Gail Bowen - The Last Good Day

In the months afterwards, I replayed the scene a hundred times in my mind. Always in my revision, I behaved heroically. I raised my head and walked across the street with the man I loved. The truth was I had not been brave. Obeying an impulse as atavistic as it was unforgivable, I had shaken off Alex’s arm and run to the safety of the sidewalk. The men in the half-ton had applauded the fact that I had allied myself with them. My apology to Alex had been heartfelt, and he had been understanding, but there was no denying the truth: that split second at the Albert Street Bridge had opened a chasm between us that we had never again been able to close.

I had failed him, and we both knew it. Tonight I had a chance to make amends. I picked up my cell and tried his number. Remembering what we had once been to one another, I wanted to warn him, but at another level I knew that I needed an explanation myself. The Alex I knew had been principled, a man of integrity who believed that every human being had an obligation to do what he could to make a difference. He had been one of the best things in my life. I needed to know that I hadn’t been wrong to love him. I needed to know that, no matter what had happened on that icy November day, Alex was worth loving.

As the phone rang, images of the apartment I knew so well flashed through my mind. It was in a small old building downtown, not posh, but comfortable, with high ceilings and a bedroom with a small balcony where, after love-making, we would take our chairs and sit and look out across the street at the blank face of the church. The memories absorbed me. I didn’t notice how many times the phone rang. When, finally, the phone was picked up, the voice on the other end was not Alex’s. It was a woman’s voice. “Hello,” she said. “Hello,” and then in a voice in which anger and fear were mixed, “Hello. Who’s there? Hello.”

I hung up. Those few words weren’t enough to reveal whether the woman in Alex’s apartment was Lily Falconer, but one thing was certain: the man I’d loved for three years had found someone else to come home to.

The next morning the skies were grey and there was a drizzle that looked like it had staying power. It was a day to sit on the porch, wrapped in an afghan, reading Virginia Woolf, but Taylor, Isobel, and Gracie had other plans. Recognizing that it would be difficult to keep a scheme involving a quantity of rocks secret on a horseshoe of land from which all rocks except those in ornamental groupings had been removed, the girls decided to spill the beans about their top-secret project.

Taylor’s enthusiasm for the Inukshuk book had infected her friends. Inspired by the tale of a man who had travelled almost two thousand kilometres guided only by the Inuksuit described in a song his father had taught him, the girls had drawn up plans for a series of Inuksuit that would lead a traveller around the land surrounding Lawyers’ Bay. Each Inukshuk would have a sight hole in the middle. When a lost soul peered through it, he would find his bearings and be guided along the route to the next Inukshuk. Ultimately, he would end up where he wanted to go. The girls had chosen their sites with care, sketched each Inukshuk, and made a rough estimate of the number and sizes of the rocks they would need. They had done their homework, and, in my eyes, the value of their efforts was not diminished by the fact that it was unlikely anyone at Lawyers’ Bay would ever get lost. Except for my ancient Volvo, every car there had a state-of-the-art global positioning system.

As if to offset the dreariness of the day, the girls were all wearing crayon-bright cotton shirts: Gracie’s was tangerine, and she had gathered her red-gold hair in a ponytail held in place by an orange scrunchy. With her rosy freckled skin and bright blue eyes, it was impossible to imagine that her mother was a member of the Dakota First Nation. Blake Falconer had said that his wife’s sadness at not having a daughter who was more in her image was enduring, but that morning Gracie seemed remarkably free of any marks of her mother’s rejection.

Cheerful and practical, she identified the role I’d been called upon to play in the scheme. “We need you to phone the rock company,” she said. “They won’t accept an order from a kid – take my word for it. I tried the company my mother used when she got the rocks for the gazebo and they insisted on speaking to an adult. My house is short of adults at the moment, so we thought maybe you’d help us out.”

“There’s a place in Fort Qu’Appelle we could try,” I said. “We might even be able to get what you need delivered today. Besides, I wouldn’t mind doing a little grocery shopping.”

Isobel gave me a puckish three-cornered smile. “You mean you’re unable to meet all your shopping needs at the Point Store?”

“Every so often I just have a hankering for something that doesn’t cost twice as much as it should,” I said.

Peter’s Rocks was one of those curious businesses that appear to spring up as backyard ventures, and then spill into the vacant lot next door, defying zoning laws and the dreams of fastidious neighbours. It might not have been nominated for any chamber of commerce awards, but Peter’s seemed to be exactly what the girls had in mind. Despite the misting rain, they stormed the rock piles with a passion they typically would have reserved for a sale at Old Navy. They argued good-naturedly over their selections, replaced hotly disputed choices with better choices, and generally settled in for a morning of solid trading. They were dressed for the long haul in waterproof ponchos, but the wind-breaker I’d hurriedly bought at a discount house before I came to the lake turned out to be worth exactly what I’d paid for it. It wasn’t long before I hightailed it to the shelter of the corrugated plastic roof that covered the concrete lawn ornaments.

All the usual suspects were there: jockeys, saucer-eyed fawns, huddled gargoyles, gargoyles with wings spread, Dutch girls saucily lifting the backs of their skirts to reveal ruffled concrete panties and sturdy legs, mother rabbits, bears wearing sweaters, angelic doomed children, gnomes, a flock of plaster owls that I glanced at only briefly, a solitary Sacred Heart, three Holy Families, and a phalanx of Blessed Virgins. Freed of the obligation to buy anything or pass judgement, I gave the ornaments my full attention, listened to the rain bounce off the roof above me, and tried to think of nothing at all.

It took the girls an hour to make their choices and another half-hour to watch a buff young man in jeans that appeared to have been put on wet load the rocks they had selected into the back of a pickup and tot up the bill. Then it was my turn. We hit the IGA, where, in honour of customer-appreciation day, the manager had slashed 10 per cent from the cost of all purchases, excluding tobacco and drugs. A good morning’s work all around, and we drove home content.

As we warmed soup and cut sandwiches, the girls dreamily revisited the many charms of the young man at Peter’s Rocks. Clearly, breasts were not the only things budding that summer for my daughter and her friends. The goofiness and speculations continued during lunch, and I was relieved when the girls asked if they could skip dishes so they could start levelling the ground where the first Inukshuk would be built.

We were without an automatic dishwasher at the lake, and I’d just submerged my hands in warm sudsy water when I heard a car pull up. I grabbed a tea towel and headed to the front of the cottage. When I saw that the visitor trudging through the rain towards my front door was Detective Robert Hallam, I opened the door with a smile.

“Come in,” I said. “There’s still soup in the pot.”