choice of a young parent or someone running errands. For the Canadian Blood Services perhaps? Would someone there have any answers? One of these days she should donate.
Meanwhile, she had to take her father his lunch at the nursing home. It was “Tuesday, Tuesday,” the cadences of the sing-song game he had invented when she and Mama Cass had been babies. He was eighty-four years old. Not long ago he had been living in his own house in Florida, adjusting to her mother’s death, finding a stylishly-coiffured, much younger Italian girlfriend named Mary at a Life Goes On meeting. Then came cumulative TIA’s, tiny punches to the brain, lurking Alzheimer’s, plain old senility. Who cared about the official diagnosis? He grew too tottery and confused to stay by himself. With his zaftig girlfriend waving a tearful good-bye, Belle rushed him back to Canada before his diminishing abilities flashed a red light to Immigration, which frowned on incoming drains to the health care system.
For a fraction of the U.S. costs, he had a private room at Rainbow Country, a small competitor of the anonymous pretty-faced high rises where the upper middle class preferred to warehouse their parents. The facility was a bit tattered around the edges, but clean as a new penny, and with matchless personal care. The nurses and attendants chronicled every sneeze and sniffle, each bite of food, pill and missing sock.
After a blow-by at the office, she pulled into Granny’s Kitchen, the friendly family restaurant where they had enjoyed a weekly meal when he could still walk. “Hi, Maria. The usual. Shrimp, french fries and cole slaw. Hold the seafood sauce. And pie and ice cream. Cherry if possible. Cheeseburger and milk for me.” Belle passed a few words with one of the regulars, a man about thirty-five whose shambling manner made him appear drunk. The sad truth was that Fred had lingered in a coma for a year after a devastating industrial accident. Intensive physical therapy and a large injection of courage had restored enough coordination to get him on his feet and enrolled in a few marketing courses.
“Did you register for the summer sessions at Nickel City College, Fred?” Belle enjoyed hearing about his progress.
“A big runaround. Workman’s Comp won’t authorize the program. They say I’d have to drive to work in marketing up here, be mobile, you know? And I’m driving, for sure. But it’s like they don’t believe I have any right to.” His laboured speech was difficult to understand, so she watched his lips carefully. He looked as if he needed a shave, or perhaps he was giving up. With a fumbly bow, he presented her with his Sudbury Star as he left. “The old dog just might have another trick left.”
Belle opened the paper. It was hard to understand why he wasn’t bitter. Maybe he was merely glad to enjoy what pleasures remained, a good meal, restoring his Camaro. On the front page were details about another residential school lawsuit, this time in Fort Albany, an isolated Cree community on Hudson Bay. Leaving an ugly trail back to the Fifties, the priests, nuns and lay workers had been charged with fondling, rapes and illegal abortions. How had the community remained silent? Easy. Parents who complained were told that their government cheques wouldn’t be cashed, nor would the company store 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
