Prized Possessions Read online

  “Eddie!”

  “ ‘Fuck you lady.’ That’s what I said.” He slumped back in his chair.

  After a while Sylvia sighed. It sounded big and wistful, like the wind just before rain starts to fall. Then she got up and went to stand behind Eddie’s chair and began massaging his shoulder muscles: until then, he hadn’t known they’d been hurting. For a while they hurt more, but by the time she moved away and sat down again, they weren’t hurting at all.

  “You’ve gotta apologize,” said Sylvia.

  Eddie groaned.

  “Eddie,” she said quietly. Reluctant, he looked at her. “It’s the only thing that works. You know it.”

  “I feel like I’ve been apologizing my whole damn life,” he said resentfully.

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “Well, it’s not entirely my fault, Sylvia, not entirely.” He badly wanted a smoke, but Sylvia didn’t allow cigarettes in her house. “I gotta stand up for myself. A man’s gotta stand up for himself.”

  “Get real, Eddie. Shoot.” She pushed her chair away from the table. “You’d think by now—” She tore the elastic band out of her hair and shook it free. “After all the times—” She grabbed a hairbrush from the windowsill and brushed her hair furiously. “And all the people—” She grabbed it, gathered it up at the back of her neck, and wound the elastic around it again. She rested her elbows on the tabletop, staring across at him, and leaned into the sunlight that was suddenly shining down through a ragged hole in the cloud cover. Eddie felt bad, because there were lines across her forehead now, and a pair of them, like brackets, from the bottom of her nose to the edges of her mouth. “Remember that girl when you worked for the post office?”

  “I don’t wanna go through it all, Sylvia,” said Eddie wearily. “I don’t.”

  “First they warned you. Then they fired you.”

  “I told you, Sylvia—”

  “You almost got fired from McDonald’s too.”

  Eddie shifted in his chair. He craved a smoke so bad…

  “And, Eddie, for pete’s sake, if it hadn’t been for that nice cop up there on the campus two years ago, you would’ve been in the slammer.”

  He put his hand over his eyes. He’d got her started, now she was going full bore; there was nothing to do but wait for it to be over.

  And this, surely, was why he’d come, wasn’t it?

  8

  THE NEXT DAY WAS a harbinger of summer. The grass was long and thick and fragrant, the rosebushes were laden with buds, and the air was warm enough for shorts and T-shirts.

  In Sechelt, Karl Alberg prepared a platter of food and took it out to the sun porch, along with mugs of coffee and a pot of strawberry jam.

  “It’s so beautiful, let’s eat out on the lawn,” said Cassandra. So they moved a card table and two chairs outside and began to eat.

  Cassandra, tearing a croissant in half, looked around her and frowned. Alberg’s backyard wasn’t designed to sit in. It was a yard you walked through on your way to the garage. “You should get a patio put in here,” she told him.

  “Good idea,” he said contentedly. “I’ll do it.”

  She smiled a little, realizing how much she liked the look of him: tall, broad, too thick around the waist, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a face ageless and enigmatic—she continued to find him attractive and was glad of that. And glad that he found her attractive too. She glanced at him frequently as they ate. It was good to see him happy and relaxed.

  “Karl,” she said, licking strawberry jam from her thumb, “do you remember how we met?”

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning. He pushed the platter closer to her. “Have more.”

  “Did you answer a whole bunch of ads? Or only mine?”

  “Why?” he said cautiously.

  “I was just wondering.” She helped herself to a bagel and smeared it with cream cheese. “Do you remember when we met? I mean, how long ago?”

  He cocked his head, looking thoughtful. “Boy, it’s got to be—three years? Four?”

  Cassandra’s lips settled into a thin line. “We met in June of 1984.”

  He was clearly astonished.

  “Almost eight years ago,” she said.

  “No. Really?”

  “I was forty-one years old.”

  “Uh huh,” said Alberg.

  “On my next birthday, Karl, I will be fifty.”

  “You’ve never looked better, Cassandra,” he said sincerely. “And I can tell you from personal experience, being fifty isn’t so bad. Me, I was dreading it, but—”

  “Karl,” she said, interrupting him, “are you up to having a serious talk?” She watched his eyes and waited for the shutters to drop, and they did. Wham. No access.

  He did this at will. She associated it with his being a cop and wondered if it was one of the reasons he’d become a cop, or if he’d got like that only after he became a cop.

  Cassandra suddenly felt unutterably weary. She tossed her napkin on the table and got up.

  With her hands in the pockets of her shorts, she made a slow circuit of his yard, looking at the rosebushes that swarmed over the fence, and through the grimy window into the garage, at Alberg’s Oldsmobile, and along the opposite fence, also smothered in rosebushes. One fence separated the backyard from a lane; across the other was a well-tended yard with a brick patio near the house and a vegetable garden at the back.

  “You haven’t finished your bagel,” said Alberg.

  “I’ve had all I want.”

  He joined her at the fence. “What do you want to talk about?” He was standing near enough to touch her, but he wasn’t touching her.

  Cassandra shook her head.

  “Come on,” he said softly. “Let’s go inside. Have another cup of coffee. Talk.”

  She let her body list slightly to the right, until her shoulder brushed against his arm. Alberg’s arm came up and around her, pulling her close to him, holding her firmly. She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed.

  “Come on,” said Alberg. They took the dishes inside. Alberg poured more coffee and led the way into the living room. “Okay,” he said. He put his feet up on the hassock and spread his hands on the arms of the wingback chair. “Go ahead.”

  “I resent that,” said Cassandra, who was still standing.

  Alberg lifted his shoulders and donned an expression of helplessness.

  “I haven’t got a speech to make,” she said. “I don’t want me to talk—I want us to talk. About us. About the future. As I’m sure you’ve guessed.”

  Alberg put his hands behind his head. “Okay. Where should we start?”

  She sat down on the sofa. “Let’s start with you and your job.”

  “What about my job?”

  “When are you going to retire?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “You could do it now, couldn’t you? Because you’ve got your twenty-four years and a day, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m not ready to retire, though.”

  “How much time do you figure to put in?”

  “I don’t know, Cassandra. I told you, I haven’t thought about it much.”

  “I don’t believe that, Karl. Listen.” She got up and went over to him. She sat on the hassock and put a hand on his ankle. “Do you resent my asking you about this? Because if you do—if you think it’s none of my business—then just say so.”

  He reached to take her hand. “No, of course I don’t resent it. You have every right to know what I plan to do. But the thing is—I don’t have a plan.”

  “What are your alternatives?”

  He sighed. “I hate this. Okay, okay. I’ve got twenty-eight years. If I stay in until the thirty-five-year mark, I can retire with seventy percent of my pay. That’s probably worth doing.”

  “In seven more years you’ll be almost sixty—”

  “Fifty-nine. I know how old I’ll be, Cassandra.”

  She withdrew her hand and went back to the
sofa.

  “I don’t have to quit then, either,” he said. “I can stay in until I’m sixty-five.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “What’s this got to do with anything, anyway?” he said angrily. “How about your job at the library? When are you going to retire from that?”

  She gazed at him evenly. “We’ll get to me in a minute.”

  He dropped his feet to the floor and pushed the hassock to one side.

  “Don’t get defensive, Karl,” she said softly. “Please.”

  “I’m not defensive,” he snapped. He shook his head. “Okay, I’m defensive.” He sat forward. “Look. I don’t like to think about it, okay? I don’t like to think about leaving the Force.”

  “But aren’t there other things you want to do? You’re still young, Karl.”

  He laughed.

  “Youngish. You are. There are all kinds of things you could do with your life if you retired early.”

  Alberg imagined himself a bearded seafarer, exploring the coast of British Columbia in a thirty-foot sailboat. He looked at Cassandra, earnest and loving and afraid of the sea. “Like what?” he said dryly.

  “You could set up an investigation business.”

  He stared at her.

  “You know. Become an investigator. A private investigator.”

  “In Sechelt.”

  “Well, in Vancouver, then,” she said, flushing.

  “Cassandra… ” He shook his head. “Listen. I don’t want to live in Vancouver. I don’t want to be a P.I. Jesus Christ.” He stood up. “Look. I like what I’m doing. I don’t want to do anything else. This is it. You want to know what I want out of life? I’m doing it. This is what I want.”

  She looked at him, looming angry and intense above her. “But what about when you can’t do it anymore?” she said quietly. “What about when your job is just a desk job?”

  He said nothing for a moment. The cats emerged from the bedroom. One arranged herself in a neat triangle and began washing her paws. The other sloped over to the scratching post and stretched, and scratched.

  “I’m not prepared to talk about this any longer,” said Alberg.

  “Will you think about it?”

  He looked at her for a long time. Then he reached down, took her hands, and pulled her to her feet. He put his arms around her. “I don’t know.”

  9

  WEEKENDS HAD BECOME the worst days of all. Charlie had learned to structure them, to stuff them full of planned activities, events that possessed a remorseless momentum which would grind him through Saturday and Sunday despite himself.

  He’d planned this weekend too, just like the rest, but it turned out not to be necessary. Once the anniversary dinner was out of the way, Charlie found himself feeling astonishingly at peace. He was looking at things, at people, differently. He discovered within himself an attitude of generosity and tenderness that surprised and pleased him. He was stronger, perhaps, than he had known.

  He and Emma spent Saturday in their usual manner. They went out for breakfast, did the grocery shopping, and when they got home Emma changed the sheets on the bed and did a load of laundry, while Charlie worked outside. Again, there wasn’t much yardwork to do, so when Sid Sokolowski invited him next door for a beer, he went. Sid spent most of their time together complaining about his other neighbor, whom he blamed for the dandelions he’d had to dig out of his lawn. Charlie listened to all this as if in a dream, conscious of the half-smile upon his face and the ache in his heart.

  He went out to rent a movie later, and Emma ordered Chinese food.

  Charlie was able to sleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes that night, and if he dreamed, he couldn’t remember his dreams in the morning.

  He moved through Sunday slowly and attentively, observing the cleanliness of the house, and the greenness of the lawn, and Emma’s beguiling grace. He sat still for long periods of time, watching his wife preparing their Sunday brunch, or curled up in an easy chair reading a book, or stepping outside just before dinner to cut some tulips, one hand holding her hair back from her face as she bent over to look for flowers not yet fully opened.

  It was as though he had been seriously ill and was now convalescent. There was the same distant appreciation for small things. He knew it was temporary—but what a relief, what a joy to have this unexpected hiatus, these two precious days of tranquillity.

  “You’re very quiet today,” said Emma, when they sat down to eat dinner. “Aren’t you feeling well?”

  “I’m feeling great,” said Charlie.

  He would have said more, but couldn’t: he’d been struck by a feeling of déjà vu so intense that he suddenly wanted to weep. He put down his knife and fork.

  “Great,” he repeated, looking down at the chicken breast in lemon sauce that occupied his dinner plate, along with a scoop of mashed potatoes and some glazed baby carrots.

  Was it the sight of the food? The smell of the coffee drifting in from the kitchen? Emma’s blond hair and rosy skin? He lifted his head and looked at her. She was eating, calmly and neatly, cutting small pieces of chicken, pushing mashed potatoes onto her fork, lifting chicken and potatoes to her mouth. Her teeth chewed, calmly and neatly. She swallowed. Sipped from her water glass.

  Charlie felt a thousand miles away from her.

  “Yeah,” he said, picking up his fork. He cleared his throat. “I feel great.”

  10

  EDDIE KNEW SYLVIA was right: he had to apologize to the girl called Melanie, and he was just about ready to do this when another bad thing happened and sent all his best intentions flying into a cocked hat.

  He finished work at noon on Monday. He left the drugstore through the front door, because of having to buy a pack of cigarettes, and went around the block and down the lane to where the Camaro was parked, behind the drugstore, right next to Harold’s Volvo.

  On the other side of the lane was a row of backyards, some with garages and some without. And it was garbage pickup day, so people had put their garbage cans out. Eddie noticed a dog sniffing around one of them, a skinny young dog with a long tail and middle-size floppy ears and no collar. He saw it get up on its hind legs and knock the lid off the garbage can, slick as anything. Eddie was admiring this when, the next thing he knew, the dog had knocked over the whole damn can. It started pawing through all the garbage, getting crap all over the lane right behind the drugstore.

  Eddie shouted at the dog and waved his arms around. Right away the dog moved, so it could keep one eye on Eddie, but meanwhile the rest of its body was still busy strewing the damn garbage all over the place. Eddie started running toward it—and he felt the flesh on his body jiggling and thought about the gym, about how he had to work out more often; gotta get my life more organized, he thought, lumbering toward the dog. When he got close enough he aimed a kick, but he missed. The dog leaped back, and immediately circled around and came right back at the garbage. Eddie saw that it had unearthed the carcass of a cooked chicken.

  Eddie was hollering now, and kicking out at the dog, and missing, and getting madder and madder, so that at first he didn’t even hear her—and then he did.

  He turned around, amazed. There she was, all right, coming out the back door of the laundromat that was two stores up from the drugstore. Her purse was over one shoulder, and her arms were wrapped around a big black plastic bag. She was wearing shorts and sandals, her bare skin still spring white, and sunglasses on her pale face.

  He sure wished, at that moment, that he’d gotten around to apologizing to her. If he had, things would have been entirely different between them now and she wouldn’t be so angry, which was bound to cause trouble—and it did.

  “Stop that,” she was shouting at him.

  Eddie looked back at the dog, which was trying to get its jaws around the chicken carcass, which Eddie decided must actually be a turkey, it was such a big bugger. He aimed another kick at the dog, and this time he connected, and the dog yelped.

  “God damn it!”


  Eddie turned to the girl. She flung the plastic bag onto the ground, and her purse too, and started striding toward him. Eddie thought this was funny, because what the hell did she think she was going to do?

  “What’re you gonna do—hit me?” he said, grinning, his hands on his hips.

  She walked right up to him and slapped his face.

  Eddie didn’t even think. He grabbed her by the shoulders and wrestled her across the lane and slammed her against the side of the Camaro. He could see that the breath was knocked out of her.

  “Bitch,” he said. “Cunt.”

  He considered hitting her. He could feel it in his fist, hear the sound of her nose crunching, see blood falling down her white face from under the lopsided sunglasses. But he didn’t do this. He didn’t even come close. He’d scare her a bit, that’s all, he decided.

  “Don’t you swear at me, bitch. Don’t you smack me in the face.”

  And he dry-humped her.

  That was all. That was all he did.

  Then he stepped back, thinking maybe she’d hit him again, and he was ready for that. But she didn’t.

  She lifted a shaking hand to her face and straightened her sunglasses. Then she walked slowly back to where she’d dropped the plastic bag. Eddie watched uneasily as she pushed into the bag the clean clothes that had fallen out. Maybe I should help her, he thought. But then it was done, and she picked up the bag of laundry, and her purse, and walked unsteadily to the corner and around it, and then he couldn’t see her anymore.

  He turned back to the overturned garbage can. The dog was gone, and so was the turkey carcass.

  Eddie went into the drugstore through the back door and got a broom and swept up the garbage before he went home.

  ***

  That evening, he sat at his kitchen table with a pad of lined paper and a pencil. He’d write it in pencil first, so he could erase mistakes, and then he’d do a good copy in ballpoint pen.

  He didn’t know for sure that she’d complain about him. In fact, she probably wouldn’t. There was probably nothing at all for him to worry about. He knew he’d scared her, and she’d probably never set foot in the drugstore again.