And she heaped the plates up high.
There was gravy for the taters
And a crispy apple pie.
An inveterate grammarian, Belle paused, her pen hovering at “There was.” Wrong, but very colloquial. And wasn’t Nancy Davis the stage name of Nancy Reagan? Would anyone remember? A plate of Tim’s chocolate chip cookies had gone largely uneaten, despite personal inroads. The few arrivals “loved” the place, coveted the pool, but found excuses not to make an offer. How would she manage without Miriam, a repository of statistics on every puddle and pond in one hundred miles? A temp would never do. Maybe the business had grown too small to be viable. The siren song sounded again to consider selling the valuable downtown property and joining a large company like ReMax. Generous bennies, no overhead, more time to herself. A crack accountant like Miriam could always . . .
Near tears, she turned as always for comfort to the framed portrait of Uncle Harold. Unlit Cuban cigar clamped firmly in his mouth, he held a huge muskie, mugging at the camera. When she’d bailed out of teaching high school in Toronto twenty plus years ago, leaving the Big Smoke to those who could tolerate teenage testosterone and mind-blowing rudeness, the scorn for authors other than Koontz and King, he’d made her a full partner. She touched a trembling finger to a figure in the background, paddling a homemade birchbark canoe. Jesse Schoenberg, his secretary, a long-time girlfriend then in her late sixties, who’d retired after Harold’s death five years ago. Jesse had gone to Israel, funded by Hadassah to organize women’s consciousness-raising groups on the kibbutzim.
Darkness came without another bootstep through the door, and Belle stared into the teeth of a fresh storm. With her eyes sensitive to light halos and glare, night driving was difficult enough without that complication. Iced over, the van door stuck, so she gave it an Eric Lindros hockey block, bruising her hips. Living in the North got harder each year, or was it just her? She had been born in Floridian Toronto, where the panicky mayor had earned national mockery for calling out the army to rescue the city from a paltry twenty-five-centimetre dump. The radio predicted the dreaded “periods of light snow,” aka PLS, five centimetres tonight, no doubt followed by another five, another five, and another five. The regional plow that serviced Edgewater Road would have a great excuse to sit idle, forcing a packdown effect that grew ruts rivalling Kosovo’s best. Ortega y Gassett had said, “Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.” She felt like a soldier in a four-season battle: nearly winter, winter, still winter and construction.
After taking a spare key which Miriam always left in her drawer, Belle went to the apartment and completed the lonely task of packing a few essentials as Evelyn had advised. On a whim, she stopped at Blockbuster Video to purchase several classics. Then, she parked the van near the front door of the San and dropped off the bag, looking up at the lighted windows as she left, wondering absurdly if Miriam’s face would peer back. Likely she was sedated in an effort to stabilize her before treatment began.
The trip home took an hour. Two vehicles had crashed at Radar Road and the turn to Skead, backing up traffic for a mile. Whirling blue lights of police cars and departing ambulance sirens warned drivers to slow. Whiteouts along the airport hill, a problem unsolved even by the pseudo-scientific erection of hundreds of yards of snow fences, wiped out all shape of the road and obscured the painted lines.
Relieved at arriving at Edgewater Road, Belle paused at the armoury of metal postal boxes, opened her cubicle with a customary fist pound to the lock and groped for a postcard stuck at the back. In the snow-scattered light from the van, she couldn’t read the writing, but the picture resembled a sunny beach. A snowbird neighbour polishing his clubs after the eighteenth hole? She gritted her teeth and stuffed it into her pocket along with delivery flyers useless in the bush. The new perogy pizza sounded intriguing, though.
The floodlights beamed welcome when she skidded down the long, winding driveway. As she opened the house door, unlocked with the dog inside, Freya bounded out, down the steps and into the woods for her duties.
An hour later, Belle was decompressing in the TV room, solaced by quesadillas filled with Monterey Jack, onions, peppers, black olives and mushrooms. She dosed them with Mcllhenny’s Tabasco sauce.
Trudging up to the master suite for bed, she noticed the red blink of the answering machine. A familiar voice, its booming cadences balm in an icy Gilead, said: “Out in this mess chasing filthy lucre? You need a mother, and I’m back.”
Choking back a laugh, Belle went downstairs to collect the postcard. From a tourist spot on the Mediterranean, palms, sand and beach umbrellas, dated three weeks ago. “Watch the stars for me. I’ve shaped up the last kibbutz and run out of maple syrup. Love, Jesse.”
At thirty-five, Belle hadn’t been a baby when her mother had died of cancer. But with only Uncle Harold and her father as immediate family, she’d welcomed Jesse’s gruff, no-nonsense affection. In the confusion of grief, Belle had had no idea how to write an obituary, jotted the bare facts and stared bleakly. Then a mechanical whizzing had sounded from the kitchen, and soon Jesse was gripping her shoulder, easing a glass of fresh-squeezed carrot juice into her inarticulate hand. “She had a life, girl. Now drink these anti-oxidants and remember that this is for her, for your father, not you.” And a chastened daughter had summoned bit by bit her mother’s career as a legal secretary, leading her class in Toronto, a wizard of torts and public relations. Terry Palmer’s garden met the challenge of an unforgiving climate, those violet delphiniums winning prizes. Belle had passed the empty glass and completed notes back to Jesse, who read them with grunts of approval. “Where do you think you got your love of plants, Belle, out of the sky?”
Jesse had been married back in the “Stone Age,” her philandering dentist husband dead of an aneurysm at forty in his mistress’s bed. Her only boy roamed somewhere chasing a cause in Nicaragua, Chile, or other points south. Jesse waved a wrinkled hand and shrugged. “He’ll float back some day like Odysseus, and if not, good riddance to a father’s son.” With this dismissal, her hooded tortoise eyes would blink, and she’d look away. Belle had never met Pete, but his picture by Jesse’s bed, a long-haired hippie demonstrating at a peace march, showed that he was more his mother’s son.
Belle dialled her friend, received a computer voice saying that the line was not connected. She’d soon be catching up with old pals, many in retirement homes or nursing facilities. How old was Jesse? Seventy-five? Belle’s Jewish mother was as timeless as the rocks of the elemental Cambrian Shield.
That night Dr. Easton called as Belle assembled a host of vitamins on the bathroom counter. “I know you’re concerned, and I don’t think I’m breaching ethics by telling you that Miriam will be at the San for several weeks.”
Belle felt a lump rise in her throat. “And a visit?”
“Dr. Parr thinks that would be a good idea. But not until she’s settled in and therapy is underway. Wait another week.”
“Why not sooner?”
“A surgeon’s a glorified mechanic, not a psychiatrist, but I suppose that in every illness, treatment depends on the individual. Healing the mind is complex. Along with choices of drugs and therapy, some people need the constant comfort of family, if they’re used to—”
“But Miriam—”
“Has been an independent lady, I gather, from what she did confide. Aside from her daughter . . .”
I’m not chopped liver, Belle thought, then responded to the last word. “Rosanne. Has anyone called her?”
“I suggested that when we arrived. Miriam didn’t want to worry the girl with exams coming up. She’s very prone to stress.”
Belle assumed the mantle of bearer of bad tidings, never a strong suit. “I’ll take care of that, and I appreciate your going beyond the call.”
She frowned at the neon glow of eleven on the bedside clock. Wait until morning? Rosanne should have been contacted days ago. What student went to