Matt Lennox - The Carpenter

The girl traded off with the old pianist again. Two more acts followed, forgotten as soon as they finished, and then came the intermission.

They hung around the corridor outside the banquet hall and Billy told Pete about how he’d met the girl. There were three high schools in town. There was a small Catholic French high school called Sacre Coeur. There was Northside Secondary, where Pete had gone before he’d quit, and where most of the out-of-town kids came by bus. And there was Heron Heights, in town, where Billy said Emily had just started grade twelve. Billy had been at Heron Heights with the Northside lacrosse team, playing an exhibition game, the first of the season. He said he’d noticed Emily sitting with her friends in the stands nearby. After the game, Billy had thought she’d gone, but later, when he was coming out of the change room, he saw her in the corridor. He said he’d gone up and talked to her a little bit, and since then they’d been on a couple of dates. He was agreeable with just about everybody, but he was bold as well. Pete envied much about him.

— Hey, you.

They turned and saw her coming towards them. She walked with cool poise.

— That was great, said Billy. The piano playing. I didn’t have any idea you could do that.

— Thank you. I practised that one for a long time. I didn’t think you were coming. If I’d known you were here, I might have been nervous.

She reached out and took Billy’s hand, then asked if he was going to introduce her to his friend.

— This is Pete.

— Hey, Pete. I’m Emily Casey.

— Hey, said Pete. What kind of music was that?

— It was a waltz, said Emily. Chopin.

— Well whatever, said Billy. It was great as hell. Anyway, when you’re done here, you want to come with us? We’ve got a case of beer in the car.

— I can’t, said Emily. I’m here with my family. But I’ve got some time in the week. And next weekend my friend Nancy might have some people over.

They would have talked more but just then a man appeared in the corridor behind them, some distance away. He was a slim man. Collared shirt and tie. The man was simply standing there, not moving towards them, but all the same Pete felt himself scrutinized. He occupied himself by examining some outreach tracts in a rack on the wall.

— Emily, said the man.

She gave the man a little wave, turned back to Billy, and said: That’s my dad.

— The cop, said Billy, his voice low enough that Emily’s father couldn’t hear him.

— Yes. Anyway, call me.

She withdrew as coolly as she’d arrived, going through the doors of the banquet hall with them watching her, and her father watching them.

The case of Labatt made a full revolution of locations before it was opened. They ended up back at Billy’s brother’s apartment, where they smoked more dope and drank beer. Billy and his brother sat on the couch with their guitars and spent some time disagreeing over what song to play. Billy’s brother had married just out of high school. His wife was watching television and didn’t pay attention to Pete or Billy or even Billy’s brother.

The hours passed and the beers got fewer. Pete went out on the balcony to get some air. The lights of town winked up at him, unchanging. Pete thought about the old bald man, Grady-or was it Gardy? — who’d come to the gas station earlier that night, with his one idiot son in the car and his talk of his other son, lover of Thunderbirds, long dead. Pete thought also of Emily, cool and collected, seated at the piano in the silent instant before she played.

Stan’s cronies usually convened at Western Autobody amp; Glass a couple of times each week. The sign over the bay doors read Family Owned and Operated Since 1934. Huddy Phillips, who’d opened the garage himself, had signed it over to his son Bob five years ago, but Huddy and the other old-timers still got together in the adjoining office to swap their stories. They stood around, drinking coffee, talking at length, sometimes talking over each other, often repeating tales they’d all told many times before.

— … I say if all them sons of bitches want to go their own way they can take everything east of the Ottawa River and go, is what I say, you know I was chums with Black Jack Stewart when we were young lads, turns out that chap she was going with was a queer, and they can take Trudeau with them when they go …

— Nothing is the same as it used to be, by Christ, said Huddy.

He sat under an official photograph of the 1959 Royal Tour, the Queen and her husband walking along a path beside Lake Louise. The photograph hung slightly crooked, and Stan could not look at it without wondering if the Queen had ever seen the inside of a place like Western Autobody, and what she might think if she had.

Dick Shannon filled two cups from the coffee maker. He was fifty-six years old, which put him much younger than the others, but he’d been married thirty-five years to the youngest sister of Bill Norman, who was one of the other old-timers hanging around the garage. Dick had been partnered with Stan at the local detachment for many years. He did not have long to go before he retired, but today he was uniformed and a marked patrol car was parked outside.

Stan was leaning beside a window into the service bay, watching one of the mechanics pump transmission fluid into an import. There’d been talk about the dead girl. He knew that. The circumstances of the discovery had not been published in the newspaper when the story broke last week, but word had got out quickly as to who’d found her. Stan had heard that her body was only now coming back from the coroner, so that a funeral could be held.

Dick brought Stan one of the cups of coffee. They listened to the gossip around them.

— Ferris’s delivery truck, said Huddy.

— That old Chevy, said Bill.

— You don’t know anything. It was a goddamn Ford. Panel built on the passenger chassis.

— How’s the house? said Dick.

— It’s standing, said Stan. It always needs this or that but I’d say it’s got more winters to stand than I do.

— Word is that Frank and Mary might move out there.

— Maybe. Not just yet. I talked to them about taking it in a few years. It’s been in the family a long time.

— I’ll come out and visit soon.

— Anytime. I don’t hide the whisky bottles any more.

They drank their coffee in silence. Then Huddy reached up and tugged Stan’s sleeve. He said: Stanley, that gal.

— What gal.

— That gal they found out there, dead in her car. That gal was one of Aurel Lacroix’s daughters, wasn’t she?

Dick cleared his throat and examined his knuckles. Bill Norman and the other men in the office became quiet.

— Yes, said Stan. That’s right.

— Aurel Lacroix, Christ Almighty.

On the evening before the girl’s funeral, Stan went to the viewing. It was held at the unremarkable municipal mortuary. Light came from brass sconces on the wall and there were watercolours of nature scenes. He signed the guest book in the foyer. His good suit had been tailored of cashmere wool many years before. Now it was loose in the chest and shoulders. The last time he’d worn it was when his wife, Edna, died two years ago.

Judy Lacroix lay in a closed casket of varnished pine with autumn wildflowers arranged on the bier around her. There were twenty to twenty-five people in attendance, but Judy’s only living immediate relative was her twin sister, Eleanor, not quite thirty years old. Their mother and father were no longer living, and their father’s brothers had died before they’d had the chance to make any families of their own. Stan had never known a family more marked by loss. He saw Eleanor speaking to two well-wishers. It gave him an eerie sense to see Judy’s twin sister here in the room, living, speaking, when the last time he’d seen that identical face, it had been frozen in dismay in the back of a car.