The Wife's Tale (27 page)

“You can’t come knocking on my door every day until he calls, Mary. We’ve got much too much going on here.”

There was dead silence within the house. No beeping microwave. No motorized vehicle. No draw of breath. “Is Jack…?”

“He’s sleeping. Chita called in sick and I’ve got food to make for prayer circle. Now, I said I’d call and I will.”

“I lost my phone.”

“You lost your phone?”

“Well, my whole purse actually.”

“You lost your purse!”

“I wanted to remind you that I’m staying at the Pleasant Inn if you need to reach me.”

“All your identification!”

“I know.”

“Your bank card?”

“I’m getting that sorted out.”

“Fine, Mary, well, I’ll call you at the hotel then, if I hear from Gooch. I really have so much to do.”

“But I don’t have
your
number. I need your number. It’s unlisted.”

“It killed me to pay extra for unlisting,” Eden complained. “But that phone just rang incessantly. Poor Jack. You’re letting
in the heat.” She opened the door and started down the hall, gesturing for Mary to follow while shushing her with a fingertip.
At the back of the house they entered a cluttered kitchen with sliding glass doors leading to a small patio and a neglected
green swimming pool.

Eden found a pen and paper and wrote the number with her gnarled fingers, then set about unloading the sacks of groceries
on the table. Mary noticed that there were dishes in the sink. Trash and recycle bins full. “I don’t want Jack to find you
here and start asking questions. It’s exhausting for him to have to think these days,” she said.

“I can only imagine,” Mary said, taking the heavy juice from Eden’s crippled hands, pulling groceries from the bags on the
counter.

“Chita usually does this. They expect more than iced tea and crackers out here. You’re expected to put on a spread.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly noticing Mary’s footwear, Eden clucked her disapproval and disappeared down the hallway, returning in a moment with
a pair of flat black loafers that she gave to Mary. “You can’t wear those boots in California.”

Mary nodded her thanks, kicked off her boots and attempted to stuff her stocking feet into the shoes.

“Without your socks,” Eden huffed.

Mary settled upon one of the stools near the counter, straining to reach her socks over the lump of her gut, hoping her mother-in-law
wouldn’t notice her struggle.

“For heaven’s sake, Mary,” Eden
tsk
ed. She leaned down, scrunching her face as she helped Mary remove her damp, stained hosiery, disturbed to see the cut on
her bloody heel. “That needs to be cleaned.”

“I know.”

Eden sighed as she searched the drawers and found the little first aid kit she was looking for. “I hope I’ve got a big enough
bandage.” It was clear that Mary couldn’t dress her own wound, so Eden pulled a chair up beside her stool and gathered her
daughter-in-law’s plump foot onto her bony lap. “Have you never had a pedicure?” she asked.

Mary knew the question was rhetorical. She watched Eden’s stern face as the old woman roughly cleaned the cut. “Eden?”

“Yes?”

“You will call me when Gooch calls, right?”

“I said I would.”

Mary paused. “Heather said you’d lie for him.”

“Heather said
I’d
lie!” Eden laughed.

“She looked really good, Eden. Heather looked good.”

Eden was careful not to glance up. “So Jimmy said,” she conceded.

“She quit smoking.”

Eden snorted but kept to her work of drying the cut and applying a healing salve, and did not ask questions about her wayward
daughter. Mary wondered if Gooch had told his mother about Heather’s found son, and was about to deliver the news when she
noticed her mother-in-law’s frustration in trying to open the bandage with her clumsy hands. “Here, let me.”

Before passing the bandage back, she found Eden’s eyes. “Thank you.”

“It wasn’t as bad as it looked.”

Mary shoved her feet inside the still-snug black loafers. “I guess I haven’t exactly been thinking about shopping. What with
my purse and all.”

“I hope you’re not going to ask me for money.”

“No.” Mary watched Eden open the refrigerator, astonished to see a wealth of food, as it appeared that the frail woman and
her dying husband dined on little more than hope.

“Because I’ve been writing checks all week, and even if I wanted to—”

“No, Eden. No. I don’t need money. I’m sure the bank in Leaford is going to sort it all out. Or my purse will be returned.
The sheriff’s office could have it right now.”

“I’ve got to get going on the food.” Eden reached for a knife, her twisted fingers losing their grip, silver clattering on
the counter.

Mary stopped her. “I’ll do it.”

“They expect a spread,” Eden reminded her, watching Mary root through her cupboards for a cutting board, too grateful to object.

“What’s your maiden name, Eden?” Mary asked, remembering that it had been one of the questions from the manager at the bank.

“Why?”

“The bank asked me. To verify access to my account. Gooch’s first elementary school. His mother’s maiden name. I’m going back
to the bank after I leave here.”

“St. Pius Catholic School. I was estranged from my family.” Eden’s people were from Western Canada, her father a farmer, her
mother a seamstress. An only child, she’d left home at fifteen, married at seventeen and been a widow at twenty when she met
James Gooch Senior at a restaurant in Ottawa. Her ancestry was Ukrainian. “My father was Gus Lenhoff.”

Mary felt the weight expressed by her response—whatever had happened between Eden and her family, she could still, a lifetime
later, not claim the name as her own. Mary wanted to pursue the details of their estrangement, but saw that the older woman
was too fragile for such a remembrance.

In the refrigerator Mary found strawberries and fresh melon and sharp expensive cheeses, boiled eggs, cured meats and olives.
She would have eaten the things whole a few weeks ago, gobbled handfuls of the berries, devoured the cheese in chunks and
gulps, washed it down with the big baguette, belched, wanted more. Now she gazed upon it like a color palette, deciding how
she would mix and compose it. Halved berries as garnish for goat cheese on crostini. Cured ham wrapped around crescents of
melon.

“Chita usually gets the groceries. I had to go this morning and leave Jack by himself,” Eden said. “I’d never be able to live
with myself if that man had to die alone.”

Mary’d often imagined a lonely death. A heart attack in her bed while Gooch was working late. In a dark ditch on a country
road. Seated on the toilet.

“Why don’t you go lie down. I’ll finish this up and you can rest before your company comes.”

Eden didn’t need persuasion. She disappeared down the hall, leaving Mary to prepare the feast. As Mary pitted and husked and
rolled and spread, she recalled a thousand recipe suggestions from the pages of her magazines that she’d promised Tomorrow
she would make, but her eager mouth had always been too impatient. Eating from bags or sacks or tins. Her choices were more
of the “empty contents into pot and stir over medium heat” or “microwave on high for eleven minutes” variety than the cutting,
chopping, caramelizing kind. Perhaps she was more like Irma than she knew. Maybe Gooch had been right, and all these years
she hadn’t loved food at all.

Hours later, after she’d prepared the food and washed the dishes, Eden appeared, casting a critical eye over the kitchen.
“We use the blue plates,” she said. “But that’s fine.”

The sound of Jack’s hacking from behind the closed door of his bedroom made Mary shiver. Eden winced and said, “It’s better
if he doesn’t see you, Mary. You have the number now. You really should call first.”

“Yes. I’ll call.”

“We could be right in the middle of something.”

“Of course.”

“And the mornings are the worst. A terrible time for company. Terrible.”

The telephone rang, shattering the silence. Eden picked up the phone. “Hello? Yes? Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello?” She hung
up, explaining to Mary, “Lost call.”

“Lost call?”

“It happens all the time.”

Mary left the house thinking of the lost caller. It could have been Gooch. She checked her watch, realizing that she had only
an hour before the Canadian banks closed for the day. She begged her feet to walk faster, grateful for the mercy of the snug
black loafers.

M
ary started back up the hill, playing with suspicion, unable to shake the feeling that her hunch had been right about Eden
protecting Gooch. Why had she told Mary not to come because they could be in the middle of something when Eden and her dying
husband were so clearly at the end of it all? And why would she say the mornings were the worst when it appeared from her
face that all times were awful? Mary suddenly felt sure that the telephone call was from Gooch, and had not been lost at all.

Reaching the fountain halfway up the hill, she paused but did not sit down on its rocky ledge. There were no cyclists on the
roads. No people marching on the sidewalks. It was mid-afternoon, and much too hot for such bodily endeavors. That was why
the people here were all out jogging and cycling and marching in the mornings. They had active times, like animals in a zoo.
She could hear the whir of leaf blowers and lawn mowers in the distance—the workers. Not too hot for them? She inched farther
up the hill and thanked gravity for helping her down, and when she reached the bottom she could only cede to her body, which
swore it could not walk one more step.

She found a tall palm to lean against, glad to share her weight with the scratchy trunk. But the tree offered no relief from
the sun’s boring rays, and she felt dizzy from the heat. Perhaps this was another dream—a nightmare of an uninhabited dystopia.
If there had been any cars around, she might have thrown herself in front of one.
A coma,
she thought hopefully, a short coma from which she might awake to the crack in her ceiling and Gooch beside her. “Someone
else do it,” she heard herself say. “I can’t. I can’t go on.”

Glancing up at the perpetual blue, Mary cued God.
This is where you send the reluctant savior. The answer to my prayer.
But there was no miracle. No little Big Avi in his black limousine. No Mexican man in a dusty red truck. No Gooch shouting
out from behind her, “I’ve been calling all over for you!”

So where was God when you needed her? Last rites in the Third World? Attending the Asquiths’ prayer circle? Celebrating the
divine victory of some sports team? Mary pushed herself away from the palm and started back down the road toward the bank.
She had to. So she did. And there was God—not in the wings but in the act. Or it was heatstroke. She massaged the spot between
her eyes.

Nearing the shopping plaza, she realized that she’d walked the remainder of the distance in a disconnected state. She was
nothing but the exhalation of her breath and the momentum of her muscles, a ruminant meditation. Only now did she feel the
blisters from the too-tight loafers.

Reaching the bank, she pulled the doors open and surrendered herself to the care of handsome, sandy-haired Cooper Ross, who
helped her to the chrome and leather sofa and plugged the phone into the jack beside her and even dialed the number of her
bank in Leaford.

As the manager on the other end of the line had not been briefed on her situation, she was required to repeat the sad tale,
including the tedious details of name and address and contact number. Her brain suffering from lack of nutrition, she could
not remember Gooch’s first elementary school. Saint Something. And husband’s mother’s maiden name “Gustoff” was incorrect,
though she was positive that was what Eden had said. The manager insisted that he could not release funds to her, or divulge
any details of her account, until she had proper identification and could fax those documents to his attention. She thought
of the number Emery Carr had written down for her, someone at the Canadian embassy.

She begged one more favor before rising from the sofa, the call of a taxi back to the hotel. “It could take up to an hour,”
Lucy said. “This isn’t New York.”

She couldn’t wait an hour. As much as she dreaded the evening alone in the hotel, she knew she could not sit on the black
leather sofa in the sterile bank a moment longer. She thanked the bank employees and started for the door.

Outside the bank, her feet aching in the too-tight loafers, Mary could barely heft her legs down the ramp toward the parking
lot. The laser sun assaulted her eyes. The parking lot. The purse. Surely it was here. Must be here. Hidden before by some
parked car. It
must
be here. Done with tears for the time being, she wanted to laugh when she realized that she was jonesing for her purse.

Nearby a cellphone rang, reminding her that someone might be calling the hotel with information about her lost identification.
Heather. What if Heather had heard from Gooch? Heather had no way to contact her either. She’d have to remember to call the
bistro in Toronto. And Gooch? What if the lost call had not been Gooch? Maybe he didn’t even have a phone. What if he’d had
an accident while hiking? What if he was lost and had no way to call for help? She felt the familiar force of centrifugal
fear. A memory of skating on the Thames River. Crack the whip—it’s Mary’s turn to be at the end. Divot in the ice—gash on
the forehead—Irma appearing in rubber boots. An embarrassment of blood. Scar still there.

She might have stood in the parking lot reminiscing with despair, but for the sun’s glare on her shiny pink cheeks and the
certainty that she had sweated off her layers of sun protection. It was not possible to stand still, she saw, and remembered
that she needed a plan. Go back to hotel. Call man who knows Emery Carr. Call Heather. Wait. Rest. A ride to the hotel.

Other than inquiring of customers at the drugstore whether they needed help to locate a product, Mary was not in the habit
of approaching strangers, of which there were precious few in small-town Leaford anyway. Seeing a pleasant-looking young woman
opening the door to her Subaru, Mary cleared her throat. “Excuse me? I need to get to the Pleasant Inn, down near the highway,
and I wonder if I could trouble you for a ride?”