her arms wrapped tightly around her middle. She wore gloves without fingers and the scarlet paint on her bitten nails was chipped and worn. I was about to ask her if I could put the bag on the floor when she looked up, her face a mass of wrinkles, her mouth sunken over gums she bared in a vicious grin. I stepped back, nearly colliding with two schoolgirls who were chatting in the aisle.
“Watch out,” one said, pulling her leather knapsack away from my feet.
I looked down at the old woman. She was bent over again, swaying back and forth, singing without words a high-pitched complaint. At least Great-Aunt Beatrice had had her house and
her cats, as well as neighbours who watched her with attention, if not with love, who may have called her a witch but noted her comings and goings. I wondered what fortune she would have told for me.
FOUR
Bonnie Hazlitt came out of her apartment when she heard the sound of my key in the door across the hall.
“How’s the mystery aunt? I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to get home. Come in and tell me all about her.”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead?” She sagged back against her door.
“It’s not that big a deal,” I said hastily. “It happened before I got there. She’d fallen down the stairs in her house and died. A neighbour called the police. Her lawyer turned up while I was talking to some detectives and he knew about me. He wanted to talk. That’s what took so long.”
“So you never got to meet her? That’s awful.” Bonnie rushed across the hall to hug me. Although I’m by no means tall, her head barely reached my shoulders. I don’t like being hugged, especially by casual friends. There’s something about touch, the too easy assumption that it means intimacy and love. I stood stiff, hands at my side.
Bonnie dropped her arms. She sniffled and swept her fist across her eyes. “Look at me, crying again. I hate it, the way I’m always bursting into tears. My heart’s too soft, that’s what Robin always says.”
Or too bruised, I thought, not for the first time and not out loud. “I have to phone Will. I promised I’d call as soon as I got back.”
She looked at her watch. “He’ll still be working. Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea? You look like you need it.”
“I don’t feel that bad,” I insisted. “It’s not as though she meant anything to me. She never wanted anything to do with me until it was too late. If you want to know the truth, I feel like I’ve won a lottery, sort of.”
“You’re the long lost heir, right? You’ve come into a fortune.” She clapped her hands.
“Not exactly.”
“You can’t leave me in suspense like this.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me into her apartment. “You’ve got to tell me the whole story.”
I gave up. There was no stopping Bonnie once she determined on some course of action. She was a friend of a friend, a graduate student like me, but of Art History, not Literature. She had come to one of our pub gatherings last year, one of those nights when we let off steam about our thesis supervisors, the slim chances of employment when (if) we finished our degrees, and the difficulties of our varied living situations. I was then trying to find an affordable apartment downtown to escape the horrors of suburbia. She knew a neighbour who was getting married and needed to find someone to sublet his place; she invited me to visit the next day, introduced us, and arranged the deal.
The fact that she lived right across the hall seemed a piece of luck at first. Absorbed as I was with classes, research, and papers, I was sometimes lonely. My friend warned me that Bonnie could be a bit demanding, but I figured that, since she was working part-time at the Royal Ontario Museum as well as studying, and had a live-in boyfriend, she would be pretty busy herself. However, her boyfriend worked long shifts and she would, too often, come across the hall, looking for company. Sometimes, when she came knocking at the door, I would sit frozen in my chair, pen poised over paper, breath held as if she could hear my heart pumping. She’d go away, but ten minutes later would be back, the soft repeated rapping insistently upsetting. If I answered her second or third attack, she would assume I’d been in the bathroom or on the phone. She was not good at taking hints that I liked my own company. For her, solitude was isolation.
Her apartment was the twin of mine. I went straight to the dining table which was positioned in front of the picture window that looked down on Spadina. Only three floors above the street, the traffic noise was a constant hum and occasional heart-stopping squeal. I pulled out one of the high-backed chairs and sat.
“What are you making for dinner?” I asked. “It smells delicious.”
Bonnie plunked down a tray laden with tea pot, cups, and a plate of chocolate brownies. The pot and cups were glazed in gradations of blue, from almost black at the base to a nearly white rim. Each handle was a braided twist that incorporated all the shades in an intricate interplay of strands.
“Ratatouille,” she said, “one of Robin’s meatless favourites. I thought I’d surprise him with it.” She sighed. “There’s lots of it. You want to stay to eat? No sense in it going to waste.”
“He has to work late?” I asked her.
“Yeah.” She poured the tea.
“Again?”
“You know how it is.”
I knew. “It goes with the territory. We’re lucky, being in school. We may have to stay up all night writing papers, but at least we can sleep in in the morning. Clock-punchers don’t get much choice.”
“It’s nothing to joke about. He works far too hard. They take advantage of him.”
“Who?”
“The kids, the other social workers, the administrators. He cares too much. He even brings them here, you know, kids just off the street: hookers and drug users, it doesn’t matter to him. He’ll say the hostel’s full and they need a place to stay. Some of them have lice.” She shivered.
“Isn’t that what you fell in love with? His goodness?”
“Taking in strays, you mean? Like me?”
“You weren’t exactly needy.”
“But straying,” she tried to laugh. “Harold would say I’m getting my comeuppance. My mother says, if you make a bed, you have to lie in it.”
“How is your mother?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
I sighed. “You knew what he was like when you decided to move here with him. And you know he only works so many extra shifts because you need the money.”
“I didn’t leave Harold and the kids to sit in this dump weekend after weekend by myself.”
“You’ve got your thesis.”
She poked the stack of papers piled on the end of the table so viciously that they teetered. I caught them before they fell.
