Day 111 – A Snippet
Once a year, the small cafe with steel countertops serves a menagerie of pie; Jack Daniels and sticky walnut, lemon with meringue that beads to the roof of your mouth, pumpkin with an ever-so-crunchy lard crust; all in celebration of a day just for Father’s.
We order. Dakota tea, myself coffee, and a slice of Key Lime to share as we sit in what remains of a train station house across from a hotel stuck in perpetual renovations. I eavesdrop on gossip, women conspire to remove Deborah from committee, speculation over the possible location of new swimming pools, prime ministerial failures.
“Where you heading?” A white-haired woman in sun-coloured trench coat asks, appearing like Athena, fully formed at our table. She’s wearing green lipstick and flat white sandals that match a pair of fuzzy white dice hanging on each earlobe.
“East,” Dakota says between a bite of pie as he reads the local paper, something about local agriculture chronicled in bold letters and sticky ink.
“Newfoundland,” I add.
“You?” Dakota asks, looking up and swallowing his pie.
“Opposite directions. West. Prince Rupert. Staying with my sister. Cancer.” Her statements are fragmented, stuck just a moment too long on her palette like chewing gum.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Dakota and I share a glance.
“No, you’re not.”
“What?” Her abruptness startles me into speech.
“You might have sympathy, but you don’t know me. Why give a shit?” She’s smiling as she says this.
“Does that really change anything?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she says.
We sit. She stands in silence.
When she smiles, wrinkles cup sage green eyes. She is, we come to find, 82 and has smoked since she was 16 when her parents would send her to the store with a five-dollar bill burning a hole in her hand. She’d return, and deposit a handful of change, and a box with two cigarettes missing into her parent’s waiting card table. Anna-May lived in a time before safe, legal abortion and a red-and-white Canadian flag.
Before she leaves, she teaches us how to read the heart line on the palm, offers advice on how to better stimulate the prostate, and tells us how to grow perfect tomatoes. Soon, she’s eating a slice of Flapper Pie while she stares over Dakota’s palm.
“You’re young,” she says, “It’s nothing to worry about. It will all figure itself out.” When she says this, she and Dakota share a smile as if she’s read his mind.
I debate telling her about my future.
“Or you can also ride life hard and put her away wet,” she adds.
“Hmm?” I grunt.
“Well, we’re all gonna die,” she says, smirking, digging in her purse for a consortium of change to pay the bill while she swallows the last bite of pie.
The bell above the door is swinging as she evaporates out the door, squeezing like a shadow through a crack. The Unnamed Woman spreads like a sunburst as she hits the fresh air, arm in arm with the sun like old friends reunited, sharing stories over coffee.
“Why do I feel like fairy tale children who just met a witch?” Dakota asks.
We try to follow her, but she’s driving a red blink of a motorcycle into the sun, and we stare in silence as she’s disappearing in a puff of gravel dust ever-so reminiscent of Glinda sucked away into her pink bubble.