The Calling Read Free

over, the pain in her lower back radiating around to her hips. She watched herself in the mirror lean forward to brace herself against the dresser. It

sometimes took up to ten minutes before she could stand upright in the mornings. If it still hurt after fifteen, she took a Percocet, although she tried to save the painkillers until the evening, when it wouldn’t matter if she could think straight or not. She tried to push her pelvis forward, but a bolt of electricity rushed down through her rear end and into the back of her leg. She shook her head at herself, ruefully. “You goddamned old cow.” Her gray hair was standing out on the sides of her head and she leaned across the dresser, separated the comb and brush, and pulled the brush through her hair. Two bobby pins tucked in tight behind her ears would keep it all in place. She ran her hand over her forehead and her hair, and her other hand followed with her cap. She tugged it down. Every morning, this transformation: a sixty-one-year-old divorcée under the covers, a detective inspector with the Ontario Police Services Port Dundas detachment in front of the mirror. She straightened her name tag and pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders, trying to stand tall. Then she took the cap off and shook her hair out. “Christ,” she said. The Percocet was in the top drawer, between the underwear and the bras. She looked at it, respite tucked between underthings, almost erotic, a promise of release. She closed the drawer.
     
    Downstairs, there was an egg-white omelet with a single piece of sprouted whole-grain flax and Kamut toast sitting on a plate. The bread that made this toast was so dangerously high in fiber it had to be kept in the freezer lest it cause bowel movements in passersby. There was a steaming cup of black coffee beside it. “You need a haircut,” her mother said.
    Hazel Micallef took her seat and put her cap down beside the plate. “No one sees my hair.”
    “I see it.”
    “Are you going to eat with me, or are you just going to torment me?”
    “I ate.” Her mother—either Mrs. Micallef or Your Honor to the entire town—was still dressed in her quilted blue-and-pink housedress. She kept her back to Hazel, moving something around in the frying pan. Hazel smelled bacon. “Eat,” said her mother.
    “I’ll wait for the bacon.”
    “No meat for you, my girl. This is for me.”
    Hazel stared down at the anemic omelet on the plate. “This isn’t food for a grown woman, Mother,” she said.
    “Protein. And fiber. That’s your breakfast. Eat it.” She stared at her daughter until she picked up a fork. “How’s your back?”
    “The usual.”
    “Every morning your back tells you to start eating right. You should listen.”
    Her mother had been back in the house for almost three years. After Hazel’s divorce from Andrew, she had taken her mother out of The Poplars and brought her home. She’d never cared for that place, and having her “underfoot” (as Hazel put it to her, to get the old goat’s goat) provided them both with company. Her mother was the sort of elderly lady that younger people called “spry,” but to Hazel, Emily Micallef was a force of nature, and not to be trifled with. She had seen her mother, on more than one occasion, react to an offer of help—to carry a bag, to cross a street—with a tart “Piss off, I’m not crippled,” followed by a semi-lunatic smile. She was the only woman Hazel had ever met who loved being old. At sixty-one, Hazel herself was not entirely enamored of old age, but at eighty-seven, her mother was in her element. Thin and rangy, with skinny red-mottled arms, and long blue-and-red-veined fingers, her mother sometimes seemed a clever old rat.

Her eyes, still clear but rimmed with faint pink lids, were vigilant: She missed nothing. In her younger years, before she entered civic politics, she and Hazel’s father had owned Port Dundas’s largest clothing store, Micallef’s. It was legend