“What a wonderful show!” Angela exclaimed.
“It was great, love,” Jack said.
Sheila smiled, holding Lily in her arms. Maggie and Kate hugged her legs beneath the layers of her creamy silk dress.
“Thanks, it was a lot of fun; I don’t get to do children’s theatre very often.”
“You don’t come home very often either,” Wanda interrupted. “How are you, my love?”
“Best kind today, love,” Sheila said.
“Good thing we bumped into you before we leave!”
Jack stiffened behind her.
“Where are you going?” Sheila asked.
“To the mainland. Peter found a job at that new gold mine, and we’re leaving in a month!”
Angela’s face paled, remembering Pete and Jack on her doorstep the previous evening. She clenched her jaw and turned to Jack, who avoided her gaze.
Lily fussed in Angela’s arms. Katie and Maggie were tussling over the last stick of gum they’d found in their mother’s purse.
“Lucky Wanda, you only have one.”
Wanda smiled, shifted a sleeping Susie on her hip. “But I plan to have more now that Pete’s got this job on the mainland.”
Angela’s eyes widened in panic. “Good for you….” she said and her voice trailed off weakly. Jack grabbed her hand and held it firmly.
“Come over for a drink before you leave?” Wanda asked.
Sheila nodded and smiled as Wanda walked away.
“Some glad to be rid of her,” Sheila whispered.
“Sheila!” Angela admonished.
“She stole Peter Fifield from me when I was seventeen.”
“Sheila, come on, you’ve got a theatre group in town, an up-and-coming folk musician who is completely in love with you, and you’re worried about some small-town miner with big thumbs?” Angela whispered back.
“It’s not his big thumbs I’m after,” Sheila said.
“Some bad you are,” Angela said and tried not to laugh as Sheila wistfully looked at Pete’s full back and thick, long legs.
“Pass me some screech,” Sheila whispered, drunker than she’d been in ages, or so she said.
“You’re getting right royally pissed,” Angela said, her voice slurred due to the amount of Jamaican rum she’d consumed.
They were sitting in Sheila’s bedroom after the show. Jack had taken the kids home to bed and Doctor Nelson sat sound asleep in his study, slumped over a novel.
Angela grew quiet. “Jack lost his job yesterday.”
“Oh no,” Sheila said and rolled over on the twin bed, a remnant from adolescence, still covered in a pink gingham bedspread. She rose and went to the window and struggled to open it since it was stuck in the molded pane. This reminded Angela of when they would sit here after school, blowing smoke rings out the window from the crisp, sharp-smelling English cigarettes stolen from Mrs. Nelson’s purse.
“What are you going to do?”
“Jack doesn’t want to leave home. He thinks life will be rough up there, but rough we can handle. Starvation — which is what’ll happen if we stay here — we can’t.”
“Where would you go on the mainland?”
“I don’t know, I suppose the same place Wanda is going.”
“That could be good then, living in a town with some people from home?”
“Yes, it’ll be a comfort, that’s for sure.”
“But it won’t be home.”
“No, it won’t be. But I guess it’ll have to do. I mean, we don’t have a choice, do we?”
Peter sat at the back of the church in his usual spot. The Women’s League was tired of cleaning the dirt on the floor from the sneakers he wore in the summer and salt stains from his work boots in the winter. The other men in town wore their Sunday shoes to Mass, but not Peter. He wouldn’t bother with the charade if it weren’t for Wanda. She made him go. Said it had to do with giving Susie a sense of the world, a sense of service and goodness. So he complied.
He looked around the small room, a kaleidoscope of purple from the stained-glass windows, the large wooden crucifix draped with a purple cloth and the priest’s vestments. His father had hated purple, thought it was too bright for the sombre occasion of Mass. Peter could still remember his parents trying to stuff him and his two younger brothers into suits for a Sunday Mass and his mother dabbing iodine over the cut on her lip, his father gargling with minty mouthwash in an effort to hide the sour, yeasty smell of more than two days of drinking beer non-stop.
They’d looked presentable. The suits hid the bruises on the boys and all seemed well. When Mass was over, the whiskey would come out, and that’s when Peter’s father was at his roughest.
Peter nodded at Jack and Angela as they took their seats a few pews ahead. Angela looked at him sharply. Peter avoided eye contact. She could always see through him, and he knew that half the time she didn’t like what she saw.
The winter his father caught him having a draw off a cigarette and the trail of blood as he fled from the house. Angela had been trudging home with a few groceries for her mother, the winter after her father had died. She dropped the bag with the eggs in it when she saw his purple face and the blood from his nose and lip.
“You are coming with me,” she’d said.
“I’ll be alright.”
She took charge, stepping over the egg yolks, lying whole out of their shells, like dandelion heads snapped from their stems, and dragged him to her mother’s. The wind meowed and hissed in the bitter cold.
“Tea and a Purity biscuit for you,” her mother said.
Angela stood in front of him and patted the wounds with a warm, salty cloth.
“I can take care of myself,” he muttered. He sat stone-faced and flicked the cloth away like it was a tick.
“Give it up,” Angela said warningly and held his chin with her small hand.
The next day Peter wrote Angela Harrington gives good head on the bathroom wall, and she was shamed and mocked by the boys and girls alike.
“I know it was you,” she said in the playground after school as she wiped away tears with the tip of her pink frosted nail.
“Quit mothering me,” he said.
So Angela stopped. Not too many knew the truth about Peter’s home life, and if they did they handled the information awkwardly: laughed, made jokes, or turned a blind eye.
As Peter sat in Mass, watching his best friend take his seat, he still couldn’t look Angela in the eye. If she looked at him long enough she’d know how desperately he wanted to leave, contrary to all the senseless nostalgia and pining to stay that everyone else felt. He wasn’t sure about who would make it out of Brighton. Some stayed in towns like this long after the industry’s lifespan. Stayed and worked here and there, odd jobs in town or worked as scabs for striking mining companies. Some stayed on the dole for life.
Peter wouldn’t let that happen to his family. He’d been fighting to get out of Brighton, he would joke with Jack, since they took a trip to Montreal in 1976. What were they? Seventeen or eighteen and in love with the city that served drinks all night, the garish spectacle of the dancing girls, the smoked meat sandwiches at two in the morning, smothered with