This All Happened(41)
From five years ago? They look recent.
Lydia: I dont know anything about them.
She’s convinced they must be mine. I hang them on the box of detergent.
10 In the post office I see Max’s father. A few months ago he fell fainted and Max found him. He was in hospital for eight weeks and had prostate surgery.
I had outdoor plumbing for a while, he says.
Mr Wareham’s pupils pinpricks in the blue. He’s wearing a pair of white cotton gloves and a tea-coloured coat. This man was born on an island off an island. He says he grows wheat in his backyard in Arnold’s Cove. Max takes him on trips to Witless Bay Line to boil the kettle and paint trees leaning over a rough shore. He has a white shag of hair. It’s funny that he has a head of hair and Max doesnt. Takes after his mother, Max does. Mr Wareham enjoys the company of women in their thirties. He has a small stainless-steel spring of joy in his ankle and a green shoot in his eye and an idea lightbulb burning in his temple.
11 I ride my bike to Motor Vehicle in Mount Pearl to relicense Jethro. First time on my bike this year. It had a flat. I flip the bicycle upside down in the backyard, wrench off the rim, tug out the tube, dunk it in the sink. I realize I’m thinking of that pair of underwear. Who the hell owns them?
The hole makes a flute of bubbles. I sandpaper the hole and dab on rubber cement and let it go tacky, apply a patch and wait for the tube to dry, and then, with the heels of three teaspoons hanging off the lip of the rim, it’s my childhood days. Been fifteen years since I changed a bicycle tire with teaspoons.
It’s a busy road. But a lull in between the two cities. With flat properties and a little farming. Rows of plastic cones over some tender crops. A gentle ascent into Mount Pearl. A girl digging in the soil, her glasses glinting gold. Or the glint tells me she’s wearing gold glasses. Her father in a row of trees. Cow manure trampled into the edge of pavement. A protest sign against the land freeze. Ballroom dancing at the Old Mill. Brookfield Drive-In. The word Brookfield has theatrical masks for the two o’s, reminds me of one of the entries I’d adjudicated a handwritten story and for the word look a fourteen-year-old had dots and eyelashes on the o’s.
At Motor Vehicle it is sunny and the skylights reflect all the hills and land around Mount Pearl. One queue is for the photo driver’s licences and men are stroking their hair back and one woman walks up to her boyfriend, pats his ear. You sign your name on an electronic pad that collects the signature directly onto the computer screen and to every province, territory, state, and free-trade zone in North America, you can be sure. It was forty-five minutes in the lineup and then two minutes at the wicket.
I say, Do I have to sign on this electronic pad? Couldnt I sign a piece of paper instead?
I wouldnt care, but the licence left off my last letter (I wrote over the edge of the pad) and reduced my signature by So percent. My signature looks tiny and mean.
12 Lydia and I drive to Heart’s Desire with Daphne and Max in the back seat. Jethro doesnt mind the weight. Maisie has knocked out a kitchen wall. She has discovered old linoleum. Maisie hands us a bucket of sudsy water to wash down the wallpaper. The walls have fat pink roses from the fifties.
Una asks me to rub down the butter chunks on her toast.
She has a purse, and in it a picture of Oliver when he was little.
I never knew your dad at that age, I say.
That’s Daddy, Una says, when he was me.
I walk to the beach with Daphne, Maisie, and Lydia. We pass Josh and Toby, who are building a fence. Leaves are bursting out of a birch. Toby looks like he doesnt get fed much. Josh nods. They are getting older. Next year they won’t even nod to me. They’ll be too cool.
Maisie: We bought this house on a whim seven years ago for six thousand. I bought it out of the money I made teaching.