The Birthday Lunch by Joan Clark Read Free Book Online

has been led away before she picks up the mirror, the mirror she will never use without hearing the man howling over the dead body of his wife. It is a howl the old woman first heard on her grandfather’s farm in River John. Eleven years old she was and lying in her spool bed when she heard the wolf howling for his mate, the mate her grandfather shot after she had been caught in a leg-hold trap near the sheep pen.
    ——
    The telephone shrills and Leonard passes it to Claudia without a word. “Hello,” she says. “Hello?” She hears a gut-wrenching sob then, “Claudia?”
    “Dad?”
    “Claudia,” the strangled voice says. “Your mother … she was … she was hit by a truck.”
    “Mom was hit by a truck?”
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “This afternoon.”
    “Is she in hospital?”
    “No.” Claudia hears another sob. “She’s dead.”
    “She can’t be dead.”
    “She’s dead. Lily is dead. I saw her lying on the road.”
    Claudia has never heard her father sob, but he is sobbing now.
    “She wasn’t breathing. Please come home, Claudia. Please come home.”
    A voice Claudia doesn’t recognize as her own says she will come right away. The same voice asks if he has spoken to Matt.
    “I spoke to Trish.”
    Claudia hears the dangerous shudder in her father’s voice. “Hold on, Dad,” she says. “Hold on. Two hours and I’ll be there.” The receiver tumbles from her hand and after returning it to its cradle, Leonard gathers her in. “There. There,” he croons, stroking her hair. Mewling and snuffling, Claudia curls into him, her tears making circles of blue on the sheet where the mattress shows through. Overhead the fan stirs the sluggish air and beyond the window, heat waves shimmer above themarshlands. The minutes tick on until finally Leonard blots her cheeks, tells her to blow her nose, says he will drive her home. He pads to her closet and Claudia hears wire hangers scrape the wooden rail. He holds out a pale green dress, picks up a bra and underpants from the wicker chair, tells her to put them on. Weirdly, Claudia notices his shrivelled penis nested in its grey goatee. “Your suitcase?” he says.
    “Where do you think?”
    “It’s not my apartment.”
    Of course. “Under the bed.”
    “Now then, you shower while I pack.”
    After her shower, Claudia sits in the chair while Leonard braids her long pale hair. Circling the braids around her head he pins them in place.
    “You look like a sensible Dutch housewife,” he says.
    “Meant to be funny, I suppose.”
    A docile beast, Claudia watches Leonard put her suitcase in the Jeep before she climbs in beside him.
    They have left Sackville and are on the Trans-Canada when she tells him she will need her Honda.
    “I’ll drive it down whenever Greg is free to follow me in his car.” A colleague of Leonard’s, Greg is the only one in Sackville who knows about their affair.
    “Thank you.”
    “Don’t phone.”
    “I never phone.” Claudia is annoyed that even now Leonard is protecting his lush of a wife. “You are the pursuer,” she says. “Not me.”
    Mile after mile appears and disappears, miles of hardwoods,bushy greens, airy and clean, set back from the road; farmed trees replacing forests logged out by lumber barons centuries ago; swaths of shorn grass; here and there a glistening sweep of watered crops, all this passes unseen. What Claudia sees is grey pavement, a white tongue swallowing itself.
    Leonard has never been to her parents’ house. Turn here, Claudia tells him, turn there. Even now she has the presence of mind to instruct him to stop halfway up the driveway. If he drops her off at the front end, her father might see Leonard through the upstairs front window; if he pulls into the back end of the driveway, her aunt might see him from her downstairs window. Her mother was the only one in the family who knew about the affair. Claudia opens the passenger door and Leonard reaches for her hand. “All the best,” says