Chapter 28 #2
“Are you okay?” Clemence asks him.
“Oh, yeah,” he says, but he’s wincing. “She just.” He pauses. “She caught me by surprise.”
“You should have seen me in my prime,” says Crampton. “I was a ladies boxing champion. Not that there was so much competition, but I really used to be able to throw a punch.”
“Looks like you still can,” says Roger Lathbury. This is the sort of thing that impresses him, and Clemence can’t help but wish it were her boyfriend meeting with her father’s approval instead of the elderly woman who’d just punched him.
“But Toby can take it,” says Crampton, nudging him, and he flinches, as though she’s about to punch him again. “No, don’t worry,” she tells him, sotto voce. “Just talk.”
“You worked hard on this,” he says to Clemence, locking eyes. “And everybody came.”
“And some of them aren’t even related to her,” Prudence adds.
“It’s the busiest sale we’ve ever had,” says Reverend Michelle, who’s just crossed the room like the answer to someone’s prayer. Hooking her arms through Bonnie and Roger’s both, leading them away. “Let me show you …”
“So you’re the one,” says Jillian, now free to speak her mind.
“I guess,” Toby says. He’s looking around for Crampton—perhaps she’ll punch him again; a diversion. But Crampton has disappeared.
“You guess?” says Naomi. “Because you either are or you aren’t.”
“You guys—” Clemence begins, but Jillian holds up a hand to stop her.
“I am the one,” exclaims Toby too loudly, a bit strangely. But then he puts his arm around her like a normal boyfriend might. “I’m here, aren’t I? I showed up at a church jumble sale?”
“Well, we all did,” says Jillian.
Toby says, “Exactly. We’re Clemence’s people.”
“And we’re her sisters,” says Grace, yanking Prudence into the circle, too.
Toby is taken aback, Clemence sees, by these two more women, both with her face, or faces like hers, and one of them is very pregnant.
If Toby can hold his own in this moment, there might be hope for him yet.
Alternatively, this might be the last time she sees him.
Would that be a bad thing? Clemence has decided that it would be.
But he is shaking their hands now, and he even laughs when Naomi mentions the caterpillar, how Toby, so squeamish, had been willing to brave it on his plate just to save Clemence from humiliation, and honestly, it’s possible that no man has ever shown up so consistently before to put himself between Clemence and trouble.
While the last thing she wants, in theory, is to need someone to save her, it’s sure nice when he tries.
Even now—he’s only here to legitimize her choices, to assure everybody that she hasn’t lost her mind.
Which makes him almost suitable now, and Clemence considers how this might undermine her project.
But does it matter?
She pulls him away from the rest.
“You came,” she says. “I never expected you would. I am sorry you got assaulted in the process.” She rubs his arm where Crampton punched him.
“Your mom’s nice,” he says perfunctorily. “And this is actually pretty impressive. Busier than the bookstore even. I bet you don’t have a box for Women’s Fiction.”
They’re standing before the second-hand books now, most of them donated from Crampton’s.
The crate of paperbacks devoted to tarot and the occult is empty.
Literary fiction is less picked over, and Clemence kneels down to sort through it, when she picks up a book that doesn’t belong.
Minor Feelings. It’s not fiction. And maybe it’s a coincidence, she supposes.
She hopes. Flipping open the cover, but no—there it is.
C. Yeung. “No,” she says, a moan of despair. Like this is a tragedy. Because it is.
“What is it?” Toby asks.
“Mrs. Yeung,” says Clemence, getting up again, clutching the book.
“Where is she?” It’s still crowded and impossible to see anyone, though she keeps getting glimpses of her nieces and nephews darting in and out of the hubbub.
Clearly her family is still here, but where is her landlady?
She had to be somewhere—this whole thing is her show.
Turning over the empty occult crate to stand on it and get a better view, Clemence rises to her tiptoes, but she sees nothing.
Min Jee has returned from a short break, starts playing, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and it’s all that Clemence can hear, because she’s standing too close to the speaker and she has to get away from it; her head is starting to pound.
Clemence makes her way through the crowd and finds Mrs. Yeung in the kitchen, putting squares on a tray.
“What is this?” she demands of Mrs. Yeung, whose tongs are dealing out marshmallow squares with the precision of a card dealer, and she doesn’t stop for Clemence’s question.
Barely looking up. “A book,” she says.
“It’s Charles’s book,” says Clemence. “You were supposed to give it back.”
“He didn’t want it,” says Mrs. Yeung, using her tongs to wave Clemence away.
“But he loves this book,” says Clemence, insisting. “I promised him that I would return it.”
“Charles has too many books already,” his mother says.
“He must think I’m such a jerk,” says Clemence.
“He doesn’t.”
“But he’ll think that I lost it, or that I kept it. That I’m just flaky.”
“Charles doesn’t think of you at all,” says Mrs. Yeung.
“Here.” She places the tray of baking in Clemence’s hands, and it’s hard to balance with the book in her grip.
“Go put these out. Happy tummies spend more money, and there’s still mountains of jumble to move.
” She is pushing Clemence out the door, and where is Toby now?
Perhaps he took his opportunity to escape, and she can’t blame him.
The scene is overwhelming, and it only gets worse as she approaches the baking table, the crowds thick around it.
She’s still got the book, got it stuck up under her arm, and she’ll have to think of a way to get it back to Charles.
Setting down the tray, she darts away from the hungry masses, and it’s still so hot in here.
Is it getting hotter? Her sweater is suffocating, and the brooch is weighing her down.
How will she get the book back to Charles if his mother refuses to help?
Clemence thinks of what else she’s taken from him, the shiny knives, all his wife’s clothing that she’s rifled through, and perhaps he thinks she’s a scavenger. The madwoman in the attic, indeed.
And then she hears her name and turns around, without even thinking, obviously, because if she’d stopped to think, she would not have turned.
She would have taken off running, the way she’s been ever since she’d left him in the spring, away, away, but the flight is over now, the jig is up, and she might as well have gone nowhere at all because Toad looks the same, hurt and sad, possibly wearing the very shirt he’d been wearing the last time she’d laid eyes on him, though it’s hard to tell because Toad is the type of person who, if he likes something, buys fifteen of them.
All of his clothes look the same. He is definitively not, however, the type of person who shows up at a jumble sale.
He is also supposed to be on the other side of the continent.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“I needed to see you,” he says, coming so close. He takes her hand, and there it is, his touch, once so familiar to her that his was an extension of her own body. Once it was her home. She’d once loved that face. Had she loved that face?
But then she realizes that he’s not just holding her hand, he’s holding her still. This has always been the problem, and she pulls away from his grip. “I’m working here,” she tells him. “I’m busy. This isn’t the place—”
“It’s the only place where I knew I would find you,” he says.
“It’s all over your Facebook. Clemence, what’s happened?
Have you lost your mind? A church jumble sale?
” He’s not holding her now, and but she’s still stuck, because the room is packed, and the crowd has hemmed her in.
“You won’t talk to me. You’ve given me no other choice.
This is embarrassing.” He sounds pitiful.
“We’ve got to work this out. I deserve that much.
I do.” His voice is wavering. He sounds like he’s going to cry again.
She tells him, “No. I mean, you do. You really do. But I can’t.
I just can’t.” She doesn’t see how he doesn’t get it.
She’d really thought that after doing what she’d done that there’d be no hope of salvage, that there’d be no pieces whole enough for any possibility of putting their world back together.
She says, “You flew all the way here, though.” He’d never been one for dramatic gestures.
And he still isn’t, because he tells her, “Well, my dad’s sick.
Cancer’s back.” He’d had a mass on his lung four years ago.
It had been scary and awful, and Clemence had been looped in to all that; part of the family.
She’d helped coordinate the meal train during his treatment.
Remotely then, but she is even further away from all that now. She’d had no idea.
She says, “I still can’t, though.” He’s not going to guilt her into this just because of his dad. She feels sweat running down her brow.
He asks, “Can’t what?” His eyes are locked on hers now, and he doesn’t need a grip. There is nowhere to run.
“‘Work this out,’” she says. “I can’t do it, and I’ve tried to tell you.
I’ve told you, in so many ways.” She closes her eyes now, the only way she can find the courage to tell him straight.
“It’s over. We can’t go back to how it was, and I don’t want to.
I don’t even think you really want to either, if you’re honest with yourself. ”
And he is silent in response. She dares to open her eyes, even though she’s afraid she might have killed him with her brutal honesty, wondering if there is any way around this fact of having to hurt him like this over and over.
But Toad doesn’t look hurt, instead confused. He says, “I don’t.”
“You don’t what?”
“Want to go back to how it was.”
“You don’t?”
“Clem, we’re done. I know we’re done. And I want it finished.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He says, “I’ve met someone.
” Minor Feelings drops to the floor. Then the most cutting barb: “I think you might be overestimating just how hard you are to get over.” His voice is fading, even though he’s still right there in her face.
“To be honest, you’ve made it easy for me. I should probably thank you.”
Leaning down to pick the book up again, blood rushes to her head, and she begins to feel even more woozy.
“Are you okay?” somebody’s asking, and is it Toby or is it Toad?
And why are her sisters here, and Jillian and Naomi?
All of Clemence’s people. Everybody’s mouths are moving, but the sounds don’t match, and why is the whole scene swimming?
Toby looks uncomfortable, this is perhaps the sole aspect of the scene that makes any sense.
And Mary-Ann Arbuckle is here, too, but she’s the size of a mountain, moving in and out of focus: “I think you might be overestimating just how hard you are to get over,” she is saying.
And then all that Clemence can hear is the dull roar of the room in her ears, the sound of a seashell, or maybe it’s the sea.
How is it possible to hear the sea from here?
Could somebody maybe crack open a window?
It’s so hot. And Mary-Ann Arbuckle is everywhere, growing like Alice in the rabbit’s house, and the only thing that Clemence has to defend herself with is her brooch pin, and she’s not afraid to use it.
The world going black for a moment, and she’s suddenly overwhelmed with the smell of books, that room beneath the stairs, everybody she’s known in her whole life gathered around her, but then reality snaps back, and Mary-Ann Arbuckle is all of it.
Perspective skewed, so that when Clemence holds out her pin, it’s a sword after all, and so maybe she’s not so defenceless, but then everything goes dark, and this time it stays that way.