Читать книгу A Year Less a Day - James Hawkins - Страница 8

The old Chevrolet sinks under Ruth’s weight as she slumps into the passenger seat. They sit like accident victims waiting for the emergency services to show up, but no one calls 911. Theirs is an accident yet to occur, though the path is clearly set. The question, “How long?” remains unasked and unanswered, but holds them locked so powerfully on the road ahead that passing pedestrians stare worriedly.

Ruth breaks the silence eventually, conscious that the burgeoning feelings of loss and grief are trying to overwhelm her. “What did they say?”

“Six months, max,” Jordan replies succinctly, and Ruth crashes.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she blubbers through the sobs. Sorry I doubted you; sorry I nagged you; sorry it’s happening to you.

What about me? Someone inside her is asking as she tells Jordan, “There must be a mistake—they make mistakes, right? They’re always making mistakes.” She brightens momentarily. “Surely they can treat it—operate or something. They must be able to do something.”

What about me? is screaming to get out as she waits for Jordan to get his thoughts together. It’s all right for you, she tells herself as she watches him; waiting for his response. You’ll be dead. You won’t have to deal with everything. The bills—all the fucking bills. Not just the bills we can’t pay now—more bills—medical bills, the funeral.

This is crazy—your husband is dying and all you worry about is money.

Jordan opens up a little, as if he’s coming out of a coma. “Chemotherapy might help. They’re gonna try.”

Ruth isn’t listening; her mind is spinning out of control. Insurance—How many times have I told you we should take out life insurance?

How the hell can we pay for insurance when we can’t even pay the coffee supplier?

This is crazy—Stop worrying about yourself, bitch. Think of Jordan. What’s going through his mind? Look at him; hug him; kiss him. Tell him everything will be all right.

“I don’t know what to say,” she says, doing her best.

Brilliant! Is that it? Is that the best you can do? But something holds her back; This isn’t happening, insists the voice with a note of anger. He can’t die—he’s not even forty. What about the holidays we never had? And kids; as soon as we have enough money—you promised. “Don’t worry,” you said. “As soon as we can afford it we’ll have more.” And if I can’t? “We’ll adopt, foster—whatever it takes,” you said.

“Jordan, there has to be something they can do,” she says, finally bringing herself to lay a hand over his in an attempt to thaw him out.

“Chemotherapy and radiotherapy, they said. They gave me some booklets.”

“So—they can cure it?”

Jordan shakes his head almost imperceptibly, but doesn’t take his eyes off the road in front of him.

“I want to talk to them,” insists Ruth. “They’ll listen to me. They’ve got to do something. This isn’t fair.”

“They’ll do their best.”

“Raven,” muses Ruth angrily. “Blasted witch. What does she know?”

Jordan looks at her, confused. “What?”

“Raven said you’d be OK.”

Jordan snorts his derision, then says, “Dave—you know, the beer breath, triple-espresso, telephone engineer?”

“Cindy says he grabs her ass,” says Ruth, momentarily distracted.

“She oughta be grateful,” sneers Jordan. “Anyway, Dave thought his wife was seeing another guy. Then Raven says, ‘Dave—stop worrying, she isn’t.’”

“What happened?”

“He gets home and finds her in bed with a plumber.”

“Raven’s always bloody wrong.”

“No. She was right. It wasn’t a guy. The plumber was a dyke.”

Their laughter is real, but fleeting, as the depress-ingly lonely road of widowhood quickly re-appears in Ruth’s future. Where now? What to do with the information—hide it in a Cadbury’s chocolate bar or a litre of Häagen-Dazs Rocky Road?

“I’m scared,” she says.

“We’d better go in,” suggests Jordan, trying to keep the conversation light. “It’s poetry night—the girls’ll be busy.”

Ruth slumps back. “Oh, no. I don’t think I can handle poetry night—they’re such a depressing bunch. Why can’t we just drive away and keep going forever? Maybe we can outrun it.”

“We’ve got to carry on,” says Jordan.

Ruth tries hard to keep her face up, but it crumples again. “I don’t think I can.”

Why bother? says someone inside. Why not just go in there, fire the staff, fling out the customers, shut the doors, and open the fridge. You’ve eaten your way out of bad situations before.

And look where it got me.

“Come on, Dear,” says Jordan, easing her out. “We’ve got to be strong. We mustn’t upset the customers.”

“Customers!” explodes Ruth, “I don’t give a ...” She pauses quizzically. “It’s not contagious, is it?”

“No, of course not. Not directly. But if word gets out, it might as well be.”

“I don’t ...”

“Listen. I spoke to a counsellor ... people will avoid us—well, me, once they know. They don’t want misery, Ruth. It’s a coffee house. People come here to escape misery. We can’t tell anyone, Ruth. Do you understand? We can’t tell anyone at all.”

“But they’re our friends.”

“Ruth, don’t kid yourself. They’re lonely, sad; holed up in one-room apartments, or holed up in a mansion with someone they can’t stand. They’re our friends because we’re the only people they can rely on. They don’t come for coffee—they can make coffee at home for peanuts. The coffee’s just an excuse. They’re escaping.”

“I want to escape. Why can’t I escape, Jordan? This is ridiculous. I don’t give a shit about their sad little lives. This isn’t happening to them, this is happening to us. Jordan, please tell me this isn’t happening.”

“We’ve got to face it ...”

“Why are you so calm? I want to scream. I want to kick something. It’s a nightmare, right? Tell me I’ll wake up.” Wake up somewhere else, as someone else—not trapped here in this horrible body with a husband who’s going to leave me penniless. “Jordan—tell me it’s a nightmare.”

The coffee house has taken on a new mantle by the time Ruth and Jordan are finally forced out of the car by the September evening’s chill. The harsh fluorescents and muzak of the day have been extinguished, but it will take more than vanilla-scented candles and a mock-log fire to warm them. The stage is set with a single swivel chair in the soft glow of a pink spotlight. An eccentric collection of poets clusters around a table trying out their latest works on each other before braving the stage, while a cuddly bear of a man sneaks a chance to upstage his peers by slipping in a quickie while testing the microphone.

“Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking,” begins Michel, a soft-voiced giant with the calloused grimy hands of a charcoal-maker. “It comes for thee.”

Michel stops at the sight of the owners entering from the street. “Hi Jordan, Ruth,” he calls, and all heads turn.

Jordan attempts a greeting smile, but Ruth’s falls flat as the early poets acknowledge them. “Oh, God. The silly hat brigade,” mutters Ruth with a contemptuous edge and she gets a nudge from Jordan.

“Shh ... They’ll hear.”

“Well, it’s like a bloody religious uniform,” whispers Ruth, and Michel reinforces her point by donning his wide-brimmed, aging fedora to signify that he is now starting in earnest.

“It’s my latest poem, ‘Trouble,’” continues the big man into the microphone, then he drops his voice an octave and takes on a poet’s serious mien.

Ask not for whom trouble comes a-knocking.

It comes for thee.

Don’t answer the door

Let misfortune meet you in the street

At least you have a chance to run.

Ruth bursts into implacable sobs and dashes for the stairs to the apartment.

“Very touching, Michel,” says Jordan, taking off after his wife, and the poet beams with pride.

“Thanks, Jordan.”

As the voices drone in the café below, Jordan and Ruth run out of words and sink into the silence of over-bearing grief, their minds focussed so deeply on the hurt that they have no spirit for outward expression. Ruth cleans her glasses for the thousandth time and wishes she could smoke. There is a dried-out part-pack of Marlboros in her underwear drawer, a reminder of the day, a year earlier, that she smoked five in succession in a desperate effort to lose weight. It had worked—marginally and briefly—she’d vomited until the bile burned her throat. She hasn’t smoked since, but now she desperately wants something to occupy her pudgy fingers. She knows they should be caressing and soothing Jordan, but something holds her back. She watches him, slumped pathetically into his favourite chair with his eyes boring into the carpet, and already sees a shadow.

“We could sell everything and live it up in Maui or Mexico for a few months,” suggests Ruth, with more humour than sincerity as she attempts to bring life to the atmosphere, but Jordan harshly stomps on the idea. Their assets wouldn’t cover half of what they owe his mother, assuming they could find a buyer, and, with his condition diagnosed, he’d never get medical insurance—ever again.

I could eat, she thinks, I could always eat. But the insensitiveness of eating in front of Jordan while the malignancy develops in his intestines keeps her fastened to her chair. “If there’s anything you want ...” she tries, and Jordan replies poignantly, “To live, that’s all. I just want to live.”

Ruth explodes in a gush of emotion and Jordan does his best to console her. They both want to hear the words, “Everything will be all right,” but the words are wisely unspoken.

The café clears at eleven, and Ruth is happy to leave behind the gloom of the apartment while she goes downstairs to prevent the evening girls from escaping prematurely. The last thing she needs is a fight with Cindy in the morning.

The register appears to be a hundred dollars light when she cashes out, but with her brain already swamped, Ruth puts it down to miscalculation and turns her attention to the cake cooler.

How could you? demands her inner voice, and she slams the door, drops the knife and bursts into tears.

Jordan is asleep in his chair by the time Ruth returns with a black candle filched from Raven’s consulting room. The flickering flame is warmly yellow, but it has a dark heart, and in it Ruth sees a dismal future. Not only will she have to run the coffee house without Jordan’s help while the cancer and treatment take their toll, but she’ll have to continue years after his death just to repay his mother and their other debts.

The night drags and periods of oppressive silence are interrupted by Jordan’s snores, and the hum of the refrigerated display cabinets downstairs in the café—a nagging reminder to Ruth that a degree of solace is close at hand. Caramel crunch cake topped with Rolo ice-cream can be hers for the price of climbing down the stairs, but she worries that Jordan may wake and find himself abandoned, even momentarily, so she stays. Fearful that his final precious moments are already draining away, she studies his face and sees it aging under her gaze.

He’s not forty for another five weeks, yet he has the drawn look of a prisoner—a lifer; his greasy wan skin the result of daily incarceration in the café’s kitchen.

How can he sleep so soundly? Ruth wonders as the night air cools and she gently drapes him with a blanket. But hadn’t it been her complaints about his lethargy that had driven him to the doctor in the first place? If I hadn’t kept on at him to work harder, this wouldn’t have happened, she tries telling herself, then shakes it off as she turns the spotlight on her husband, almost willing him to hear. “How could you do this to me?” she muses illogically. “Haven’t I been through enough?”

Pull yourself together, she tells herself, realizing that the burgeoning anger is overwhelming her with a desire to smash him in the face. It’s not his fault. He’s not dying on purpose. And it’s not your fault either.

“I bet the fucking old bat’ll blame me,” she whines to the air, knowing that somehow Jordan’s mother will manage to twist the facts until her darling son’s suffering can be laid at her daughter-in-law’s feet.

It’s not your fault, she tries again, but can’t avoid the ridiculous feeling that she has somehow driven him into the arms of another, as if the tumor is a malignant third party with whom he is willingly flirting—a cancer that will ultimately win him away from her.

“Jordan, I love you. I’m not going to let you go,” she whispers tenderly as she brings herself down and kisses him lightly on the forehead, but she knows that while a pair of frilly panties and a peek-a-boo bra may have worked in the past, it’ll take more than that to break him away from this new mistress.

The flame of the exhausted candle is barely alive at dawn, and Ruth’s tear-clouded eyes see Jordan through a fog as if he is already cloaked in a shroud when the sound of Cindy’s crappy Ford pulling into the gravel parking lot reminds her that time has not stopped, despite her most fervent wishes. She is still dressed from the day before and rushes downstairs to the front door, waiting with a spare key in her hand, as Cindy arrives.

“Sorry. I should have given you this before,” Ruth says, flooring Cindy. “Jordan’s got a bit of a cold. I’ll do the breakfasts,” she adds and quickly turns back into the café.

“Are you all right?” queries Cindy, turning over the key in her hand. Ruth scurries away with her face to the kitchen. “I’ve asked Phil to come in early and I’ll take on someone new if Jordan’s not better in a few days,” she calls over her shoulder, but has difficulty keeping her voice straight.

Ruth shivers as she turns on the bright kitchen lights. It’s the stainless steel appliances and ceramic tiles, she tells herself, but knows it is Jordan’s absence, and quickly fires up the gas stove. “I can’t do this,” she says, losing her nerve. Not that she can’t cook—it isn’t complicated. Eggs—“Any way you want”—bacon, sausage, hash browns, and bagels, mainly.

You can do it. You just need to eat first, says her inner voice. You’ve got to keep up your strength.

How can I eat when my husband’s upstairs dying? she scolds herself.

Not today. He’s not dying today, nags the voice, and she grabs a frying pan and opens the fridge. Three eggs or four, she is considering, when Cindy’s shouts and the noise of a commotion in the café send her running. In an instant her mind conjures a terrifying scene, with Jordan writhing in death throes at Cindy’s feet, and her heart is pounding as she plows through the door.

It’s not Jordan, he’s still asleep upstairs.

It’s Trina, struggling to control a yapping yellow Labrador she has hauled in off the street, and Cindy appeals to Ruth for backup. “I told her not to bring her crappy dog in ...”

Trina cuts her off as she drags the animal around the room by its collar, looking for a tether. “It’s all right, Ruth. It’s not mine—it’s a stray.”

“Trina, this is a café!” remonstrates Ruth, but Trina’s determination to rescue the animal makes her deaf, and she quickly fashions a leash out of an electrical extension cord attached to a floor lamp.

“No, Trina,” screeches Ruth advancing the length of the room with the frying pan. The dog, sensing hostility, takes off with Trina and the lamp in tow. “Stop ... Stop,” yells Trina as she is dragged toward the street, then she braces her feet against the door frame while the electrical cord streams through her grasp.

“Let it go,” screams Ruth, racing to grab the lamp. Too late. The coloured glass lampshade explodes on the floor and the remnants of the lamp fly across the room to slam into Trina’s back.

“Oh, shit!” exclaims Ruth.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pay,” shouts Trina heroically, clearly enjoying the tug-of-war with the dog, and now, with the lamp’s standard jammed across the doorway, the cord stops streaming and she begins reining in the reluctant animal.

“Don’t you dare bring him back in here,” barks Ruth as she stomps back to the kitchen, “And you fucking well will pay for the lamp.”

Ruth is still in the kitchen, bawling into her apron, when Trina returns to the café and starts picking glass shards out of the carpet. “I put him in my husband’s car,” she tells Cindy triumphantly.

“Is he safe on his own?” queries Cindy.

“He’s found my husband’s lunch,” laughs Trina, “Sushi and a low-fat strawberry yogurt.”

“Trina!” exclaims Cindy, but Trina cuts her off as her face suddenly falls.

“Oh, Christ. I’ve left the kids’ guinea pig in the oven.”

“What?”

“Tell you later,” yells Trina as she heads for the door and collides with Tom. “Sorry, Tom,” she calls in her wake. “Family crisis—baked guinea pig.”

Tom shakes his head and laughs to Cindy. “What the hell has she done this time?”

“Apart from wrecking ...” starts Cindy as she drops glass fragments into a dustpan.

“Hang on,” says Tom, grabbing the morning paper. “Need the little boys’ room first.”

“Oh, crap,” calls Cindy. “We’re not even open yet.”

Ruth’s appetite for a fry up has vanished in the kafuffle, but it is no longer Jordan’s condition that bothers her. One nagging voice has been supplanted by another—a voice of reason.

“You can’t afford to eat the profits any longer,” she tells herself, and settles for a couple of carrots and a cup of tea while she cooks for the customers.

By eight-thirty the breakfast rush is winding down and Ruth has laboured upstairs and checked on Jordan four times. He wakes on the final occasion.

“Would you like some breakfast, dear?” Ruth coos.

Jordan pushes aside the blanket and struggles out of the chair. “What’s the time? I should be cooking.”

“Don’t worry, we’ve coped,” Ruth says, and bursts into tears with the instant realization that she’s going to be coping for the rest of her life. That, short of a miracle, her life is heading for a wreck as fast as her husband’s, but unlike him, she’s the one who’s going to have to deal with the bloody aftermath. “We’d better tell your mother,” Ruth snivels as she reaches for the phone.

“She’ll say it’s God’s punishment because we don’t go to church anymore,” says Jordan.

“And that’s my fault?” shoots back Ruth, knowing well that her mother-in-law will blame her.

“He always used to go,” she’ll spit, “before he met you.”

“Maybe we should start going again,” says Jordan.

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Ruth scoffs. “God gives you cancer, then you want to go to church and beg him to cure it.” Sanctimonious cow. Bet you’d be the first on your knees if you got it. “I’m sorry,” she pleads. “Don’t take any notice of me. Of course we’ll go to church if you want. We’ll do anything you want. Tell me what you want, Jordan. Anything. From now on, anything you want.”

“I don’t want my mother to know,” says Jordan coolly.

“Ruth!” Cindy yells up the stairs, “Are you doin’ the crappy breakfasts or not?”

“We’ll discuss it later,” Ruth calls to Jordan, and she uses her apron to dab her eyes as she heads down the stairs.

Trina is back and is frustrating the crossword gang. Matt, Dot, and Maureen have wrestled the relevant page of the Vancouver Sun from Tom, and they studiously worry at each clue in succession.

Trina is like a butterfly as she flits ahead and robs the others of the easiest clues. “Trina! That doesn’t fit,” yells Maureen as Trina races across the page with “TANJIT,” and collides with the “E” of “NUISANCE.”

“You always do that,” moans Matt, sotto voce. “You’ve ruined it now.”

“Oops. Sorry,” chuckles Trina insincerely. “It’s not my day. I nearly cooked the kids’ guinea pig.”

“What?”

“Well, there was a frost last night.”

“And?”

Robyn from the candle shop three doors away races in, close to tears, wanting to stick a hastily created poster in the window.

“Sure,” says Cindy. “What is it?”

“Lost dog,” says Robyn, showing Cindy a photocopied picture of a familiar Labrador. “I just let him out for a pee. He usually comes straight back.”

“Trina,” yells Cindy, “someone here to see you.”

“Give Jordan a call, Cindy,” demands Matt jovially. “We’re stuck on 5-across.”

“Only ’cos Trina made such a damn mess,” moans Dot. “What is a Tanjit anyway?”

“I dunno,” calls Trina as she glances at Robyn’s poster, “But it’s got six letters.” Then she turns to Robyn for support. “It’s only a crossword for chrissake ...”

“What about my dog?” snivels Robyn.

“He’s at the pound. I’ll take you. They know me there. I find two or three animals most weeks. You’re really lucky I caught him ... Did you know he’s fond of strawberry yogurt?”

“Yogurt?”

“Yeah, and sushi, though he spat up the wasabi on the dashboard.”

Robyn takes the lead, saying, “Quick. We’ll take my car,” as she hustles Trina out.

“Jordan’s sleeping-in this morning. Ruth’s doing the cooking,” Cindy calls to Matt once the commotion has died down. But Ruth isn’t cooking. She’s taken cover in the kitchen in the same way she’s been hiding most of her life—using feigned busyness as an avoidance mechanism. Ten minutes later, as she angrily swats at a lump of dough with a rolling pin, she wishes she could disappear altogether when Cindy pokes her head around the door.

“Ruth. The coffee guy’s here.”

Ruth’s empty stomach cramps and she stands quivering.

“What’s the matter with you today?” asks Cindy.

“The till was short a hundred bucks last night,” Ruth complains, though she knows that’s not the reason her knuckles are blanching as she grips the pin.

“Yeah, I know,” says Cindy. “I paid Raven. You promised her cash, remember?”

Ruth’s grip doesn’t relax. “Cindy. Do me a favour, would you? Tell the coffee guy I’m out ...”

Cindy shakes her head. “Won’t work, Ruth. He already told me, ‘No cash, no coffee.’ He says you haven’t paid in three weeks.”

“Shit.”

“I’d help, but ... How much d’ye need?”

“About five hundred.”

“What about crappy Tom?”

Tom is an unremarkable little man in his late fifties who would be slowing down if he had anything to slow down from. His morning rush to the washroom, and the subsequent evacuation, are generally the most energetic motions of his day. In fact, the only other time Cindy has seen him move was the time two doubtful characters in raincoats walked in without the slightest intention of buying coffee and Tom shot out the back like a scorched rabbit.

“Had an important call from my Zurich office,” he’d explained when Cindy cornered him the following morning.

Tom has two faces—both smiling: one that loans money to people without asking awkward questions, and the other that invests money for people who don’t ask awkward questions. He lives on the edge, between penury and fantasy, and sees no point in waiting until he has made a fortune before plucking its fruits. His latest “Mercedes” is a twelve-year-old Toyota with peeling paintwork that he hides in a corner of the municipal parking lot. His second car, a “Rolls Royce Corniche,” which “Only comes out on special occasions,” bears an uncanny resemblance to the banged-up VW Beetle on blocks at the back of his apartment. But his one-room basement apartment is only a front—somewhere in the back of his mind it’s an eight-bedroom mansion.

One thing is certain: Tom has an office. It’s Ruth and Jordan’s Corner Coffee Shoppe, where he hangs out every morning at the start of the week, then, at lunchtime on Thursdays, he’ll loudly proclaim, “I won’t be in the rest of the weekend,” as if the weekend is already dripping away. “I’m popping over to the island for a bit of a sail.”

No one scoffs. If anyone knows that Tom never goes further than his sister’s bungalow in North Vancouver they keep it to themselves. As for sailing, the only yachts he’s ever mastered are in the glossy boating magazines that he casually flips open when anyone impressionable is near. “I was thinking of this one,” he’ll say of a sleek fifty- footer. “What do you think?” he’ll ask with a sigh of boredom.

“I think you need some new shoes first,” would be an appropriate response, though no one ever says so.

Ruth’s request for a five hundred dollar loan brings only a moment’s thought, then Tom beams, “No problem at all, Ruth. Happy to help out.”

Ruth catches her breath as Tom pulls a monster roll of fifties from his pocket. “Walking-around money,” he says poker-faced as he tantalizingly peels off the first bill. Then he pauses. “Hold on, Ruth . . .”

He’s changed his mind, thinks Ruth, and she visualizes the customers departing as the percolators run dry.

“Why don’t I give you hundreds,” continues Tom as if he has no idea of the torment. “Would that be all right with you?”

“Hundreds. Yes, of course,” replies Ruth brightening, thinking fives, tens, twenties, who cares? “Hundreds will be fine if that’s better for you.”

“OK. Back in a moment,” says Tom, quickly squirreling the roll back into his pocket, and he dashes out of the café before she can discover that his stash is a wad of carefully clipped newspapers ringed with a few photocopied fifties.

“Well?” questions the coffee guy with his hand out.

“He’s ... He’s just popped over to the bank for me,” stalls Ruth, reddening, though her mind races as she tediously counts every bill from the till and adds it to the small bundle from her pocket.

“How much do I owe?” she inquires for the third time, seemingly confused, then starts counting all over again.

“Would you like a coffee?” she asks the delivery man with it half counted, then loses count as he scowls his frustration.

“Look, I’m in a bit of a hurry, lady.”

“Sorry ... Lost count,” she says starting at the beginning, knowing that the end offers no salvation.

He’s caught on and counts with her now, “Twenty, forty, sixty ...”

Ruth stops. “Does that include today’s delivery?” she asks innocently, but she’s overstretching.

“Yes,” he hisses. “That includes today.”

“That’s not fair ...” she starts, then backs off and takes a deep breath. “OK,” she says, ready to confess, when Tom returns and slides five new hundred dollar bills into her hand.

“I promise to pay you at the end of the week,” enthuses Ruth as soon as the delivery man has gone, but Tom is unconcerned.

“No rush, dear—pocket change. You just take your time. Six months if you want. You and Jordan aren’t planning on running away, are you?”

Ruth runs, tears streaming over her cheeks, and slams herself into the washroom where she sits staring deeply into the mirror, wishing she could liberate herself from reality as easily as Alice. But the mirror is cold-hearted and reflects the truth.

“Who’d wanna look at a fat lump like you,” she had often mused to the mirror as a teenager, before consoling herself with a box of Oreos and a good cry over a chick flick, while her peers were out screwing in the back of the family Ford. But, by then, she’d had years of practice in vanishing, especially at school where her baby fat had been solidified by the misery of being the universal punching bag. Weakened and slowed by her lumpiness and hampered by poor vision—once her glasses had been snatched she was easy prey—her only defense was inconspicuousness. Not easy for someone her size.

“You’re early, Phil,” says Cindy as Phillipa dashes in trailing her coat and shaking the rain out of her hair.

“Shh. Where’s Ruth? She wanted me in at nine, but what with the kids an’ my mother, then I heard the news and had to check the lottery.”

“Did you win?”

“Nah. Some lucky sod has though. Five mil’ and it’s someone around here, according to the radio.”

“More chance of getting hit by a crappy bus ...” starts Cindy, but Raven appears from nowhere and cuts her off.

“Not today, Cindy. Today I’d put my money on the lottery. Would you let Ruth know I won’t be in for a few weeks?” she adds breezily. “Something unexpected has come up.”

“Fine crappy psychic you are,” mutters Cindy, but Raven has already taken off.

“Ruth’s blubbering in the washroom,” Cindy tells Phillipa, “God knows what’s going on. It’s like a bloody madhouse in here today, and look at the crappy fuckin’ weather.”

“You want crappy, move to Newfoundland,” says Phillipa.

“I might just do that, Phil,” replies Cindy as Trina rushes in and shivers in front of the fire while a puddle grows around her feet.

“Robyn is mad at me ’cuz I saved her dog’s life,” Trina explains to the crossword gang. “I sometimes wonder why I do favours for people.”

“Why?” asks Maureen.

“He might have got run over.”

“No. Why is she mad at you?”

Trina’s tears turn to a giggle. “It cost her fifty bucks to get him out of the pound, another thirty for a rabies shot, twenty-five for a licence—which she should have had anyway, and then she got a ticket for another two hundred for letting him loose on the street in the first place.”

“Oh, shit ...” mutters Maureen, but Trina isn’t finished. “She wouldn’t bring me back from the pound. I had to walk. Now I’m late for work.”

“You’d better get going then,” says Matt with his arms folded over the nearly completed puzzle, then he remembers the guinea pig.

“He’s fine now,” calls Trina over her shoulder. “I shoved him in the freezer for a couple of minutes to cool off.”

The café fills with the mid-morning office crush demanding cappuccinos and lattes faster than man or machine can make them. Ruth is back in the kitchen, warming up the fryers and griddles as she prepares for lunch, when Jordan shuffles in.

“You shouldn’t be up,” she begins kindly, then she slams a stainless steel spatula onto the metal table. “This is crazy. What’s the point in doing this? What’s the fucking point in doing anything anymore?”

Jordan recoils at the venom, but Ruth drops her voice and starts to snivel again. “I’m sorry, but we should be together every moment. I shouldn’t be stuck here cooking for a load of ungrateful pigs, and I can’t go out there and pretend nothing’s happened. I want to be upstairs with you ...”

“Because you are dying,” hangs unspoken, as it will at the end of almost every sentence in Ruth’s immediate future. “We must do this because you are dying. We can’t do that because you are dying. I must say this because ... Don’t say that because ... Take this because ... Don’t cry because ... Don’t shout because, don’t scream, don’t make a fuss, don’t argue, don’t demand, don’t force, don’t yell, don’t tell. Don’t . . . don’t . . . don’t.”

Ruth’s future is filled with the caregiver’s burden of don’ts as she asks Jordan, “Why don’t we hire a cook so I can be with you all day?”

“Because I’d get on your nerves and you’d be happy to see me go.”

“Stop that, Jordan. Please stop. I know we can’t afford it.”

“That’s why we mustn’t tell my mother—not yet anyway. Once she catches on, she’ll probably want her money back.”

“Tell her she can’t have it,” says Ruth, though she knows the suggestion is going nowhere.

Jordan’s mother was English, before she emigrated, a grouchy northerner from Newcastle-on-tyne. She’s a Geordie with the dialect, the arms, and the determination of a Sunderland steelworker. If she wants her money, only God might stand in her way.

“Ruth, I hate to ask ...” Jordan hesitates.

“What is it, love?” Ruth queries, lightly dusting him with flour as she enfolds him.

“I’m going to need money for drugs and stuff.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll be al right. Just take what you want,” she says, thinking, Tom will have to wait.

“Then there’ll be other things: travel, special food. How will you manage?”

“Jordan, I said, ‘Don’t worry.’” She says, then floods into tears as she realizes that the man dying in her arms is more concerned for her future than his own. “You needn’t worry,” she reiterates softly, realizing that truth has become an early casualty.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right,” she carries on, but what is she supposed to say? “Sorry, Jordan, but we simply can’t afford for you to have cancer right now.”

“I’m sure it will be OK,” she adds, still praying for a misdiagnosis or a spontaneous remission. It could happen, she tries convincing herself, and now, more than ever, wants that to be the case as she comforts him—a man about to be overtaken by mortality who finally seems to care.

Not that he hadn’t been a good husband, in his own way, for seven years. And if he had found more enjoyment in the pages of Hustler and Playboy she would accept her share of the blame. The bigger she had grown, the more he turned to the stack of magazines by the bed.

“Look at this,” he’d say, pointing enthusiastically to a couple of stick insects with digitally enhanced pudenda in some impossibly contorted pose. “We should try that.”

Jordan had usually ended up seeking satisfaction from the image on his own, while Ruth had shuffled, embarrassed, to hide out in the kitchen.

A new world had opened up to Jordan when they had subscribed to the Internet, and his interest in Ruth had flagged entirely as he surfed porn sites and dating agencies.

“I can’t sleep,” he’d complain to Ruth as she crashed after an exhausting day. “I think I’ll send some emails,” he’d add, stealing quietly out of the bedroom and softly closing the door.

Ruth caught him eventually, the morning he fell asleep at the monitor with his hand in his pants and a live sex show streaming across the screen. She had promptly stopped the monthly cheques.

“Sorry Jordan, we can’t afford it,” she had explained when his screen died.

“You can’t do that. We need it for business,” he had insisted. “Everybody’s on the Net now.”

But Ruth knew which bodies on the Net he was most interested in, and held firm. “We managed all right before.”

Ruth weeps quietly as she continues holding Jordan in the kitchen. “It’s not going to happen,” she whispers in his ear. “You’re going to be all right.”

“But what about you, Ruth? I worry about you.”

Ruth collapses to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, unable to deal with the knowledge that her dying husband is burdened by a future that he will not be party to. But her grief is deeper. For the first time in her life someone actually cares. No one has ever cared before. Not even her parents. On the contrary, apart from fleeting satisfaction at the moment of her conception, neither her mother nor her father had taken any pleasure in their daughter.

To her father, Ruth does not exist and has never existed. The few minutes it took to inseminate her mother, a seventeen-year-old devotee of the Fab Four, when she was high on their music and pot, is a distant hazy memory in his mind.

“I’m one of the Beatles, luv,” he had claimed to the young Canadian woman, and had the Liverpudlian accent and a guitar case to prove it.

“He’s a famous English musician,” Ruth’s spaced-out mother confessed to ten-year-old Ruth one night—but when wasn’t she spaced-out? In fact, had she not been high the night of the Beatles concert, she probably wouldn’t have splayed herself to a complete stranger in the middle of “Hard Day’s Night” when he was supposedly banging away on his guitar with his cohorts on stage.

“It was dark in his dressing room,” her mother had continued to the confused ten-year-old who was demanding to know why all the other girls in her class had fathers. “But there was a star on the door and he definitely said his name was George.”

To the tormented offspring of a single mother in a rural Canadian community in the sixties, the probability, however bizarre, that her surname was Harrison was gold. Armed with the first bit of good news in her short life, Ruth had gone to school the next day full of vengeful thoughts. “You can’t play with us, you haven’t got a dad,” the other kids had frequently taunted, but it wasn’t them talking, it was their mothers, well aware that Ruth’s mother had a certain reputation.

Word spread and, despite the scoffing of a jealous few, was widely believed. That April day in 1975, and only that day, Ruth had shone in the glow of her supposed father. But, by the following morning, a dark cloud had descended and left her in a deeper gloom than she could ever have imagined.

“Liar, liar, pants on fire,” chanted the entire school, fuelled by the scornful skepticism of their parents, and then they had thrown rocks at her—schoolyard gravel in truth, but the cuts went much deeper than the scratches bathed and tended by the school secretary.

“Double home burger with super-size fries,” yells Cindy through the intercom, and Ruth drags herself up and pulls herself together.

“What are we going to do, Jordan?” she asks, not expecting a resolution.

“We’ll just have to carry on,” he replies, offering none.

It’s only eleven-thirty, but lunches have started and Ruth will be trapped in the kitchen until three. The café is starting to fill with regulars, but there is an interloper. Detective Sergeant Mike Phillips of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is new to the area, though he has quickly sniffed out a coffee shop. Tom, with his roll of fake fifties bulging in his jacket, has a nose for the law and has eyed the newcomer guardedly from the moment he entered, but he’s trapped as Phillips sits directly across from him and starts a conversation.

“It’s still raining,” says Phillips.

“Vancouver,” says Tom in explanation, then he downs half his coffee.

“I’m from Toronto,” says Phillips and is mentally preparing a potted biography when Tom drains his cup and slides out.

“See ya,” says Tom. “Gotta check on my investments.”

“Weird,” mutters Phillips as he sits back with his Caffe Americano and looks forward to an upcoming visit to England.