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“Should we head home, then?”
The casual drop of his question made Daphne think for a split second that it was possible, inevitable really, that he would bring her home. Off they’d go to Halifax to start a carefree life together of doughnuts and books and baseball caps.
Then she looked around at where she was. “Sure. I’d appreciate a ride back to the motor home.”
* * *
SHE WAS SHORT, no doubt about it.
From the corner of his eye, Mel watched Daphne climb into his company truck. She’d waited for the running board to descend and now gave herself a heave into the seat. She launched herself sideways to catch the open door and pull it closed. Her feet dangled, her flip-flops hung from her toes, and she quickly tucked them under the seat.
She was no bigger than his twelve-year-old nephew. Mind, with all the soft curves, you wouldn’t mistake her for a boy.
“I have never seen so many trucks in all my days,” she said, “than I have since crossing into Manitoba about two weeks ago.”
“Is that right?” Mel said, easing out of the parking lot. “You know, I’ve never been down East. What’s it like?” He tried to make it sound as if he’d been everywhere else but there. The fact was he’d not even made it to the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, three and a half hours east. He was probably the only healthy male adult in all of Spirit Lake who’d never got a passport. He’d wanted to travel when he was young, but he’d never had the time and money. Then when he had both, no one else could get away, and he didn’t see the point of experiencing new places alone. Or his friends or family wanted to go to a place that required flying, which terrified the socks off him. It was an irrational fear, but he figured everyone was entitled to one or two.
“Canada,” Daphne said, producing sunglasses from a purse so large that it filled her lap, “is many books long.”
“Oh,” he said. “How’s that?”
She told him how she read while Fran drove, and that she read while Fran slept. She could categorize the provinces by the books she’d read. The Ontario pile—very high—the Manitoba and Saskatchewan piles—shorter—and the Alberta pile—unfinished.
“I’m an English professor,” she explained. “Of nineteenth-century literature. Primarily Jane Austen, though I’m currently on sabbatical.” She dug again into her purse. “I’m currently reading this one. Well, again.”
He glanced at the title. “Sense and Sensibility. I remember from the accident.” What he remembered was Daphne clutching the book to her nightgown, the hem riding up her bare legs as she’d scrambled to let Linda and Fran by.
He concentrated on coming up with something bookish to say to someone who taught students better educated than him with his high school dropout status. Best to stick with questions. “I get the sense part but how’s that different from sensibility?”
“Sensibility means feelings, emotions, especially if overwrought.”
Overwrought. As in over-rot? Emotions gone bad. He’d go with that meaning. He didn’t want to ask for two definitions in a row, in case she came up with another word he didn’t know. “Sort of like Car and Driver,” Mel said.
Her mouth pursed into a little O shape. He’d bet behind her sunglasses she was blinking in complete confusion. She probably wondered if he was making a bad joke, which he wasn’t. “The thing,” Mel stumbled on, “and then the person that gets the thing moving.”
Yep, no argument about which of them was the brain. He might as well hurry up and finish.
“I’m no book expert,” Mel continued, “but it happens often enough in life. We use reason to justify the way we feel. Or to get what we want.”
“That pretty well describes every relationship.”
“Don’t I know it,” Mel said and he surprised himself at how bitter and frustrated he sounded.
Daphne tucked her hands under her thighs and looked out the passenger window at a city strip of grass and poplars.
He hoped he hadn’t scared her. It would be a new record for him to have a woman leave him and another one afraid of him on the same day.
“One more thing that came out wrong,” he said. “I just had a rough start to my day.”
“You, too?”
She had him there. “I guess we’ve both got stories to tell about this day.”
“Oh. What’s yours?”
He wasn’t about to say that he’d been dumped that very day. She’d see him for the loser he was—and her an attractive woman, a good bit younger and single from the looks of her bare ring finger. He had a little pride left.
Then again, who better to talk to about his romantic troubles? Here was an intelligent, attractive, single woman, clearly passing through. He could pick up pointers from her without any of the usual awkwardness or expectations. She could speak sense to his sensibilities.
“My girlfriend broke up with me.”
Her grip on her book tightened. “Oh. That is quite the story.”
“Not the first time I’ve told it, unfortunately.”
“Oh.” She wrapped both hands around the book. “I’m sorry.”
She sounded as if he’d announced a death close in the family. Ending things with Linda wasn’t anywhere as bad. He knew that for a fact. He was actually surprised at how little it hurt. Maybe getting dumped for the seventh time in a row automatically gave him the thick skin to take rejection. And the guts to finally fix whatever it was he was doing wrong.
“I’m good, actually.” He pushed on. “But I was wondering if you could explain something to me,” he said, “seeing as how you’re a woman in the business of explaining sense and sensibility to people.”
“I don’t claim to be an expert. Go on.”
“My now ex said that she got the impression that I didn’t want her. That I just wanted anyone who’d take me. And that I shouldn’t settle.”
“Yes.”
“You agree, then?”
“I don’t know her or you, so I can’t comment. But I agree with the part that you shouldn’t settle.”
He hitched himself higher up in his seat. “I guess I’m wondering how to go about making a woman feel that she matters when...” He needed to proceed carefully. He’d already said plenty to Daphne that had come out wrong. “When showing how much she matters might scare her off, too.”
“Why would a woman be scared off by hearing how much she was loved?”
Well, now. He gunned the truck to merge onto the highway, ahead of a fast-approaching red sports car, which immediately switched lanes and started coming up on his left. “I guess she might feel she has to give back the same amount, and I wouldn’t expect her to.”
“In other words, you’d settle.”
“No. I—Well, I guess.”
“Would you settle because you think no one can love you better than you can love them?”
Mel slowed for the turnoff to Spirit Lake, an exit he’d made a thousand times and never while having such a conversation. “No. Not at all. I have requirements.” He realized that expecting them not to be drunks or druggies might prove Daphne’s point, so he hurried on. “I don’t believe I’m better at loving.”
“But you may deliberately put yourself in situations where you will be because you secretly don’t think the women will love you.”
He took the reprieve of a stoplight to consider her words. “I suppose there have been...situations that might’ve made me feel that I gave more love than I got. But it’s not as if I prevented any of the women from proving they could love better than me. So why would they assume I was settling?”
Daphne feathered her fingers across the colored sticky notes sprouting from the top of her book. “Austen is often critical of how pride can impede or delay happiness. Both for men and women. I’m writing a book about how economics mold sensibilities in the Austen novels. I plan to devote a chapter to pride.”
Writing a book about books. The last thing Mel had read were parts of the provincial safety codes, years back. The red light switched to green and Mel released the brake. “I still don’t think it’s pride.”
“The lack of it, then?”
Lack he could relate to. “Maybe so. What would you suggest I do?”
“Do you want to reconcile with your girlfriend?”
Mel thought about the set to Linda’s jaw when she’d said she refused to settle. “That ship has sailed.”
“Well, then,” Daphne said and slipped her book into her purse. “I suppose you will have to wait for a woman who won’t be afraid of all the love you can give her, and you will have to prepare yourself for getting topped up yourself.”
“Huh. You don’t know of anybody like that, do you?”
She wrapped her arms loosely about her giant purse. “Mel, I said you have to wait for her.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE SUN WAS going down as Mel gave the chimney flashing a final resounding whack with his hammer and unhooked himself from the safety rope to take the ladder down off the roof and onto his customer’s backyard deck. No sooner had his boots hit the wood than out came Brittany, holding her eight-month-old daughter. She must’ve been on the lookout for him.
Brittany was Linda’s daughter. He’d taken her roofing job a month ago when things had been cozy between them all.
“Mom called today,” Brittany said. “She told me what happened.”
Mel wondered if she was referring to the breakup or the Tim Hortons accident that had gone viral across the region.
She twisted her mouth in a way that was all Linda. “I’m sorry.” Nope. She meant the breakup. Baby Emma uttered a sharp, gaspy squeal and kicked her chubby legs.
“That’s right,” Brittany said. “It’s Unca Mel.”
Emma tipped herself over, arms out to Mel. Mel took her, all soft and mini, and set her on his arm. She’d been born two weeks after he’d started dating Linda. He’d accompanied Linda to the hospital to see the new arrival, and from the second he’d clapped eyes on her tininess, he’d been sucked in. Though he’d gone home and had a bad night in which memories had become nightmares, it hadn’t stopped him from enjoying Emma. Gradually he’d learned to box away his memories and put himself back to sleep.
He kissed Emma’s downy head—maybe for the last time. Kids were always the awkward, dicey part in any breakup. He had none of his own, so a chunk of his experience with kids came from all but the first of his seven relationships. Six women and fifteen kids in total, counting Linda’s three grandkids. He was still in touch with eleven of them. Last year he’d gone to the high school graduation of the son of the fifth woman.
Did Daphne have kids? Grandkids?
No matter. Talking about family was first-date material, and he wouldn’t be going on one with her. No point of a first date if there was no chance of a tenth.
Arms now free, Brittany grabbed a straw broom and pushed stray shingle trimmings into a pile. His responsibility, but she was a neat freak like her mother. “I think she’s just not over Dad,” Brittany said.
“It is what it is,” Mel said, not wanting to apply any sense to his sensibilities right now. “Look, I’ve got a stop to make and I want to get there before they close. How about tomorrow, first thing, I’ll swing back, put on the new downspouts and finish the cleanup?”
Brittany eyed the mess on the deck. Mel felt a twinge of guilt. “Or I could come by later, if it’s still light enough.”
“No, no. It’s okay,” Brittany said, taking Emma with one arm, the broom still in the other. Ten to one, the deck would be clean before he returned.
He sneaked another kiss on Emma’s cheek. “You be good for Unca Mel,” he said and hurried down the steps. Fast exits were mandatory around single-minded babies.
“Hey,” Brittany called. He stopped. Brittany and Emma looked at him over the railing. “Just because things didn’t work out between you and Mom doesn’t mean you need to be a stranger.”
As always. Unlucky in love but rich in friendships. “You bet,” he said, and beat a path to the back alley, where his truck was parked. Behind him, he heard Emma kick up a fuss and Brittany try to distract her with the excitement of a moving broom.
Mel headed to the library for his own kind of excitement. Maybe he did have a problem with his pride, too much or too little. Or maybe with loss. Something was the matter with him. Seven women couldn’t all be wrong. But if he had to take Daphne’s advice to wait for the right woman, he could, in the meanwhile, work on making himself into the right man.
And if Daphne got her good advice from a book, then he could, too.
No sooner had he cleared the door into the library than his friend Judy hollered from her desk behind the library counter, “Mel! How you doing?”
Judy was a cheerful yeller. “All the better for seeing you,” Mel said. “I’m here for a book.”
“A book?” Judy said, not lowering her voice one bit as he walked up to the counter. “I thought you were here for me.”
Judy and Mel had never dated, but they sharpened their respective romantic saws on each other. Judy’s seemed sharper since she’d reached the altar three times. But sharper meant she got more easily cut. She’d been divorced three times, too.
“I am here for you,” he said, testing his blade. “How can I prove it to you?”
Judy sidled up to the counter. “Honey, you had me at book.”
He pulled on his cap and glanced around. A teenage girl wearing a tuque in July glowered at them, her lip curled in repulsion. She reminded Mel of Ariel—the teenager his sister, Connie, was adopting. That girl, too, was a real romantic.
“What are you staring at?” Judy said to her. “You should take notes for how it’s done.”
Mel wasn’t at all sure the girl should be doing anything other than warming her head outside in the sun. “Anyway, I’m serious,” Mel said. “I want a book.”
Judy hovered her fingers over the keyboard. “Any one in particular?”
“Sense and Sensibility.”
Judy’s fingers stayed suspended. “The Jane Austen book?”
“Yep.”
“You won’t like it. It’s a classic.”
“I know that. I...I’m doing...research.”
“You’re lying. Did Linda put you up to this?”
Mel paused. He’d met Judy when she’d caught her second husband with his third girlfriend. Mutual misery developed into a friendship they still had twelve years and a raft of romantic breakups on both sides later.
Not wanting to set Judy off in a place with a general expectation of quietness, but not wanting her to hear it from anyone else, he slowly held up seven fingers.
Judy growled, picked up the nearest thing at hand—a thick, shiny hardcover from James Patterson—and slammed it on the counter. Tuque Girl jumped in her seat. “You have got to be kidding me. What was the excuse this time?”
Mel shrugged. “The usual. It wasn’t me. It was her.”
Judy shook her head. “Women are insane. I have lost all confidence in my gender. All. You’re a great catch. Own your own business. Own your own place. Excellent health. No criminal record. You clean up good.”
“Why is it again that we don’t date each other?” Mel said.
“I like you too much,” Judy said.
“I knew it was something,” Mel said. “Listen, about the book?”
“You tell me the real reason you want it, and I’ll check to see if we have it.”
He didn’t want to bring up his discussion with Daphne. His time with her in his truck felt...well, not intimate but...private and new. Like an unbelievable bargain at an auction. “I could go check the shelves myself.”
“You could, but what would you do if we needed to order it in?”
“I could do that online.” It occurred to him that he might have a copy in the stack of old books he had in storage. No, more convenient to go through the library.
“I could figure out how to access your account and delete your request.”
“You can’t—” He sighed. “Ok, fine. I met a woman who’s reading it. She’s a professor.”
“Was this before or after Linda broke up with you?”
People shouldn’t change on his account. Still, he wouldn’t mind if Judy took up whispering. Everyone at the terminals—all six pale, acned kids—was staring. Apparently Mel’s love life trumped avatars on missions. “During,” he muttered.
“This I gotta hear.”
“You heard about the motor home that hit Tim Hortons?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“Linda and I were there and this woman was in the motor home.”
“You’re interested in the woman who drove into Tim Hortons?”
“No, her goddaughter. She was the passenger. And I’m not interested in her. She said something interesting, is all.” He had to get this moving. If he gave Judy enough time, she would drag every last detail about Daphne from him. “Could you check on the book now?”
Judy set to tapping the keys, humming. She could do nothing silently. She even talked in her sleep, which had contributed to the breakdown of her third marriage to an insomniac. “If she was in the motor home, is she even from around here?”
“Halifax.”
She frowned. “Then why—”
“The book, please.”
She typed and hummed. “Not here. I can bring it in, but it’ll take a week. However, we do have the complete works of Jane Austen in one book. Do you want that one?”
“I do,” he said.
Judy retrieved from the stacks an oversize hardcover book with old-fashioned illustrations and letters the size of ground black pepper.
“You’re squinting,” Judy said. “We’ve got the movies, too.”
“That’s fine,” Mel said. He didn’t like to watch movies alone. Especially funny ones. Laughing in an empty room made him feel loony. “But order the books separately. I don’t want to carry this brick around for longer than I have to.”
Checking it out required buying a library card, his patronage of the library before today having consisted entirely of chatting with Judy. When he would’ve taken the book, she held on to it and said in a voice that only he could hear, “Professor or not, there’s no point trying to catch someone who’s already on the move.”
First Linda, then Daphne and now Judy. All telling him not to settle. He tugged the book free from Judy’s hold. “I know that. All I’m catching is up on my reading.”
* * *
“DAPHNE MERLOTTE, YOU will give me those keys right now or I’ll—I’ll...”
Fran scanned the interior of The Stagecoach.
She had been released from the hospital after one night of observation under strict orders not to drive for five days until her body had adjusted to the new painkillers. The one hundred and twentieth hour had now passed, and she was determined to make it to the mountains before nightfall.
Only, she was not better. Her siestas nearly lasted all afternoon now, and when Daphne had arrived back from her walk this morning, she’d smelled the cloying scent of air freshener over the acrid stench of vomit.
Fran had denied all knowledge and spent the morning bustling around the motor home in preparation for a late-afternoon departure, scattering Daphne’s books and papers before Daphne hustled them all into the safety of cupboards and boxes.
Daphne could say nothing to dissuade Fran. Repairs to the RV were not yet done. Fran’s answer: Daphne’s fault for not seeing to it during the last five days. Her prescriptions were only partly filled. Fran’s answer: Daphne’s fault for walking the town instead of getting them filled. They didn’t have enough groceries. Fran’s answer was, of course, that Daphne was to blame.
Accusations that weren’t entirely untrue, yet belied Fran’s basic unfitness behind the wheel.
Desperate, Daphne had seized the RV keys.
Now Fran snatched Daphne’s Sense and Sensibility from the couch.
“Give me the keys or I’ll rip this up!”
Fran had it stretched open exactly in the middle, where Marianne learns of Willoughby’s deception. Nearly every word was underlined, and Daphne’s notes trailed up the side. She had inputted all her notes into her digital copy but still, this limp, dog-eared paperback grounded her. And Fran knew it.
Daphne gripped the keys so hard they cut into her palm. “I will not give you the keys.”
No one called Fran Hertz’s bluff and got away with it. Not breaking eye contact, Fran started pulling at the binding. The book sagged and twisted, but despite the worn spine, it didn’t tear. She was too weak.
Daphne’s heart folded like the book. “Fran, listen—”
Fran tossed the book into the kitchen sink, flung open a drawer and took out the barbecue lighter. Then she set Daphne’s beloved volume on fire.
Daphne screamed and ran for the sink, flipping on the water, which, if possible, damaged the book even more. She opened the door and slid open all the windows and set the fans whirring on high. She turned to Fran, who was sitting with a straight back and crossed knees at the small square dining table. “You knew how much the book meant to me.”
“It meant too much. More than me.”
Daphne drew a deep breath of damp smoke. “How can you say that?”
“You’ve had your nose stuck in one book or another from the moment we left Halifax.”
Fran was right. Daphne had deliberately ignored her. To talk long to Fran was to see not only the imminent death of her godmother, but of her entire family. Since the car accident that had killed Daphne’s parents when she was sixteen, Fran was Daphne’s one claim to family. And through Fran, she’d gained admittance to Moshe’s family. Once Fran was gone, in a few short months, Daphne would be well and truly alone. Better to bury herself in a book than confront the grief that hunkered in her heart.
“What else do you want me to do? I can’t drive, and by the way, I’m writing a book. I have a deadline.” It wouldn’t advance her argument to say that the deadline was more self-imposed than real.
“An utterly irrelevant book.” Fran waved her hand with its slipping rings, the polish chipped from two of her usually impeccably polished nails. “Who cares if a bunch of fictional characters experienced hard times?”
Fran had never criticized Daphne’s work before; she had instead lampooned Daphne’s marriageless, childless, near-friendless, petless life.
Daphne poked at her ruined book. The faces of Elinor and Marianne on the cover were blackened, their pale, diaphanous dresses burned away.
In her defense, she called upon the statement of purpose she’d presented to the faculty. “I intend to draw parallels between the economic and domestic realities of Austen’s fictional society, her real world and our contemporary expectations of women.”
“Could you not do that while worms feast on me for Christmas dinner?”
Daphne refused to cater to Fran’s morbidity. “I expect I will. In the meanwhile, I don’t see the harm, since I can’t help you drive.”
“The harm? The harm? I drove into a restaurant. I could’ve killed someone. If you hadn’t been reading, you would’ve seen what was happening to me. You are supposed to watch out for me.”
Everything went astonishingly still between them. The stench of burnt paper and lime freshener and vomit constricted around Daphne. In the past five days, she’d failed to concoct a plan to keep Fran from getting behind the wheel. Instead, she’d read and studied and wrote, or gone for long walks along the lakeshore when she couldn’t bear being in the presence of Fran’s terminal sickness anymore.
She’d contemplated phoning Mel. He’d left his number with the offer to call him if she needed anything. Short of granting Fran perfect health, she didn’t see how he could help her. She couldn’t very well ask him to brainstorm schemes to stall Fran. He was without a girlfriend, not a life.
Avoidance was no longer an option.
“You’re right.” She held up the keys. “And that is why you’re not getting these.”
Fran’s rings clacked as she curled her fingers around the table edge. “You’ll fail me again if you don’t let me have them. In three days, maybe four, I could dump Frederick into the ocean and die happy.”
Die happy knowing she was leaving Daphne behind. Daphne despised herself for thinking so selfishly about Fran’s death. Loneliness was not worse than death, was it? “But...you always said seeing me married would make you happy.”