While he enjoyed his shrimp and she made messy inroads on the chili dog, Belle leafed through the Enquirer. Jackie O was still getting headlines even after answering the last trumpet. If it could happen to her . . . Belle probed behind her right ear where she had been having some discomfort. No lump yet. She checked discreetly to see how her father was faring since it wasn’t wise to chat with him while he ate. Coordinating breathing, chewing and swallowing became difficult after a series of small strokes; aspirated food was a geriatric nightmare. He cooperated with her, but with the nurses he was bossy and demanding, reverting to the “bad boy” of his childhood. However, he seemed more “with it” today. “Good shrimp. Good shrimp,” he nodded. “Pie and ice cream?” His eyes darted back and forth to the box on the dresser.
“Sure, as soon as you’re finished,” she agreed. Shortly after, she replaced the remains of the meal with the dessert. “Hey, you’re in luck. Cherry pie. Remember how Mother used to make it? What a dope I was to lose her pastry recipe.” Then she went to the dining room and returned with his tea.
“How are your feet?” She looked sadly at the swollen pair.
“OK, OK,” he insisted. “Can we go out for lunch next week?”
She didn’t like to believe that he would not walk again. Just getting him to medical tests was a bitter challenge, weather aside. A recent chest x-ray had been a logistical horror story, though he had tried his best. “Well, there’s still lots of snow left. And you would have to walk to the van.”
“I can walk. I’ve never let you down yet, have I?” he asked. And she felt her eyes tear and pretended to look out the window at a chickadee.
“No, you certainly haven’t.” She shifted topics. “Do you know that this has been the worst winter in the last century and a half? That means that no other Palmer ever in Canada has seen one as bad.” He liked to boast about his family emigrating from Yorkshire in 1840. In Toronto she had taken him to Prospect Cemetery to find the grave of his grandfather, a corporal in the New York 22nd Cavalry during the Civil War. Many Canadians had gone south to fight for glory or purpose or something absent in the peace-loving North. When her father had first arrived at the nursing home, he had had a black roommate, to whom he had proudly related his grandfather’s service.
“Oh, I saw Love on the Dole last night. Remember that one?” She knew he loved talking about his working days.
He brightened, sipping his tea, which she had cooled first with an ice cube from his bedside pitcher. “That’s an old one. Deborah Kerr. Before the war, right?” He scratched his head. “No, 1941. Brits were at war, maybe not the Yanks yet. I saw every picture ever made back then.” When the television news ended, Belle rounded up the detritus and left him anticipating his afternoon soaps and after-dinner favourites, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. He had been interested to learn that Alex Trebek had come from Sudbury.
On her way out, she leaned over the high desk at the nursing station. “You know most of the doctors in town, Cherie. What can you tell me about Dr. Monroe?”
“Are you taking your father there?” She emphasized the last word with a gasp.
“No, it’s a business matter. I met him the other day and had a few questions.”
Cherie leaned over the desk and glanced around. “A woman in my nursing class dated him, if that’s a polite word. After they broke up, she had some pretty harsh words. Hypocrite, liar, that kind of tone. His qualifications maybe?” She paused and looked sceptical. “Could be spite, though. She went to Victoria after that. Wanted a change.” She snorted, pointing at the snowdrifts outside. “Guess she got it.”
“Wouldn’t his credentials have been checked?”
“In those days? He came here back when the place was desperate for doctors. You know the North. Always on the short end. Glad to get what we could.” She lowered her voice until Belle had to lean perilously. “But don’t mention this, will you? Not too ethical of me to blab.”
“Of course not. And thanks for keeping an eye on the old man.” Belle went out into the sunlight that had replaced the morning fog. Behind her in the nursing home, every day was the same, just like in her fish tank. They did their best, God bless them, she thought, getting into the van and turning on the radio as Oprah’s voice beamed out, greeting her fans in Northern Ontario in connection with a contest to win a trip to her show in Chicago. The country station plunged on. “Last time I saw him, he was Greyhound bound,” Dottie West sang as Belle blinked into the brightness.
As she returned home, the plow sat in the same spot. This time the driver had been joined by a front end loader large enough to shift the Skydome. Likely laughing at his friend’s poor driving, the loader man had ignored the banking and slipped off at the same spot. Megalon sent to rescue Godzilla and not a brain cell between them. Strolling neighbours were pointing and laughing, while the men hunched morosely in their cabs. What kind of unimaginable bigger brother would have to be summoned now? The churned-up land looked like Guadalcanal.
TEN
It was time, past time really, to search Jim’s camp. Belle checked her calendar. Clear for tomorrow. Perhaps if the weather held, she could go. She filed some papers, made a list of places to visit which included the land registry office, and sent two new bills. And three reminders. And one downright threatening, well, sort of, letter to a man who owed her over two thousand dollars for her appraisal of his twenty-unit apartment. Her “1001 Letters for All Occasions” software had seven inventive sequences of seven dunning letters, like the biblical seventy times seven. At first, assume that the person had merely overlooked the bill (reminder stage); then get the facts about why payment had not been forthcoming (problems stage); in the crisis stage, hint gently that it was to the miscreant’s credit rating that he pay, suggesting legal intervention only if all else failed. In Belle’s experience, professionals who baked in Jamaica over the winter and paved their double-wide drives in salmon stones were the worst. She typed “Dear Mr. Bowman: It has been ninety days since we . . .” Too bad she couldn’t hire Jimmy Cagney as a collection agent, someone to rub a grapefruit into the client’s face, or maybe a rutabaga.
Bored by her prosaic prose, she turned up the news on the radio and flipped off the computer. A bad storm was blowing down from the northwest, the worst direction. Thunder Bay had two feet of snow, and the blizzard was charging through the Sault, closing the Trans-Canada route. She tapped Miriam on the shoulder. “Bad storm. Better get home while you can.”
They trundled out together, pulling scarves up and wool hats down against the gusting white swirls. Five quick inches had fallen by the time Belle hit the Jem Mart for the obligatory cream, bread and eggs, along with a couple of packages of Kraft Dinner (50 cents—bargoon!). A Score bar jumped into her basket, then another. Her university roommate Pamela had always said that every now and then, everyone needed a score. True then, true today, she thought, crunching one for solace as the snow began to cover the vehicles outside. “Another bloody dump of snow,” a grizzled man in a snowmobile suit grumbled, tearing Nevada tickets in a mindless routine as he stuffed the unlucky remainders into the trash. “This winter’s the limit. I’ve been here sixty years and never seen the like. Can’t even afford Ft. Myers with the dollar in the toilet.” Then Belle remembered her fish. If they really were in for it, she had better stockpile feeders for Hannibal.
She reached the pet store at the mall just as “Mrs. Popeye” was turning the closed sign. The old girl was a living Victorian etching, impervious to medical advances; forever wheezing, with lively brown eyes pressed into her face like raisins into a cookie, she bullied her teenage clerks like an old pirate. “Do you want some feeders, my girl? You’re just in time. We are closing early with this terrible storm. The usual dozen?” She stroked an overstuffed Siamese which homesteaded by the cash register, then rocked on her swollen legs as a coughing fit shook her. A few whiffs from the oxygen bottle clipped to her hip stopped the spasms. “Mother’s milk,” she snuffed.
Belle