the Big Nickel, a small restaurant that changed hands every other year, in competition with taverns and pizza delivery, their meals were ready. Her milk and a tuna sandwich on rye, his chopped chicken, mashies, peas and gravy. Cherry pie to follow. Since a near-fatal choking incident, he was on the gummer’s special, but he never complained.
Balancing the clamshell boxes, she made her way up the wheelchair-accessible ramp of Rainbow Country, the two-storey building run by the Finnish community as a stopgap before finishing their Minnow Lake complex for the aging. Shabby around the edges, but whistle-clean, it was cosier than the generic high rises that warehoused the elderly. She’d been lucky to whisk him back from Florida with minimal immigration problems, a bit of fact-fudging aside. At American nursing home prices, his mutual funds would have evaporated like the Jays’ chances at a pennant, and the logistics of travelling across a continent to check on him made her shiver.
She picked up silverware and linens in the kitchen, then passed the nurses’ station. Cherie was on guard, a curly blonde sparkplug who never missed flagging the slightest change in her charges. “George’s skin is getting worse. Our doctor hasn’t a clue. I know you took him to Vonnie, the skin specialist, only last month.”
Belle paused, nuances of worry on her forehead. “He said it was bullous dermatitis. Nothing serious.”
The nurse snorted in contempt. “Another kind of bull. That’s Latin for blisters. A description, not a diagnosis.”
“Ouch. Guess I shouldn’t have taken Spanish.” Belle nodded, appreciating the woman’s sharp eye. “Even my father said the man was senile. Vonnie must be in his eighties.”
“We need every specialist we have up here, but sometime I wonder.” She turned as a frail man in a walker lurched by, his bum crack exposed by pants that hung on him like a scarecrow. “Here, Jim. Let me tuck you in, my man.”
In the bright, private room with easy-care linoleum, Belle found her father in his gerry chair, the jailer designed to keep him from falling but also from walking, since he wouldn’t cooperate with physio attempts. She doubted whether the trade-off was worth it, but he enjoyed his television, magazines and newspapers, and especially his food. Every meal her mother had placed before him had been the “best”. He wore a clean blue sweatsuit and Labatt’s slippers on his feet, an ironic touch. He was a teetotalling Methodist, but Belle and her mother had made up for that with their mutual predilection for scotch straight up.
He brushed a shaky hand through his thick mane of white hair, cheeks pink with a fresh shave. Staff knew when the family would be visiting and made the extra effort. He tapped his watch as if to coax the hours to pass more quickly. Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune defined his evenings. “Late. I thought you weren’t coming.”
She arranged the bib and food. “Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor earthquakes nor tsunamis can stop me.”
As he dug in with a will, she winced at the large black blisters branding his mottled hands. Suppressing an urge to roll up his pant leg to check further, she turned instead to her sandwich, making sure he stopped now and then to drink water.
When he had finished ten minutes later, she let him attack the pie, carefully mashed. “Remember Gary Myers?”
“Of course. Of course. One of those blond German lads you favoured. Were you trying to recruit your own Wehrmacht?”
She smiled at the quirkiness of his memory. Sometimes sharp, recalling Dunkirk with his Churchill imitation, dull some mornings when he forgot having breakfast and wanted another. Who had been her troopers? Wertman. Gall. Erhart. Stretching from Grade One to university. Was she a Teutonic magnet or vice versa? Then she explained what had happened.
“We never know when the grim reaper is going to come calling. Only the good die young, your sainted mother aside. Gary, now. I could see you wondered about that boy. Why he never came around again.” He tapped his temple. “But parents know.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “You never mentioned it.”
“None of my business. My cousin Ab’s daughter, Tracy the vet, she lives in Lethbridge with a female dentist.” He waved his hand. “Asked Ab about it. That’s what he said. None of his beeswax.”
Belle sat back in wonderment at a curiously twenty-first-century attitude for a man alive during the Twenties. “Tracy? I guess that wasn’t a topic for discussion while I was growing up.”
He gave a low whistle. “As a kid, you sure were confused about The Children’s Hour. Your mother was at Massey Hall the night it showed at the screening, so you had to come.” He had been a booker for Odeon Pictures in Toronto, and they’d seen four new releases every week together once she reached Grade One. “You cried because Shirley MacLaine was so sad.”
The large clock on the wall was sending her a message. She turned with reluctance to a more alarming subject. “Cherie says your blisters are getting worse. Let’s see.” She rolled up his pants and nearly gasped in horror. Huge, watery black sacs covered his lower legs.
“They don’t hurt. Not one bit.”
“A saving grace.” She tried not to shudder. Was he merely being brave, or was some more pernicious condition festering, like diabetes?
Making a note to tell the nurse to have the doctor check her father on the weekly visit, she left the nursing home. Something was very wrong here. For once she wished she lived down south with a lion’s share of specialists . . . or in the States, with money up front and no waiting.
FIVE
It’s all still a nightmare, but I can’t wake up,” Mutt said, sipping coffee on her deck. A slight breeze ruffled the needles on the huge fir that loomed twenty feet above the railings. The poplars and birch in the greenbelt to their right wore a bright cloak of new leaves, but he didn’t seem to notice. His handsome face was battling the signs of stress. Circles had appeared under his dulled eyes, and his hand shook. “When I saw him on that table . . .”
She leaned forward. “I’ve never had to do that. Must be painful.”
He shook his head, his dark curly hair close around his neck. “I write about this stuff. I tried to be objective, but it’s different in real life. His face was untouched. Almost serene, pink from the sun. The illusion of warmth. I wanted to touch . . .” His voice broke off.
A minute passed. “What about his family?”
“I had to call his mother. She’s in a retirement community near Hamburg. Even three Valium didn’t do the job for me. Maybe I should have driven down, but I didn’t trust myself on the highway.”
Like her, Gary had been an only child. Belle tried to recall his parents, seen at a distance at concerts and plays. He’d never introduced her, a bad omen. His father had been a lithographer, his mother a housewife like most women in Scarborough of that era. Gary had inherited his father’s blond hair and his mother’s chubbiness. “And his father?”
Mutt drained his cup. “Liver cancer. Didn’t make it past fifty. Gary connected the condition with his work, all those toxic chemicals. Of course, they didn’t know in those days.”
“Did you get any more information from the OPP?”
“I took a taxi and picked up the truck at the impoundment lot.” He gave a bitter laugh and
