Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“I don’t need all these,” he said. “You can take half.” He remembered as he said this that sharing a box of gloves was a thing they had done often, but not in recent years. Another thing they had done was eat in a restaurant on an outing to Goose Bay but ask the waitress to give them their coffee in paper cups after they had eaten. They would take the coffees in the truck and drive to the lookout on the highway back to Croydon Harbour and stop the truck and drink their coffee while looking out at the Mealy Mountains. Today after their hot dogs at Mom’s Home Cooking they did this again, and it felt very good to them both, so that when they arrived home, Treadway said, “I don’t have to go into the bush yet. The shingles on the old part of the house are gone, and while I’m up on the roof I might as well have a look at the flashing.”

Jacinta put on the work gloves, got her small-bladed shovel out of the shed, and turned the garden over to get it ready for the potatoes. She brushed her hair and put on a red dress and her green wool coat and her shoes instead of her winter boots, and she walked to the Hudson’s Bay store to buy carrot and parsnip seeds and snow peas and, while she was at it, sweet peas, which she grew not for any pea but for their frilled flowers that grew six feet high if you knew where to put them. None of this could be planted for another two weeks, but it was nice to spend that fortnight with the seed packets on the kitchen windowsill, imagining the shoots coming up out of the ground.

Roland Shiwack had borrowed Treadway’s wheelbarrow the previous autumn and had not returned it. Now, when Treadway went to ask for it back, Roland mentioned that he had noticed Jacinta out turning over soil to prepare the garden.

“Now that is something,” Roland said, “my own wife will never do. I admire that you have a woman who can work hard like that and still look nice.” Roland had seen Jacinta in her green coat and shoes. He did not know where the wheelbarrow was, and Treadway could not understand that. He could not understand why a grown man would borrow another man’s wheelbarrow in the first place instead of getting one of his own, and he could understand less how anyone could lose a whole wheelbarrow and not know where it had gone. There was something, moreover, in the way that Roland Shiwack had said Treadway’s wife looked nice that Treadway did not like. It was as if Roland had voiced something Treadway felt too shy to say out loud himself, and Jacinta was his own wife. If Treadway was married to her and could not say it, how did Roland Shiwack summon the nerve to pass a comment on Jacinta’s looks? And what was wrong with Roland’s own wife’s looks? Melba Shiwack looked like a normal woman. There was nothing bad looking about her. She was unremarkable, as far as Treadway could see, and he did not know why Roland had now decided to remark on Treadway’s own wife.

Treadway would not have called these passing thoughts jealousy, but he did think, on his return home, that it was a good thing he had decided not to go back into the bush just yet.

Jacinta did a laundry in which she washed as many of her filmy nightdresses as she could fit in the washing machine, the ones that had unconsciously reminded Treadway of misty stars while he was reading the book of Job in his hunting cabin. She hung them on the line, where the late May breeze made them dance over the mix of newly dug garden and what was left of the snow.

STEVE KEATING SHOWED UP at Wayne’s apartment door on Forest Road, the picture of remorse. He looked, Wayne thought, like someone who was twelve years old instead of fifteen, and he presented Wayne with a lunch from Caines Grocery.

“It’s a cold plate.” Steve handed Wayne the bag and Wayne took out a paper plate covered in plastic wrap and laden with the kind of food Mr. Caines’s regular customers bought for their husbands on Saturdays before they left their kitchens for the bingo hall. Two slices of boiled ham, two of turkey, some coleslaw and macaroni salad, a bread roll, and potato salad dyed purple with pickled beet juice and triggered out of an ice cream scoop.

“I told you,” Steve said.

“You told me what?”

“That if you really got to know me you wouldn’t like me.”

“You never told me that.”

“I did.”

“I don’t think you did, Steve.”

“Well, I thought it then. If only I had kept my mouth shut. I never meant to blab about you to Warford, honest to God I didn’t. My mother says I can’t keep my mouth shut, and she said she wouldn’t be surprised if you tore the head off me after what I done.”

Wayne had not gone to work in the days that had passed since his attack. He had a cut near his eye and he had injuries that Derek Warford and his gang had inflicted when they were experimenting with his body, but he had not gone to a doctor and he had not told anyone what had happened. At the drugstore he bought ointment whose label said it was cooling and healing and you could use it on babies’ skin, and he put that on himself in all the places that were hurt and that he could reach. When Steve came to the door with the lunch, Wayne was hungry. He had nothing in his fridge but half a tin of beans and some bread. When he called in sick, Frank King had told him not to stay off the job too long or he would be replaced, and now he was afraid to go in because he knew he did not look well, and he also knew Frank King would soon say something about his appearance. On Signal Hill Derek Warford had kept referring to his breasts and mocking them, and Wayne realized, when he took a long look in the mirror, that if Frank King had not already noticed, he would surely do so soon.

“I wouldn’t blame you,” Steve said, “if you hated me now.”

“I don’t hate you, Steve.”

“You can if you want.”

“Once I like someone, no matter what they do, I keep liking them.”

“That’s what Miss Cramm used to say. She was my teacher before she went away. She let me make top hats for the school play and I didn’t have to be in the play, and that was a good thing because I can’t remember any lines. But now I have Miss Fiander and she doesn’t like me one little bit. Are you working today?”

Wayne had been devising a way to go in and load up his truck without Frank King seeing the cut on his face. He knew Frank took the same lunch break every day and ate at Wendy’s. He wanted to make his deliveries after dusk, but it was nearly June, and every evening the light lasted longer.

“I’m having a problem,” he told Steve, “with the thing I told you about. How I want to go after dark to deliver the meat. Last night it was still light at almost nine o’clock, and no one wants a delivery man coming later than that.”

“I can do it!” Steve looked overjoyed to be able to make it up to Wayne. “My mom has my supper ready at five thirty, after I come home from Caines, and at six o’clock I can come here and we can go in the van and I can go up all the driveways and you can stay in the van. Anyway, you don’t look that bad, if you went and bought yourself some clothes that weren’t so baggy on you.”

Wayne let Steve make the deliveries. He let him go up the driveways with the meat and come back down to the van with the money. And he went to Frank King’s warehouse to load up between 12:40 and 1:30 every day, when he knew Frank was down Thorburn Road eating a double cheeseburger and a baked potato with grated cheese and cheese sauce at Wendy’s, so that Frank would not see him.

But one day Frank came back early because Wendy’s had run out of cheese sauce, and he spied Wayne.

“You definitely need,” he said, “to become more image conscious.” Frank looked at Wayne’s jeans, his shirt and