So Much Love Read online

  It’s tempting to go down the rabbit hole of reading the comments: the conspiracy theorists who say he was in a cult, the girls who knew him in school and clearly had crushes on him, but Catherine has to be at work in an hour. That means that she should leave now if she is taking the bus. She closes the laptop on Donny’s tragic grin and tumbles off the couch half on purpose. She’s in the bedroom, bending to fish her uniform blouse out of the basket of clean clothes, when Grey appears.

  “You want to go so early?”

  “Yeah, if I’m taking the bus I should go soon.” She straightens, presses her blouse to her chest as if assessing the fit.

  “But I can drive you.”

  “It’s snowing.”

  “I don’t mind. If I drive, you won’t have to leave yet.”

  Catherine nods and, seeing that Grey is poised to speak, unzips her dress and pulls it over her head. From behind the fabric, she hears him say, “I think we should have a kid.”

  “Oh?” She leaves the dress up, over her face, and tries to guess his expression by his tone. She plays this game often—whenever Grey calls to her through the bathroom door or up the stairs, speaks to her in the dark. She is not always right, and sometimes she doesn’t find out if she was right or not because Grey leaves or the mood changes before she glimpses the shape of his mouth, the squint of his eyes. “I thought we already decided we’re going to have kids.”

  “I mean soon. I could get you pregnant right now, if you want.”

  She brushes her lips against the rough linen of the dress—it feels fantastic. “Well, I do want to, but eventually. It’s just I’m still in school. I don’t want to be a waitress forever. I can get a better job once I’ve graduated. And there’s still so much on the mortgage and—I think it’s important to wait for the right time.”

  “It’s the right time when we decide it is.”

  She feels him tugging up at the hem of the dress, above her head, and she clenches her fingers into the fabric even as she leans her body in, searching for his.

  A baby. She has been watching strollers at the mall so long, she’s stopped even pretending she doesn’t stare. When Daria comes into the restaurant with her little Stevie to pick up a paycheque, Catherine’s arms are the first extended. As soon as she hears him squawking out front, she is aware of the hard flat surface of her sternum between her breasts, where the baby should be held. When Daria hands his squirmy body over, the fit is so perfect she can almost hear the click.

  Her dress suddenly whooshes up over her head and Grey’s face appears, slightly flushed. Her skin goose-pimples and warmth floods her face as she stands in front of him in her bra and panties, even though she has been half-naked all along. It’s just seeing him see her that makes her nipples perk up and her scalp tingle.

  “Do you want a baby?” She bends to the basket again, snatches out her skirt.

  Grey’s hands circle her waist and pull her back upright. “Lately, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s the house, I guess. I never thought a guy like me could have a nice house and decent furniture and a decent job. And a wife…a wife like you. Sometimes I walk around this place and I’m like, Wow, really?”

  Catherine laughs into his shoulder. “Yeah, me too.”

  “And that’s you, Catherine—you figured it out for us. If it were left up to me, I’d still be in that little apartment with that ugly brown carpet… ”

  “Now that we have nice carpets, the next step is a child?”

  “No…just that it seems possible.” He backs away from her slightly and brushes his thumb across his mouth, but his other hand still firmly rests on her hip. “We pay the mortgage on time and take out the recycling. We show up to work every day. We’re happily married people who eat a well-balanced diet and are kind to our parents—it’s people like us who have babies. I really think I could care for a little baby, be responsible for all its needs.” He starts to step around the bed still holding her: they are dancing, sort of.

  “But would I?”

  “You would. You would if you wanted to, Cat. You have a way.”

  Catherine shakes out her blouse, then tosses it on the bureau. “You always have too much faith in me. I don’t—”

  “It’s so weird how these things don’t wrinkle. The fabric looks just like cotton.”

  “But it doesn’t feel like cotton. Are you really going to drive me? It’s snowing a lot.” She points at the window.

  “I am a man of my word. When have I not done what I said I’d do?”

  “I don’t know.” She is thinking about taking off her panties, about being late for work—they still have maybe half an hour, a little less, until they should leave. Plenty of time. “It’s probably happened.”

  He steps back slightly, eyes wide and curious. His shirt has come partly untucked from the right side of his jeans, so she slides her hand across his hip, over his belt, and into the space between fabric and flesh. The skin there is cool, even though it’s warm in the house. He comes closer again, sliding one thigh between hers.

  “But most of the time, I’m a pretty good husband, right?”

  She tries to look serious. “Yeah, you’re all right.”

  —

  Her shift is a not-unpleasant blur—she long ago learned how to be polite to people without listening. She stays locked in her daydream about a powder-scented little baby in one of those pretty patterned-fabric slings she sees people wearing in the park, just the pink bald baby heads peeking out. The idea that she doesn’t have a degree or a career or really any kind of life plan dances around the edges of the daydream. Sometimes Catherine feels like she is barely a person. She is still trying to do enough things, read enough books, have enough life to build into a character. She doesn’t even have her driver’s licence yet; she keeps saying she’s going to take the test but never gets around to it. Who could she be to a baby?

  She pockets her tips without looking, a surprise for later, and takes her first break outside, sitting with Daria on some old office chairs someone left by the dumpsters, spinning around until they are dizzy, watching Claude smoke. She doesn’t feel up to reading in the corridor tonight, even though she has her Julianna Ohlin book in her bag. When Catherine stops spinning, Claude is complaining about a movie he saw, something with a dragon in it. No, not complaining about the movie, Catherine realizes, just about the audience.

  “The worst—running up and down the aisle, spilling popcorn, crying when the dude got killed.”

  Daria kicks off Catherine’s ankle to spin in the other direction. “Serves you right for going to a kids’ movie matinee. What did you expect?”

  Claude shrugs. “My girlfriend wanted to go—I wasn’t listening when she said the title or I would have argued.”

  “You don’t like kids?” Catherine pivots the chair to the left, digs in her toes, pivots to the right, clomps on the ground. She didn’t change back into boots to come out here and her feet are going to be slush-wet for the rest of the night.

  “I don’t like parents.” Claude drags on his cigarette so the cherry flares. “Don’t have them if you’re not going to raise them to act like humans.”

  Raise them, Catherine thinks. Like cattle.

  “Hey, thanks for the awesome advice, Claude! I’ll totally take that under advisement.” Daria’s boy is only a few months old. You can still see the soft mound under her blouse where her pregnant belly used to stick out.

  Claude smiles at Daria but doesn’t answer. He’s had a crush on her for a couple years now, but the baby confused things—now he doesn’t seem to know how to talk to her at all. He turns to Catherine instead. “How’s school?” Claude is nineteen and goes to the same university as her but full-time. He just does a few hours a week at the restaurant during the school year; his parents pay for the rest.

  Catherine takes one class a term and works full-time. “I’m starting my final paper.”

  “In what? Literature?”

  “No, on why money is awesome. Isn’t that wh
at you always write about?” Catherine stands up, and the chair clanks and tips backwards in the dirty snowbank. “It’s about a poet, someone from around here.”

  Daria stands, then rights Catherine’s chair carefully before starting up the stairs. “Poets in Iria—imagine that,” she says.

  “She’s pretty good, actually.”

  Daria shrugs, and even Catherine isn’t positive she believes herself.

  “Well, I mean, the poems sound good—everything fits together. Sometimes I’m not sure what things mean, like is a screw falling down the kitchen drain a metaphor or just an actual screw?”

  “What difference does it make, if you like the way it sounds?” Daria says, holding the screen door open. Claude shuffles through, then glances back before disappearing into the restaurant. “It’s not like I know what half the singers on the radio are saying,” she adds.

  “Well, I have to write an essay on her poetry, for one thing.”

  Daria laughs, and Catherine wanders to the washroom before going back to the dining room. She is caught between two daydreams for the rest of the evening—the one from earlier in the evening of her and Grey’s spare bedroom painted a soft green all over, with cushions, a white crib, and the squeaky cry of a kitten—she can’t quite fix the sound of a baby in her head. But now the pretty blond poet from the back of her book is mixed in somehow. Catherine pictures her looking the way she did in Professor Altaris’s video in class, tense and serious but wearing a beautiful violet dress, reading poem after poem to the kitten baby who is lying unseen in the crib.

  —

  After her shift, Catherine walks toward the bus stop. If she goes home after work she has to take the slow, dank, late-night bus, but if she goes to her mother’s she can walk. Also her mom will probably be asleep when she gets there, but Grey will be up playing video games with the sound off, waiting for her. He’ll want to have beers and continue the conversation from earlier. She keeps going past the stop, past the lighted streets of downtown where the tourists come to drink within sight of the water. It’s just coming on spring, still slushy but not too cold and the wind is gentler. Soon the semester will end and she hasn’t decided about her summer class. Maybe a course on poetics, or something on Greek comedies cross-listed in the Classics department. Or nothing at all—there’s always the temptation to take the summer off and just go to the beach with Grey every weekend, spend the evenings she’s not working out in the yard reading, barbecuing, fixing up the garden.

  She walks to a twisty little neighbourhood of tall, narrow houses, most of them subdivided into apartments, most of them falling apart. If she had a baby, would she get her degree? Her mother never did; maybe that’s why Sue hasn’t pushed her to finish hers faster. Would she get up the guts to take a creative writing class around daycare and storytime? Something in her says too soon, but another part thinks of snuggling a baby against her body and says now now now.

  The building her mother lives in is nicer than most on this street, but that isn’t saying very much. Catherine changed into jeans after her shift, and the tree out back is easier to climb in winter, without the obstacle of leaves. Still, she briefly loses her grip halfway up and when she braces herself against the trunk her left cheekbone grazes a branch. It stings, but not badly. She’s usually happy enough to do things the easy way; the tree is an exception. It’s her favourite way of getting into her mother’s apartment and Sue leaves the window ajar all year. The tree is not that tough to climb, but when Catherine leans off the branch and swings onto the windowsill, she always feels like she has scaled Mount Everest.

  Her mother is wearing her red velour bathrobe and isn’t very surprised when Catherine hops awkwardly into the room.

  “You want tea, honey?” Sue half stands, her magazine slapping to the floor.

  Catherine snatches up the magazine, automatically flipping it over to see the cover. The New Yorker—her mother is addicted to it. “No, thanks.” She is unbuttoning her coat, sitting down, shrugging it off. There is no other place so warm as here.

  Sue settles back in her chair but gazes intently at Catherine. “You have a fight with Grey?”

  “No. I don’t usually come here for that, do I? I just didn’t wanna take the bus.”

  “Oh, Cat, no one wants to take the bus.”

  She toes her boots off under the table, trying to remember if they’re slushy or dry enough to leave there. “It’s okay if I stay, though, right? You don’t mind?”

  “What am I doing? Nothing. But don’t you have a lot of homework?”

  “Just a paper.”

  Her mother leans her elbows on the table. “What’s it about?” Sue is a bank teller, with many rhinestone broaches and a comforting manner. The other ladies she works with talk about people they see on the street, and sales at the grocery store, and the new television lineup each season. Sue has The New Yorker and Catherine for poetry.

  “Someone from here. Julianna Ohlin. She—”

  “Oh, her.” Her mother does not have bangs, but if she did she would have blown them off her face. “I remember her.”

  “You don’t like her work?”

  Another red velour shrug. “I just read a couple of poems, but not until long after she was dead. But my friend Lainey used to babysit her, so I knew her a little bit. Lainey would bring her to our place on the way to the library, and I’d give them popsicles. She was just a little girl then.”

  “Really? You knew her?”

  “Well, it’s not like this is Margaret Atwood. Just a woman with a nasty boyfriend. That’s what the papers said, anyway.”

  Catherine tips her head to the side. Her own father had been a fairly nasty guy, from what she can recall—yelling, the shattering of Sue’s only bottle of perfume, a firm smack to her own small hand as she reached for the remote control. Though Julianna Ohlin got murdered and Sue, as far as Catherine knows, bears no physical scars.

  “No, but she was still a good poet. She can surprise you with weird lines, double meanings. She’s funny when you’re not expecting it. She died before she got famous, but a lot of people really liked her book.” Catherine feels more confident, this time, saying the poems were good. She can’t stop hearing the rhythm of the one about mopping floors in her head.

  Sue shrugs again, the vee of her robe widening slightly. “All right, I guess I should try to read some more of her poems. You got anything I can borrow?”

  “Sure. But you never heard anything about her, as an adult?”

  “I heard that sonofabitch boyfriend of hers broke her neck after they moved away.”

  “Yeah, but nothing about her book? It came out the year after that. 1996, I think.”

  Sue reaches for her tea. “I probably heard something, but I never read it. You know that modernist stuff was never my thing.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Tennyson or bust.”

  “Oh, I’m not that narrow.” Sue taps her empty cup down. “You really think she’s good, the Ohlin girl?”

  “Well, yeah. But I feel like I don’t like her poetry as much as I should.”

  Sue keeps watching Catherine but doesn’t say anything.

  “She was a waitress too. She wrote poems about serving potato soup, getting orders wrong. About all the stuff I do—laundry, walking outside when it’s hot, feeding the cat.”

  “You don’t have a cat. You don’t even like cats.”

  “I like them okay, I just think I’m allergic. But what I’m saying is—I feel like I’ve already lived her words, so they’re too familiar. Is that weird?”

  Sue stands up and puts her cup in the sink. “But you haven’t, not really. Because even when she was washing her dishes just like you wash your dishes, even if she used the same soap, her life was not the same because her boyfriend was a rep-ro-bate and Grey would kiss your feet.”

  Catherine shakes her head, looks away, not because Sue is wrong but because she knows she’s right—he would. “It doesn’t all come down to the love of a good man, you know. People’s
lives are more complicated than just one thing that happened to them.”

  “Yes, but sometimes that one thing can colour everything else. You don’t know because you got lucky the first time, finding him when you were only twenty years old. I haven’t always liked everything about Grey, but he loves you 100 per cent and that’s enough for me. You’ve never had to know anything else.”

  “I had other boyfriends. Remember Kev? Two whole years.”

  “Sure, but you were a kid—it was a high-school romance. You went out with him and did god knows what, but you still came home every night. Nothing really changed. But Grey changed your life. Even when he’s not around, even if you’re doing something that has nothing to do with him, it’s better for you because of him. You could learn a few things from those poems, try to see things from the perspective of a woman who lived the other way.”

  “I’ll try, Momma.”

  “So if you’re sleeping here, you send that man a text. Don’t make him worry.” Her mother nodded sharply. “There’s sheets in the ottoman. I’ll make you some eggs in the morning.”

  “I’ve got class in the morning.”

  “I’ll be up, don’t worry. Good night, sweetheart.” Her mother squeezes her shoulder like a football coach, sturdy and pushing.

  Catherine flops onto the bare couch—her back and hips are tense from fatigue, her feet tender when she rubs them on the arm of the couch. It was a long evening, full of anniversary dinners and girls’ nights out. But what she’s thinking about are high chairs. If she and Grey had a baby, they’d need one. Lots of other stuff too, of course, but she’s thinking about high chairs because of the spindly blond wood ones they have at the restaurant. They all get sticky with mashed pears and chicken gravy—she can smell it on her hands after she’s had to carry one. But the babies like them, even though they’re belted in—there was a red-headed baby in the corner tonight, patting a pile of spaghetti into pulp.