At the hotel the mining company had started to hire. Men the locals did not recognize caused resentment when they stood in a line that stretched the length of the corridor and slithered down the stairs, each man waiting his turn to step up to the desk and state his occupation – electrician, carpenter, welder, pipe-fitter, labourer. Miners would not be needed for a long time yet. On site a chain-link fence was being raised around the property, an army of men were throwing up temporary offices, warehouses, bunkhouses, cook shacks, tool sheds. To make themselves heard above the roar of graders, Euclids, and bulldozers which wheeled and plunged and bucked all over the grounds, everyone shouted.
The people of Connaught stood by like witnesses to a catastrophic accident. In the blink of an eye, everything had changed and they weren’t sure how it had happened. On the east side of town a disorganized, ramshackle trailer court had sprung up, by day populated with frowsy women screeching at slummy kids, and by night the scene of all-night drinking parties from which husbands stumbled out in the morning, bound for work. There were rumours that there was another kind of woman out in the trailer court, the kind that lived by herself and entertained men at any hour.
On the west side of town a different kind of development was taking place. It was marked by newly excavated basements surrounded by heaps of earth and the skeletal frames of the split levels the Americans were building to house their families. Rumours mushroomed like the houses themselves. The town was making a fortune selling lots to the Yankees at inflated prices, so much money there would be a moratorium on taxes next year. You wait and see, others said, the taxes we’ll all be paying when we start laying water and sewer lines for the Americans and building them their hardtop roads. This was the viewpoint which suited the old-timers – that the mine meant nothing but heartbreak and disappointment. Wasn’t the school board already worrying where they were going to put all those unplanned-for kids when classes started in the fall? Some said there was no avoiding it, a school would have to be built next year. Then taxes would go through the roof. And prices were going up in the grocery store, going up everywhere you looked. There was too much drinking and fighting and general carrying on, nobody could deny that either. These newcomers were a bad lot and their kids were worse, shifty-eyed little buggers you couldn’t trust as far as you could pitch one of them. Wait and see what Hallowe’en is like this year. Wait and see. Your eyes’ll pop.
The feeling took root in the ordinary citizen that whatever benefits this hullabaloo brought weren’t worth it. Vera did not share this opinion. To her, life seemed to have made an unexpected detour through Connaught, stirring it up, waking it up. The sudden flush of raw, uncouth energy, the jump and bustle, the easy come and easy go of it, reminded Vera of what it had been like during the war.
It didn’t hurt either that her business had taken another upswing, nearly doubling, with the start of mine operations. A sudden flood of men, many of them single, meant she could barely meet the demand for meals. There might be cook shacks out on the mine site but when the day shift ended the first thing on every man’s mind was to drive into town for a couple of cool ones. Usually they didn’t bother to return to camp for supper. “Let’s eat at Vera’s,” someone would suggest, and it was decided. Besides, if they remained in town for their meal they could get back to the beer parlour with scarcely an interruption.
Circumstances had reversed themselves. Now it was her father’s restaurant which was the second choice and received the overflow, not The Bluebird. Men were willing to wait for a place at Vera’s. Vera had Mr. Stutz hammer together a long sturdy bench which she set outside, against the front wall of her cafe. There her customers could wait in comparative comfort when the weather was fine. Townspeople strolling by during the supper hour never counted fewer than ten men sitting there side by side, waiting their turn and considering what it would be tonight – a half-chicken crisp and golden and savoury, a T-bone smothered in buttered mushrooms, a thick slab of pink roast beef, or maybe Vera’s pork chops and sauerkraut. Then dessert. Deep-dish apple pie, hot, with two scoops of ice cream melting into the pastry. Or a maple walnut sundae. They would sit, dog-tired, smoking cigarettes and drinking the complimentary coffee which Daniel brought out to them, the evening sun spreading its still bronze light over them so that it would have been easy to mistake them for statues representing some quiet virtue such as patience or fortitude.
Inside, however, it was bedlam itself. Vera had installed a juke box, and if the men weren’t feeding it quarters she’d toss in a few herself, just to keep the mood cheerful. She’d also taken on another cook so that no matter how busy it got she could always take a few minutes to have a word with her patrons. Floury-armed and red-faced, the Queen of the Portuguese went on her walkabouts, distributing the regal smile and nod, chaffing this one, dropping a joke here, exhibiting the common touch. The men loved it.
“Hi, good-looking. What’s cooking?”
“Not your supper, John. You talk to me that way yours goes on the back burner.”
“Hey, Vera, Tony wants a date!”
“So does his wife. They ought to get together.”
Roars of laughter, forks ringing on water-glasses in applause, and Vera would glide through the swinging doors of the kitchen, buoyant on a wave of popularity.
“That Vera, isn’t she something?” they’d declare, shaking their heads.
For the first time in a good many years Vera was inclined to agree with them. Yes, she was something. Damn right she was. People were beginning to sit up and take notice. “That one is a goer,” Connaught’s old-timers would say. Even her father couldn’t overlook her now. She couldn’t suppress a small smile of triumph when Mr. Stutz reported that Alec had crossed out the prices of all the meals on the hotel menu and reduced them all by twenty-five cents. When she learned that, Vera also crossed out her prices, but instead of cutting them, she increased them all by a dime. It wasn’t greed which prompted this; she merely wanted to demonstrate that the success of The Bluebird had nothing to do with cheapness, nothing to do with money was at the heart of it.
The daily take continued to grow. Working seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, there was little opportunity to spend her money. The best she could manage were daydreams while rolling piecrust or scraping carrots, daydreams of the things she could afford to buy herself now: tailored suits, a good cloth coat, smart wool skirts. Clothes that didn’t go in and out of fashion on a whim, clothes that bespoke quality. Katharine Hepburn clothes. It was good enough to know that she could have them if she wanted them; the money would stay in the bank, earning interest for the day Daniel would need it.
Vera had made a strange discovery. Money was like a telescope, extending the range of vision. In the bad old days, when she had been a checkout girl in the supermarket, Vera had seldom allowed herself to look beyond payday, the end of the month, further than thirty-one days. There seemed no point to it. Now things were different. Letting her imagination run free she could see him through six or seven years of university, or however long was required to make him something really fine, a doctor or a lawyer perhaps. Contemplating that made clothes unnecessary. Anticipation was sweeter than any showy glad rags, so were feelings of sacrifice. She thought of how proud Stanley would be – of her, of their son.