Don’t mention Toad, Clemence telepaths to her sister, who must get the message because her words trail off. Good. Clemence doesn’t want their mother to ask if she’s been in touch with Toad yet, and she’s actually glad she hasn’t been, because doesn’t that prove that Clemence left him behind months and miles ago? That shehasmoved on? Why must she be getting boned in order for everyone to see that? Especially when she has so much else to show for how far she’s come since then?
In the kitchen, Allison is assembling a seven-layer cakemade of rainbow stripes, scraping off the icing on the side in a deconstructed style.
“Now that’s different,” says Bonnie under her breath, which is what she always says when anybody varies from the motherhood practices she set in stone in the late 1980s. Bonnie’s fancy birthday cakes were those with coins wrapped in wax paper baked inside. She’d had to stop when it was one of Prudence’s kids’ birthdays and somebody swallowed a dime.
And because Juniper and Jarvis are twins, there are actually two seven-layer rainbow cakes, lit with sparklers, and Clemence is called up to carry the other one outside. Holding the cake out beyond her so the sparkler doesn’t spark in her face, or set her hair on fire, but the cake is heavy and awkward, and she doesn’t want to drop it, and how does anybody manage to hold it all and not get burned?
Nineteen
The bookstore window gets smashed sometime during the night on Sunday, which Crampton discovers in the morning. Nothing appears stolen, though it would be hard to tell. Piles of paperbacks stacked up against the pane are now spilled out onto the sidewalk, surrounded by shattered glass that glistens in the sun like diamonds. Whoever did it did it for the impact, for the sound and the fury, but things are quiet now as Clemence comes around the corner to pitch in with the cleanup. Pedestrians do delicate sidesteps around the mess. Crampton hands Clemence a broom, and she starts to sweep, Crampton picking up the books, returning them the same piles they’d been stacked in for decades.
She needs to open the grocery store and while the bookstore doesn’t open until noon, she asks Clemence to wait around anyway for Tom to arrive and put up plywood in the window until the new pane can beinstalled. Tom is Crampton’s handyman—she uses him for everything. Not because his work is good, but because he’s never put his rates up in the half century he’s been working for her. Crampton is not rattled by the destruction of the window—these things happen. Alifetime on the block, she says, has taught her that much.
And so Clemence continues the cleanup, discreetly disposing of books so overtaken by mould they’re no longer saleable, and scooping out a few more volumes for the jumble sale, which is coming up fast. She’s created a Facebook event, but the only people who’versvp’d are her family, determined to support her, even though she’s told them they don’t have to. What Clemence needs is to drum up local hype—she’s been contacting vendors from the artisan market to see if they might want to buy tables. Afew sellers of succulents and a potter or two would offer a whole different vibe to the jumble sale, plus that woman selling tiny pots of local honey from the hives she keeps on the roof of the Montessori school. Jillian’s friend Sarah has promised to promote it both in her newsletter and in the community newspaper she writes for, happy to pay Clemence back for all the clicks her profile’s outrage generated. Naomi has offered her own marketing expertise, pro bono, and if the Facebook event doesn’t pick up steam, Clemence will probably take her up on that. There’s a poster up in the bookstore by the door, but since nobody goes into the bookstore, it’s mostly symbolic.
Tom the handyman arrives, sauntering in with a hammer hanging from the loop on the back of his denim overalls. Clemence wonders how he drives his truck likethat, if he has to sit on the hammer, and if that’s awkward, but everything is awkward with Tom, and the hammer is the least of it. Tom is impossibly slow. Slow to move, to process, to get to the end of a sentence. He’ll look at a thing and say, “Well, now …” Until you think you’ve lost him, but then he’ll say another couple of words before he trails off again. It’s fortunate his rates are low, because if he billed by the hour, Crampton would be paying him forever. Clemence watches Tom cut what’s left of the glass from the frame, and then amble over to his truck to see if he has a piece of plywood that will fit.
It takes all morning. Clemence goes inside, clearing off the chair near the door and getting comfortable there. She picks up a sun-damaged novel calledFamily Happiness, which turns out to be a collection of short stories about a woman having an affair. Not what she’d expected with a title like that, and Clemence checks to make sure that the main character doesn’t lie down on train tracks at the end, which seems the common fate for wives who commit adultery.
But no: (spoiler alert) the adulteress doesn’t die. She doesn’t even get found out or in trouble, and she loves her husband, and she loves her children, and there’s just this other facet of her life that is a retreat from all the rest of it and which she requires in order to be her truest self. An indulgent fantasy, this book is, and Clemence adores it, reading it cover to cover before Tom has finally bumbled around enough to be finished with his work, the plywood panel making the bookstore even darker than usual. Clemence has to use her phone light to read by.
As the church bells are ringing twelve, Toby arrives. expecting neither Clemence nor the damage.
“Crampton called me,” she explains. Crampton hadn’t called Toby because Toby doesn’t have a phone. And this is what Clemence has been waiting for as she’s been reading, anticipating this moment, her first encounter with Toby since what happened in the closet. From where she’s sitting in the chair, Toby looks imposing, his face all in shadows. She can’t read his expression, but she wants to. She rises to meet him, to tell him, “There is something Ineed to ask you about.” And this time she’s the one who so easily leads them to the small room under the stairs, where everything gets lost in darkness and you have to feel your way.
At the church,thejumble is overflowing, and there’s scarcely enough space for the latest box Clemence brings from the bookstore. All she can do is pile it on top of another box and hope the tower doesn’t topple. Reverend Michelle is there scoping out the scene, looking concerned. The jumble sale absolutely has to be a success, and not just to feed the hungry and to raise the roof, but because if it isn’t, the church will be left with the further problem of what to do with all this stuff.
“Although to be fair,” Reverend Michelle admits, “we have room to store it. We have rooms upon rooms. So much space, but that’s not much good without a roof above it.” The parishioners who’d spent the twentieth century growing the building had never envisioneda time when resources at St. Saviour’s would be this scarce.
Clemence tells her about her social media plans and connections with vendors from the artisan market. Jumble sales, she explains, have retro charm, but they’re also very much of the moment in terms of the economy, the environment, and the public appetite for all things vintage. There are vendors at the artisan market who make their living selling jumble. “The key is curation,” she says, and tries not to think about the shoebox full of headless Barbies somebody donated, and the plastic bag stuffed with worn-out slippers with no mates.
All this stuff—it’s overwhelming to behold. If a person was determined, they might unearth a few treasures, but most of it is anything but. Ugly mugs from tourist attractions, and amateur folk art projects. Clemence and Toad used to make regular donations of household junk to second-hand stores, their household seemingly lighter every time they did, but it would never be long before they’d start finding even more things to get rid of. Stuff multiplies. Though they’d never ventured inside any of the stores they’d made the donations to. Toad didn’t like the smell of second-hand, and their townhouse had a distinctly modern aesthetic that made vintage items seem unsuitable. And how the tables have turned, Clemence thinks now, in that—the books from Crampton’s aside—she couldn’t rustle up a second-hand donation if she tried. Instead, she is eyeing the stock for things she’s in need of—an egg beater among the kitchen stuff whose shine keeps catching her eye.
Mrs. Yeung arrives with her clipboard, ready to officiate. She is fluent inRobert’s Rules of Order, and insists that minutes be taken no matter how informal the meeting. When the rest of the group is present, everyone sips bad coffee from Styrofoam cups, and just before proceedings are about to begin, Clemence’s phone starts to buzz, the buzzing curiously amplified by whatever synthetic material the tabletop is made of. It’s a rude interruption. Nobody else on the committee even has a phone on the table, let alone one impertinent enough to start buzzing before the call to order.
“You want to take that?” Reverend Michelle asks Clemence kindly, ignoring the rest of the committee’s nasty looks.
But Clemence—without even flipping her phone over to see who’s calling—knows she doesn’t, because there is only one person who would be calling, the most dogged human being she’s ever met, and she still doesn’t want to talk to him. She’d come halfway across the continent to escape him. Feeling virtuous, for once, because she has a reasonable excuse to not take the call, which is thatshe happens to be in a meeting. Once she picks up her phone and directs Toad to voicemail—which is already full and she wouldn’t know how to check it even if she wanted to—the meeting can begin.
Last spring’s jumble sale, the treasurer reports, brought in a grand profit of seventy-five dollars, and Clemence wonders if they ought to do something about their pricing. But that’s not possible, someone else explains, because they’d had signs specially done up and laminated withthe prices displayed, and it would mean the signs were out of date.
“Committees are exhausting,” Clemence says to Mrs. Yeung on their walk home together.
Mrs. Yeung murmurs her agreement. “People are an interesting project, though,” she says, “and that’s why Ikeep going.” She turns to Clemence with a mischievous grin. “You know today Charles is coming downtown?”
And then she rushes ahead, Clemence trying to keep up, which means she can’t possibly play it cool as she asks, “But how would Iknow that? Ihaven’t talked to Charles.” She couldn’t have. They never exchanged numbers, which only seemed strange until she’d learned about his wife.
Mrs. Yeung says, “Oh sure.” Dismissively. “You don’t even think of Charles, right?” Is she winking? She’s a remarkably awful woman to be the mother of such a nice guy. “He’s donating jumble. He said he didn’t have anything and then Itold him you’d joined the committee, and Iguess he changed his mind.” What even was this?
“Iguess he’ll be bringing his wife.” Clemence would like to meet her, for real. To see Superwoman in person.
“Who knows?” shrugs Mrs. Yeung. They’d finally reached their front door. “She’s very busy.”
“She’s a doctor,” Clemence adds.
“You know her?”
“You told me.”
