Lost Purse
by Sue Murtagh
Theresa misplaces her phone every single day. Ditto her car keys. But after the regular panic and flurry, running around like an idiot upstairs and down, dialing the phone from the landline, checking yesterday's pockets, she always finds what she's looking for. The wasted time sticks around, though. Makes her late for work. Or for visiting hours at the hospital. Or errands for her mother.
On Tuesday, she had a miracle half hour to herself so she walked around the Halifax Commons after her ICU visit. When she got back to the car, there was a ticket on her windshield and, oh yes, keys locked in the trunk. She was forced to walk back to the hospital and ask her oldest sister, Peggy, to use her CAA membership to send help. Then she had to wait by the car in sub-freezing temperatures for 45 minutes until the tow truck guy arrived with his wedge and the fancy coat hanger. Took him less than a minute to open everything back up.
Last month Theresa lost her Visa card, and then the replacement was hacked by someone who spent $193 online buying shoes before her $3000 credit limit was hit. Stray five-dollar bills appear in her jacket pocket but cash she swears was in her wallet evaporates. Also missing: two earrings, a hairbrush that could use a cleaning, and her work lunch bag. Her 2012 Fiesta has a two-foot scratch (deep, almost a dent) on the right side, and a gouge on the bumper from hitting the same concrete parking post two days in a row. She missed three chiropractic appointments and her left shoulder is coiled into her neck, which presses like a jagged rock against her skull. Turned up for a haircut at the right time, wrong day.
Sitting in the Fiesta in front of her mother’s apartment building, Theresa realises two things. First, she cannot recall the drive. Travelled 80 kilometres an hour down the Dunbrack connector, and unaware of it. She has no memory at all of a thing that happened thirty seconds ago.
Second, no purse. No purse.
It is a purple Roots crossbody bag that her three sisters chipped in for. A quality item, they point out. They aren’t the shy types. One of them told her “it was expensive, even on sale.”
“At that price it should include a wallet of cash,” their mother said. “Theresa you take good care of it.”
She had the bag not five minutes ago, but situations turn in an instant. You have something, then it boom vanishes. Gone.
She remembers flying into the Spryfield Sobeys to buy canned tomato soup, evaporated milk, Metamucil, and Red Rose teabags. At the cash register, Theresa held up the line because she couldn’t find her Air Miles card. Then had to dig around for the car keys. Maybe she put the purse on her shoulder. Maybe into the cart with the plastic grocery bags (her cloth bags are in a dirty pile in the trunk of the scarred Fiesta). But then what? She has no idea.
Theresa drives back to Sobeys. But she has no memory of where she parked the first time, so she cruises the lot. People pull into parking spaces and pull out, they jockey carts over the icy pavement, prepare to buy what they need. Families. Stuffing their trunks with chicken and eggs and frozen chunks of potato. Other lives continue, she thinks.
After her third circuit of the lot, Theresa begins to understand this is futile. She gets out of the car and stops a buggy boy.
“Have you seen a purple purse? I lost my purse,” she says. The buggy boy’s tiny eyes move down and to the side.
“Nope. Check inside with Customer Service.”
It seems to her that he must be lying. She approaches the store’s automatic doors on this January day with a northwest wind of 60 kilometres an hour. Predicts that Customer Service won’t care either. They’ve seen it all. The misplaced receipts, the spoiled milk, the rejected credit cards. We all have troubles.
***
Theresa has a key to her mother’s apartment but buzzes anyway, and is surprised by Peggy’s voice crackling on the intercom. When she gets upstairs, she finds her sister on the couch, folding their mother’s socks and underwear, still warm from the dryer. Making herself at home and making herself useful. Peggy explains their mother wanted to be on the move, already drove to the hospital by herself and insisted that she wait for her sister.
“Jesus, I’m only fifteen minutes late,” says Theresa as she drops the grocery bags on the kitchen counter.
“You know how she is,” says Peggy.
She doesn’t want to tell Peggy about the missing bag but she has to. No surprise that her sister quizzes her about what is in the purse. Wallet, credit card. Maybe health insurance, a few points cards. Peggy immediately wants to write a list.
“You need to organize yourself Theresa. Think.”
But Theresa can’t be precise about the purse contents without a side-trip home to check which cards are in her dresser drawer.
“Right, okay, let’s go do that,” says Peggy.
“No time,” says Theresa. “We’re already late.”
“He’s not awake, Tree. There’s no rush.”
“But I think he can hear us,” says Theresa, curled up in her heavy coat on her mother’s soft couch with a plastic container of the slightly burned ginger cookies a neighbour delivered the day before. Peggy takes a handful of cookies and shoves Theresa’s legs aside to fit into leftover sofa space, putting her sock feet up on Mom’s coffee table.
“Tree, at least cancel your credit card,” Peggy says after a few minutes.
“No, not now. Later.”
After her fifth cookie, Theresa thinks: pictures. Our Christmas pictures are on that phone. She should have backed them up. She meant to back them up but didn’t. Told her kids no don’t do it for me, I will do it myself. She really meant to. Theresa tries hard to remember exactly what will be lost. Hundreds of images embedded in four inches of plastic and metal and she can’t bring to mind a single one.
“We should call Mom,” she says. Neither sister moves until the Northern Cardinal on the Audubon wall clock chirps three o’clock. Theresa uses the land line to phone the hospital. She tells their mom they’re running late and about the lost purse.
“How much money was in it?” her mother asks.
“None,” says Theresa.
“No money? Tree, you need money,” says her mother.
“No cash, mom. It’s all the other things, replacing all of the other things,” Theresa says before passing the phone to Peggy.
***
When they get to the hospital, Theresa and Peggy see their middle sisters—the away sisters—for the first time. One just flew in from Mississauga and the other drove from Moncton, with a stop at the airport. The away sisters brought tea and muffins.
An ICU nurse invites them to a private waiting room. Their family name is typed in capital letters on a piece of paper eased into a metal slot on the door. It is a small kindness. Families granted a private room will only need it for a few days. Then a nurse will remove the old piece of paper and slide in a new one with another family’s name.
Theresa’s mother updates the newcomers after they settle in. “Theresa lost her purse.”
Everyone is retired except Theresa. The Moncton sister asks her how she’s managing with work. Will these missing days make it harder to get hired on full-time at the call centre?
“I’m on vacation,” Theresa lies. She is a part-time employee, still on probation, so she has no vacation days.
***
In the hospital waiting room, drinking lukewarm tea, they tell stories, sharing favourite scenes like movie reviewers. Peggy brings up the time Theresa hit her head on a patch of schoolyard ice and went missing for two hours.
“You were right out of it,” says one of the middle sisters, and the others laugh but Mom doesn’t.
***
Theresa thinks of the snow boots they all wore. The stench they gave off. Clodhoppers with the hand-me-down sweat of her siblings and a half dozen Maritime winters. By the time she got them, no grip at all.
Remembers fishing the boots from a jumble of rubber and fake fur by the radiator. They were meant to fit over her despised black oxfords. The frustration of squeezing leather shoes into damp galoshes that buckle at the ankle.
Late, always running late. Then clomping into the battleship grey of a Halifax February.
Pixie face and pixie hair framed by a K-mart pom-pom hat, she joins a band of the similarly heavy-footed and they all thump past Peggy in the alley, who is shivering in a poncho and passing a cigarette to a pale Jesus called Donny. Past the corner store that takes her allowance on Saturday mornings. Over and through snowbanks, to a red-brick prison named after a saint.
Mid-morning—a brief liberation—heavy wooden doors push open into salt air. She leaves her sweater, mitts and hat in the cloak room.
Theresa sails across sheets of dull diamond. The fastest in the schoolyard, boys included. Then a tumble up and back. Horizontal now, on a patch of hardened soil. Still and silent. A rush of colour comes into focus: blue white sky, a wildfire of hair, green eyes more curious than concerned. She closes her eyes against the light, but itchy wool fingers brush her cheeks to interrupt. The faces are closer. A brittle ache sets in as the buzzer orders their return. The crowd scatters back to the classroom.
All except Theresa, who just wants to go home.
She loses herself on the winter sidewalks of the neighbourhood. Snow begins to fall. She must be close to home but the clouds in her head block the way, so she keeps walking. Wanting to be home because she knows he is home, back from crawling into boilers and turbines in Cape Breton and New Brunswick. She’s grown used to the schedule, takes both his absences and his presence for granted. He doesn’t wear a suit and work in an office. He doesn’t work in a factory either but he knows how to fix things.
Maybe a half hour later, a plainclothes nun looks across a sea of navy tunics and yellowing blouses and notices an empty desk. She finally calls Theresa’s mom.
“Imagine that. And you missing since recess,” her mother says, now wedged between the two away sisters on the waiting room couch. “That woman was useless. Useless as the day is long.”
The February snow that Theresa wandered in that day was not the stuff of fairy tales. The snowbanks that lined the streets were hard and sooty. She paused to lean on a blackened pile. Leotards drooping and jacket hanging open, bare hands pressed against needles of ice. Nausea—up came breakfast. Fragments of raisins and Cheerios, toast with strawberry jam on the dirty snow, on her cold fingers.
“You puked your guts out,” says Peggy, breaking the last chocolate chip muffin in half.
This is where the Chevy Impala found her, six blocks from the school. He wore his brown tweed fedora, no mitts on his massive hands as he scooped up Theresa with a speed that dizzied her dizzy head and she felt for a split second the roughness of his unshaven cheek as he held her tight and then it seemed she was thrown across the bench seat at the back of the car. Time slowed again. The motor ran but the car stood still. She saw her father’s blue eyes in the rearview, looking back at her.
“Little Tree. Sweet Jesus,” he said.
Theresa twisted to look back. Snow fell. A weightless camouflage to cover her humiliation. Gentle and careful, it blanketed the debris. In the car, the dry heat blasted and the wipers began their rhythm. The warmth and the swishing back and forth. She faded away. He always kept that car so hot.
Back in the hospital waiting room, her feet sweat in her fleece-lined Sorels.
“Yup,” she tells her sisters and her mother. "I was right out of it."
***
Peggy’s phone rings. The purse has reappeared. The call is from a woman named Beverly who found it, and thanks to decent phone hacking skills, called her big sister’s number.
“It’s a miracle,” says their mother. “It’s a blessing. You see?”
Instead of passing the phone, Peggy takes down the details. She doesn’t ask the questions Theresa would have asked. Annoying. Their mother tells them to get going for God’s sake. Nothing will happen while they are gone.
Peggy drives. The lady lives close to where they grew up, off the Herring Cove Road. It is a subdivision carved out of a gravel quarry where Theresa and her sisters used to smoke and drink before school dances. The city made a land swap with a developer and now there are $850,000 homes and a new walking trail. The houses are each different but all the same.
“Christ, imagine the property taxes,” says Peggy as they pull into the driveway.
When Beverly opens the door, Theresa recognizes her. This Beverly, who now goes by Beverly Holmes, used to be Bev Murphy. They hung out a bit in high school. Bev Murphy made out with just about anybody who muckled onto her at a dance. Beverly Holmes wears Lululemon and has a dream kitchen that smells like home-made beef stew and hot biscuits. She doesn’t recognize Theresa until Theresa says Tree MacDonald.
“Oh Tree, my god,” she says and invites them to sit at her kitchen island. They leave their boots on a rubber mat at the front door but keep their coats on. Beverly tells how she found the purse in a dirty pile of snow next to the Sobeys parking lot. How she was leaving the grocery store when she spotted it by the exit near the gas station next door. It was the colour that caught her eye. Something didn’t look right so she stopped her SUV to check it out.
“Seemed like it was nothing,” she says. “But I picked it up and looked inside, and thought, this woman must be worried sick. Just worried sick.”
The good news is that nothing is missing, but as she rummages through the bag, Theresa wonders what Bev/Beverly who lives in this house with the cobbled walkway and the symmetrical shrubs thinks of the inside of Tree/Theresa’s purse. The fabric lining has grimy edges and pen marks; wrinkled grocery receipts, balled-up tissues, earbuds with tangled wires. Her call centre swipe card.
“The cap was missing from your hand cream, so I put it in a baggie. But there was no money when I found it. Looks like whoever stole your purse just wanted the cash and chucked the rest,” says Beverly.
“Well, it’s only money,” says Theresa.
“Well, la-di-da,” says her sister. “How big of you.” Beverly laughs.
They should leave. Theresa ignores her sister’s dirty look and takes in the kitchen’s neutral toned paint, ivory cupboards, granite countertops and stainless steel appliances.
“The things we got up to in high school,” Theresa says.
“That time your father chased Billy up the street with a baseball bat. Running after that poor bastard in pyjama pants and rubber boots,” says Beverly.
Bev, with an epic blonde perm and three coats of black mascara, was there that night in grade ten when a half dozen of them were kicked out of a dance after Billy McKenna spewed up lemon gin on the vice principal. Somehow, they ended up at Tree’s place. They could sneak through the back door and into the basement. There was an old couch and a few chairs down there, and a ping-pong table. She must have thought it was a good idea.
Her father sat at the kitchen table eating a slice of cold Kraft pizza, drinking Ten-Penny from the bottle. Doing the crossword in an undershirt and baggy pyjama pants. Waiting up on a sticky June night, the screen on the back door letting in a slight breeze.
Billy was the first one in. Tree behind him, head spinning from Blueberry Mist chugged on the way home, arms around his waist, her hands tucked into the front pockets of his hockey jacket. Attached.
He pushed open the screen door, turned his head and then body to kiss her. Open-mouthed, lots of tongue. Tree tasted the gin vomit in his spit. Bev and the others pushed and crowded from behind, shouting and laughing.
“Holy shit,” said Billy as he saw her father get up from the kitchen table to come after them. Sliding bare feet into dirty boots. Grabbing a bat they kept at the back door.
***
Beverly asks how their parents are doing. Are they keeping well? Peggy explains what’s going on, and then Beverly insists on giving them homemade tea biscuits and a container of the stew bubbling on the stove. When they try to refuse she won’t hear of it and fills a Tupperware with stew and a freezer bag with biscuits.
“Your mother always sent me home with something,” she says.
At the door, Theresa notices there is a For Sale sign on the front lawn, whipped back and forth by the north wind. How did she miss that on the way in?
“Are you guys moving, Bev?”
“I guess so but no idea where or when. My husband hooked up with some girl. Now I have this shit to deal with.”
Peggy does that thing Theresa can’t stand—the sympathy head tilt.
Beverly shrugs and hands over the food. “Mortgaged up the wazoo. He can’t afford to keep it. Me neither.”
***
After five minutes, the car is hot—almost unbearable. Peggy likes to crank the fan. It is dark and seems very late, but it’s just past six. They really should check in with their mother and sisters but they’ll be there soon enough. They can’t change anything that might happen in the meantime.
Theresa holds her purse close. They will never learn how it ended up in the gas station snowbank. She’ll shine up the scratches with a special leather cream she bought.
Rush hour but they’re driving against the traffic on the Herring Cove Road. Cars approach in a steady stream. People fight to get home through a winter night that has only just begun. The car reaches the rotary that leads back to the peninsula of Halifax. The flow of this endless circle changes depending on the time of day. They wait and watch for an opening.
“Rubber boots and a baseball bat.” Peggy breathes the words, lifting her shoulders and rolling them backwards in the heavy parka she wears.
Theresa turns down the fan so she can hear herself think. She looks at the waves of headlights. “Yelling ‘you keep running, you son of a bitch. Just keep running’,” she says.
The oncoming glare is blurry and distorted. There’s a split-second lull in the circle of vehicles. This is when you’re supposed to make a move. Peggy guns it and their car slips into a lane between two SUVs. They make it around to the other side. A few more miles, a few more intersections and they’ll be back at the hospital.
“Biscuit?” says Peggy.
“They’re still warm,” says Theresa and opens the Ziploc bag.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Sue Murtagh lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She won the short fiction category of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia’s (WFNS) writing competition in 2016. In 2020, she apprenticed with Alexander MacLeod through the WFNS Alistair MacLeod mentorship program. Her writing recently appeared in The Nashwaak Review and Grain Magazine. Sue is working on a creative writing diploma at the Humber School for Writers and is being mentored by Danila Botha.