Road to Thunder Hill (5 page)

As soon as I hear the toot of Billy's horn telling me that Olive has reached the highway, I start thinking it might be nice to go back to bed and wait for Ray there. That would be juicy, him finding me in bed. I could be all naked and ready for him to slide in between the sheets. But first I'd better go out there to the barn and secure that swinging door. I wouldn't want Ray to mistake sexiness for laziness. I start looking around the porch for my rubber boots, which I'd worn only yesterday. So where the hell could they have gone?

3. Instant Sister

T
HE DAY I'D BEEN
dreading finally arrived. Six months after my father's will was read, Olive moved to Thunder Hill. My mother told me that inviting them over to supper was the right thing to do. That at least she could say we'd been hospitable.

On the very same day Alana called me to say that she'd spotted the moving truck pull up to Kyle House, I phoned over there to invite them for supper. “Fish chowder,” I said. “Nothing special, but I don't imagine your kitchen's very set up over there.”

“That is so kind of you,” the voice on the phone practically screeched. “I can't wait to get to know my sister!”

They would come at six.

Suddenly, I had relatives where before there were none. Gayl was curious about having three new cousins, even if they weren't really related. While I chopped celery and onions into my red enamel pot for my famous fish chowder, Gayl made Rice Krispies squares for dessert. Ray had gone to town to pick up beer and fresh rolls at the bakery.

“Why are you so nervous?” Gayl said, after I'd asked her about fifteen times to wipe the crumbs off the table. “It's normal to have crumbs on the table.”

I stuffed the dishrag in her hand. “It's not normal and I'm not nervous!”

“Well, they're not even our real relatives, since everybody knows Olive is a bastard.”

“Wipe that word right out of your brain,” I said. “And get out of your pajamas. It's time for supper already!”

Gayl said, “Well, isn't that the truth? I mean, does she even look like Grandpa? Or you?”

“We'll see soon enough,” I said. “The point is to welcome Olive and her family to Thunder Hill, got that?”

“I still don't know why it's such a big deal,” Gayl said, as she wiped the crumbs off the table onto the floor. “They might as well see what we're really like, right from the start.”

“There's such a thing as being hospitable,” I said, sounding exactly like my mother.

“You should shave your legs,” Gayl said, “and paint your toenails red.”

“Maybe you're right about the legs, but I wouldn't be caught dead in red toenails.”

“Exactly,” Gayl said. “So don't expect me to change out of my pajamas.”

I sighed. Did anyone ever win with a fifteen-year-old?

The green Volvo soon pulled up to the side of the house. I expected us to be a little shy with each other, seeing as we'd never met, but this red-haired freckled woman who was supposed to be my half sister came marching right up to me, her long arms spread wide, screeching, “Patricia! Finally!”

“It's Trish,” I said, as she pretty near knocked the breath right out of me with a hug. Later, Gayl told me that I'd looked like I wanted to dive for cover. But I stood there bravely and took the hug. Looking over her shoulder, I could see that when Gayl had mowed the lawn she'd left tufts of grass looking like a messy haircut, but still, the light of the late afternoon sun made our yard look golden and green. I stood there wondering when this hug would end and if Olive was getting some sort of sisterly sensation out of it. I sure wasn't.

When Olive finally loosened her grip, she went about introducing us to her husband Arthur and to their ten-year-old twins, Kyla and Kira. Arthur looked like he'd rather be somewhere else. The twins had freckles too and when Olive nodded in my direction they both curtseyed and said in the same voice, “We're so happy to finally meet you!”

“They've been practicing their curtseys all day,” said Olive, placing her hands on each girl's head.

Then we stood saying nothing until Gayl pointed to the back seat of the car and said, “Who's that?”

In all the excitement we, my family at least, hadn't noticed that someone was still sitting in the car.

Arthur said, “The boy who refuses to leave the car is our son, Byron, or Biz as he likes to be called. Biz is a bit of a loner I'm afraid.”

“What Byron is, is rude,” said Olive. “But we won't pay him any mind.”

For someone who didn't want to pay her son any mind, she wouldn't let up about him. Even after we got ourselves settled in the kitchen and Gayl had taken the twins upstairs to show them her room, Olive kept looking out the porch window. “He is still so angry with us about leaving the city. Normally, he's so friendly.”

“Maybe he's just shy,” I offered.

“Who? Byron?” Olive laughed then, a cross between a shriek and a snort. “He's not shy at all, is he Arthur?
Arthur?
”

“Sorry, sorry… What was that?”

All this time, Arthur had been talking to Ray, who was loading beer into the bottom of the fridge. “Ray has just been telling me all about dog breeding. A most fascinating subject, I must say.”

Olive said, “Oh yes, the real estate agent told us that you and Ray used to breed collies. I suppose that's country life for you; everybody knows everybody's business. We'd better get used to it, Arthur. We were thinking we'd like to get involved in some sort of small business venture, like truck farming, or ostrich ranching, isn't that right, Arthur?” Olive said. “Something for Arthur to do besides teach at the university. Something to help him integrate into country life.”

I looked at Ray, but there was no way in hell he was about to meet my eyes. How many people move from the city to the country in search of a peaceful, and saner life? They learn pretty fast that country living is not necessarily peaceful or sane. With only a hint of a smile, he said, “There's always pigs.”

“Pigs,” Olive repeated. “But don't they smell?”

Ray raised his eyebrows and said with a perfectly straight face, “Pigs are known for being very clean animals.”

“You know, I've heard that.”

I kicked him then, a little sideways poke in the calf. Where was he going with this? Ray is not usually one to bullshit someone but here he was stringing these people along.

“The beauty of pigs,” he continued. “is that you don't need a lot of land since they're not grazers. All you need is a barn.”

“We have a barn!” Olive said.

“Don't listen to him,” I finally said. “You wouldn't want pigs. There's no money in them nowadays and don't believe for a second that they don't smell.”

“Oh,” Olive chuckled, thrusting a finger at Ray's shoulder. “You were teasing us.”

I frowned at Ray, who was still grinning like he'd just won something big at the annual Blueberry Fest carnival. I turned back to my chowder.

“Anybody want another beer?” he said.

While everyone squeezed around the dining room table, I stood in front of the stove ladling out the fish chowder, then handing the bowls to Ray. Gayl pulled the rolls out of the oven and we all sat down to eat.

“This is delicious, Patricia,” said Olive.

“You can call me Trish. Everybody else does.”

“Oh, but Patricia is such a beautiful name,” Olive said, her eyebrows rising. “Now what kind of fish is this in the chowder?”

“Flounder.”

“Mmm, I love fresh fish.”

“Fresh out of the freezer,” Ray said, as if he was proud of the fact. I narrowed my eyes at him.

“It's superb in any case,” said Arthur.

“So, tell me, Raymond, why didn't you stay in the dog breeding business?” Olive said. “You don't mind me calling you Raymond, do you?”

“If you don't mind me calling you Ollie,” Ray said, giving her a playful push on the shoulder when she actually gasped.

“Touché, Ray.” Olive said, and turned to me. “Now tell me, Patricia, what happened with the dogs?”

“It got to be too much,” I said. “With both of us working, I couldn't keep up.”

Ray said, “You didn't want to keep up.”

I said, “Excuse me, I forgot the napkins.”

Olive said, “I'd like to have Weimaraners. They are the most beautiful dogs with their blue-grey coats.”

“Can I get you more chowder, Arthur?” I said, carrying the pot in from the kitchen.

“Oh, no thank you. It's delicious, but I'd better save some room for the next course.”

I stopped right in the middle of my step. “The chowder is the
only
course.”

Everyone stopped eating, some in mid-slurp.

“Oh dear, I am so sorry!” Olive exclaimed. “This is my fault entirely. I told Arthur that we were coming for supper.”

“This is what Trish calls ‘supper' around here,” Ray said.

“I thought it was what we
all
called ‘supper' around here,” I said, glaring at Ray who continued to attack his chowder like it might be his last meal on earth. “Please forgive me,” said Arthur, whose face was about as red as the chowder pot. “For being … so presumptuous.”

Everyone got quiet after that and the only sound was the clinking of spoons against bowls. The twins kept looking at me and then at each other. Finally, I couldn't stand it any longer so I told Gayl to go show the twins the new kittens out in the barn.

“Remember not to touch them, Kyla,” Olive said, and turned to me. “By the way, Patricia, does Gayl have any allergies? I wondered if they might be hereditary. I have so many questions to ask you about our father, I don't even know where to begin!”

“The one about the allergies is simple enough,” I said. “My father had none, Gayl has none, and neither do I, so that answers that.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly looking down at her hands. There was that silence again. And Ray shot me his look that always makes me feel small. Later, he would ask me why I hadn't come right out and said Olive should ask the veterinarian, her real father, if he'd had any allergies. He also said straight out that I have a mean streak in me. I told him he was every bit as mean, the way he'd strung Olive along about the pigs.

Meanwhile, I couldn't sit a second longer so I went to put the kettle on and tried to calm myself down the way I always do, which is by looking out my kitchen window at what I figure counts as the real world, and not the one churning within my own walls. Did Olive really think she could move into Kyle House and claim my father as her own? Was she actually going to pretend that she was my blood sister?

The sky was growing dark over Thunder Hill. Sure enough, I heard a low rumble even though it was still sunny in my yard. I looked out the porch window and wondered out loud, “Now, what the hell is she doing?” There was my daughter, out there in the yard, running around Olive and Arthur's car. The boy inside was still trying to stare straight ahead, but that was obviously getting harder and harder to do as his eyes were clearly on Gayl. She ran around that car about eight times before he showed the first movement since they'd all arrived by giving her the finger. I could see the glee in Gayl's face as she shot her finger right back at him. Then, she grabbed each twin by the hand and pulled them to the barn.

4. Boiled Icing

“D
ON'T YOU THINK IT'S
time you outgrew that habit, Ma?”

I look up at my daughter who is leaning against the porch door, strands of hair tumbling down from where it is scrunched up in a loose bun.

“What habit would that be?”

“Sucking your thumb?”

“Don't be silly,” I say, wiping my thumb on my jeans. It was sore from where I'd chewed off my thumbnail after Olive left my yard.

Still searching for my boots, I kick aside a bag filled with wool mitts and scarves and hats, that gets them spilling over the braided rug. So much for trying to be organized enough to put away winter gear. I might as well leave all the mitts and scarves and hats lying here since winter has decided to return to today. Whoever said that spring begins in April?

I find my rubber boots stuck halfway under the freezer.

“You're gonna tear your boots, pullin' at 'em so hard,” Gayl says.

I blow a strand of hair out of my eyes and say, “It's ‘going to' and it's ‘pulling' and it's ‘them.'”

“Huh?”

“Your words. You sound like a hick.”

“So what? That's what I am,” says Gayl, now in a thick hick accent.

“You are not! Your father and I aren't hicks, so you aren't one either.”

“Sure you are. Isn't that why you moved out here in the first place? To learn how to be hicks?”

“No. That wasn't why at all.”

“Oh right. Excuse me, not hicks,
hippies.
But I bet when you were running around naked in your little commune, you never dreamed you'd turn into hicks.”

I suddenly feel tired. I rest my forehead on my arm against the doorframe and say more to myself than to Gayl, “We weren't hippies…”

We wanted to run a farm as a co-operative, and we did, for a good two years. A pretty successful run it was too, in spite of how it ended. Ray and I had Gayl during this time, while Danny and Alana were the parents of two little kids. There was this American couple, Sly and Sheena, who'd met up with Ray that year I stayed in Toronto and they were the ones who'd gotten him so inspired about co-op living and farming. They introduced him to organic gardening and yoga and the whole idea of a counterculture. When I returned from Toronto, Bear moved in with us too, and before long there were seven of us pooling our resources. Our door was open to every freak who needed a place to crash. Some stayed for days, others for months. They all left something behind. We got a goat named Gert that someone had brought all the way from
BC
in a school bus. They were headed for the States next and didn't want the extra hassle of bringing a goat across the border. So we had fresh goat's milk for the kids. Someone else stole into the electric company's yard and brought us back a wooden wire spool, so we had a coffee table. Somebody also left some of us the clap, which had some others, like Alana, really pissed off, and then there was the guy who pretended to be cool but ripped us off of some of our pot plants one night. We never saw him again. But that was cool too, we decided, all a part of karma. As long as we practiced good karma, nothing worse than that could ever happen to us. We may have thought of ourselves as seventies freaks, but never hippies and certainly never hicks.

“I like being a hick,” Gayl is saying, bringing me back to the present. “Nobody expects much out of you, so if and when you do something halfway decent, everybody thinks you're a genius.”

I sigh into my sleeve. “I can't tell you how encouraging that sounds.”

“How come you're so tired today?”

“I don't know,” I say, my head feeling too heavy to lift. “I'm sure it has nothing to do with Olive coming by this morning and the table being a disgusting mess.”

“I'm sure it doesn't either,” Gayl answers cheerfully and turns back into the kitchen, “because that would be a stupid reason to be tired.”

I watch my daughter slap some of Olive's homemade pear compote onto toast. Olive is forever charging over with her latest home-made stuff. Last fall it was the compote. Before that she had filled up some thin bottles with oil and herbs and garlic. The garlic floating around in the bottles reminded me of the floating pig fetuses in Gayl's biology classroom. But I told Olive how pretty they were and that I'd keep them on my pantry sideboard, which I did. They sit there still, coated with a layer of dust. Not only that, but the last time Gayl made muffins and used the mixer, bits of yellow batter had splattered onto the bottles. The splatters are still there, only now they're not quite so bright. Given time, dust dulls just about everything.

In three weeks it'll be Gayl's seventeenth birthday, which will make it a year since Ray first left. Last year, her sixteenth birthday had started out like all of her birthdays, with me in the kitchen wrestling with my mother's recipe for boiled icing. Tricky, boiled icing was. Especially when your mother's recipe does not even call for a double boiler. Everything had to be perfect: the purity of the egg whites, the exact consistency and measurement of brown sugar and water, and my mother says, the barometric pressure. Even one's mood has much to do with the icing's success rate. I rarely get it right on the first try.

The only difference between the start of Gayl's birthday last year and her other birthdays was that ever since I'd gotten out of bed, I'd been crying. Not a solid cry with a damned good reason attached to it, but one of those cries that well up in the eyes without warning. “This is just silly,” I said out loud. I tried to shake it off since I knew my period was at least two weeks away, but the tears kept coming and later Alana said I should have taken this as an omen about Ray leaving me that exact same day. Especially the part when some of my tears fell onto the stove and sizzled next to the pot of boiling brown sugar.

I ignored the tears as I beat the egg whites, checking that the hot syrup was stringy before pouring it into frothy peaks. Even still, before I'd poured half of the syrup into the egg whites, I knew the icing wouldn't work.

I wiped my eyes with my sleeve when I heard Gayl bounce down the stairs. There stood my daughter, hair wet from her shower, breasts popping out of her tube top.

I stared.

“Wha-at?” she said, her hands spread wide.

“A tube top?”

“What's wrong with a tube top?”

“It's only April?”

“April 29, which is almost May, you know.”

“You know what I mean.”

Perhaps my voice caught ever so slightly here, because Gayl said, “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. The onions, I guess.”

She leaned around to look at my face. “No way is that onions.”

“Yes way. I just chopped some for the hamburger.”

“Those aren't onion tears.”

“Okay, then, hemorrhoid tears. How's that?”

“Ugh,” Gayl said. “Are those things hereditary?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “I didn't get them until after I got pregnant with you.”

“Well, sorry for being born.”

My daughter's face hadn't quite matched her tone, so I'd handed her one of the gooey beaters to lick.

“But I loved you so much I would have happily suffered a thousand hemorrhoids.”

“Oh yeah, good try,” Gayl huffed. Then she softened. “Do they hurt so bad they make you cry?”

“What, having children? You better believe it.”

She laughed then and tossed the beater into the sink. Then she bounced back up the stairs and began to sing, “
It's my party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to…
Oh, sorry Ma, that just popped out.”

Out of the mouths of babes, I thought, as I called up after her, “If you really care about me you'll change into something else before everybody gets here. And wake your father up, will you?”

Later, when my mother's housekeeper, Karen's car pulled into the yard, I realized I should have warned her to hide my mother's rum. As soon as Karen opened the passenger door for my mother I could tell it was too late. My mother was wearing heels and one of the big hats my father used to wear in the blueberry fields. The only way she could see out from under it was to tilt her face upwards and that didn't help her balance on the gravel.

Olive and Arthur had already arrived, so they got to watch my mother make a total fool of herself, out there in the yard.

“What gorgeous shoes, Bette,” Olive shrieked, reaching out to take my mother's arm as she came through the door.

Things went downhill after that. I got busy frying up the hamburgers and onions while Ray was supposed to keep all the guests happy in the living room. All the guests included Gayl's two best friends from town, her oldest friend from out here in Thunder Hill, Olive's family and Bear James of course. Alana and Danny hadn't yet arrived and I was just thinking I should call them to see where the hell they were because everybody was getting hungry. After I made myself a rum and coke, I went into the living room to look for the phone and just in time saw my mother reach behind the curtain for a glass.

As soon as she saw me, she tried to put the glass back on the windowsill, only it hit the edge of the sill and broke, so now I had sticky rum and coke all over my curtains and broken glass scattered all the way from the window to the middle of the living room, and of course Gayl and her friends were in stocking feet so I yelled, “Don't anybody move!” Then I shouted at Ray to get the vacuum cleaner and the broom and a cloth to clean up my mother's mess, but really what I meant was Ray's mess, because obviously he'd given her the drink. When he
knew, knew, knew
how I felt about my mother being drunk, especially in public, especially on our daughter's birthday. But that was Ray for you, everybody's friend, especially when he's been drinking himself. Meanwhile, Bear had run upstairs to get the vacuum cleaner and Olive fetched the broom and there she was cleaning off the windowsill, which she could likely tell hadn't been wiped in probably a year. And then there was Ray, helping my mother up from the chair and moving her over to the couch next to Gayl, who wore a look of pure disgust, and who could blame her since her friends and cousins had to witness all of this, but why she kept looking at me like it was all my fault was beyond me. To top it all off, there was my mother crying, and Gayl hushing her, telling her not to worry, that it was just a little accident and not worth getting all worked up about. And what was I doing in all this? Marching to the kitchen to mix myself another rum and coke thinking my own bloody family drives me to drink.

I cornered Ray in the pantry where he was way ahead of me by happily mixing up more drinks. “How could you give my mother a drink when you saw the kind of shape she was in?” I asked, arms folded, foot tapping.

“I didn't think she was all that bad,” Ray said.

“How would you know?,” I said. “You're already drunk!”

“So? So are you.”

“Bullshit. I've only had one.”

“Two. I saw you drinking two.”

“One. You've had at least three.”

“Oh, but who's counting?”

I wheeled around to see Olive standing in the pantry doorway. “Patricia, I have to apologize. I made Bette's drink.”

I looked at her and I looked at Ray, who hadn't even bothered to deny his part in this. “You watched Olive get my mother a drink? When you knew I'd have to scrape her off the floor later?”

“Trish,” Ray said, in that way he has of making me feel like I'm ten years old, “you're making too big a deal out of this.”

“I swore Ray to secrecy,” said Olive, as if that would change everything.

“Oh you did, did you?” I glared at Ray, who sighed loudly. I grabbed the kettle off the stove and filled it under the faucet. “Amazing. Even though he knows what one too many drinks can do to my mother, he can be sworn to secrecy.” I wheeled around to drive this point home, just in time to catch Ray actually wink at Olive. I probably started foaming at the mouth right about then.

“What?” said Ray, hands outstretched, a guilty grin on his face.

Olive cleared her throat. “I think it's time for me to go and join the party.”

Ray cleared his throat. “Me too.”

Fat chance of that, I thought as I grabbed his arm and hissed, “Thanks a lot.”

He pulled his arm away, and the change in his face was sudden and dangerous. “Lighten up Trish, I was just joking around. And can you try to remember it's our daughter's birthday?”

“Oh. I don't see how I could forget that seeing as how I'm the one who spent the morning vacuuming and putting away a week's worth of laundry. Plus making the cake for
our
daughter's birthday.”

“It was a cake mix,” he said with what looked a lot like a smirk.

“So what? I'm the one who made it.”

“And I'm the one trying to keep things cheerful around here, which is pretty hard the way you're acting.”