, she was the type who would never marry just because it was expected but if she did fall in love, would do so head
over heels and stay married until the end of time. She once told me she was waiting for the type of marriage my parents had, where my mother had followed my father out into the storm, looking for his boat, forsaking all else. That was true love, she said, and rare as rare could be and the only kind for her. She was looking for someone who could do that, forsake all else. And Uncle Jack might not think he was courting Miss Bowzer, but something in his manner said he was. I think we have all kinds of different parts of ourselves stored away and waiting and sometimes some of them get unleashed on us without us even knowing. I could tell he wasn’t being disingenuous or simply lying when he said he wasn’t courting her; he really didn’t seem to be aware that the courting part of him was unleashed and on the loose. Maybe he thought he flirted with her just the same as he did with everyone. He couldn’t help being charming. I thought the flirting he did with her was of a different sort but in case this was just wishful thinking, I asked my mother what she thought.

“Of course he’s in love with her,” said my mother. “Do you know what they’re like, Primrose? They’re like those magnets that push each other away when they get closer.”

Jack was her half brother and didn’t look like her. She has a fox face and he has a pig face but in a nice way. He’s tall and blond, broad-shouldered and ruddy. My mother has sandy hair. I have red hair and freckles. None of us
look like each other. If you saw us lined up you would never guess we were family. My mother didn’t even meet Uncle Jack until she was older. He was a drifter and was always flitting about developing and doing deals and in the military and in general not available to family. But when my mother got herself lost at sea, the town council looked for a relative for me, and by a fluke Jack showed up in Coal Harbor and solved everyone’s problem. Ever since, my mother had felt an indebtedness to her brother. Part of this was manifested in a determination to figure out a more stable life for him, and I could see that this conversation had started wheels turning in her brain.

“We should do something to help this along,” she said as she bustled about making dinner.

“I wouldn’t,” said my father, who was seated on the couch with his newspaper. “Jack always seems to me more than capable of paddling his own canoe.”

“Well, we can have them both to dinner, can’t we? That’s just civilized.”

“Uh-huh,” said my dad, not sounding convinced in the least.

“He’s my brother. There’s nothing more natural than having him for dinner. It’s just that I’ve been so busy at the B and B. We never
have
had Miss Bowzer for dinner and shame on us for that, the way she lets Primrose hang out in that restaurant.”

“I help her!” I protested.

“And was one of the people who watched over her
when we disappeared,” my mother went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “I suppose we should plan on Sunday when I’m not working.”

“But Miss Bowzer works Sunday,” I said.

“Oh, of course,” said my mother.

“The only night she has off is Monday and she said the other day that she might have to start keeping the restaurant open then too because she barely kept body and soul together this winter.”

My mom and dad looked at each other over the top of my head and my mother nodded.

“You know it’s hard to survive in a small town on one income,” said my mother. “Much better to be married.”

“Although she seems to have done okay so far,” said my dad, rustling his paper and pulling it up over his face again as if this were his last comment on the topic.

“So far,” said my mother, pursing her lips. “Monday it is. I’ll just tell Miss Clarice that I must leave early and that is that. Now, let’s think of a menu.”

“You don’t even know yet if they’ll come,” I said.

“Well, that’s your job, Primrose. You invite her. Jack just eats TV dinners every night anyway. Why
wouldn’t
he come for supper? We ought to have him more often. TV dinners have no nutrition.”

“He likes TV dinners!” I said. “Especially the chicken ones.”

“Those chicken TV dinners always remind me of rat pieces. Those stringy little legs in there,” said my mother.

“Even if they are, why ruin it for him?” said my father quietly from behind his paper.