Grave Concern (2 page)

Out West. Those days, the phrase was like a mantra in the wind.
Out West
. Work was said to be plentiful and was. Kate found herself in the common graveyard of Arts majors: something now called
communications
but then known as
PR
. Public relations. But she wasn't cut out for PR, not at all. For one thing, she was shy with strangers. She hated large groups and crowds. Crowds of strangers: the worst. Setting up news conferences, chivvying media, speaking with forked tongue — it was all wearing. As for her employers' public image, for the most part Kate could not have cared less.

Romantically, Kate's philosophy turned on liaisons rather than serious affairs: how could she tie herself to a place where winter was not only endless but palpably malevolent? A blizzard-wracked plain that kept trying, like a fly-tormented horse, to sweep her from its backside? Witness the annual siege: the months of November, December, and January, better known (by Kate) as Chapped Lips, Sinusitis, and Influenza. Trapped in a cage of cold, assailed by long weeks of stark refrigeration under a merciless firmament, one's sole source of hope was a massive cloud moving in on the western horizon, presaging the warm wind known as Chinook. After a day or two of its relief, though, came inevitable re-immersion in the deep freeze.

Kate found what solace she could in her bookshelf.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …

Come February, the longer and relatively warmer days saw her stir like a bear from hibernation — she might look into jazzercize or accompany her straight (and happily married) friend Gladys, whose old-fashioned name and impeccable manners belied a pulsating rage at convention, to the one lesbian bar in town. Just (as Gladys demurely put it) “for the heck of it.”

Thus, by various mental tricks and devices, Kate would arrive at what she'd dubbed Mingy March. Harrowed by the foreknowledge of April's certain snows, Kate would book the cheapest package deal she could find to somewhere warm. There, cloaking meatier fare behind Danielle Steel (so as not to attract undue attention), Kate would retreat to plastic loungers by interchangeable blue pools to devour more Eliot or Donne:

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls …

It tolls for thee.
With the perspective of distance from the icebound city, Kate yearned still more to bid it adieu — the bland, grey pavements, the soul-sucking aridity, the abysmal architecture. Not to mention the prospect of Maddening May, when the same long weekend that would see her eastern comrades easing down in a lawn chair with a beer by the lake would see Kate's odds of waking up to snowfall hardly less than in previous months.

Irrespective of the appalling weather, from the beginning Kate had, at best, an uneasy relationship with the phallic engorgements of her booming city. At first, she'd been merely puzzled by the popular weekend pastime of visiting gargantuan show homes just for fun. As time went on, she found herself increasingly put off by the patronizing patter of the nouveau riche. In the end, she felt downright exhausted by the stresses of upward mobility.

But the final straw was the day her beloved fifteen-year-old Toyota, still running perfectly, was rear-ended by a monstrous SUV. It was two weeks before Hallowe'en — she remembered because she'd been dreaming up a costume for an upcoming party. She and the Toyota had been crawling toward work at thirty klicks, reasonable given the whiteout conditions and a road more like a skating rink. The driver of the Cadillac Escalade didn't even see her. In his quest to beat the light, he ran right up over her rear end, which, thank God, was fortified by a load of winter tires she hadn't gotten around to putting on. That was the thing in this crazy town — let up for a second and you would pay, one way or another, to the gods of either nature or commerce.

In the event, Kate got a nasty jolt, which in turn necessitated the wearing of a distinctly unfashionable neck brace for the better part of three hellish months. The Cadillac captain's response to the damage? From the pilot house in the sky had emerged a finely gloved middle finger along with a rude reference to female anatomy, culminating in a treatise on the obvious defects of a Toyota owner.

And yet, and yet. To retreat from her carefully wrought scaffold — to run back east, for instance — felt to Kate like cheating, as though some malfeasance were out to break her will.

In a dark hour one April night, abed in the howling city, the delicate fabric of Kate's light sleep was rent: the phone ringing like hell's fire alarm. All the way from Ontario, clear as black ice, a voice informed her that her parents, driving home from visiting friends Monday night of the Easter weekend, had been smashed head-on by a drunk careering over a hill into their lane. Nothing they could have done. Both killed instantly. Kate's loud silence prompted the caller to stop speaking officialese and say gently, “I'm so sorry. If it's of any help, I can supply you with the number of a crisis counsellor in your area.”

A crisis counsellor. Wasn't that what they sent into schools when some disgruntled former student returned and shot up a bunch of kids? Was this a crisis? It wouldn't have occurred to Kate to call it that. Godawful. Horrific. Heart-squeezingly, throat-achingly, stomach-churningly sad. But a
crisis
?

Kate was pitched headlong into funeral planning. In a fug of grief, she began to pack a suitcase. As she packed, Kate considered the word “crisis” again. One of her more optimistic employers, in an effort to bring Kate into the corporate fold, had once sent her for management training. The keynote speaker was all about Crisis (this was the eighties). The word “crisis,” he said, came from a Chinese character meaning “
opportunity riding on the wings
— or was it
winds
? —
of a storm
.” Bullshit, most likely. But it won over the crowd. True or not, it certainly made a person feel better.

Maybe that's what this detestable news was — opportunity evilly disguised. Within five days, Kate had packed up her apartment, rented a Drive-Away and — despite her friend Gladys's wry observations, dark warnings, and, finally, bald entreaties — moved back across the country into her parents' house.

From the highway, Kate planned her entrance to a driveway that hadn't seen a shovel in some time. She signalled and began braking. The Impala shuddered mightily as Kate slowed enough to turn but not so hard as to be rear-ended by the semi looming in her rear-view. At the last possible second, she turned the wheel and plunged through the bumper-high drift into a shadowy indentation in the whiteness she could only hope would yield. Whew, close! The logging truck flew by, horn blaring.

Opening her door proved a challenge, as the snowbank, stiffened by numerous passages of the county's ploughs, held its own. Kate wiggled the Christmas table display out of the car and post-holed through the snow to the front door. There she waited, and waited, her bouquet-decked hand growing numb. Finally, she heard the tremulous sound of a latch, and, oh God, if it wasn't old man Marcotte who opened up. Since when had the Marcottes moved out here? And now it came to her that
this was the old shop
, Marcotte Antique & Fine Upholstery. Everyone knew the place. You couldn't miss it: An old rocking chair hung up on a high pole — it looked like a gallows — right next to the highway. Kate used to wonder whether big trucks clipped it as they passed.

Kate and her mom hadn't gone to the “shop on the highway” often, but when they did, it was an occasion. Kate remembered her mother bending down, swiping a handkerchief across Kate's patent leather shoes just as they entered the store. The man there always gave Kate a twisty peppermint sucker, something Kate never saw anywhere else. She was taught to say
Thank you so much
,
Monsieur Marcotte
, and not to stare or gawk. Then she would be sternly warned not to touch
a single thing
, and she would wander about, sucking her sucker and making sure not to let any part of her body or clothing brush the antique oil lamps and mirrors, while her mother and Monsieur Marcotte conferred over a cherrywood drop-leaf table or a bird's-eye maple armoire.

No rocking chair now. The Marcottes must have sold the house in town and moved out here when he retired. Kate glanced down at the card attached to the floral display:
Love from Guy and the gang in Wollongong
, it said. Wollongong — sounded like Africa. Or Australia. That was it, Australia.

The old man was waiting, his green eyes piercing her confidence, just as they had all those years ago. Kate averted her own gaze and held the flowers out. “For you, Mr. Marcotte. Merry Christmas!”

Monsieur Marcotte
. Antique seller, keen curler, but, more relevant to Kate, the
father of Jean–Philippe (J.P.) Marcotte
, object of her first heart-stopping, knee-wobbling, gut-searing love. A love Kate had learned to ignore but never, in thirty years, got over. Somehow she remembered to hand Marcotte senior Flower Power's business card.

Back in the car, she turned the key in the ignition, saying a silent prayer to the gods of internal combustion.
Yes —
the engine caught. An ironic reversal. For it seemed not out of the realm of possibility that, at some time between Monsieur Marcotte's answering his door and Kate's return to the insouciant Chevy, her own beating heart had come to a complete stop.

Kate found herself back in town with little memory of the return. Her last delivery was at a large, white house with pretentious black columns and a portico. This house and its owners had been reviled when she was young, their grandiose renovation of a post-war bungalow considered spendthrift and somehow unseemly. Still reeling from the shock of encountering Marcotte the elder, Kate reached automatically to pluck the flowers from the seat behind. The bouquet consisted of a dozen enormous roses, six white, six pink, all swathed in a froth of ferny greens.
Congratulations on your new baby daughter
, the card read.

Kate snapped to. Oh, God. In forgetting Nathan Niedmeyer's double anniversary, she'd also missed the relevant order deadline for Binary Blooms, the online discount supplier she normally used. There were nice Christmas greens at the ValuMart, but the cost would eat up much of the profit on the Niedmeyer order. What on earth would she put on Adele's Nathan's grave?

If Kate's soul could be said to have a Facebook wall, it was now the devil made his first post. Kate looked up at the quiet house, its curtains closed. She glanced around the cul-de-sac, checking for spies. None. She flipped a tawny hank of hair from her eyes, gently caressed the bouquet on her lap. Crazy — the extravagance, the expense. Complete overkill, likely bigger than the baby it celebrated. She gently tugged at the thick satin bow binding the stems together. Really, in the great scheme of things, what were a few roses more or less?