Practical Jean (14 page)

“I know that. I'm asking you why you're taking such an interest in me that you bring me chocolates and talk to my husband and then you drive me here.” Jean knew that her manner was bordering on harsh, and she tried to down-shift into a less aggrieved mode. “I mean, I'm sure you have other important things you'd rather be doing.”

“I just thought you might need a friend right now, that's all.”

“But you're
not
my friend.” That was unfortunate. She had realized the road she was on and tried to veer off it. But something had pulled her back at the last second and she'd gone smack into the thing she was trying to avoid. “I'm sorry,” she said, “but, I mean, we haven't really done the sorts of things friends do. You've never even been to my house. I've never been to yours . . .”

Beside her, Fran was looking at the maps on the stand, touching the edges of the “P” maps and the “T” ones. She blinked once or twice, and her mouth was working, moving, as if she might be trying to stop her lower lip from trembling.

“Yes, that's right,” she finally said, in a voice softer than usual. She fleeted a glance at Jean and tried to smile, though her eyes looked moist. “So, maybe I'll just wait for you in the car.”

Fran's SUV was sitting out front and running when Jean emerged with her map in a little paper bag and her souring guilt sitting as a great big ball on her neck. She got in the front seat and shut the door, and without a word Fran immediately put the car in gear and started off. The first minute or so, when they seemed trapped by the circuitous exit lanes of the mall parking lot, were the most excruciating. Once they were out on Highway 18, they sped along silently for several minutes, past the trailer campground and the Marble Monuments store and the Pioneer gas station advertising firewood, ice, and marshmallows. Fran still had the air conditioning on, but set to low.

The whole time she sat in silence in the passenger seat, Jean tried to unravel her dislike for the woman next to her. She wondered if it was based mostly or even entirely on money. She thought it was possible. She had a suspicion that Fran wanted to be her friend because of the flattering contrast between their household incomes. Perhaps that was unfair, but in her view of Fran that idea was too big to avoid. There were also Fran's constant putdowns of the town Jean had grown up in, which was the next thing to insulting Jean herself, and the way in which Fran seemed to regard Jean's ceramics as the peculiar, amusing product of a slightly addled mind. And something even less definable, something about Fran's apparent insistence on being her friend, as if it were already a
fait accompli
and Jean had no say in the matter. Individually these were really no more irritating than the habits of other people she genuinely liked. But somehow they added up to something overpowering, an aversion that had an almost physical dimension, the way allergens could confuse the natural defenses and make your whole body itch. That's how Jean felt just now. Fran's personality was an irritation that had entered her cells and made her inflamed.

She sighed. “Have you ever been to the Finger Lakes District, Fran?”

“You don't have to make conversation with me,” said Fran. Her two hands gripped the wheel and she stared bolt-straight toward the road in front. “I'm nobody. Just consider me your chauffeur.”

“No, Fran. If it's all right, I'll consider you someone who was very thoughtful and helpful to me today. And someone I was probably not very fair to. And I apologize.”

Beside her, Fran stared hard at the road, her hands pale with pressure on the wheel. Then she took in a breath and lifted her chin.

“We have, actually, Jim and I,” she said. “We went about five summers ago, to visit his sister before she had her surgery. Parts of it are pretty.”

Jean wished she could take a pill to suppress her Fran reaction. But there was no such thing.

Chapter 11

M
ilt was such a . . . well, Jean didn't want to even think the word, because it was childish and spiteful. But he
was
what he
was
, and that was why she could not drive to the Finger Lakes District the way she had planned. The path from cause to effect was clearly marked, it seemed to Jean, carved out with a machete from A to B, and about this she was not in a mood to be “understanding,” as Milt had so hopefully put it.

It all came down to laziness and procrastination. When the garage had told Milt, weeks before, that the brakes on the Hyundai needed to be replaced, he had mentioned it to Jean on the phone. She'd still been at her mother's at the time, her attention entirely consumed by matters of pain and loss and impending death, which effectively obliterated any other small concern. So there was nothing she could do but assume that Milt was seeing to the tiny, minuscule brakes problem. If the garage said that your brakes needed to be replaced, you went about having them replaced; there didn't seem to be a terrific variety of options available to a person of common sense. But Milt had chosen the option of not feeling any urgency about the problem, the option of taking no action. And then, after he'd rushed off yesterday in the car and while he was driving to wherever it was that he was driving, the brakes had failed, and Milt had smashed into the back of Harv Clute's Dodge pickup.

“You should be happy I'm alive,” said Milt, pouting, as he washed egg yolk and marmalade residue from the morning dishes. “It was lucky I was wearing my seatbelt.”

It was luckier that Harv Clute was not of a mind to send the claim to insurance because he was planning to ditch the old Dodge anyway. And luck wouldn't even have been a factor if Milt had been a person of normal inclination and fixed the brakes when he was supposed to. These were Jean's thoughts as she sat at the dining room table reading the entertainment page of the
Star-Lookout
. She just didn't say them out loud because she was still observing an angry silence over the Finger Lakes, which she couldn't drive to now because the car was well and truly in the shop, and was probably going to be there for
weeks
.

“Why do you even want to go to that Finger Lakes place anyway?” asked Milt from the kitchen, where he seemed to be doing an unusually thorough job on the egg yolk.

“Why did you need the car all of a sudden?” she piped from the dining room. “That question has yet to be answered.”

Milt stopped washing and sighed. “I wanted to go pick strawberries. As a surprise for dinner. So, too bad, now it's not a surprise anymore.”

“Strawberries? Since when have you ever wanted to pick strawberries?”

“I just got the idea.”

“Out of the blue.”

“Yes.”

“Interesting.”

“What?”

“I said that's interesting.”

“Not really.”

“Not really, no. More like extremely odd.”

Considering everything, as she read the paper in the light from the window and tried to ignore Milt, Jean decided it was probably just as well that she hadn't driven off to the Finger Lakes and presented herself on Cheryl Nunley's doorstep without any warning. She'd been caught up with the excitement of Welland locating her long-lost friend, and her mind had conjured up all sorts of wonderful scenarios. Emotional, storybook scenes of meeting and reacquaintance and apology. But, thinking practically, who knew what sort of state Cheryl might be in? She had looked miserable and lost in the picture Welland showed her, a woman without hope, and if that was any indication of Cheryl's current condition, then someone showing up out of nowhere, someone from the past who dredged up difficult memories, might make things even worse. So in a way it was a blessing that Milt had made all that trouble with the car; he had saved her from what her mother had frequently called her “reckless enthusiasm.” Although the fact that he had saved her from anything was something Milt would breathe his last without ever knowing.

Instead, she decided that some time within the next couple of days, when she had a quiet moment to herself, she would call Cheryl on the telephone, and take things from there. It wasn't as picture-perfect, but it was more prudent.

And yet, Jean was unsatisfied. All those thoughts of the past and of reuniting with Cheryl, all that joyful anticipation, not to mention the lingering sorrow of knowing Dorothy was gone and being shipped to Halifax in a jar, had left her yearning to spend time with someone with whom she had a real history. Someone who went back. And the best she could do for now was Adele.

It was a long shot, because Adele was by far the busiest person she knew, but Jean got out her cellphone and started dialing. Washing dishes in the kitchen, Milt would have heard this:

“Adele? . . . It's Jean . . . Sorry to bother you at work . . . I'm sitting here looking at the entertainment section in the paper, and there's a little review here for that new musical
Hold Everything
at the McArthur Theater . . . Yes, sometimes the
Star-Lookout
does reviews for the big shows. We're not total hicks here, you know! Anyway, they say it's really good. If I got some last-minute tickets, is that something you'd like to see with me tonight? . . . Oh, that's wonderful. I'll call you right back.”

When Jean closed up her phone, Milt appeared at the door from the kitchen with a dishrag in his hand.

“You're going into the city?”

“Yes, Adele and I are going to the theater.” Jean found the box office number at the bottom of the review and circled it with a pencil.

“How are you getting there?”

“Well, I guess I'll have to take the bus, won't I?”

“Why didn't you ask me to come along?”

“I didn't think you'd be interested.”

Milt made a little coughy sound of incredulity. “I teach English,” he said. “I love the theater. Why don't you know that about me?”

Jean recognized this as the start of a spiraling conversation, like one of those pinwheel galaxies out in the universe that keep spinning and spinning without end for all eternity, and long ago she had learned that the best way to squelch a discussion like this with Milt was to leave the room completely. She got up from the table and patted him on the arm.

“Why don't you help me,” she said, “by calling the bus station and finding out the schedule for buses to the city?” Then she took her cellphone and the entertainment page from the paper and locked herself in the bathroom.

There were buses at four and six and eight p.m., Milt discovered, and because the ride from Kotemee to the city took an hour and a half, Jean decided she would board the early one. Before that, she told Milt, she wanted to check on her mother's house.

She walked over to Blanchard Avenue, up past the elm and beech trees that alternated along the south side of the street, thanks to a town initiative decades before, to the large olive-green house at the top of the hill. When she unlocked the front door, she walked through the foyer and up the stairs, directly to her mother's bedroom.

Inside Marjorie's closet, on the top shelf, sat a large, circular hatbox decorated in peach and cream stripes. Jean took it down.

All her life, the hatbox had contained a wide-brimmed raffia sunhat that had been an object of Jean's fantasies as a child because it had seemed to her the sort of hat that Queen Elizabeth II would wear. Her mother had bought it one Fifties summer during a visit to Martha's Vineyard, before Jean was born, and had worn it nearly every summer since—but only at the lake, and only during the two weeks of vacation she allowed herself annually. The rest of the time the hat had stayed in the box, Marjorie refusing to take it out even when Jean, at age eight or nine, had pleaded tearfully to be allowed to try it on in front of a mirror. There had been something satisfied, even proud, about Marjorie's refusal. The hat was for holidays, and other than that she would never take it out of the box, never. “That's how things last,” she had told Jean.

In the days after Marjorie died, before the funeral, Jean had begun the task of sorting through her mother's things. She hadn't given a thought to the hat in years, but when she'd opened the closet her eyes had drifted up almost involuntarily to the striped box on the shelf. She'd taken it down, of course—there'd been no one to stop her—and when she'd opened it and pushed aside the tissue, she'd had to admit that in one sense her mother had been right. The hat showed none of its decades of age. Even the band of pale pink ribbon inside seemed nearly new.

There was a moment when Jean, holding the hat in her hands, could easily have set it on her head and glanced up: the mirror was just there, on the vanity at the end of the bed. But although she had realized her opportunity, she'd chosen to ignore it. There were no fantasies attached to the hat now, and wearing it—being allowed to wear it—conferred no special status. Instead, Jean had simply stuffed the hat into one of the several heavy-duty garbage bags to be filled with dresses, blouses, and nightgowns that she pulled from her mother's closet. All of these she'd planned to send to the Goodwill, where she knew the hat would be touched and tried on by the multitudes.

Now, in her mother's bedroom, Jean set the hatbox on the bed and lifted off the lid. Inside were all of Marjorie's unused jars and bottles of prescription drugs. It had seemed a kind of sin to throw out such expensive medicines and, emptied of hat and tissue, the box had been the perfect container.

Among the drugs were a package of disposable latex gloves and a month's supply of Fentanyl patches. Each of these patches consisted of a wide, squishy pouch, like an individual serving of strawberry jam. But instead of jam it was filled with clear Fentanyl gel, a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine, which passed through an adhesive membrane into the skin. Jean had learned to don the protective gloves and strip and adhere one of these patches to her mother's upper arm whenever the pain became too great. It occurred to her now that all she would have had to do for her mother was attach a second and a third patch to her arm, and her torment would have been over. Nothing could have been easier. But those days had been quite turbulent and confusing, and with her mother writhing in the jaws of her agony, Jean hadn't been thinking properly. Instructions on a package had been a kind of anchor for her, keeping her steady.

Now everything was calm. Her thinking was altogether clearer and her duty to her friends was plain. The only question left for Jean was whether she was strong enough to follow through, or whether her emotions would get in the way and ruin everything.

She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed and, as she did, she noticed the oddest thing. The bed was made. The pink marseille bedspread had been carefully smoothed and draped. And Jean realized that of course it was she herself who had dressed the bed with fresh sheets and pillow cases, and taken pains to pull and tuck everything tight, the way her mother liked, and she had done all of this an hour or perhaps two after Marjorie's corpse had been wheeled away. A thing her mother would often say came back to her:
Jean Vale Horemarsh, what could possibly have been going through your mind?
She had heard that question on so many occasions. The time she'd stayed up till four in the morning listening to Beach Boys albums the night before her Grade 11 exams. The time she'd cut a big hole into the middle pages of her copy of
Pride and Prejudice
. The time when she was thirteen and she'd painted a big blue star on her cheek for school photo day. And the time she was six and Marjorie had lifted the lid of the garbage can to find all of Jean's stuffies moldy and wet at the bottom, and then a week after that when she'd caught Jean walking home with soaked shoes.

Each time, in the hot light of her mother's glare, Jean had struggled to answer that question, even though she had always had reasons for doing the things she'd done. She'd listened to the Beach Boys all night because she'd been nervous about her exams and Brian Wilson's candy floss voice was the only thing that soothed the worry out of her mind. She'd carved a secret well into her
Pride and Prejudice
because Andrew Jr. was stealing her babysitting money and she needed a place to hide it, and she knew he'd never in a million years think of opening a book. She'd painted a star on her right cheek because on the left side of her face was a super-big pimple and she was trying to use distraction. The sopping stuffies in the garbage can were something she could never talk about to her mother, and so neither could she talk about the shoes. Because they were soaking wet for the reason that she had been sitting with her feet in the Mott Park fountain. You had to have
something
in the water when you made a wish, or the wishes couldn't ride to Heaven on the water jets. And it was important that her wishes get there, because she was asking the puppies to forgive her mother, and the stuffies to forgive her, for what had been done to them.

It sometimes occurred to Jean that her mother's view of her as frivolous and impractical might have been different if only she'd been able to answer the question of what had been going through her mind. But then again, here in her mother's bedroom, she had to admit to herself that she had no idea why she had made the bed like that. Not the faintest clue.

She opened a plastic shopping bag, dumped in the packages of Fentanyl, and grabbed the disposable gloves while she was at it. She slid the striped hat box onto the top shelf of the closet, and she left.

Milt stood with his hands in his pockets in the hallway of their house on Edgeworth, staring into their bedroom watching Jean as she rolled on antiperspirant. She had told him not to expect her back that evening; it would be late when she and Adele got out of the theater and so she'd catch a bus in the morning instead.