11. Sunday
SUNDAY
“So,” Sarah said, keeping her voice carefully casual, “my friend is going to pick me up at our house a few minutes after we get back.” They were in Maureen’s car on their way back from the wedding.
Sarah was driving, and she had noticed that the mileage on the car was barely more than it had been when she had come home for Christmas.
Her mother worked at a local grocery store, and Sarah suspected that she did most of her food shopping at work and never went anywhere else except for church on Sundays.
“And she’s going to drive you all the way to the airport? That’s nice.” Her mother had been fretting about whether she should drive Sarah to the airport herself, but Sarah knew that Maureen got nervous whenever she drove more than fifteen minutes from home.
“No.” Sarah took a breath, debating for the hundredth time whether it was better to lie about her plans. “He is actually going to take me out west to help with a photography workshop he’s running.”
“He’s the other photographer?” Her mother’s eyebrows shot upward. “The handsome one?”
“Yes, he’s an old friend from McGill.”
“And he knows Paul, too?”
Sarah nodded. “They met in Toronto.”
There was a long pause as her mother watched Sarah’s expression. “You’re not in love with him, are you?”
“No, I am not in love with him,” Sarah confirmed.
“Because men that handsome…” Her mother gave her a meaningful look.
“I know, Mom. You’ve said.”
“I just worry.”
“I know, Mom. It’s fine. He is definitely not interested in me like that.”
They had gotten on the road early, so they arrived at her mother’s house at a little after nine in the morning and immediately checked on the parakeets, who were remarkably unperturbed after their hours of horrible abandonment.
“I guess they’re okay,” said Maureen as she changed out the little compartment of water in the birds’ cage. “They don’t seem too upset.”
“The parakeets are fine, Mom. Let me know if there’s anything you need me to do before I head out. He should be arriving soon.”
“And then you have to leave.” The gut punch of guilt was familiar, but it still hurt.
“I was always going to take a flight home this morning. Now I’m doing a few days of work first, that’s all.”
“I know. I know you have to go,” her mother said, her voice cracking with sadness. “You have work.”
“Hey,” Sarah said softly, “you should move to Toronto. I mean it. This place is too quiet. It’s too easy to be sad here.”
“Oh, no. I don’t want to move to a whole new place where no one knows me.”
Sarah looked around their small house. It felt like a memorial more than a home, frozen in the era when Sarah had been a young child with two living parents.
Since then, the house had never really changed, never shifted décor.
Her mother didn’t see the point in buying something just for herself.
The one new armchair in the corner had been purchased by Sarah as a Christmas gift, and Maureen had accepted it only with great reluctance.
“If you’re happy here, that’s fine,” Sarah said. “But if you’re not…”
Her mother looked around. “I didn’t know anyone would be coming over. The house is such a mess,” she said, although it wasn’t. Maureen didn’t get into enough trouble to make messes; there were a few knitting projects on the sofa in front of the TV and a couple of mugs on the counter.
“It’ll be fine. The house looks great. Ren won’t stay long,” Sarah said.
“And then you’ll be leaving.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sarah took her mother’s suitcase and brought it to her mother’s bedroom, placing it carefully on the bed.
“Do you want me to start your laundry?” she asked. Doing tasks together was a reliable trick for pulling her mother out of these spirals of sadness.
“Oh, I can do it myself, sweetheart.”
Ren knocked on the door only a few minutes later. Sarah walked over to let him in. He was wearing one of his especially charming smiles, which Sarah suspected would only make things worse.
“Hello,” Ren said, putting out a hand to Maureen when she approached. “I’m Rene Durand, a friend of Sarah’s. We didn’t get to meet at the wedding.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Her mother stared at him for a moment. “You met her at McGill?”
“First semester.”
“Well, come inside, it’s not very…” She waved a hand vaguely. “Can I make you a cup of tea?”
“Tea would be great,” Ren said.
“I only have milk, not cream.”
“Milk is perfect. Thanks.”
“Well, I wish I had cream, but I didn’t know I’d have people over. So I only have milk.”
“Milk is great.”
Maureen began to walk around the kitchen with the nervous, fluttering energy she always had when guests came over.
Sarah led him into the small living room, thinking about how much it looked like a Newfoundland cliché: hand-knitted blankets, fishing lures in a glass case, carved duck decoys.
She would have been mortified for Ren to see it during school, when Sarah still hoped to seem cool to people.
His childhood home was probably full of books, while the only book in sight here was a dogeared paperback on the coffee table called Touched by Angels: Real-life Stories of Angel Encounters.
“My family estate,” she said, gesturing towards the solid oak furniture and the ancient rocking armchair.
Ren smiled reassuringly, then walked over to the wall of family photos. The images in the photos were faintly yellowed, peeping out of circular and square cutouts.
“That’s your father?”
Her father had been a friendly man with curly brown hair and clothes that reflected his love for the outdoors.
In the photo Ren was looking at, Sarah was probably five years old and looked winsomely adorable, her rosy-cheeked face tucked under her father’s chin as she crouched in a friend’s wooden canoe.
Sarah had kept that same face into adulthood, alas: round and cute rather than dramatic and sexy.
She had so desperately wanted to be waifish in her teen years.
“That’s my dad,” Sarah agreed.
Ren continued examining the photos carefully as Maureen spoke from the kitchen. “Her father died!” she called. “That’s why she has no brothers and sisters. We were thinking about having another, but I had trouble getting pregnant and then he was killed by a drunk driver.”
Sarah’s eyes went straight to her mother. “I didn’t know you had trouble getting pregnant.”
“Oh yes, we wanted children two years apart, but it didn’t work out. And then he was gone.”
Sarah had never explained her own fertility issues to her mother, not wanting to cause her more anxiety.
She had said that she and Danny didn’t want kids, because it seemed easier to surprise Maureen with good news rather than constantly tormenting her with bad news.
Now she felt the loss of an opportunity to connect.
She watched her mother standing stock still, frozen in place in the kitchen for a moment, before she collected herself and opened the cabinet to get out the mugs.
Sarah hadn’t seen her mother entirely happy since her father was alive.
It was a wonder that Sarah had ever found the courage to fall in love at all, growing up in a house where this was the devastation that followed when you lost someone.
She felt Ren watching her.
“And this?” he asked, pointing to a young toddler doing an awkward somersault.
“You know who that is. That’s the groom from this weekend’s wedding.”
He smiled at the tiny image of Paul. “He’s exactly the same.”
“He was always hilarious. And very sweet. I’m glad he’s acting again, even if it’s just improv.”
“Me, too.” Ren gave her a look, something mischievous in his eyes. “So I know we have to get on the road soon, but I will never forgive myself if I don’t ask you a question.”
“Oh, no.”
“Do you have a childhood bedroom with your stuff still in it?”
She sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”
She pushed open the door to her bedroom, a small space off the downstairs hallway, and stood back for Ren.
He entered with the focus of an anthropologist, standing in the middle of the room to take it all in.
Her mother had left a few in-progress crochet and knitting projects on her desk and bed, but the rest was the same: the fantasy novels, the Tim Burton movie poster, the Belle and Sebastian and Elliot Smith CDs.
“Just say it,” she said. “Get it out of your system.”
“There is no way I can say anything while my brain is storing up every single detail to memory.”
“Okay, okay.”
“This is so perfectly you. This is the you I first met.”
He walked to her bookshelf, looking at the classics from college tucked between rows of science fiction paperbacks.
“Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice.” His voice was full of laughter.
“I’m sure you spent high school reading Kafka. You once told me that you refused to read anything written after 1980 because you weren’t sure if it would stand the test of time.”
Ren gave her a mischievous look. “I was trying to impress you. I read plenty of Terry Pratchett growing up.”
“Oh my God, Ren, if you tell me that your entire intellectual snob thing was an act…”
“It wasn’t an act,” he replied. “I just exaggerated it around girls.”
“Now I want to see photos of your childhood bedroom.”
“It’s been turned into my father’s office,” he said. “You’ll never get the dirt on me or my movie poster of Magnolia.”
She smiled, finally. “Okay, enough, get out. I need to dig through my drawers to see if I have any clothes that I can use for this trip. I didn’t bring the right clothes for a photography workshop when I was packing for a wedding.
So you are not allowed to judge me if I spend this week wearing Pearl Jam T-shirts. ”
“I was going to stop and buy you more clothes, but now I don’t want to.
” He was giving her such an affectionate look that she fell silent.
That gaze felt unfair. He had no right to look at her like that, not without apologizing…
not without him giving her the apology that she had insisted she didn’t want.