Bitter Sweet (24 page)

She set down her suitcase and listened.

From somewhere in the depths of the house came the sound of a radio playing a
George
Strait
song, accompanied by the rhythmic swish of sandpaper on a plastered wall. She followed the sound along the front hall where the sun, enriched by its journey through stained glass, streamed across the entry and music room floors.

Tilting her head, she called up the stairs, ‘Hello?’

‘Hello!’ a man returned, ‘I’m up here!’

She found him in one of the smaller bedrooms, his clothes dusted with white, standing on a plank between two stepladders, sanding a replastered waft.

“Hello,’ she repeated from the doorway in a tone of surprise. ‘where are the Lavitsky brothers?’

‘Gone to do a short job somewhere else. I’m Nordvik, the plasterer. ‘

‘I’m Maggie Stearn, the owner.’

He motioned with the sandpaper. ‘House is coming along fine.’

‘It certainly is. When I left there was no heat in here, and no kitchen walls. And, my goodness, the bathroom and fire exit are all in!’

‘Yup, it’s comin’ right along. Plumber got the furnace in first of the week and the rockers started hanging the same day. Oh, by the way, there was a delivery came this morning from
Chicago
. We told ‘em to put it in the living room. Hope that’s okay.’

‘Fine, thank you.’

Maggie rushed downstairs to find her antique furniture in the main parlour, and experienced one of those minutes where everything seemed so right, and the future so rosy, she simply had to be with somebody.

She called Brookie.

‘Brookie, you’ve got to come and see my house! It’s all painted outside and nearly ready for paint on the inside, and I’ve just come back from
Seattle
and the house there is all sold and my first pieces of antique furniture just arrived from
Chicago
and...’ She paused for a breath. ‘Will you come, Brookie?’

Brookie came to share her excitement, bringing - out of necessity -Chrissy and Justin, who explored the vast, empty rooms and played hide-and-seek in the closets while Maggie gave their mother a brief tour. Nordvik left for the day. The place became quiet, permqated by the cardboardy smell of new plaster and the sharper tang of glue from the tiles in the new bathroom. Maggie and Brookie walked through all the upstairs rooms, pausing finally in the Belvedere Room where they stood in a warm patch of sunlight while the voices of the children drifted in from down the hall.

“It’s a great house, Maggie.’

‘It is, isn’t it? I think I’m going to love living here. I’m so glad you forced me to come and look at it.’

Brookie sauntered to the window, turned and perched on its low sill. ‘I hear you saw Eric a couple weeks ago.’

‘Oh, Brookie, not you, too.’

‘What do you mean, not me, too?’

‘My mother nearly freaked out because we rode to
Sturgeon
Bay
together for that board meeting.’

‘Oh... I didn’t hear that. Did anything happen?’ Brookie grinned impishly.

‘Oh, Brookie, honestly! You’re the one who told me to grow up.’

Brookie shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d ask.’

‘Yes, something did happen. I got my permit to open a bed and breakfast.’

‘I already found that out, even though my best friend didn’t bother to call and tell me.’

I’m sorry. Everything got crazy - the trip to
Chicago
, then to
Seattle
. I can’t tell you how happy I’ll be to get my own belongings back. As soon as I have so much as a frying pan and a bucket to dip lake water I intend to move out of my mother’s house.’

‘It’s been bad, huh?’

“We don’t get along any better now than we did when I was in school. Do you know she hasn’t even come to see the house?’

‘Oh, Maggie, I’m sorry.’

‘What is it with my mother and me? I’m her only daughter. We’re supposed to be close, but sometimes I swear, Brookie, she acts like she’s jealous of me.’

“Of what?’

‘I don’t know. My relationship with Dad. My money, this house. The fact that I’m younger than she. Who knows?

She’s a hard woman to figure out.’

‘I’m sure she’ll come to see the house soon. Everyone else has, that’s for sure! This place is the talk of Fish Creek. Loretta McConnell’s been bragging hither and yon that you intend to name it after her forefathers, and about how you restored it to its original colours. You can’t talk to a soul who hasn’t driven past to look at it. It really looks beautiful, Maggie.’

‘Thanks.’ Maggie crossed to the wide window and sat down beside Brookie. ‘But you know what, Brookie?’ Maggie studied the new plaster while the sound of the children’s play echoed from the distance. ‘When I see it changing - something new finished, like today when I got here - I get this...’ Maggie pressed a fist beneath her breast. ‘... this big lump of emptiness because there’s nobody to share it with. If Phillip were alive...’ She dropped her fist and sighed. ‘But he’s not, is he?’

‘No.’ Brookie got to her feet. ‘And you’re going to do it all alone, and everyone in town including your mother is going to admire you for it.’ She hooked an elbow through Maggie’s and drew her up.

Maggie’s lip lifted into a grateful smile. ‘Thanks so much for coming. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ Arm in arm, the two sauntered toward an adjacent room to scout up the children.

In the days that followed, as Maggie watched the house take shape, the lump of dejection appeared sporadically, particularly at the end of the day when the workers left and she’d wander the rooms alone, wishing for someone to share her sense of accomplishment. She couldn’t call Brookie every day; Brookie had her own family responsibilities to keep her busy.
Roy
came often, but his enthusiasm was always counterposed by the fact that Vera never came with him.

The kitchen cabinets were hung, the Formica countertops set, the new bathroom fitted with its antique fixtures and the water turned on at last. Maggie’s furniture arrived from
Seattle
and she moved out of her parents’ house with a sense of great relief. On her first night in Harding House she slept in the Belvedere Room, though it contained only Katy’s twin bed, a table and a lamp. The bulk of her belongings were piled into the crowded garage and the apartment above it until the floors in the main house could be refinished. An antique door for the new upstairs exit was located; Maggie stripped and varnished it, watched Joe Lavitsky hang it and as the light fell through its etched window for the first time she wished anew for someone with whom to share such moments. October, viewed from the deck of the Mary Deare, was a season without rival, the sky-blue water reflecting the change in colour that intensified daily as the trees turned in familiar sequence - first the butternuts, then the black walnuts, green ash, basswood, sugar maples, and finally the Norway maples. As the days progressed, Eric watched the breathtaking spectacle with a veneration that returned each year on cue. No matter how many times he witnessed it, autumn’s impact never dulled.

This year Eric watched the season’s change with an added interest, for each descending leaf exposed another bit of Maggie’s house, it became anathema, this misplaced preoccupation with a woman not his wife. Yet he found himself passing Harding House daily, watching it appear section by section behind the maple trees, and he sounded his horn wondering if she ever stepped to a window to watch him pass, or onto the belvedere after he had.

Often he thought about the night they’d moused around in the blackness of her house with only a cone of light between them. It had been unwise, the kind of thing which, if discovered, could start tongues wagging. Yet it had been wholly innocent. Or had it? There had been a nostalgic feeling about the entire night, picking her up at her house just as he had when they were in high school, the hug on the courthouse steps, the ride back to Fish Creek and the confidences they’d exchanged in that black, black house.

In moments of greater clarity, he recognized the danger of putting himself anywhere near her, but at other times he’d ask himself what harm could come from sounding a whistle dear out on the bay.

By the last week of October the branches of her maples were nearly bare and he thought he saw her once, in a window of the Belvedere Room, but he wasn’t sure if it was she or only a bright reflection off the glass.

November arrived, the waters of
Green Bay
turned cold and bare, its flotilla of autumn leaves sunk like shipwrecked treasures. There came that dreaded and anticipated day when the last of the fishermen had come and gone, and it was time to lay up the Mary’ Deare for the winter. Every year it was the same, looking forward to the slack time yet feeling forlorn when it arrived.
Hedgehog
Harbor
, too, seemed forlorn, quiet with inactivity - no boat trailers unloading, no fishermen in misshapen caps posing for snapshots, no engines, horns, or shouting anywhere. Even the gulls - fickle birds - had disappeared now that their ready supply of food had stopped. Jerry Joe and Nicholas were back in school, and Ma had shut off the two way radio till spring. She spent her days watching soap operas and shaping pieces of coloured foam rubber into butterflies with magnetic bellies that perched on refrigerator doors. In those silent, crisp days that preceded snow, Eric cleaned the Mary Deare for the last time, winterized her engine, swaddled her up in canvas, lifted her from the water and blocked her up on a cradle. Mike laid up The Doe then disappeared into his back twenty to put up next winter’s stovewood. The sound of the engine on his log-splitter sometimes drifted through the quiet from a half-mile away, revving and idling, revving and idling with monotonous regularity, adding to the melancholy.

Eric had told him to go; he’d finish the rest. When the fish-cleaning shed was scoured, and the docks out of the water, the rods and reels stored for the winter and all the outbuildings padlocked, Eric spent a few restless days at home, eating doughnuts and drinking coffee alone, doing what little laundry had accumulated, straightening spice cans in the kitchen cupboards. The coming winter loomed long and lonely, and he imagined
Nancy
at home with him, or the two of them going south, to
Florida
maybe, as so many of the other Door fishermen did in the winter.

Then one day when the house got too lonely, he went out to the woods to help Mike.

He found his brother beside the log-splitter, working alone over the noisy gasoline engine mourited on a knee high trailer. Eric waited through the crescendo of sound while the powerful pneumatic ram slowly pushed the log against the wedge. The log creaked, tore, and finally fell to the earth in two pieces.

As Mike leaned over to pick up one, Eric called, Yo, brother!’

Mike straightened, tossing the firewood aside. ‘Hey, what’re you doing here?’

‘Thought you might like a little help.’ Tugging worn leather gloves more tightly on his hands, Eric stepped to the far side of the rig. He tossed aside the other half of the log, then reached for a whole one and placed k on the splitter.

‘I’d never turn that down. It takes a mountain of wood to heat that house all winter.’ Mike engaged the clutch and the sound swelled as the log began moving. Above it, Eric shouted, ‘Thought you were going to put in a gas furnace this year.’

‘So did I but Jerry Joe decided to go to college o it’ll have to wait.’

‘You need extra, Mike? I’d do damn near anything for that kid, yot know.’

‘Thanks, Eric, but it’s not just Jerry Joe. There’s some thing else.’

‘Oh?’

Another log split, fell, and the engine quieted.

Mike picked up a piece of oak and said, ‘Barbara is pregnant again.’ He gave the wood a ferocious heave, then stood glowering at it.

Eric stood motionless, letting the news settle, t’eeling a wad of jealousy lodge in his chest: another one for Mike and Barb when they already had five scattered in ages from six to eighteen while he and Nancy had none. As quickly as it came, the jealousy fled. He picked up the piece of oak from his side of the splitter and tossed it onto the pile, grinning.

‘Well, smile, man.’

‘Smile! Would you smile if you’d just found out you were expecting your sixth one?’

“Damn right, especially if they were all like Jerry Joe.’

‘In case you hadn’t heard, they don’t come out that way, all raised and wearing size-ten shoes. First they need shots and they get ear infections and colic and measles and they go through about two thousand damned expensive diapers.

Besides, Barb’s forty-two already.’ He stared morosely at the naked trees nearby, then muttered, ‘Christ.’

Between the two men the engine idled, forgotten.

‘We’re too damn old,’ Mike said at last. ‘Hell, we thought we were too old last time, when Lisa was born.’

Eric leaned down and killed the engine, then stepped over it to grip Mike’s shoulder.

‘Listen, don’t worry. You read all the time about how people are younger at forty than ever before, how women are having babies later and later in life, and everything’s turning out fine. Hell, a couple years ago I remember reading about a woman in
South Africa
fifty-five years old who had a baby,’