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“Good morning, Daphne.” Moshe’s voice was as smooth as the granite countertops in his house. “How are you?”
He didn’t care. They’d been close as kids, along with his sister, but his conversion to Judaism, his marriage, his wife, his children, his work—life—had stripped their relationship down to just the Fran factor.
“I’m fine. You?”
“Good, good. Listen, I would not be troubling you but Mother is not answering her phone.”
“It’s charging.” Daphne picked up a book from the floor and looked about for a safe spot to put it. “She’s in the shower right now. Would you like her to call you back?”
“I’m in court for the rest of the day. I only want to confirm she’s okay.”
Daphne tossed the book on her bed. “She’s as well as can be expected.”
Her standard comment in all her texts and calls with Moshe. He had all the legal acumen and more of his mother, so the less said the better.
“You will contact me immediately if there is any change, as we agreed?” Like his mother, he was a fast adherent to verbal agreements.
“Of course, Moshe. Of course.” She delivered the lie with all the aplomb of his mother.
* * *
DAPHNE EXITED THE hospital that afternoon, wondering if she should do an about-face and check herself in. She ached to the bone, her tracksuit hung on her like garb for a homeless vagrant and she was light-headed enough to either sink to the warm cement or float off.
She was checking for the taxi she’d ordered when Mel Greene rounded the corner of the building from the parking lot. He was alone. Strange to see him without someone, as if he had a missing limb. He had shifted so smoothly between the nurse, the police officers, the restaurant employee and her that somehow she’d got it stuck in her mind that he was always with people.
He waved, and Daphne waved back. As if they were old friends. Had he come to see her? Or Fran? But why visit a cranky woman he didn’t know? Somebody else, then? She ought to speak to him. Update him on Fran. On The Stagecoach. Thank him for his help. Old friends had less to talk about.
Her taxi pulled up. “A moment,” she said to the driver as he emerged. “I need to speak with—” she wondered how to refer to Mel “—my friend.”
She turned to catch the guarded surprise on Mel’s face. “I acknowledge that’s not the most appropriate term,” she said.
“It’ll do for now,” he said and extended his hand to her. “We haven’t met properly. I’m Mel. Mel Greene.”
She decided to not let on that she knew his name as his hand, large and warm, wrapped around hers. It would only prove how much more significant he was in her life than she in his. “Daphne Merlotte.”
Mel carried on to the taxi driver and held out his hand. “Hello. How are you today?”
The man in a tunic and head scarf stared at Mel’s hand as one would stare at an unknown but sweet-smelling food. Daphne felt for him. Who made such an expansive gesture to a total stranger for no apparent reason? Was it a cultural faux pas on Mel’s part, or was it simply something Mel did? And if so, why hadn’t he done the same to her when they first met? Was it because she was wearing the hideous nightie, and was she overthinking this?
“I—I’m...fine,” the driver stuttered. As if to prove it, he thrust his hand into Mel’s and gave it a quick shake.
Stepping away from each other, the two men regarded Daphne. “Fran’s checked in, and I was returning to Spirit Lake,” she said to Mel. “To attend to the RV,” she added.
“I parked it over at the town campsite. I can drop you off there easy enough, and give you the keys. I had to come into Red Deer to pick up a few things and thought I’d swing by.”
He really had come to see her—Fran—them. So expansive gestures to strangers were part of his nature. The taxi driver frowned at Daphne. Fran pulled the same look when Daphne was on the cusp of refusing her. She handed the driver a ten-dollar bill. “To cover me calling you here.”
His lips thinned. Daphne kept the money outstretched.
“Seems fair to me,” Mel said.
The taxi driver snatched the bill from her fingers and muttered his thanks through gritted teeth. He pulled away and Mel waved, as if the man was family leaving home. The driver lifted his hand in farewell.
Mel turned to the hospital doors. “How is she?”
“As well as can be expected.”
Mel pulled on his baseball cap. “Not sure who’s expecting what.”
“You do know that Fran has terminal cancer? You were there when she told Linda.”
“Yes. Only—” he nudged his cap up to show his face more “—I’ve not much experience with Fran, and I want her to feel easy around me.”
Daphne felt as the taxi driver must’ve—surprised by kindness. “But you mustn’t feel obliged to visit her at all.”
This time when he smiled at her, it was too weak to reach his laugh lines. “I know. I guess... My mom died of cancer, but she had her family around her...and Fran doesn’t have that.”
“I’m family,” Daphne said, more sharply than she intended. “I mean, we treat each other like family.” Or, at least, Fran and Frederick, when he’d been alive, had invited Daphne to their family functions, and she’d tried to fit in. Into a corner with a good book.
Mel pulled on his baseball cap. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
She was annoyed that he’d spotted a disconnect between Fran and Daphne. Still, she could hardly blame him for that. “No offense taken. She’s sleeping right now. She does in the afternoon, at any rate.” She suddenly remembered her good news. “Oh, and they’ve also increased her pain medication, which means she can’t possibly travel for the next five days until her body adjusts.”
“Oh.” Mel scratched his temple. “I don’t know if—”
“Yes,” Daphne said. “I completely agree. The good news is I have five days to think of a way to delay her further.”
Mel was staring at her with his full hazel scrutiny. The Edward Ferrars look. Wait. Had Austen noted the color of his eyes? Or Mr. Darcy’s? Or any of them? Surely after her endless readings, she ought to remember something as basic as that. Had she been so absorbed in issues of metatexts and contexts and textualizations and intertextualities that she’d overlooked a simple character description?
“You all right?” Mel asked. Was his voice softer than normal? What was normal for him?
She tugged her sweatshirt off her belly and her buttocks.
“As well as can be expected,” she said and when his hand drifted to his cap, she added, “Fine. A little tired but fine.”
“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.”
