Maggie grinned mischievously, chocolate stuck to her front teeth.
“Let her be,” Angela snapped. “She can eat whatever she wants.”
“Not in my house she can’t.”
Maggie stood, nervously knotting her black pageboy with her chocolate-covered fingers, innocent and bewildered blue eyes wide and round as those of the cows in her colouring books.
“Don’t bother with the tea. If my kids are hungry, I’ll go home and feed them.”
“I’m sorry —”
“No need to explain,” Angela said and rose to pick Lily up from the floor. “We’ve worn out our welcome here.”
Angela slipped on her coat, wrapped Lily in a shawl, and nudged Maggie toward the door. Outside on the wooden step, she turned back toward her mother at the door, her face slack and sad.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be gone soon, and you won’t be bothered —” she said bitingly as Maggie kicked stones halfway down the gravel driveway “— by the child,” she continued and covered Lily’s ears with her hands, “that looks exactly like the man I married.”
As she walked away, she brushed a few tears from her face. It’s bad enough that she doesn’t like my husband, but to take it out on our daughter? That’s unforgivable, she thought sorrowfully. It will be great to get out of here, to get away from her. She’s a horrible, miserable old woman. She thinks she knows what my husband’s faults are? She doesn’t know the first thing about Jack. He won’t let me down. He’s promised to do everything for me and the children. I don’t doubt him. He listens to me, he always has. It’ll be good for the children to not have to grow up with her condescension. God knows how I survived it myself.
Angela thought back to all the hours she’d spent arguing with her mother over every choice she’d made or wanted to make: all her life, badgered about her preferences from skirt length — in high school — to hairstyles, choosing baby names, and finalizing wedding details. She’ll have no say in this new little baby’s life, Angela thought, and her eyes cleared. She sniffled and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “We’ll be far away from her. Hopefully sooner rather than later,” she whispered to Lily, asleep in her arms.
Jack took his time taking the last few steps from the unemployment centre toward home. He couldn’t believe it: she was pregnant again. He’d heard her throwing up this morning. She’d tried to hide it with the running water and a lot of loud coughing. He let out a low whistle, unable to believe that another baby was on the way.
Another mouth to feed, Jack thought and gulped as he halted mid-step. He looked around, hoping for someone, anyone, to be heading home. He’d like to find someone to go play darts with or have a game of cards. He didn’t want to face her. Or face this. How could this have happened? Why weren’t we more careful? He wanted to run back to the mine and burrow underground. Or swim away, jump into the Atlantic and go to Ireland and search for his roots, his other family, and other men in his gene pool: roughnecks who quite naturally had deserted their women for the drink or for the freedom to chase other women. Or he could shove off to Boston, stay with his uncle who owned an Irish pub in the university district, take a course with his bar-tip money and become a history teacher like he’d always wanted to be. He could still make that choice; there was time. Angela hadn’t seen him come down the road yet.
Suddenly Maggie’s eyes flashed into his mind, her beautiful blue, full round eyes, stubborn and righteous, innocent and wise. He couldn’t bear the thought of her in the care of some other father, a man who inevitably would come along and be moved by Angela’s beauty and would quite naturally want to provide for her and the children in place of the nasty old black Irish husband who had deserted them. But there’d be one child the new husband wouldn’t like. It would be Maggie, of course, because she looked so much like her father. And she would grow up and want to be a schoolteacher, just like her father, whom she believed had left them for that very purpose. She would tuck her grief away, like the hair she would tuck behind her ears, clipped in a tight bun, place glasses over it, to smother and drown all of her twisted, convoluted feelings for men: deep love and hate for the man, her father, who had deserted her, and a certain emptiness she’d feel toward the stepfather.
No. He couldn’t do that to his little Maggie; she was too precious. They all are, especially Angela, oh Christ … Angela …he thought. He put one foot in front of the other and continued toward the house, a bright smile on his stiff face.
After supper she paced the room while he sat in the easy chair, a hot cup of milky tea in a saucer on the tea table beside him.
“Well, what are we going to do?”
He took her in his arms and hugged her tightly. “Whatever you want, my love.”
She smiled and let him hold her. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”
His stomach tightened. “Yes?”
“You’ve got an interview, Jack, in St. John’s with Noraldo.”
He stiffened and his heart thumped. Worry drained the blood from his face but he forced a smile. “This is great news,” he said and squeezed her hands tightly. “How did this happen?”
“I applied. I sent in your resume.”
“Well, I’m glad one of us was thinking,” he said and rubbed her belly, “otherwise we might’ve missed the interview.”
“You’re not upset, are you?”
“No,” he said as his stomach and jaw tightened simultaneously. “Don’t worry, my love, everything will be fine. I’ll have a job before you know it.”
On the morning Jack went to St. John’s for his interview, Angela stood at the kitchen sink and held a box of table salt at an angle, ready to pour the contents into a small clear glass shaker. The salt was held in a white cardboard box with ochre and electric-blue rows of oversized polka dots that faded as the dots got bigger. It trembled in her thin hand, the salt spilling onto the chrome sink.
“We go through so much salt,” she mumbled and shook her head. She pinched the grains between her fingers and rubbed them lovingly. She dipped the end of her tongue into the white crystals. Saliva dripped from her cheeks and the glands in her neck cramped with pleasure.
There’s so much salt here, in the fish, in the water, in the rain, on our tables. Too bad it isn’t worth anything, she thought. She had read an article one morning while tidying up the girls’ bedroom in Katie’s junior science magazine she’d found lying on the floor. The article contained all kinds of interesting trivia about salt. Salt had once been used as currency, it said. Roman soldiers were given salt rations known as “solarium argentum” or a salary, and before they went off to battle they rubbed themselves with salt. After reading the article she had gone to the kitchen and had thrown salt over her shoulder, superstitious and silly, but the article also noted the importance of salt in religious rituals. Throwing it over your shoulder casted out evil, because salt was a symbol of incorruptible purity, the article had said.
I should have rubbed Jack with salt before he went off to town for that interview, keep him incorruptible and pure. He would think I’m crazy, and I probably am, a married woman licking the salt from her hands, standing by the kitchen window. If Wanda were next door, it would be her turn to pity me and want to feed me, under the guise of asking me to help her pack or pull laundry from her line.
Wanda had left a week ago with Peter at the wheel of a U-Haul truck, setting out for the long drive up to Alberta, due to work two weeks from the day they left. Her home looked animated now that they were gone, taking with them all the gloom and dolor of a family dealing with unemployment, leaving in its place, underneath the receding shroud of anxiety, what had always been there: a beautiful yellow clapboard with chocolate-brown shutters and window frames sitting primly around easy windows, flower boxes spilling an assortment of perennials, yellow