Tribb's Trouble
Authors: Trevor Cole
TREVOR COLE
Tribb's Troubles
Copyright © 2012 Trevor Cole
First published in 2012 by Grass Roots Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Grass Roots Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies:
the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.
Grass Roots Press would also like to thank ABC Life Literacy Canada for their support. Good Reads® is used under licence from ABC Life Literacy Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cole, Trevor, 1960-
     Tribb's troubles / Trevor Cole.
(Good reads series)
ISBN: 978-1-926583-84-6 (Print)
ISBN: 978-1-927499-46-7 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-927499-47-4 (Kindle)
     1. Readers for new literates. I. Title. II. Series:
Good reads series (Edmonton, Alta.)
PS8605.O44T75Â Â Â 2012 428.6'2Â Â Â C2012-902407-4
Printed and bound in Canada.
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Tribb Munday was watching football in his living room. Suddenly, something made him look toward the hall.
Nothing. The hall was empty.
Tribb's wife, Linda, was sitting on the couch against the wall, knitting. Linda worked as a nurse at the local hospital. Lately, whenever she was home, she was knitting.
“Did you see that?” Tribb asked her.
Linda didn't look up. “Was it a good play?” she said.
Tribb shook his head. “I'm not talking about the football game. I thought I saw something in the hall.”
In the light coming from the kitchen, Tribb saw the hall carpet and the wall. On the wall hung a framed picture of the Munday family. Tribb, Linda, and Suzy, their daughter. They were standing on the dock of the cottage they'd rented a few summers before. Suzy was eight years old then. That summer, Tribb often thought, was his family's happiest time. But besides the wall, the carpet, and the picture, there was nothing to be seen. Still, Tribb couldn't shake the idea that something else had been there a moment ago. If only he'd looked a second earlier, he'd have seen it.
“I'm sorry, honey,” Linda replied. “I'm not really watching the football.”
Linda was still focused on her knitting. Every fall she made scarves and mittens and hats to raise money for Suzy's school. This year's sale was at the end of next week, and she had a lot of items to finish. Right now she was working on a powder blue scarf, her long knitting needles clicking in a steady rhythm. Tribb could tell she was not paying any attention to him.
“Linda, it's hard to talk to you when you're not looking at me.”
Linda kept knitting. “Okay, then,” she said, nodding.
Tribb watched her. “Linda?” he said, and waited. Nothing. “Linda?” he tried again. “Linda? Linda? Linda?”
His wife dropped her hands and the blue scarf into her lap and stared at Tribb with wide eyes. “Tribb,
why
are you
bothering
me? I have all this knitting to do!”
They just looked at each other for a moment.
“Never mind,” said Tribb. On the small table beside him sat an old crystal candy dish, a real antique. It held wrapped butterscotch candies, and Tribb tipped the dish to take a few. When he took his hand away, the dish rattled back into place.
“Careful,” said Linda. “That dish was my grandmother's. You know it's very precious to me.”
Linda paid more attention to the rattle of a dish than to Tribb's own words. He wasn't surprised. That was marriage for you.
“This is looking nice, don't you think?” said Linda.
Out of the corner of his eye, Tribb saw Linda hold up the blue scarf for him to praise. He didn't have to look. He had very good eyesight out of the
corner of his eye. Better than most, he thought. Not that anyone else appreciated it.
“Very nice,” said Tribb, as he shoved a candy in his mouth.
Early the next morning, the three Mundays gathered in their bright kitchen. Outside, orange and yellow leaves from two big maple trees covered the yard. At the stove, Linda cooked sausages for breakfast. Tribb and Suzy sat at the kitchen table, holding their thumbs side by side to see whose thumb was longer.
Being eleven years old, Suzy never stopped noticing how her body compared to the bodies of others. Her height, her weight. The number of freckles she had. The thickness of her wrists. The lengths of her fingers and toes. A day did not go by, it seemed, without Suzy judging some part of her body against someone else's. Tribb supposed that she kept measuring herself to see how she fit in the world. Like anyone, he thought.
“Your thumb is huge!” Suzy said. She had a playful grin. “It's so big it's gross!”
Tribb waggled his thumb. “It's not gross,” he said. “It's impressive.”
“It's like the thumb of a monster!” She pretended to be scared and hid behind her hands. Tribb felt pretty sure she'd be an actress when she grew up. Either an actress or a comedian.
“Now, now, Suzy,” said Linda at the stove. “You might hurt your father's feelings.”
But Tribb smiled. “The Mundays have always had big hands,” he said to Suzy. “You should have seen your great-grandfather's.”
“Well, I'm a Munday,” said Suzy, “and I have a small thumb. A dainty thumb.”
“Who wants toast?” Linda asked.
“I do!” said Tribb.
“I do!” said Suzy.
Tribb saw Linda reach for the bread bag on the counter. She opened it and pulled out a handful of bread slices. She was about to drop two into the toaster when she paused. She looked at the slices.
“Someone's taken a bite out of these pieces of bread.” She looked at Tribb. “Who would do that?”
“Not me!” said Tribb. He looked at Suzy. Suzy had made her thumb and index finger into a circle. She held the circle over her fork and squinted through it as if through a magnifying glass.
“Suzy?” said Tribb. “Was it you?”
“Egg yolk,” said Suzy. She looked up at Tribb, still squinting. “There's a tiny bit of egg yolk on this fork. At least I think it's egg yolk.” She smiled. “It might be alien poo.”
Tribb sighed. “None of the women in this house listen to me.”
“Suzy,” said Linda, still standing at the counter. “Did you take a bite out of these slices of bread and then put them back in the bag?”
Beside Tribb, Suzy made her scrunched-up, you-must-be-crazy face, with one eyebrow raised high. “Why the hell would I do
that?”
“Suzy, don't swear,” said Tribb. “Say heck instead of hell.”
Suzy turned her you-must-be-crazy face to Tribb. “Why the
heck
would I do
that?”
“Thank you.”
Linda looked closely at the bread. “All these slices have a bite out of them in the same corner.” She picked up the bag. “There's a hole in this bag.” She held it up so Tribb could see the hole. To Tribb, it looked about the size of his great-grandfather's thumb.
“I think we have mice,” said Linda.
Tribb was enjoying a beer with his friend Peter at the Cap and Cork Pub. They had met fifteen years before, when they both started working at Donner Metal Works. Tribb was a shift supervisor. No matter what day it was, he liked to arrive at work and joke, “Hope you enjoyed your weekend, boys. Munday's here already.”