of the motorhome where she keeps a folder and returns to the dinette with it. She takes out her notebook, and a bundle of photographs secured with a red ribbon slides out onto the table. She opens the notebook.
Postcards, $18.49, Walnut Crest, $11.95
, are the last entries she’s made. Beneath that she writes,
Clara’s Boutique, $88.87
.
Her eyes stray from the page and come to rest on the bundle of photographs. On top is a picture of her grandmother with Joe’s mother, Verna.
Pals forever
, someone wrote in black ink across the bottom. They pose in front of a café in winter in the small northern town where they grew up. Her grandmother’s hair is curly, like her own, while Verna’s hair is stiff and blunt, cut in a style that makes her look like a sphinx. Her grandmother was already a widow when the picture was taken. She’d been left to raise Laurie’s mother alone before Verna was even married. When Alfred returned home from Japan, he’d come upon Verna and Laurie’s grandmother having a coffee in that same café, and Verna swept him off his feet, according to the story he liked to tell.
Laurie unties the ribbon and shuffles through the pictures, finds the one she’s looking for and cradles it lightly in her long fingers as though it’s brittle and in danger of crumbling. Her mother, Karen Rasmussen. While Lauriedoesn’t often contemplate her future, she does contemplate her past, the young mother she never knew, her sliver of a smile like a new moon suggesting there’s much more to her than what meets the eye. In the photograph she rests a drinking glass on top of her pregnant belly, her long fingers, like Laurie’s fingers, wrapped around it.
It’s the only picture she has of her mother and herself. Verna took it on the veranda steps of the house on Arlington Street, the day Laurie was born. The day her mother, and Verna, also died. In the picture, her teenage mother looks as untroubled and unsubstantial as a paper doll, although only minutes after it was taken she went rushing off toward the river—and Verna went rushing off after her.
All three women are gone now. Laurie’s grandmother, who raised her, struck down by a terrible stroke several years ago while still living in her cramped three-room house in the northern town, collapsed on the kitchen floor. The neighbours found her when Laurie alerted them that she hadn’t answered their usual Sunday afternoon telephone call. Verna drowned trying to rescue Laurie’s mother after she fell from the train trestle bridge.
Fell
, Laurie’s grandmother preferred to say, although it was well known around town that Karen Rasmussen had got herself pregnant, been sent to a girls’ home in Winnipeg where she threw herself off a bridge. On the twenty-seventh day of July, 1967. The year Trudeau proclaimed the government had no business being in the bedrooms of the nation, people still thought they had the right to know the business of pregnant unmarried women.
The newspaper account of Laurie’s rescue is near the bottom of the stack of photographs. She unfolds it andbegins to read, although she knows by heart how the class of graduating nurses were having their picture taken on the lawn of the Misericordia Hospital when they heard her crying. They followed the sound down to the riverbank and saw her mother lying on the small island. Soon after Laurie was rescued by the river patrol who found her cradled between her dead mother’s legs. The island she was born on, and where her mother bled to death, is within walking distance from Arlington Street, and when seen from the height and distance of the train trestle bridge, it looks no larger than a doormat.
Her hands tremble when she folds the clipping, gathers the photographs, her meagre history, and binds them once again with the red ribbon. Such a small bundle of pictures culled from the albums days before they left Winnipeg. She gave the albums to her friend Sandra, for safekeeping. Albums filled with
Postcards, $18.49, Walnut Crest, $11.95
, are the last entries she’s made. Beneath that she writes,
Clara’s Boutique, $88.87
.
Her eyes stray from the page and come to rest on the bundle of photographs. On top is a picture of her grandmother with Joe’s mother, Verna.
Pals forever
, someone wrote in black ink across the bottom. They pose in front of a café in winter in the small northern town where they grew up. Her grandmother’s hair is curly, like her own, while Verna’s hair is stiff and blunt, cut in a style that makes her look like a sphinx. Her grandmother was already a widow when the picture was taken. She’d been left to raise Laurie’s mother alone before Verna was even married. When Alfred returned home from Japan, he’d come upon Verna and Laurie’s grandmother having a coffee in that same café, and Verna swept him off his feet, according to the story he liked to tell.
Laurie unties the ribbon and shuffles through the pictures, finds the one she’s looking for and cradles it lightly in her long fingers as though it’s brittle and in danger of crumbling. Her mother, Karen Rasmussen. While Lauriedoesn’t often contemplate her future, she does contemplate her past, the young mother she never knew, her sliver of a smile like a new moon suggesting there’s much more to her than what meets the eye. In the photograph she rests a drinking glass on top of her pregnant belly, her long fingers, like Laurie’s fingers, wrapped around it.
It’s the only picture she has of her mother and herself. Verna took it on the veranda steps of the house on Arlington Street, the day Laurie was born. The day her mother, and Verna, also died. In the picture, her teenage mother looks as untroubled and unsubstantial as a paper doll, although only minutes after it was taken she went rushing off toward the river—and Verna went rushing off after her.
All three women are gone now. Laurie’s grandmother, who raised her, struck down by a terrible stroke several years ago while still living in her cramped three-room house in the northern town, collapsed on the kitchen floor. The neighbours found her when Laurie alerted them that she hadn’t answered their usual Sunday afternoon telephone call. Verna drowned trying to rescue Laurie’s mother after she fell from the train trestle bridge.
Fell
, Laurie’s grandmother preferred to say, although it was well known around town that Karen Rasmussen had got herself pregnant, been sent to a girls’ home in Winnipeg where she threw herself off a bridge. On the twenty-seventh day of July, 1967. The year Trudeau proclaimed the government had no business being in the bedrooms of the nation, people still thought they had the right to know the business of pregnant unmarried women.
The newspaper account of Laurie’s rescue is near the bottom of the stack of photographs. She unfolds it andbegins to read, although she knows by heart how the class of graduating nurses were having their picture taken on the lawn of the Misericordia Hospital when they heard her crying. They followed the sound down to the riverbank and saw her mother lying on the small island. Soon after Laurie was rescued by the river patrol who found her cradled between her dead mother’s legs. The island she was born on, and where her mother bled to death, is within walking distance from Arlington Street, and when seen from the height and distance of the train trestle bridge, it looks no larger than a doormat.
Her hands tremble when she folds the clipping, gathers the photographs, her meagre history, and binds them once again with the red ribbon. Such a small bundle of pictures culled from the albums days before they left Winnipeg. She gave the albums to her friend Sandra, for safekeeping. Albums filled with
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