Phyllis points at the exit doors with a set of keys. ‘Derm’ll meet you in the lot just outside the doors. He’ll go over the car with you. Make sure it’s all right. No dents so far. Just watch the moose on the highway. Don’t worry though – there’s lots of signs. They’ll flash fit to blind you if they sense a moose in the area.’ She waves to the left. ‘Just to the left once you’re out the door. Big Budget sign. Sign gots a crack so we can’t light it up at night right now, which is a cryin’ shame. How’s people meant to knows where we are if they can’t see the sign?’ She hands Sophie the car keys. ‘Got Derm’s brother on the case. Should be fixed by the time you brings the car back. But in case it’s not, you knows where to find us now, don’t you, duck?’
Sophie grabs the handle of her suitcase. ‘Thanks. I’ll remember.’
‘Your aunt’ll be pleased as punch to see you. Tell her Phyllis from Budget sends her regards. She don’t know me from Adam, but tell her we all loves her and Florie here.’
***
Sophie steers the car, a Volkswagen Golf in an alarming shade of red, along the bumpy asphalt of a two-lane highway along the coast from Gambo, through a landscape of grey rock and scrubby spruce. From time to time, as she crests a hill, a glimpse of steel-grey water glints below, undulating under the sharp blue sky, its ripples broken by the occasional crest of a wave or a spray of water like a fountain. Here and there a lone scraggy pine leans from a precarious foothold in a rock into the wind blowing in from the Arctic, like an old man fighting to keep upright on a blustery day. Sophie passes lonely clusters of clapboard houses and stores, the wooden sidings painted in vivid hues, the ones closest to the shore propped up on wooden stilts weathered silver grey by the elements. Neat stacks of wooden-slatted lobster traps and circular orange-net crab traps sit ready on the end of wooden piers, and an occasional lone motorboat bobs in a tickle or a cove, moored for the day.
Sophie slows, trying to remember the turn-off Sam had taken on that first drive from the airport. Her first time on a motorcycle. Her Escada velvet suit never recovered.
She indicates right and steers the car onto a narrow road, pocked with potholes, leading through a knot of knobby pines. The road winds through the woods and breaks out onto a grassy meadow at the crest of a hill. Far along the coast to her left she glimpses the lighthouse, still keeping vigil over the steely ocean. Several clapboard buildings come into view near the shore as the car rounds the hill and bumps down the road. She stops beside the petrol pumps in front of a one-storey garage clad in yellow aluminium siding. A large blue and white illuminated IRVING sign shines like a beacon over the open garage door.
A stocky man with an impressive beer belly and a face that looks like it’s been carved and cratered by a lifetime of wind ambles out of the garage, wiping his hands on an oily rag. ‘Hey, there, b’y. How you getting on?’
‘Fine, thanks. I don’t need any gas, but could you check the oil?’
‘Sure thing, duck.’
‘Could I use your loo?’
He jabs behind him with a greasy thumb. ‘Right round the building. Door’s at the back.’
‘I remember.’ She opens the car door and gets out. ‘You don’t recognise me, do you, Wince?’
The man’s blue eyes, almost as blue as the sky, peer at her between his hooded, red eyelids. ‘Holy God. You’re Sam’s girl, as I live and breathe. What took you so long?’
‘Oh, it’s not like that. Sam and I … we’re just friends. Well, we were. I haven’t seen him for ten years.’
‘Oh, don’t I just know that. He was a misery guts for ages after you left.’ Wince props up the bonnet and unscrews the oil cap. ‘Said you never called nor wrote.’ He drills her with his blue eyes. ‘But time heals and all that. Life goes on.’ He checks the oil gauge and grunts as he wipes it clean with the rag. ‘Them car people in St John’s never checks the oil. Good thing you stopped.’
‘Sam’s still there? In Tippy’s Tickle?’
‘Still there. Doing what he does.’
Sophie swallows down the questions that are rushing up her throat. Is he with someone? Is he married? ‘I’m staying with my aunt there for a couple of weeks.’
‘Well, I expects Sam’ll know you’re comin’ then. Just don’t expects him to be doin’ a jig about it.’
***
Wince wipes his hands on the oily rag as he watches Sophie crunch across the gravel path and disappear around the back of the building.
‘Misery guts?’
Wince squints over at the tall man in motorcycle leathers leaning against the garage opening bouncing a can of oil from one hand to the other.
‘Well, you were a misery guts for an awful long time, Sam, b’y.’
‘How’s she looking?’
‘Some good, b’y. She was askin’ about you.’
‘So I heard.’ Sam tosses the oilcan over to Wince. ‘Doesn’t mean anything.’
Wince catches the oilcan. ‘All I knows about women, which, mind you, wouldn’t fit on the end of a squid jig, is that if she’s askin’ about you, she’s interested.’
Sam grunts. ‘You don’t know Sophie.’
‘Not so sure you does either, b’y.’ Wince stabs the oilcan with his penknife and leans over the engine, pouring the thick black oil into the car’s oil tank. ‘Why doesn’t you say hello?’
‘Bike’s fixed,’ Sam says as he heads back into the garage. ‘I’ll see her soon enough.’
Wince shrugs and tosses the empty oilcan into a rusty rubbish bin. The motorcycle engine roars to life inside the garage and Sam rides out on the gleaming black and red Kawasaki. Pausing at the road as he checks for traffic, he waves at Wince before turning right towards Tippy’s Tickle.
A crunch on the gravel. Wince looks over to see Sophie pulling a wallet out of her shoulder bag as she approaches. ‘All done? How much do I owe you?’
‘It’s twenty-two, but if you gives me a twenty, and we’ll call it square.’
***
A car door slams and Ellie glances up from the watercolour she’s working on and out of the shop’s bay window. She drops her paintbrush into a jar of water and wipes her hands on her apron.
‘She’s here!’
Florie emerges from the back room wearing a red T-shirt, jeans and a checked lumberjack shirt with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows. She balances a mixing bowl full of icing sugar and butter against her left hip and clutches a wooden spoon in her right hand. She joins Ellie at the window.
‘Took her long enough.’
Ellie glances at her wristwatch. ‘What do you mean? She rang only two hours ago from Gander.’
Florie grunts. ‘Ten years, Ellie. Not two hours.’
Ellie looks at Florie over the top of her horn-rimmed bifocals. ‘Don’t be like that, Florie. She’s a busy woman. She’s practically running that architecture firm in New York.’
‘A phone call more than a couple of times a year would’a been nice, even if she couldn’t haul her arse up here. We didn’t even gets a Christmas card last year.’
‘Yes, well. People don’t always act the way you expect. If there’s anything I’ve learned in all my eighty-odd years, it’s a waste of time to feel disappointed about things like that. I’m just delighted she’s here now. That’s the important thing. She’s come for my birthday, and I think that’s lovely.’