provide credit. Thank God the last of these “schools” had closed in the early Eighties.
“No charge today,” Maria said, appearing like a benevolent dervish and setting the bags on the table. “This is my final shift, so I want to thank my best customer.”
Belle looked up in mild confusion. “Going on vacation?”
“I have needed one for some years. An eighty-hour week, you know, running this place. My son Tony helps in the kitchen, but he wants to study to be a chef in Montreal, and I am not so young anymore.” She shook her wattles like a weary ox, as wide as she was tall. “So I have sold the restaurant.”
Belle took her tiny, talented hand and offered good wishes. For her father’s sake, she hoped that the new owner would keep the same menu. Routines were important to old folks.
At Rainbow Country, she passed a few lawn chairs on the small porch, saluting the coughing brigade who had abandoned the free tar and nicotine of the dreary smoking room. Under nursing home rules, smokers were allowed one cigarette an hour, receiving lights from the staff. Abby, a grizzled veteran nearly blind behind mirrored sunglasses, recognized Belle’s voice. “Got to grab some fresh air with our smokes,” she said with a wheeze and rummaged in the bag attached to her walker.
Belle opened the pack and lit one for her, then went inside to collect a bib, towel and silverware from the supply cabinets. Along the hall, she noted the subtle, depressing changes, the pixie with two canes now a blanketed shape in bed, the empty blue chair where the cadaverous man who chuckled over Janet Evanovich’s Deep Six once rocked. Father’s television was blasting out an exercise program, a Jane Fonda clone in spandex hip-hopping to unearthly perfection.
She shrank a bit as always to see him in his “gerry” chair, designed to guard against a fall, but a cruel jailer. Broken hips were a nightmare ending with blank spaces on the name board by the nurses’ station. She remembered the day she had bought it. He’d been found on the floor twice, too proud to call for help. In the Model Sick Room at a local pharmacy, she’d sat down to test the comfort, and the officious clerk had leaped forward to lock the lap table into place. The sudden confinement in a padded cell on wheels had nearly forced a scream from Belle’s tightened lips. Holding her breath, she ‘d unlocked the clasp with paralytic fingers and scrawled a check for nearly a thousand dollars while tears dried on her face.
“Hi, handsome. It’s Tuesday, Tuesday, and I’ve brought your shrimp.” She unpacked the boxes and arranged his bib.
“I thought you weren’t coming.” He recited the same line with a calculated pout, even after her scrupulous visits through blizzards and ice storms. The rare times she left town for more than a few days, she arranged for an aide to deliver the lunch.
His thick white hair was fresh cut and brushed, baby blue eyes large and clear, glasses long abandoned in a drawer. For some reason he no longer used them, even to read, or perhaps he had forgotten that he wore glasses. A Maple Leafs’ shirt and machine washable work pants completed the easy-care outfit. Despite the extra effort, the staff was religious in making sure everyone was up and dressed by nine so that they didn’t sit around in nightclothes.
Filling a glass with water from his tiny bathroom, she bumped an elbow against a cumbersome Hoyer lift straddling the toilet like an enormous mantis. Then she set up his lunch, sat back and let him enjoy the food without conversation. Not only was his speech unintelligible with his mouth full, but he needed concentration to coordinate chews and swallows. A minced or puréed diet might soon be required, the dietician had noted. Belle had tried to keep his bridges battened down, but getting him to the dentist was a navigational minefield, and it didn’t take much to wrench a back, helping him in and out of the van. Saner to operate without teeth at all. Bridges and dentures often went missing anyway with the cob-webbed female wanderers who collected small items on their “clean-up” rounds.
The cheeseburger, milk and his Maclean’s magazine kept her attention, though she cocked an eyebrow at the fanatical exercise woman flogging a Nordic Track. How senseless to buy costly steppers and treadmills to compensate for sedentary lives instead of choosing a relaxing walk. Belle’s quiet paths were the best reason for living in the wilderness instead of in a city where five-year-olds took classes in street smarts. Then she thought glumly of Anni and put away the rest of the cheeseburger. To be banished from the world outside to a little room like this would not have been her choice, but to leave so soon, upon the whisper of a breath?
Her father wiped his mouth with a tiny burp after the last french fry had vanished. “What’s up? You’re pretty quiet.”
She had no qualms about telling him about the murder. He loved excitement. When he had worked as a booker for Odeon Theatres in Toronto, a gas explosion had levelled a building across from his office. The disaster had been his number one story for fifty years. “Hold your horses. First the coffee.” She cleared away the debris and opened the pie box, fetching from the kitchen a mug bearing a picture of him with his arm around his lovely girlfriend. “My neighbour was murdered.”
A gleam lit his eyes, and his voice strengthened. “Murdered? In Canada? I don’t believe it.”
“Neither do I, but trust me.” She paused for the dramatic effect he enjoyed. “I found the body.”
His pitch jumped an octave as he ate up the details as fast as his dessert. “No kidding? Tell me everything.” And so she did.
“Her name was Jacobs? Was she a Hebe, then? Pretty rare birds in this neck of the woods.”
Belle frowned. “Father, really. That’s not politically correct these days, a word like that.”
“What does politics have to do with it? The whole fillum business was Jewish when I worked there. That’s what they called each other, Hebes.”
She sighed, wondering how to span the decades, explain the evolution of manners into diction. “It’s one thing for an ethnic group to use those names, but for an outsider, it’s quite rude.”
“So I’m a Scot. Like Arnold Palmer. Is that rude? The Pope’s a Pole. Is that rude?”
“Well, I only . . .”
He stared her down, stubborn in his innocence. “And besides, I nearly married Eva Rosenblum. Except her parents lined her up with a rich doctor, a fancy one, a gyro . . . gyro . . .”
“Gynaecologist. Lucky Eva, or maybe not. Anyway, Jacobs was the married name. Anni was Danish.”
He beamed. “A Dane. See?”
Old dogs and new tricks. Maybe he had a point. As she left, he stabbed an index finger on his lap table. “Appearances can be deceiving, girl. Look underneath. Use your peepers.” He drifted off for a moment. “Remember what you said to that clown at the Christmas parade who asked where you got those eyes so blue?”
“Right, Father. ‘Out of the sky as I came through.’ Except that my eyes aren’t that blue anymore. And speaking of precocious brats . . .” She kissed him and returned to the van. Such observations might be the ravings of an old man seduced by films, but sometimes, like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, he grasped an idea that sliced the fog. Would she have to play Edna May Oliver and chase the donkeys from the yard? “Peepers.” What was there to look at? Were any of the puzzles valuable? Had Anni been having work done at the house where calculating eyes might have tucked away information? Word got around in the casual labour market.
