Finding My Own Way (8 page)

“Let me tell you what I do here, Libby. First of all, I look after everything myself. And I mean everything. So if Alex thought I let too many spelling mistakes slip by, it's quite possible.

“I do the gathering of news, write the copy, sell the
advertising, set the type and run off the papers. Even do the deliveries, which is what I'm about to do very shortly. Why do it all myself, you ask? Because there's no money to hire any extra help. Sometimes I wish there was.”

“I don't need to make a lot of money, Mr. Thomas,” I explained. “Just enough so I can pay my household bills and buy a little food. It shouldn't take much.”

“Ah, Libby. I wish I could hire you. Really I do. But things are different here from when your mother started, what, twenty, twenty-five years ago? We published three papers a week then, had two full-time reporters. Now we're a weekly, carrying mostly local news, village council meetings.

He brought his chair back down and smiled at me. “You know, I remember how I first came to hire your mother. Best move I ever made. She'd been sending in pieces while she was still in high school, some really good stuff. I published a few of her seasonal stories, even ran some as serials. The readers loved her. I hired her to write advertisements at first, till she got the hang of newspaper work. Before you knew it, she was writing feature articles. Of course, by then, she was able to sell her stories to the bigger papers too.”

William Thomas leaned toward me over his desk, his face kind. His hair, which needed cutting, curled out over his ears, and his wild, grey eyebrows sprouted hairs in every direction. Even the cuffs of his shirt were beginning to fray. “Are you sure you've thought this thing out, Libby?” he asked. “You're awfully young. Why not stay with your aunt for a few more months? Maybe go to teacher's college. Teaching's a wonderful calling.”

I stood up. “I'm not going back to the city, Mr. Thomas. If you ever decide you need some extra help, I'll be around.” I hesitated, my hand on the doorknob, my vulnerability showing. “Do you remember at Alex's funeral, how you suggested I should write about what I was feeling?”

He nodded slowly.

“Well, I took your advice. I've been writing ever since. It really did help.”

“Then, I'm glad you took the advice,” the man said. “Your mother was a good writer. And she worked at it, every day. If you want to write, that's what you have to do.”

“Well, the writing I do now isn't making any money,” I pointed out.

“No, but one day it may.” He came around the desk and put his hand against the door, preventing me from leaving just yet. “Can I lend you some cash, Libby? Are you really okay?”

“I have enough to do me if I can find a part-time job,” I said. “I'm sure I will.”

“I'm sure you will too. You have the right attitude.” William Thomas stepped out onto the sidewalk with me. “Why not try at the five-and-ten? They seem to hire youngsters like yourself.” Savaway, better known to the older people as the five-and-ten, was where Margaret had worked the last two Christmases. That was to be my next stop.

“I've put my name in at the employment office,” I said. “They might call me if they need berry pickers.”

“Well, good luck. And Libby,” Mr. Thomas said, as I lifted my bike towards me, “why not bring me something
you've written?”

“Really?”

“Yes. I'd like to see how well you write. Just in case. You never know.”

“We only hire kids for after school and on Saturdays,” Mr. Forth, the manager of Savaway, informed me. His office was a glassed-in cubicle at the back of the store, three steps up off the main floor. I had to stand on the bottom stair, which already put me at a disadvantage. He didn't invite me in, didn't even bother to look up.

“I'm available any time,” I pressed. “I'm finished high school and could work as many hours as you like. My best friend, Margaret Pacey, used to work here. She's gone now for the summer.”

“I heard. I have three regulars now.” He raised a hand to his head, to smooth hairs that weren't there any longer, and looked down at me. He seemed to be considering. “Oh, what the hay. I guess we could use a bit more help.”

Mr. Forth stood then, hiking his pants. “So, okay. I'll get you an application.” Unclipping a pen from the pocket of his rumpled shirt, he slid a form under the glass at me. I filled out the application against the wall.

“We pay students forty-three cents an hour.”

I stopped writing. “Really? That's not much, is it?” The man didn't flutter an eyelash. “But if there's a job, I'll take it.”

“So, be here at eight-thirty tomorrow, sharp,” he said.
He'd already turned his attention back to his desk.

It was not that I'd actually landed a job on my first day of trying that cheered me on my ride home, but that Mr. Thomas had asked to read something I'd written. I knew it was only because of Alex that he was willing to look at my work. But that was all right. There was nothing wrong with a little help to get one's foot in the door. After that, it would be up to me.

I remembered how Alex had told me a writer has to be a listener, someone who pays attention to things around her, to the way that people speak, as well as to what they are saying. I could do that, I thought. Even while I worked for forty-three cents an hour at the five-and-ten. And, like Alex, I would always be on the look out for opportunities to write.

The flag was up on the mailbox out front when I came back down the road. I stopped my bike and reached inside. Instead of the letter from Margaret I'd hoped for, there was one of those dreaded envelopes with a window in it. The electric bill. Already, and the power hadn't been turned on for one full week yet.

“Mr. Thomas is kind,” my journal entry that night read. “He asked me to bring him a sample of my writing. He didn't hire me on the spot the way I had hoped, but who knows?

“The money at Savaway is pitiful. Maybe I'll make some other contacts while I'm there and will be able to find something better.

“I have started reading one of the books Alex was reading. I remember when she brought this particular book home, delighted at finding it in the second-hand
shop. It makes me feel close to her, holding it, knowing her eyes crossed these lines of text, her mind absorbed these ideas.

“I can see her reading this book, sitting in the lawn chair down by the river, wearing her straw hat, her legs stretched out on the foot rest. Ernie is wedged in underneath her. It is her last summer.

“I remember standing at the upstairs window, feeling on my face the breeze off the river as it comes through the screen. It is not raining, yet my face is wet. This is the day Alex tells me she isn't going to get better, that she is going to die. When I go down to where she sits, to continue our anguished discussion, I see this book lying in her lap. I don't think she ever got to finish it.”

I was in the midst of a dream where I was riding double on my bicycle with the woman in the polka dot sundress, throwing off newspapers door to door, when suddenly I jerked awake. What had I heard? In the dark I sensed that Ernie too had raised his head and was listening.

Pulse racing, I rolled slowly onto my back, straining both ears for what had wakened me. There it was again: a thump, thump at the back of the house. I reached up and pulled on the light on the head of my bed. The shadows leapt away into the corners of the room.

Was there someone trying to get into the house? Or worse, was whatever I heard already inside, bumping against the walls in the dark?

Ernie was on full alert now, a low growl in the back of
his throat. “Easy, boy.” I crept to the window and eased the blind aside. Might be only a raccoon, I thought. The outside light was still on, and from here nothing looked amiss. The wind had risen, and I could see the tree branches swaying against the night sky.

There was a switch at the top of the stairs that turned on the hall light below. Ernie clattered down ahead of me.

Standing barefoot in the kitchen, I determined that the sound was coming from beyond the back door. There was no way I was venturing outside. Everything looked okay in the rest of the house. The chair was still wedged under the doorknob, so whatever it was had not gotten inside.

I backed away from the door and perched on the edge of the couch in the front room, shivering. Eventually, I drew my feet up under me, then curled up, pulling over me the rough, maroon blanket we kept folded over the back. I used to hate these raw blankets Nan got from the woollen mills at Bancroft. They were so scratchy against your skin, and had no satin edging like the ones on Margaret's bed. Tonight though, the blanket was a comforting cocoon. Ernie dozed on the floor beside me.

In the morning, I discovered I'd left the canvas bag of clothespins on the line outside. It had worked its way down the wire to where it now hung, bumping in the wind against the house. Feeling ridiculous, I took it inside and tossed it into the laundry basket. If I was going to succeed at living on my own, I'd have to do better than that.

When I arrived at the five-and-ten that morning, I found Mr. Forth more frazzled than yesterday. “It's Bobby Baker, the assistant manager who is in charge of
staff,” he explained, wringing his small hands while I waited on the bottom step to the office.

I stood firm. He wasn't going to change his mind if I had anything to say about it. When I was still there, fully a minute later, he continued. “Bobby won't be in today till after lunch. I forgot that, when I told you to come in for eight-thirty.”

“That's okay,” I said reasonably. “I'm sure I can find enough to keep me busy till then.”

Because Mr. Forth seemed to have no idea what to do with me, I had no trouble convincing him that I should follow the other girls around and get used to where things were in the store. “There's nothing worse for a customer than to ask some staff person where something is, and then follow them all over the store because they don't know themselves,” I told him.

So I spent the next two hours getting acquainted with the layout of Savaway. After that, I offered to help a middle-aged woman named Pat do some price changes. I pulled the pins out of the old price tags and Pat repinned the new ones.

At twelve o'clock Mr. Forth came around to tell me it was time for me to take my lunch. In my excitement that morning I had forgotten that I needed to bring one. There was a lunch counter at the back of the store, and I studied the menu on the wall above the grease-spattered mirror. There was a picture of a grey rectangle, masquerading as meatloaf, a colourless chicken salad, a plate of chips with gravy. The smell of the canned spaghetti was making my mouth water.

I slid up onto a stool. “Just a Coke, please,” I said
when the waitress pulled the order pad out of the waistband of her apron, the pencil from over her ear.

“That all?” she glared. “I thought you were on lunch.”

“I brought my own today,” I lied.

“Well, you aren't allowed to eat it at this counter.”

“I wasn't going to,” I said. “I just want a cold drink.”

“Suit yourself,” the woman shrugged. She had black hair with a lot of grey in it, cut short, with whiskers at the back that matched those on her upper lip.

The man on the stool beside me left half a bun on his plate, along with a slice of anaemic tomato and a single piece of wilted lettuce. I spun the stool in the opposite direction to avoid salivating while I waited. I hadn't had anything to eat since supper last night.

I bought a ten-cent bag of potato chips in the candy aisle and was heading for the back room when I spotted William Thomas at the stationery counter.

“Oh, Mr. Thomas,” I said, “I wanted to thank you for the tip.” He gave me a puzzled look. “About coming here to find a job? I got it. Today's my first day.”

Recognition dawned. “That's terrific, Libby. Congratulations. I hope you make a fortune,” he said warmly.