Guess what? I’ve got a job.
And she couldn’t keep her mind on her work. Her thoughts turned repeatedly to Father Lauzon. Although he had been the pastor at her church, St. Mary, Star of the Sea, for six or seven years before this latest transfer to St. Alphonsis, she really only knew him to see him and say a shy hello. As far as she knew, he never bothered much with parish kids. He had a distinctly un-priestly air about him. To her, he seemed more like a businessman than a priest. Tall and deep-voiced, hands nearly always shoved deep into his pockets, playing with loose change, he was friendly and aloof at the same time. On Sundays, after mass, he always came out into the church parking lot. You could hear him talking to everybody in his big booming voice. Cathy’d heard him joking with men parishioners, asking when he could get a game in at their golf club. She’d even seen him pull a golf bag out of the trunk of his car, so she knew he wasn’t just making conversation. And he whistled and sang all the time. Snippets of tunes from the radio. She couldn’t imagine him looking over her shoulder and fussing over details of housecleaning, investigating her work and raising his voice if he found a spot of dust somewhere or a wrinkle in a bedspread. He certainly didn’t look as if he’d care whether a rag was wrung out properly or not. In fact, Cathy was certain he wouldn’t even realize that some people considered that there was a right way and a wrong way to do such a thing.
As she finished up in her room, the last thing she did was adjust the angle of the slats in her blind to let in as much light as possible. Her mother liked lots of light in a room, except when she was brooding behind one of her closed doors.
She was expected to scour the bathroom from ceiling to floor, ensuring that all its shiny surfaces—mirror, white tile, white porcelain fixtures, silver chrome taps, faucets, and cupboard handles—all sparkled. She even had to bring the step ladder in from the garage and take down the round glass ceiling light cover and wash it so that when her mother turned on the light and looked up, she saw only light and not the little dark specks of dead insect bodies. Finally, she had to replace all the towels and facecloths and the bath mat, making sure they all hung perfectly folded from their correct rack.
Then came the dining room, dusting and polishing all the dark wood furniture and washing all the little square windows in the French doors. Finally, she had to wash and rinse the floor in the front foyer, put two coats of paste wax on it, and then buff it to a gleaming shine, first with the brushes on the electric floor polisher and finally with the lambs’ wool pads.
Her well-trained hands worked independently while her thoughts wandered, wondering about St. Alphonsis. She pictured herself answering a beautiful heavy dark door, placing a hat on a coat rack, and leading a visitor inside, settling him in a comfortable parlour before she went to knock softly on a study door and say, “Father, you have a visitor. Shall I make tea?”
Finally, at two o’clock that afternoon, having made sure that all the drapes and curtains in all the rooms of the house were wide open to the bright afternoon light, having checked that not a dish was out of place in the kitchen, and having changed her clothes and combed her hair, she was free. The last thing to do was to hunt through the lemon-, pine-, and vinegar-scented rooms for her mother. Cathy liked the sharp, tangy air. Along with the orderly appearance of the rooms, it was palpable evidence of all her hard work.
She knew to be diligent in her search. Sometimes you could miss Adele because she sat so silently, hidden in a corner of a room, sunk into a chair, staring at the carpet in front of her feet, with a cold cup of tea in her lap. This time, though, Cathy spied her through the dining room doors, sitting outside on the swing, with her head thrown back, her eyes closed, and the garden hose held tightly in her right hand. As the swing rocked gently back and forth, the water from the hose splashed across the trunk of the nearby hawthorn tree, tracked across the grass, spilled onto the soil beneath a lilac bush that her mother had recently transplanted, and then reversed its path. Cathy cautiously called out through the screen that she was going to Janet’s. She knew enough to pause, looking towards her mother, just in case Adele was watching her through narrowed slits. There might be one more task that she wanted completed. But this time, her mother did not respond, and so Cathy quickly and quietly left the house by the laundry room door.
The Saturday-morning lawn mowers had fallen silent, and the smell of fresh-cut grass had drifted away. Now the hot afternoon air was scented with petunias. Oppressed by the sun, people had abandoned the street to their automatic sprinklers, which were busy ffutt-ffutt-ffutting arcs of water across the front lawns. Cathy stepped off the end of her driveway onto the gravel shoulder of the road, listening to the playful sounds made by the shooting water. Ffutt ... ffutt ... ffutt ... ffutt ...went Mrs. Munro’s sprinkler onto her beds of pansies and then chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka- chucka-chucka-chuck as it mechanically jerked away in another direction. Quich ... quich ... quich ... said Mr. Grant’s sprinkler.
“Kinda like one big conversation out here, isn’ t it?”
Angela had fallen into step beside Cathy. She could have walked right out of a flowerbed in her hot pink silk top, bright green silk pedal pushers, and yellow sandals.
“Just goes to show you never know how many parallel worlds exist right beside yours, you know?”
Cathy was staring straight ahead to the end of the street. Angela followed her gaze.
“Ah! Tar bubble time.”
Cathy smiled, her mind flooding with the memory of how, years ago, on a hot day like today, with the sun beating down so hard that her black hair felt almost on fire to the touch, and the heat waves rising from the scorching asphalt, the tar bubbles would always be up. Good big ones, ready for pushing down. And they belonged to her and Isabel Labelle.
She began to run towards the end of the street, pulled by memory back into the summers of her childhood. The crown of the road was scarred with cracks that had been filled in with tar. The tar was melting and bubbles were there now rising up slowly in the broiling heat, tiny reflections of the sun riding on their glossy thinning surfaces.
“This the place?” Angela asked, arriving at her side.
“Right here.”
“How many on a team?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just the same number on each side.”
“Remind me of the rules?”
“You pair off your bubbles and just watch them grow. If yours gets to be the biggest, you get a point. Unless it bursts. Then you lose it and your team gets smaller. So that’s why you have to decide whether you’re going to push it down before it bursts so you can keep it. But if you push it down too soon, and the other team’s bubble gets bigger and doesn’t burst, they get the point.”
“Hmph!”
“Isabel and I used to spend whole afternoons lying here,” Cathy said, her hand drifting up to caress the side of her face, “with our cheeks on the road.”
“Yikes. A hot asphalt facial.”
“You can’t see the height of the bubbles unless you’re right down there beside them.”
“Wanna have a game?”
“Naw. It has to be Isabel.”
“Whatever happened to her?”
“Don’t know. Moved away.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. Years ago.”
“No, I mean them. Look at them. They’re just waiting for you.”
“Well, they’ll have to wait forever, now.”
“You taking the shortcut to