The time that she spent hanging out with Tom and Summer Feelin’ was the time that Dory could escape. Tom was distracted and didn’t mind as much if she left when he was busy. Usually she’d go out for coffee with her friends or to her office where she did some part-time bookkeeping for the farm labour pool. Or she’d shop at the Do-It Centre in Whithers for wallpaper and carpets and flooring and cupboard fixtures and curtains. She was re-doing the entire house, one room at a time. It had been twenty-five years since anything had been changed and now suddenly she was attacking every square inch of her house. She was getting rid of everything that was beige, brown, avocado, or moss green (which was everything) and replacing it with light sunny colours or pastels or white.
She had vowed she would not stop until the entire house was done. When she was tearing wallpaper off walls she’d wear an old pair of Tom’s sweatpants, cut off at the bottom or rolled up, and a T-shirt that said SoHo, New York, on it. Tom would take a floor heater and down-filled sleeping bag and the paper or sometimes one of his veterinarian manuals and go and read in the garage while she worked. He hated the noise and mess but he loved Dory, and if Dory wanted to change the house around he wasn’t about to stop her. He’d sit in the garage and wait until he heard the washing machine go on, which meant Dory was washing the sweatpants and SoHo shirt and all the rags and things she used and her work for the day was over.
Often, after Dory had removed the easier sheets of wallpaper and moved on to the next room, Knute would stay behind and finish off the tougher bits, steaming and soaking and, finally, scraping them off. Dory would yell to her from the next room, “Hey, Knutie, do you remember Mr. Pagliotti?” And Knute would say, “Uh, yeah …” just knowing something awful had happened to him because Dory seemed to be in a morbid mood these days and was constantly telling Knute about somebody or other who had died or been diagnosed with terminal cancer or had a leg amputated or lost her baby.
“His grandson found him dead in his car,” she’d holler from the other room, from up on her ladder or stretched out on the floor with a hammer.
“Hmmm …” Knute would say bracing herself.
“Yeah, he and his grandson were taking a look at the field and apparently he had told his grandson that he was a bit tired and he was going to go and have a little nap in the car.”
“Oh oh,” Knute would say. She knew what was coming.
“The grandson came back to the car, found Mr. Pagliotti, well, you know, his grandpa, and then ran back to the house telling everyone Grandpa won’t get up. He’s sleeping and he won’t get up.”
“Yikes,” was about all that Knute could muster. And she could imagine Dory in the other room sucking in her breath or shaking her head. Knute thought, maybe, that Dory was trying to prepare herself for Tom’s death, for a sudden departure on his part. Or maybe she was trying to make herself feel better. After all, Tom was still alive. Or maybe she could only relate this type of gloomy information when Tom was safely tucked away in the garage. All Knute knew was that the telling of these morbid anecdotes was somehow related to the home renovations. And as soon as she’d positioned herself on the stepladder, holding a steaming kettle in one hand and a scraper in the other, she could expect Dory’s “Hey, Knutie, do you remember so-and-so, something terrible’s happened” stories to come floating over from the other rooms.
So, Knute was working. But then again she wasn’t making any money. Not that she had a lot of expenses. No rent, no food, no utilities. Tom and Dory would never have thought to charge their own daughter room and board. But at her age, she figured, a little contribution to the general management of affairs might be in order.
She wondered just what Hosea Funk would pay her to do. It couldn’t be that complicated being the mayor of a town with fifteen hundred people. Besides, nothing ever really changed in Algren. About the only thing she remembered Dory telling her was that Johnny Dranger’s farm kept being rezoned. One week it would be in the town limits of Algren, the next it was, well, sort of in limbo. Somewhere in the municipality of Libreville, but not actually in any town. Which makes sense, Knute thought. What’s a farm doing in a town? Last time she checked farms were in the country, not next to a 7 Eleven or a credit union. But she didn’t think it was Hosea doing the rezoning anyway because mayors didn’t have that privilege. It was a provincial government thing. She thought.
So after Johnny Dranger’s being in and then out and then in again, the only other change in Algren was the new indoor arena and curling rink. Hosea had battled long and hard to get that built. None of the older people in Algren thought it was a good idea. They had always played hockey outdoors — why shouldn’t their grandchildren? They would have liked to have seen the money spent on another doctor, an English one preferably, though nobody would have said it, or maybe new blacktop on some of the roads. In Algren the oldies lived for new blacktop. But, in the end, Hosea had managed to convince them. He promised that during the summer he would air-condition the indoor arena and curling rink and hold auctions and quilting bees and bake sales and have inspirational speakers and car shows and you name it, he’d get it. So that, in the summer, the seniors of Algren would have a sort of retirement club of their own.
Hosea had also managed to convince the townspeople to name it The Euphemia Funk Memorial Arena, Curling Club, and Recreational Complex. Of course, nobody called it that, they called it the rink, but it had raised a few eyebrows at the time. Mrs. Funk, as the kids of Algren knew her even though she wasn’t married, had this aura of mystery about her. They all found out, at a certain age, that she wasn’t really Hosea’s mom, and different stories about how she got Hosea were always circulating. According to Tom and Dory, the truth was somebody, a man on a horse, had just come along and given him to her, barely a day old. Nobody knew who the man was or where Hosea came from, but Euphemia, from that day on, was Hosea’s unofficial mother. So anyway, it wasn’t like Mrs. Funk, Euphemia, had done anything wrong, it was just considered, by many people in Algren, a bit weird and maybe not entirely healthy for a single unmarried woman to suddenly become a boy’s mother. And many people would have preferred Hosea and the arena committee to come up with a different name for the complex, a name that wouldn’t have them shifting in their chairs, staring at the ceiling, or changing the subject every time one of their kids asked them who Euphemia Funk was.
But that’s what it was called and that was the big news in Algren.
“There it is,” thought Hosea. The scribbler was always there, in fact, in the top drawer of his desk, but Hosea would always repeat these words to himself, not so much as an obvious affirmation of what was there but as a sort of mantra, preparing him for his work, a simple prelude to the more complicated nature of his obsession. The scribbler was an orange Hilroy, the kind still available on dusty drugstore shelves in places like Algren. On the front of it, at the bottom, were spaces to fill in personal information. Hosea had filled in each space. Name: Mayor Funk. Subject: 1500. Classroom No.: Mayor’s office, town of Algren, Canada’s Smallest!
Hosea preferred to take out his scribbler when no one was around. Usually that wasn’t a problem as there were only two very part-time employees working in the place. The old renovated house was a municipal government project. It contained the Mayor’s Office, the Arts Council Office for Algren and the surrounding areas, the Recreation District Office, the Weed Control District, and the Cemetery Board. Two women, sisters, in fact, shuffled around between the various responsibilities. Hosea’s Aunt Minty, Euphemia’s younger sister, used to work in the office, but years ago she and her husband, Bert Seeger, had moved to Fresno, California, and Hosea didn’t hear much from her anymore. She and Bert had come out for Euphemia’s funeral, but most of their time had been taken up with the Seeger in-laws.