serial fiction

Delroy and the Cheese — Part Sixteen

The passeggiata proves problematic

This is the sixteenth chapter of an 18 chapter series about life in a Canadian tree-planting camp. If you’re new, you may want to start at the beginning or go to the complete list of Delroy and the Cheese chapters.

Later that evening we put on our new duds and walked over to the pizza place. I was tempted to wear the disco boots, but sanity prevailed and I went for a navy blue suit with black shoes. The girls looked fabulous in their new dresses. Maeve met us along the way. She had changed clothes and was now wearing a pair of tan slacks and a sport coat over a white blouse.

We split into two groups. Andrea and I darted around the other side of the pizza place while Maeve and Susan strolled along in front of it. As soon as we had raced around the corner, Andrea and I slowed down and sauntered toward them from the other direction. We met just in front of Mario’s.

“Good evening,” I said and bent forward in a slight bow. “How are you ladies this evening?”

“Fine and dandy,” said Susan. “We are just out taking the air, don’t you know?” She twirled the parasol resting on her shoulder.

“What a lovely evening it is,” said Maeve.

“Yes, isn’t it,” said Andrea. “Absolutely delightful. I hope to see you again soon.”

And with that, we all continued on our way. We circled around the pizza place and met up with each other again after a few minutes. This time, after chatting for a bit, we headed off as a foursome. I really hoped that Mario had spotted us.

Apparently, he had because when we came by the pizza place again, he came outside and waved at us. We walked over to him.

“Buongiorno,” I said, or at least something like it.

“Buono sera,” he replied. “You are all looking very fine. What are you up to.”

“Why, thank you,” said Andrea. “We are just out enjoying the night air.” She tipped her hat towards him.

“It’s a passeggiata,” said Susan. She did a little hop of excitement.

Mario shook his head. “I’m sorry, principessa. You have a good heart, but you can’t fake a passeggiata. It is more than players walking back and forth on a stage. It comes about because people genuinely want to stroll along the piazza and talk to each other. Not because a few friends want to cheer up an old man. And here… Here there is no piazza.” He gestured at the road in front of us. “There is just a road and not a very pretty road at that.”

Andrea had been holding the bouquet of fake flowers in front of her like a bride. She now let them drop by her side.

“But we bought all these clothes,” said Susan.

“And you look bellissima,” said Mario. “That, alone, has cheered my heart, but I fear this is not the town and not the road for a passeggiata.” He gestured at one of the tables and pulled a chair out for Susan. “But, please. Sit. I will make you a pizza.”

Susan sat down and the rest of us joined her at the table. “Damn,” said Susan. “I really thought we had this nailed, but if anything he seems a little sadder.”

“It was still fun,” said Andrea. “Maybe if we convinced more people to join us.”

“I don’t think that will do it,” said Maeve. “I think it has to be organic. Something that sticks. There needs to be a reason for people to come out here rather than you just pulling them out of their shop.” She stared out at the vacant lot across the road. “It’s too bad it’s not a little prettier.”

After we finished the pizza, Maeve headed for home and we went back to the motel. Andrea and Susan slept in one bed and I slept in the other. There was a bright moon that night and we had gone to bed without closing the curtains. At some point, I woke up and found myself watching Andrea as she slept. She was over on the other bed lying on her side with the covers scrunched up under her chin. I was on my side facing her across the gap between the two beds. She woke up and saw me watching her and smiled. She stretched out a hand across the space between the beds and lazily twiddled her fingers in the air. I reached out and we held hands briefly before she drifted off to sleep again and her hand dropped from mine.

In the morning, neither of us made any mention of what had happened and I wasn’t entirely sure it really had. Was it a dream? Was it real? I was too embarrassed to ask. Sometimes I have dreams I’m convinced are real but then, after a moment’s reflection, I realize they couldn’t possibly have been.

I once had a dream where I was sure someone had replaced my tent with a little wooden shed. They had done this as a mean-spirited prank, knowing that it had a leaky roof and a big hole in the floor above a pit of snakes. I spent my entire breakfast thinking about how to deal with this.

“I can deal with this,” I thought to myself. I’ll turn it around somehow. I‘ll put a tarp over the roof. And I’ll cover the hole in the floor with some branches and bits of cardboard. That should deal with the snake pit. And maybe I could put in an airtight stove. And, anyway, the leaks and the snakes were a small price to pay for the big four-poster bed that had come with the shack.

It was at that point that I realized I may not have quite been dealing with reality. The wooden shack was conceivable. It’s possible someone might have run across an old abandoned trapper’s shed and put it where my tent was. But a four-poster bed draped in velvet was just a step too far outside of the realm of the possible.

We were in a bit of limbo until we officially heard from Griff that we were out of a job. After getting some breakfast, we decided to go to the charity shop and check in on Maeve. When we got there, it was closed and there was no sign of her. Not having much else to do, we wandered over to Mario’s, and there she was. Well, she wasn’t at Mario’s exactly. She was across the street in the vacant lot picking up litter.

“Hey there,” Andrea asked. “What are you up to?”

She picked up a piece of litter and added it to the half-full garbage bag beside her. “Well, I got to thinking last night, that maybe what Mario’s missing, what this town is missing, is not so much the people, but the prettiness. And I got to thinking about this empty lot and the fact that no one has done anything with it for years. And that made me angry for a minute until I realized I was one of those people that had never done anything with it either. So I decided to change that and do something. Want to help?”

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t think we need to tackle the whole lot,” said Maeve. “Not right away, anyhow. But I thought if we could tidy up a nice strip along the sidewalk, maybe find some flowers or something, it would at least be a nicer view for Mario when he looked out his window. “

“Great idea.”

The lot was mostly tall grass and random weeds. Maeve had brought some gardening tools with her. I took a shovel out of the back of her truck and started turning over the dirt and ripping up weeds where she’d already cleaned up the litter. There were four worn-out tires that someone had dumped in the lot. Andrea and Susan half-buried these in the ground alongside the sidewalk and filled them with dirt.

“Now we just need some flowers,” said Maeve.

Andrea had an idea where we could get some. “We passed an old cut block on the way into town that was filled with fireweed. We could try transplanting some of those.”

“Good idea,” said Maeve.

We jumped in her truck and Andrea directed us to the cutblock she was thinking of. We dug up some fireweed and some other wildflowers that we found nearby and raced back to the empty lot. We planted them in the tires and watered them. I wasn’t sure they were really going to make it. They didn’t look like the happiest flowers in the world, but they would at least add a bit of color for a few minutes, maybe even hours. And, who knows, they might survive.

Mario came out to talk to us as we finished planting the flowers.

“What is this?”

“You were right about it there being no reason for anyone to come out here,” said Maeve. “It’s an ugly stretch of road. I thought we could brighten it up a little.”

“We’re good at planting things,” said Susan.

“You didn’t need to do this,” said Mario. “If anyone should have done it, it should have been me.”

Maeve laughed. “Well, why didn’t you, then?”

Mario didn’t have an answer to that. Personally, I was willing to cut him some slack. The guy was a million years old, after all, and had a pizza joint to run.

Next Chapter…

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