Welcome to The Spot Writers. The current prompt is a story about a character who
finds an object that had been lost.
This week’s story comes from Phil Yeats. Phil (using
his Alan Kemister pen name) recently published his first novel. A
Body in the Sacristy, the first in the Barrettsport Mysteries series of soft-boiled police detective
stories set in an imaginary Nova Scotia coastal community is available on
Amazon.
***
Good
Deed, Bad Consequences
By
Phil Yeats
On my way
home from work, I strolled as usual through the Halifax Public Gardens. I
needed those minutes of quiet contemplation to recover from the daily stress of
my job in the nearby hospital’s pathology lab. My job wasn’t overly complex,
and my efforts had my bosses’ approval and my colleagues’ respect. But it
required a level of interpersonal communication I found difficult.
On that particular
day, I noticed something blue as I watched squirrels foraging for food. I
reached down and recovered a wallet, a woman’s judging from the colour, from
the grass. It contained money, credit cards, driving license and other
identification, so not something dropped by a thief.
The owner, a
middle-aged woman named Meredith McCall, lived a few blocks away. I plugged her
address into Google maps, established my route, and set off.
Minutes
later, I rang the bell at Ms. McCall’s Edwardian townhouse. A young woman in her
early twenties responded.
I held out
the wallet. “Found this in the Public Gardens. It belongs to Meredith McCall
and gives this address.”
She turned
and yelled into the house. “Aunt Merry, someone to see you.”
An older
woman, the one who stared from the driver’s license, appeared from the far end
of the hallway. I handed her the wallet.
Meredith
McCall flipped it open and glanced at the contents. “What do you want?”
I shrank
backward. “Nothing. I found this and I’m trying to return it.”
“Thank you,” she
said before striding back into the house.
The younger
woman stared in disbelief as I shrugged my shoulders and turned toward the
street. “Wait,” she yelled, hopping down the steps as she tried to don a pair
of sandals. “I’m sure she didn’t mean to be so unfriendly. She just not merry
like her name implies.”
I laughed. “Oh,
Merry with an echo and two romeos, not Mary with an alpha.”
“Yeah, Merry,
short for Meredith.” She pointed at a street-corner coffee shop. “Here, let me
buy you a coffee.”
She grabbed my
hand and dragged me toward the café. In the ubiquitous Tim Hortons Donut shop, she
ordered, with minimal input from me, two coffees and a box of six assorted
donuts. As we sipped coffees, and I nibbled a donut I really didn’t want, she
chatted away with barely a break for breath. My input was limited to short
answers to direct questions and intermittent grunts of encouragement. Half an
hour later, she collected the remaining donuts, said a cheerful goodbye, and
sauntered from the shop oblivious to the fact she left me in emotional turmoil.
She was one
of the boisterous self-confident people I admired from afar a few years earlier
when I was a student. I’d learned to avoid the highly sociable pack animals
whose lives tended to subsume those of their less outgoing compatriots.
I’d watched
the campus dynamic from the sidelines without participating in any meaningful
way. After graduation, I continued to lead a solitary life, interacting with
colleagues and neighbours without establishing serious interpersonal
relationships.
The minutes
spent with Ms. McCall’s niece changed nothing. Nothing she said suggested she
was interested in anything more than the half-hour interlude, but it brought my
choices back into my consciousness. I was happy we’d gone to Tim’s for coffee
rather than a pub for beer because that might have initiated a solitary evening
of beer drinking and unwanted introspection.
I wandered home to a supper of leftovers and an evening in my
studio working on a new painting. Perhaps, I would start a cityscape of
families relaxing in a park or young people cavorting at a beach. The paintings
were therapeutic, allowing me to reconcile my solitary life with the gregarious
lives of those living around me. Ironic, I thought as I applied the first brush
loads of bright paint to the canvas, how my simple attempt to do someone a good
dead had upset my carefully crafted but limited existence.
***
Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/
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