Everything on a Waffle: List 5

They never asked me to confide in them but after two weeks I knew what a strain this must have been for Evie, so one day I sat them down and laid out the whole story, most of which you already know except for the part that finally landed me with Evie and Bert.

“So,” I finished up after an hour, as, eyes glued to me, they rocked in their rocking chairs and fed Quincehead niblets of chopped-up steak absentmindedly from a bowl in Evie’s lap, “Uncle Jack got me a net and I would go down to the docks to wait and watch for a whale to bring my parents in. Everyone left me alone because it looked like I was fishing and they were used to kids down there trying to scoop up fish for the mink farm. Occasionally, of course, I would have to catch a fish.”

I couldn’t figure out how old Evie was. She had deep wrinkles, crevices really, and flame-red dyed hair.

“Uh-huh. I could tell. She was hypnotized by those waves, Bert.”
“Ohhh,” said Bert, nodding affably.
“So she had no track of time,” said Evie.

My hand was all mangled and I remember thinking, ‘It’s another little trip to the hospital for me.’

He couldn’t very well say, to snare him, without sounding like a conceited fool, so he just stormed around and spluttered.

Anyhow, she claimed to have nothing but my welfare at heart and maybe she does because, after all, she is bred to the nobility, so she has to do the right thing no matter what.

“Me too!” sobbed Evie. “You can be sunk low as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy just lives like one of those spinning things, what’re they called, Bert?”
“Gyroscope?” said Bert.

You’ll probably have to stay with us, honey, seeing as how you’re a ward of the province these days.

“Look, Bert, that’s her,” said Evie, pointing to the mannequin hanging from the trapeze in the middle of the restaurant.

“I saw a great recipe recently, air-dried beef and marinated lentils on radicchio, that I thought you might like to add to your menu, Miss Bowzer,” said Uncle Jack.

“We’re expecting a big tourist influx, Miss Bowzer,” said Uncle Jack.

“I think it’s a rotten thing you did, sending this child so far from home,” said Evie, standing up and looking Miss Honeycut right in the midriff.
“Nonsense,” said Miss Honeycut, not at all perturbed.

“I think it’s a rotten thing you did, sending this child so far from home,” said Evie, standing up and looking Miss Honeycut right in the midriff.
“Nonsense,” said Miss Honeycut, not at all perturbed.

Miss Honeycut launched into one of her long anecdotes, this one about some cat who kept having accidents. “In the end there was so little left of her that the mouse was stalking her. The mouse was stalking her.”

We all sat silently while Miss Honeycut guffawed. She stopped suddenly, flushed, flared her nostrils, raised one eyebrow, and got all brisk again.

“Still, it’s a terrible thing,” said Evie as the food arrived. “And the poor tyke has to get used to a whole new school.”

“You ought to see it in the spring,” I said. “My mother isn’t much of a gardener but she plants some shake-and-scatter seeds which grow a mix of long, tangled, old-fashioned flowers that are really beautiful until they wilt...."

In a hot skillet (that same ovenproof one you used for your shepherd's pie) put a little oil and drop in your pork chops so that they sizzle and sear.

Bert ran after Evie, who tried to dash right into the inferno to find Quincehead.

A sudden burst of flames revealed that it was Miss Honeycut, who was being half supported and half pushed through the door by Uncle Jack, who had taken off his asbestos jacket and put it on her.

Uncle Jack looked up from his hospital bed where he was going through a stack of mail I had brought him. He grimaced every time he moved because of the pain in his ribs.

The lunch rush was over and she looked frazzled and exhausted.

“Of course they died, don’t be ridiculous,” said Miss Perfidy. “Too many people indulging you in this notion. That’s the problem.”

She told us that Miss Perfidy had been taken ill in the middle of the night and was up in intensive care and not expected to live much longer.

Intensive care was scary. There were lots of bodies on beds separated only by curtains and everyone was hooked into so many machines. It was quiet except for the raspy sound of respirators.

“Oh, Miss Perfidy,” I whispered to her as I was jostled aside by doctors and nurses trying to jolt her back to life with machines.

We all sat around the kitchen table while Mrs. Witherspoon ate scrambled eggs and reminisced about growing up with Miss Perfidy and Evie worked on her macrame and drank tea and Bert and I, I have to admit, pretty much just sat there.

The week before Christmas, Uncle Jack got out of the hospital and he and I took long therapeutic walks on the beach.

Sheriff Peters was ambling by and he bent over and picked up and handed the packages to Miss Honeycut, who was frowning and didn’t even seem to say thank you, and then Miss Bowzer spied us and waved.

So I flew across the sand but as I was running I was thinking that all along I had thought Uncle Jack believed as I did that my parents were still alive because he never ever once contradicted me but now I knew that all along he had been certain they were dead and, as happy as I was to see my parents again, the most prominent emotion I had at that moment was just overwhelming gratitude because he had stood at my side all those months keeping the faith even when he didn’t believe it himself.

My parents ended up in the Comox Hospital because they were emaciated and needed to be checked out.

It was taking on a lot of water from both sides and he was just inflating the dinghy when he spied her.

He managed to finally get my mother on board the dinghy, help her get her raincoat off, which blew over the side, and put her survival suit on her, but she had gotten wet enough that he was worried about hypothermia.

They were disoriented by the storm, so my father wasn’t exactly sure where they were but he knew they couldn’t be that far out of the range of small craft that might sail in close enough to spot them, so they took turns all this time watching.

At first they thought my parents were grizzly bears and motored in to get a closer look and were surprised to see two gaunt, savage-looking people.

I was feeling so grateful that I expansively invited Miss Honeycut to join us that evening at The Girl on the Red Swing.

She jabbered on as usual, but this time I made myself pay attention.

All my life I had wanted to travel but what I discovered that year was that the things that you find out become the places that you go and sometimes you find them out by being jettisoned off alone and other times it is the people who choose to stand by your side who give you the clues.

We all flipped through our menus surreptitiously to see what she had pointed to, while Uncle Jack beamed into his, unaware of us apparently.