Chapter Seven
The house was quiet…
The house was quiet as she worked. The TV in the next room was turned down low, with Jon Schneider’s voice bringing a small grin to her face as she listened with half an ear.
“And now your moment of Zen…”
After the usual temper-tantrum, Ashley was asleep in her room, snuggled close under multiple blankets, hugging her bear Muggles tight to her chest. Jason was down in the basement, where they’d built a room for him shortly after moving in. There was a tall, built-in wardrobe, a bookcase and a big Canadian flag pinned to the ceiling for an entrarnce, substituting for permanent walls and doors. All his games were three or four years old, and he had been complaining a little bit, and dropping broad hints all over the place with Christmas so near. She wondered what she was going to do with Mom gone and Dad in the old age home. They had been generous to a fault, but Dad’s retirement income was sucked up by the need to pay for his maintenance.
It was a two-bedroom house, the rent all she could afford after Don’s death and her own layoff from the early childhood education centre where she had worked, that is, until the closing of the mill pretty much shut the whole town down. With no jobs, a lot of parents were keeping the kids at home, despite the current theory that kids needed lots of stimulation and good socialization skills at an early age to cope with the modern world. Layoffs, mortgage payments, and short-duration employment benefits at only fifty-five percent of wages had a logic all their own.
Her home only had four rooms, plus a small bathroom with a tub but no shower.
The living room was fairly large, and the old-fashioned eat-in kitchen was huge. Except for the kitchen, which had a murky old linoleum, once-patterned but now very worn floor, there were hardwood floors throughout, albeit kind of scratched up in the front hallway from a lot of traffic. The house had been built by the original owners in 1934.
She sat at the kitchen table, wishing the overhead pair of fluorescent bulbs threw more light, but the landlord had never upgraded to a multiple-bulb chandelier. Going through the stack of bills tended to confirm the worst. Many were not paid, or she had been making partial payments to prevent the utilities from cutting them off entirely. Janet still owed a hundred dollars from last month’s rent. Even with the thermostat turned down, and trying to instill pretty tough discipline into Jason about the need to keep doors closed and the lights turned off when you left a room, it was a tough go. At first, her friends were pretty good about showing up from time to time with surplus produce from their home garden plots, or fresh milk they had bought on sale, the lie apparent to them all even as they spoke.
Even that had dried up when the mill shut down. They had to think of their own families first. Jason was asking when he could get on the internet.
Without help from the Salvation Army Food Bank, and the Inn of the Good Shepherd, they wouldn’t have made it this far. The gas bill was the worst. The attic had a heavy layer of blown-in insulation dating back to government programs in the 1970’s, and the refinished basement had some kind of insulation in behind the wood paneling.
She had the distinct impression that there was little or no insulation in the ground floor walls. The furnace was converted over from oil in the early ‘70’s. It made the term high-efficiency a bit of a joke, or something to envy. The walls were always cold. And now the damned truck was acting up. Janet had managed to save a little over a hundred dollars for Christmas, and she just didn’t know what to do. Jason needed a new winter coat, and her credit card balance was creeping up, with the possibility of paying it off looking more and more unlikely every day.
Ashley needed boots, and some new slacks, even stretch pants for the mini-athlete would suffice.
“Oh, Don.”
She felt a kind of resentment for her deceased lover from time to time, irrational as that might be. Up until now, she had completely forgotten the tall, handsome stranger who helped them with the truck that morning. It was like something out of one of the cheap romance novels she bought at the used book store. It was one of the few little things she ever did for herself.
Janet hadn’t bought a new bra or a pair of shoes in several years. Lately she had been washing her hair with dish soap in an effort to put a few more pennies away. It was pretty demoralizing. Janet had once been a beautiful woman, a girl, really. It seemed like such ages ago. When she looked in the mirror these days all she saw was worry—and horrible, nagging guilt at her inadequacy.
She wondered with an aching heart just how much longer she could go on.
She should have at least asked his name. The idea of inviting him over to dinner just made her feel bad. All she would have to put in front of him would be Kraft Dinner and hot dogs, stale bread instead of buns. Janet realized with a shock that she had indeed been beautiful, once. She could look back on her callow youth with objectivity…now.
It was a nice fantasy.
Janet Herbert sat at the kitchen table and wept over the unpaid bills, praying that Jason wouldn’t come up the stairs right now to go to the bathroom.
From the living room came Stephen Colbert’s voice.
“Look who’s not praising me now.”
She had to smile a little bit in spite of herself. Getting up, she went in to the other room and snapped off the set. Tonight it just wasn’t helping.
END
Images. Louis Shalako.
Louis has many books and stories available from Amazon. You can see some of his art here. He’s also on Artpal.
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