Taking a Chance on Love (2 page)

When the
Lady Alexandra
docked at the Landing that Friday night, crowded with the usual weekenders from the city, I spotted Amy's father among them. I'd met him before — he came to the Landing about twice a month — and once again I was struck by how much alike he and Amy looked. They both had thick blonde hair, the same dark, arching eyebrows and eyes blue as the mountains on a September morning. As soon as Mr. Miller stepped off the gangplank, he hugged Amy. Amy's mother wasn't there to meet the boat, but that wasn't surprising. Amy had told me the first time we met that her mother had high blood pressure and didn't go out much.

She'd said, “It's really the reason we moved here. The doctors said she needed to be out of the stress of the city.”

Amy's face was bright with happiness as she and her father walked up the wharf together. I knew that she loved her father almost to the point of worship, but seeing her face now, so radiant with love, made me swallow hard. Even though I didn't like the way my father acted around other women, I missed him. Most of the time, I was able to push the feeling down to a dull ache.

Amy didn't seem to see me, she was so taken up with her father. I wondered if I should call on her in the morning as I always did.

Just when I had decided I wouldn't, she turned around and called over her shoulder, “See you tomorrow, Meg.”

“Sure,” I called back, happy again.

The next day I took the shortcut from the main road up to the secondary road and then up the few steps over the drainage ditch to Amy's cottage. I had been to her house so often, my feet knew every stone. Wild broom on either side of the path quivered with bees, dizzy with the scent of the red-streaked yellow blossoms.

Amy answered the door. The house smelled of bacon and coffee, and Mr. Miller was still eating at the table in the living room. Mrs. Miller was all dressed up in a matching sweater set, a pale blue that made her red hair glow in contrast. Usually, I would find her lying on the living room couch wearing an old ratty sweater with pills of wool that my fingers longed to pick off. She would have a cup of tea beside her and a stack of magazines and books to read as she rested.

“My mother has to lie down as much as possible,” Amy had once said. “That's what old Doc Casey told her.”

Mrs. Miller had a petite figure and giggled. She treated me as if I were a younger sister that she liked, and I couldn't help liking her back. Amy didn't like her mother, though.

Once I asked her why, and she'd said, “I hate the way she treats my father.”

“What do you mean?”

“She should be nicer to him. Not take him for granted.”

I said to Amy now, “Let's go down to the beach.”

The tide was out when we got there, and the smell of seaweed mingled with the tang of salt water. A tugboat, its diesel engines throbbing, edged past Keats Island on its way to the pulp mill at Port Mellon. Amy and I scrunched down into the sand and leaned against one of the silvered logs. I closed my eyes against the sun.

“You know what I'd like more than anything?” said Amy dreamily.

“What? What would you like more than anything?” said a man's deep voice.

Robert Pryce. He had his dog, a young German shepherd, with him, and they both sat down beside us. That is, Robert Pryce sat next to Amy. I thought of what my mother had said about Amy soon after the Millers had moved to the Landing.

“That young girl attracts too much male attention, in my opinion.”

Robert shifted his weight until his leg touched Amy's. I waited for her to pull hers away. She didn't. I remembered my mother warning me once, “Don't let any man get too familiar with you, or touch you. Trouble lies that way.” My tongue was dry and stuck to the roof of my mouth when I saw how Amy leaned in closer to Robert.

Robert stayed with us for about fifteen minutes. He and Amy chatted away about nothing at all important, but it seemed charged with an undercurrent of excitement. I felt shut out, a hundred years old, ugly, unwanted: incredible feelings I'd never had before. How two people talking in the sun could make me feel that way, I would never have imagined. When Robert got up to leave, I was glad.

Even though Amy and I spent the rest of the afternoon together, I couldn't shake the disturbed feeling that I had watched my best friend begin a game whose rules I didn't understand.

I met Sylvia Ballard in the village store that Saturday morning. Smiling, she came over to me. “Are you free to babysit tonight at seven-thirty? My husband and I have decided at the last minute we'd like to go to the dance at the Legion in Gibson's.” Since Amy and I had put Mrs. Ballard at the top of our list of suspects, I was quick to say yes.

That evening as soon as I had Joanie, the Ballards' five-year-old, in bed — and it seemed to take hours with her wanting endless drinks of water, and “just one more story” — I began to look for clues. There weren't any that I could find.

I looked everywhere but the parents' bedroom. All I discovered was that Sylvia Ballard liked
True Confessions
magazines and hid them in the deep kitchen drawer that also held a twenty-pound bag of white Five Roses flour. I learned, too, that Mr. Ballard liked to leave little love notes lying around for his wife and that he called her “Bunnykins.” It didn't seem to fit with his bald head and long, gangly frame.

Amy and I talked about it after school on Monday.

“There was just the usual junk lying around the desk and kitchen counters,” I said. “Bills and stuff like that.”

“Did you check her jacket pockets? She always wears that red plaid one when she goes for a walk.” Amy loved clothes.

“I didn't think of it,” I said. “Joanie was being a real brat. I was looking for something to eat, and she called out, ‘I heard you open the fridge door, and I'm going to tell my mother.' She's spoiled rotten. My mother says it's because she's an only child.”

Amy looked at me, annoyance flickering in her eyes. Too late, I remembered that Amy was an only child. “I like being an only child,” she'd once said.

“Your dad get away to the city all right?” I asked.

“Yes. And the
Lady Alexandra
had barely pulled out when you-know-who came to visit. I answered the door, and you'll never guess what he said to me. He said, ‘You're even prettier than your mother.'” Amy looked pleased. “Of course, my dad thinks so, too.”

I looked at her in surprise. “That's stupid,” I said. “She's your mother, not your rival.”

Amy's chin came up. “Maybe you're jealous, Meg. Ever think of that?”

“Jealous of what?”

“Well, you're not exactly beautiful,” Amy said.

“Thanks a lot … Think about ‘S.' And all the other women Robert Pryce makes a play for. The guy's trouble, you know that.”

“I know that I like the way he makes me feel. As if I'm special.”

“I think you're making a mistake, Amy. And cut it out. I'd never say a thing like that to you, that you're ‘not exactly beautiful.'”

“Well, no, because it wouldn't be true.”

“We're supposed to be friends. Friends don't say mean things to each other.”

That was our first quarrel, and it took a couple of days to get back to our usual friendliness. Those were a horrible few days. I went around with a great hollow pit in my stomach until we were best friends again. Well, maybe not exactly best friends. Amy had made another friend at school — Louise was her name — and they began to spend a few recesses and lunch hours together.

We didn't find any more notes, but we did notice Sylvia Ballard hanging around that stretch of road. “We could set a trap,” suggested Amy. “We could write a note to ‘R,' signed ‘S.'”

“But then we'd have to copy Mrs. Ballard's handwriting, and we don't know what it looks like.”

“You could find out the next time you babysit there. Get a sample, a grocery list or a note, something like that.”

Amy turned to me, putting her hand up to her hair. “How do you like it this way?”

“You mean that streak at the front? It looks good. What did you use, peroxide?”

“Yes. I'm thinking of doing the whole thing. My hair is kind of mousey, not really blonde.”

“Peroxide is supposed to be bad for your hair,” I said. “And you'd have to keep doing it. Otherwise, you'll begin to look like a skunk … I read somewhere that if you use a lemon rinse after your shampoo, it will bring out all the blonde, brighten it up. Or if you want to go darker, use vinegar.”

“I'll try the lemon juice tonight.”

I walked her back to her house. For a change, her mother wasn't home. We went down to Amy's bedroom, which was in the shed beneath the front porch. Amy had plastered the walls with pictures cut from movie magazines. She began pointing out all the blonde actresses.

“I wouldn't want to go as light as Alice Faye,” she said. “Or Veronica Lake. I like the colour of Lauren Bacall's hair best. It's sort of tawny-coloured. I think I'll start practising her voice. It's so sexy.”

We went back upstairs to see if we could find something to eat. There was nothing but peanut butter and crackers, and we took them out onto the front porch. From there we saw my brother Dan, who's four years younger than me, come hurrying up from the wharf. As he got closer, we saw that his clothes were dripping, and his shoulders were hunched up around his ears.

“Hey, Dan!” I called out. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” he said and walked away even faster.

“I can get him to tell me,” Amy said. “He's got a crush on me.”

She left me to go after Dan, and when he spotted her, he began to walk even faster until he was almost running.

Amy turned to come back, but before she did, Mrs. Miller arrived home.

“Don't talk to me,” she said, not coming up the steps to the front door but heading around to the back where the bathroom was. “I'm going to have a hot shower and lie down. I don't feel well,” she called over her shoulder.

A couple of days later, I asked Dan what had happened. “You looked pretty upset. Did someone push you in the ocean? You were soaked.”

“I promised I wouldn't tell,” Dan said, turning away.

“Who made you promise?”

“Some jerk guy.”

“All the more reason not to keep quiet.”

“Well … After school, I went down to the wharf to check my cod line, and I heard this shouting from over by Keats Island. It looked like a boat was in trouble. So I took one of the rowboats tied up at the float and rowed across. It was Mrs. Miller and that new guy, you know, the oldest Pryce brother. He said that they'd run out of gas, and he wanted a tow back. That was all right, and I got them here okay, but when I tied up, Mrs. Miller started acting silly, giggling and stuff, and she couldn't get out of the boat. When I tried to help, she fell in between the boat and the float. I bent over to haul her out, but with all her stupid flailing around, she pulled me into the water. Mr. Pryce gave me ten dollars and told me he'd appreciate it if I didn't tell anyone about it … The whole thing made me feel kind of sick.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“No. I said I wouldn't tell anyone.”

“You told me.”

“You don't count.”

“Yeah, well, thanks, I love you, too.” I told Dan about the notes that Amy and I found.

“I've seen Robert Pryce up in that part of the woods,” Dan said. “Yeah, he probably left the notes. I'm not going to have anything more to do with him. The next time he hollers for help, I'm going to pretend I don't hear.”

“Dan, do you have a crush on Amy?”

“That's none of your business … Maybe I did, once. But one day she said she'd like to climb Lookout Hill with me. Once we got to the top, she told me all these things she wanted me to do with her. I was disgusted. I told Father Smith at confession about it. He explained it all to me and how I'm supposed to resist temptation.”

“Dan!”

“I know she's your friend and everything. All I'm saying is that I don't want her coming near me.”

I looked at Dan more closely. Dan and sex? I didn't know whether to believe him or not. But I knew he didn't usually make things up.

As for Amy, had she really tried to seduce him, or was it some kind of a pastime for her, a joke? I decided I would try harder to make friends with the other girls at school.

I was kind of worried about Father Smith, too, about Dan going to confession. Dad was dead set against any of us becoming Catholics. The peninsula had been without a priest as long as we had lived there. Then one was sent from Vancouver to round up all the Catholics and build a church.

“Over my dead body,” said my father.

“Murray!” My mother had been raised a Catholic in Ireland, though she hadn't married in the Church, because Dad was a divorced man. “For pity's sake.”