The smell of wet cedar and iron filings always hung in my coat when I worked the night shift in Calgary. Four winters of standing by a stamping press in fifty below zero tend to strip the fat off a man, leaving nothing but gristle and focus. Every two weeks I walked down to the remittance office on Seventh Street.
Every two weeks I mailed eight hundred dollars home to Selina. My mother had the deed, she had the bank routing numbers, and she had my wife. She swore on her Sunday Bible she would keep Phedra safe while I was up north paying off the mortgage we took out the year we married. I trusted her handwriting on those little blue aerogrammes. I trusted her when she wrote that Phedra had taken to wandering the township and needed looking after.
The bus dropped me off three miles down the county road because the transmission started smoking outside of Peoria. I walked the rest of the way in the damp twilight with my shoulder screaming under the strap of my heavy canvas bag. The gravel crunched under my boots with that same dry rattle I had listened to in my head for fourteen hundred nights. Our yard had always been full of Queen Anne’s lace and wild chicory when we first moved in.
Now the grass was worn down to gray dirt, packed hard by boots and neglect. I didn’t knock on the front door. I slipped around the side past the rusted frame of our old lawnmower because I wanted to surprise Selina with the news that the plant was closing down permanently and I was back for good.
The scene in the backyard wasn’t a surprise. It was a demolition. Phedra was on her knees in the dirt near the spigot, gathering pieces of a shattered white saucer with her bare hands. Her head was shaved down to the scalp, leaving pale patches of skin exposed to the April wind. Her cheekbones looked like two dry stones jammed under translucent skin. A three-gallon bucket of gray dishwater sat near her knees, smelling faintly of turnip skins and vinegar. I froze with my hand on the wooden gate latch, my brain refusing to process the math of how my wife had shrunk down to eighty pounds in a house I paid for.
Selina’s voice carried right through the open kitchen screen door, sharp and thin as a bandsaw. “Pick up the pieces properly, Phedra,” she called out, not even bothering to step outside. “If someone cuts themselves on my porch, I’m taking it out of your food allowance for the week.” Phedra didn’t answer. Her fingers trembled so badly she dropped a shard of porcelain back into the dirt, and she didn’t cry out, she just pressed her forehead against her forearm and stayed there. The metal handle of my suitcase bit into my palm so hard my knuckles turned the color of lard. I didn’t drop the bag, but I let go of the gate and walked right past the porch steps without making a sound.
The front screen door gave a familiar squeak when I shoved it open. Selina was sitting at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table with a porcelain teacup between her knuckles, reading a Sears circular by the dim light of a three-way bulb.
She looked up, her spectacles sliding down the bridge of her nose, and the small frown of irritation on her face didn’t clear away for a full three seconds. She didn’t drop the cup, but she set it down so hard the amber tea splashed over the rim onto the flowered oilcloth. “You’re early,” she said. Her voice didn’t have any welcome in it, just a flat, annoyed recognition like a landlord checking a meter. “The bus isn’t due until midnight on Tuesdays.”
“The stamping line cracked a housing plate on Thursday,” I said, my voice sounding like gravel rolling in a tin bucket. I set my canvas bag down by the umbrella stand. The thud shook the hallway floorboards. “They paid out severance and shut the whole bay down. I’m home for good, Ma.” Selina stood up slowly, smoothing the front of her gray cotton apron with palms that looked entirely too clean for a house with an acre of garden to tend. “Well,” she muttered, her eyes darting past my shoulder toward the back screen door where Phedra was still kneeling in the dirt. “You should have telegraphed. The house isn’t right. Phedra has been… difficult. She got some sort of scalp rot back in November and I had to take shears to her hair to keep the whole place from getting infested. You know how she gets when the weather turns.”
I didn’t blink. I walked right past her into the pantry, pulled out two warm sodas from the crate by the water heater, and set them on the kitchen table without looking at her face. “She looks like she hasn’t seen a butcher shop since the midterm elections,” I said. Selina gave a short, dry cough and adjusted her collar with two fingers. “Food costs what it costs now, boy. You sent what you sent, but prices in this county aren’t Calgary. Besides, she doesn’t earn her keep. She spends all day staring at the wall or digging in the weeds. I have to lock the pantry from the outside just to keep her from spoiling the flour with her dirty hands.”
That was when I pulled the manila folder out of my inside pocket. I didn’t open it yet. I just tapped the corner against the oilcloth right where her tea had spilled. “Good thing I don’t need to worry about grocery prices anymore,” I said, leaning my weight onto my palms. Selina’s gaze snapped from my eyes down to the brown cardboard edges of the folder. “What is that?” she asked, her voice dropping an octave into that greasy, wheedling tone she used whenever the tax man came by the county seat. “The plant settled the class-action suit over the ventilation failure,” I lied, keeping my voice level and dry as bone. “One million two hundred thousand, lump sum, after the lawyers took their cut. Half of it cleared into my wire account yesterday morning before I caught the greyhound out of Winnipeg.”
The silence in that little kitchen got so thick you could have sliced it with a butcher knife. Selina’s pupils dilated until her eyes looked almost black behind those wire-rimmed glasses. She didn’t ask about my lungs, or how I managed the four-day bus ride, or why my wife looked like she had just crawled out of a storm cellar after a siege. She reached out one thin, trembling finger and touched the corner of the manila folder like it was a greasy pork chop dropped on the floor. “A million?” she whispered, the greed coating her tongue like thick cream. “A million dollars? In our name? Well. We’ll have to see about taxes. The county takes a fierce bite out of windfalls like that. I’ll need to handle the paperwork with the bank down in town. You never were any good with figures, boy.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “You always were better with figures than anyone else, Ma. You managed every nickel I sent back from the north for four years.” Selina nodded eagerly, her chin bobbing up and down so fast her loose jaw skin shook. “Every single dime, kept in the ledger behind the flour tin. I fed this household, and I kept that girl from running off into the brush like a stray dog. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you that. She cost me more in salve and salt pork than she was ever worth.” She reached for the back door handle, her face twisting into a quick, practiced mask of domestic hospitality. “Let me go tell Phedra to clean herself up in the pump house. We can’t have her looking like a vagrant if we’re going to talk to the bank lawyers tomorrow morning about the estate.”
“No,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice, but I stepped sideways until my boots blocked the latch. Selina stopped, her hand hovering an inch from the iron ring. “Let her stay right where she is for a minute. Let’s talk about the ledger first.” I pulled out a small black cassette recorder from my pocket and thumbed the red button down until it clicked with a sharp, metallic snap that echoed off the yellow wallpaper. Selina stared at the spinning plastic wheels inside the little machine, her breath catching in her throat for the first time since I walked through the door. “What is that?” she rasped, her hands suddenly flying up to clutch at her throat. “What are you doing with that thing?”
“I’m recording the part where you explain how eight hundred dollars a month for forty-eight months turned into a shaved head and a bucket of gray dishwater,” I said. I leaned down until my face was six inches from hers, smelling the peppermint lozenges she used to cover up the smell of stale coffee and cheap gin. “The settlement check is a lie, Ma. The plant didn’t pay out a damn thing. But the bank audit of the wire receipts I pulled in Winnipeg? That’s real. Every stub, every signature, every deposit slip with your name signed at the bottom while my wife was starving in the backyard.” Selina staggered back half a step, her hip hitting the corner of the enamel sink with a dull clatter. “She was ungrateful,” she snarled, the mask cracking right down the middle to reveal the ugly, shriveled thing underneath. “She didn’t want you to go north! She threw your boots in the well before you left! I had to break her spirit just to keep the roof over our heads!”
“You didn’t break her spirit,” I said, turning the tape off and slipping the recorder back into my coat pocket. “You just saved me the trouble of guessing why the locks were on the outside of the bedroom door.” I walked past her, ignoring the way her fingers clawed futilely at my sleeve, and shoved the screen door open into the cold twilight. Phedra was still on her knees by the spigot, her hands buried in the wet gravel around the broken saucer. She didn’t look up when my boots crunched on the dirt. She probably thought Selina had sent another bucket for her to scrub. I dropped down onto the damp earth right beside her, ignoring the mud soaking through the knees of my work trousers.
“Phedra,” I said, my voice cracking for the first time since I got off the bus. She flinched, her shoulders hunching up toward her ears like she was waiting for the strike of a willow switch. I reached out and took her raw, bleeding fingers out of the broken porcelain, holding them between my palms despite the gray dirt and the dried blood under her nails. “We’re going inside now,” I told her, my chest tightening until I could barely drag the air down into my lungs. “The house is ours. Selina is leaving.”
From the kitchen doorway, Selina let out a high, thin screech like a cat caught in a screen door, her voice rattling against the rusted tin of the gutters. “You can’t throw me out of my own house! I raised you! I put food in your mouth when your daddy ran off to the mines!” I didn’t turn around to look at her. I just reached down and picked up the heavy iron garden shears she had used to humiliate my wife, tossing them deep into the center of the compost heap where the weeds were already starting to rot. I scooped a handful of warm water from the bucket, rinsed the mud from Phedra’s palms, and helped her stand up on legs that shook like dry reeds in a gale. We walked past the threshold together, leaving the kitchen light burning behind us into the dark county night.
