Object of Your Love (10 page)

Occasionally Loretto needed Bev's company. Bev's company was sometimes—
sometimes
—better than nothing. Her visits supplied Loretto with something to tell Dewey about at night. Bev got into town more than Loretto, who kept to herself mostly, distrusting the gossip, the viciousness of the town. She said the town was too crowded, she didn't like people bumping into her, it was unnatural for people to live on top of each other like that. In contrast, Bev drove into town nearly every day to shop, taking her two kids with her, taking them, for instance, into the lingerie section of Booth's department store where, once, while she was in the change room, the little boy, David, pulled down the underpants on all the mannequins, causing the old woman at the cash to faint. When she came out of the cubicle with her hands full of lacy brassières, Bev laughed. She didn't care. She liked to shock. She liked to leave an impression. Bev heard things in town. She had a way of pulling information out of people she hardly knew, a way of digging and undermining. She was subversive, Loretto thought.

“How about some coffee?” Bev said in the kitchen. “And you're going to need some too. A hot, soothing drink. I hope you're feeling hearty today,” she said with exaggerated concern. “I hope you're up to strong news.” Her pink lipstick was like paraffin, there was a general waxiness about her complexion, reminding Loretto of a corpse. Bev had the figure of a young teenager because she starved herself or puked up everything she ate until her pelvis bones jutted through her clothes, two curved blades. Her high breasts were the size of muffins, fresh and tempting. Loretto, looking at Bev's bleached hair teased into a brittle, dated flip, thought of a photograph in an old high school yearbook.

“What are you talking about?” demanded Loretto, irritated.

“You better sit down. What I'm going to tell you will knock you flat.”

“If it's going to knock me flat,” said Loretto, planting her feet solidly on the floor and crossing her arms over her chest, “it won't make any difference if I'm standing or sitting.”

“Okay,” began Bev with visible relish. “Dewey gets an hour break at noon, right? He has off from eleven forty-five to twelve forty-five. What does he do with his time?”

“He eats his lunch. I make it for him myself.”

“How long do you think it takes him to eat a sandwich? Where do you think he goes after that? Do you suppose he stays at the factory the whole time? Do you think he goes out for fresh air? For a little drive around town, maybe? What do you think he does?”

“Maybe he goes for a drive. I never asked him. Why should that concern me?”

“Think, Loretto. How long would a spin around town every day keep a man like Dewey happy? How long would it be before he got bored? What would he start doing next? Maybe stop in somewheres for a visit? Strike up new acquaintances?”

“I don't know and I don't care. That's his business.”

“Oh, but you
should
care, Loretto,” crooned Bev with pleasure. “You should make it your business. You'd find yourself surprised.”

*   *   *

The next morning around nine o'clock, Loretto drove into town, parked in front of the paint and wallpaper store on Main Street and went inside. It was a large new store with immense windows facing the street. Loretto had never been in there before. She was the first customer of the day. The girl was there, at the back, organizing the cash and eating a doughnut and coffee, her breakfast. She wore mauve lipstick, heavily applied, and she had a flat chest and the slender legs, hips and behind of a young boy. Her frizzy brown hair hung down on her shoulders. She'd come into work with it still damp. She was seventeen or eighteen.

Unbuttoning her coat, Loretto sat on a stool at one of the high counters near the front where all the wallpaper books were kept. She began to look through one. Soon the girl came along, carrying a large cardboard box. She tore it open and began to unpack rolls of wallpaper, placing them in a bin fixed to the wall.

“Excuse me,” Loretto said. The girl straightened up and looked at her with a flat, vacuous face. When she got a better look at Loretto, something flickered across her expression, like a shadow passing over it, a moment of recognition.

“Excuse me, but do we know each other?” Loretto said with patient curiosity.

“I don't think so,” the girl lied.

“I feel like we do,” said Loretto calmly. “Why is that?”

“I don't know,” said the girl, blushing and backing away.

“Are you sure?” Loretto went on in a quiet, reasonable tone. “Perhaps we haven't met directly, but are you certain there isn't some connection? Some link we aren't thinking of? Maybe a person we both know, however distantly or—intimately?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” said the girl, a blend of defiance and fear in her voice.

“No? I wonder.”

The girl picked up the empty box and hurried away, pretended to busy herself at the desk. Now Loretto was openly watching her and this was upsetting the girl—Loretto could see this.

Presently, Loretto called back to the girl, “Excuse me. Could you come up here, please? I need some advice.” Putting down her papers, the girl reluctantly approached Loretto. “Could you give me your opinion here?” asked Loretto, indicating a wallpaper sample. “Do you like this paper? Do you think it's appropriate for a bedroom? Do you think it would create the right mood?” She was watching the girl's face, which was stricken with alarm. “Do you think it would increase my husband's desire for me? You look like a girl who knows a lot about a man's desire. Especially a married man's.” The girl turned and fled to the storage room, her hair flying back, her heels clattering across the linoleum floor. Loretto heard voices back there, a distant door slamming.

Calmly, she continued to turn the big pages of the book, though her own heart was pounding with the raw and brutal excitement of a dog following a scent, certain of its prey. In no hurry to leave, Loretto ran her hand appreciatively over the flocked paper. The store was bright, warm and pleasant and Loretto found it soothing to sit here and watch the traffic slide past the big windows. Women out on a Friday morning shopping for the weekend. A sense of well-being and industry to the town on a day like this. The sun shone, the streets glistened with runoff. An unexpected thaw.

Soon, an older woman, the store manager or owner, emerged from the back room, strapped a gallon of paint onto a machine and flicked a switch, setting the can gyrating. She noticed Loretto looking at her and came to the front of the store.

“May I be of any assistance?” she asked.

“I was dealing with that young girl,” said Loretto.

“Wanda.” The woman was tiny, withered and bitter-looking as an old dried-up walnut, her hair a thin pink cloud. “She's gone home.”

“Oh?” said Loretto with concern. “What's the matter with her?”

“She's feeling sick.”

“Oh, dear,” said Loretto tragically. “She didn't look too good, did she? She was looking a little peaked. The poor girl. I hope she'll be all right.”

“Is there something I can help you with?” asked the woman, growing a little suspicious, impatient with Loretto's solicitude. Perhaps she'd overdone it.

“No,” Loretto answered, sliding off the stool and picking up her gloves and purse. “I think I've accomplished what I wanted. Goodbye.”

Outdoors in the warm sunshine, Loretto walked along the slushy sidewalk a block or so to the butcher shop, where she pushed through the glass door and shuffled along in line with the other customers until her turn came.

“I'd like five pounds of liver,” she told the butcher. “Make it good and bloody.”

“Big fry-up tonight, ma'am?” asked the butcher in a friendly way.

“Something like that,” said Loretto. She paid for the liver and left the store, carrying back to the car the neat, heavy package wrapped in stiff brown paper and tied with a string. She drove away, turning at the post office, heading north from the commercial street into a residential neighbourhood of old brick homes, some large, some small. Sunshine flooded through the windows, heating the car. Loretto drove along, humming to herself, contentedly stroking the fat butcher's package on the seat beside her, as though it were a purring cat. She drove slowly, enjoying the sight of the redbrick homes against the bright snow and reading the signs. Ottawa Street. Burwash Street. John Street. Soon she came to a short, quiet, wooded road, shady with tall blue pines, like a street in a cottage town. Here was the cemetery, with its stone pillars, its iron gates standing open, its gravestones descending the white hilly terrain sloping down to the river. Next to the cemetery was the place Loretto was looking for, a narrow red-brick house with plain windows, a shallow porch with the Christmas lights still strung along it, a Victorian gable in need of a coat of paint.

With the car idling at the curb, she went up to the house, bearing the package. There was a wicker basket hooked beside the door for a mailbox. Loretto untied the string on the package, opened the butcher's paper and dumped the liver into the basket, in among some letters left by the postman. By the time she was back in her car, the dark blood was flowing out the basket, trickling down the side of the house. As she drove away, she saw the girl, Wanda, standing in an upstairs window, holding a white curtain aside, watching her.

*   *   *

That night Loretto waited for Dewey to come home and face her. It was well after nine before he arrived. Loretto knew why he was late. Bev had called earlier.

“I heard the girl tried to kill herself,” Bev told Loretto. “Dewey was called away from the factory. The police came and picked him up and took him to the hospital so he could talk to the doctors. Talk to the girl. Maybe try and calm her down.”

Loretto was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee when Dewey got home. He came and stood in the kitchen doorway, filling it with his bulk. He was a tall, heavyset man with a sandy brush-cut and long, lustrous eyelashes.

“It's finished,” Loretto told him. By that, she meant: Don't ever see her again. If you try to, I'm warning you I can't be held responsible for what I might do. We won't speak of it again. We'll go back to Life before Wanda.

“I know it's finished!” Dewey said angrily. “You made goddamn sure of that, didn't you?”

“What did you expect me to do? Write her a thank-you note?”

“No, I didn't expect that. Not from
you.
”

“Do you know how humiliating it was for me to have to face her?”

“You didn't have to face her. You didn't have to go into that store.”

“I like to meet things head-on.”

“Why did you have to go for her? Why did you go and scare the shit out of the kid? You could have kept it between you and me.”

“And pretend she was just an innocent bystander? I believe in people taking the consequences of their actions.”

“What you did might have killed her. How would you have felt then?”

“The slashes on her wrists weren't sincere,” Loretto scoffed. “She called the ambulance herself before she'd bled a thimbleful.”

Dewey turned from her in disgust and walked away. “Why did you do it?” Loretto yelled after him. “Why would you be attracted to someone like her? How could you touch her pathetic body? I've seen more flesh on an insect! I've seen more intelligence on the face of a moron! She isn't even worth talking about. She's
nothing!
”

*   *   *

“Maybe you went too far,” Bev said to Loretto the next day on the phone.

“She had it coming to her.”

“She was just a child,” Bev pointed out.

“She was old enough to commit adultery.”

“They don't call it that any more.”

“What do they call it?”

“A love affair.”

“
Love!
” Loretto spat out.

Wanda's parents were contacted by the police and called home. All the way from Florida, where they spent their winters, summoned from their comfortable trailer home at considerable expense, flying because of the emergency when ordinarily they would have returned economically by car in May. Called back to the Canadian winter because of a package of liver.

“They didn't have to come back because of a package of liver,” Loretto told Bev. “They had to come back because their daughter is a slut. It's time they knew what she was up to. Using their house for her carryings on. How many other men were there before Dewey?”

The whole affair caught the imagination of the town. People visited the wallpaper store to talk to the pink-haired lady—Florence Quickly was her name—asking exactly what Loretto had said to the girl, asking if Loretto had purchased any wallpaper in the end. They'd dropped in at the butcher shop. How much liver had Loretto bought, they wanted to know, and at what price per pound? The butcher offered a week-long special on liver to take advantage of the publicity. He was sold out every day. Households all over town were eating it. People drove past the girl's house to look at the blood stain, dark as tanned leather and frozen to the front of the house. Wanda's mother was seen by some spectators on her knees on the front porch with her Florida tan and a pail of steaming water, trying to scrub off the liver blood with a stiff brush.

“She's lucky I didn't smear blood all over the front door, like they did in the Bible,” Loretto told Bev.

“You probably would have, if you'd thought of it. The Angel of Death. What would you do,” Bev asked Loretto, “what would you do if Dewey ran around again?”

“He wouldn't dare.”

“But if he did. I mean, the liver. That's a tough act to follow. What would you do next time?”

“Something drastic.”

“Murder?”