Wendall lifts the phone from Ruby’s lap by the tripod to hang it up. He sits up, sliding his feet into his slippers, while carefully turning the device around in his hands, looking for an off button. He randomly taps the screen with the pad of his thumb, the way he has observed people more technologically savvy than himself doing.
“What are you doing?” Ruby asks, pushing the quilt down, ready to follow Wendall around the bedroom. “Leave it alone, Wendall.”
Handling the phone like a monkey with a gun, Wendall murmurs, “Just hanging it up.”
“You don’t have to hang it up. Dylan hung it up already. Just leave it!” Frustration rises in her voice.
“It looks like it’s still on… ah-ha! There you go. It’s off.” Wendall sets the phone on Ruby’s dresser and steps away. It stares back at them blankly, an inscrutable black expression on its face.
“Dylan said to leave it on.” She flops back against the headboard and covers her eyes with her hands.
“It’s on. When it rings, we’ll just pick it up, or answer or… there’s a button…” Wendall turns the phone around, exploring its smooth edges for an on/off switch.
“If it’s turned off, it won’t ring. We won’t even know they’re calling.” Panic overtakes the frustration in Ruby’s voice, and she slaps her hands down on the bed beside her hips. “Jake said plug it in when the battery gets low. That’s it! Otherwise, leave it alone.” Her eyes glass over with tears. Her tears have as much to do with the call ending as they do with the possibility of missing the next one. Whenever Ruby says goodbye to one of their children, and especially to their granddaughters—in person or by phone— her love for them invariably spills out of her eyes.
Wendall, as always, is highly motivated by her tears. “Hang on, hang on, I’ll put it back.” Another thumb roll on the screen, and he finds a little picture of an f. He presses down on it hard, and another screen opens. He sees a video camera with the word Live beside it and pushes it. A new screen pops up, displaying the bedroom behind him. Wendall lifts the phone over his head by its tripod, like the Olympic torch, and declares, “We have contact, Houston!”
He repositions the tripod on Ruby’s cluttered dresser so she can see her tiny self on the screen, assured that all is well and at the ready. He checks, nudges, and lines it up for the next call. Ruby expects it could come at any moment. That’s the difference between hope and optimism, Wendall thinks.
Optimism is a considered opinion based on tangible evidence: The doctor is optimistic about a full recovery because the patient’s steady improvement points to a positive outcome. Hope, on the other hand, is confidence without regard to the evidence: We hope it’s not too late to stop the climate crisis. Ruby is not always optimistic, but she is fiercely hopeful. Lately, Wendall finds himself feeling neither hopeful nor optimistic about anything.
He grunts and shimmies back up onto the bed and under the covers. Not that he expects to sleep. His nights are more like long, dark tunnels of wakeful dreaming, punctuated with existential angst over the meaning of his life, and worries about whether or not he remembered to pull the garage door closed. He can go check that the garage door is closed to bears, but has failed to arrive at any conclusions regarding the meaning of his life.
Ruby drops off like a stone. All she needs to do is position a pillow between her knees to reduce pressure on her clicky hip, and she’s gone. Wendall shuts off his bedside lamp, settles onto his back and stretches his arm out above Ruby’s pillow. Ruby scooches over to rest her head on his shoulder, as they have done nearly every night for fifty years. He folds his arm down along her back and rests his hand on her hip. They fit together like two old trees planted close as saplings that have intertwined with age.
“I miss them,” Ruby whispers.
“Me too.”
“They’re taking the girls off to Japan.” Ruby sniffs in the dark. “We’ll be alone on the continent.”
Their daughter, Meadow, and her girlfriend, Paige, are volunteering at the Women’s Shelter in Cusco, Peru. The girls are four months in and have not said anything about an expected date of return to Canada.
Conscious of their carbon footprint, Wendall and Ruby are determined to travel by air only when necessary. Driving to Vancouver, or Peru for that matter, is out of the question. Ruby’s hip couldn’t handle that much sitting.
It has been at least eight months—Ruby could probably tell Wendall how many days—since they last visited Amanda and Millie. Flying out felt absolutely necessary. They could hear on the telephone how quickly the girls were growing up.
In August, Meadow and Paige drove their vintage Westfalia north to Twenty-Six Mile House for a three-week visit before pointing the VW bus south toward Peru. Wendall starts counting backward in his head but gives up before sorting out how many months ago that was. Three or four, at least.
“Maybe we need to move,” he offers. Twenty-Six Mile House, its population hovering around one thousand, is situated just south of the Trans-Canada Highway on the top of Lake Superior, in the middle of nowhere. For an airport, shoes, or an echocardiogram, they drive to Thunder Bay, four hours to the west on roads that are snow-covered and treacherous half of the year. It’s twelve hours to Toronto, east then south. They’re getting too old for that.
Relocating is a regular topic of conversation for Ruby and Wendall. A conversation that eventually circles around and ends up back in Twenty-Six Mile House.
“Where would we go?” Ruby asks, her head resting on Wendall’s chest. This is the question that starts their elimination of options. Wendall has begun to think that the “where to go” conversation is like counting sheep for Ruby.
She was the youngest sibling and the only sister of three brothers. They grew up on the family’s mixed-crop farm, just outside of Leamington in Southwestern Ontario. Her ancestors farmed that land for four generations. Ruby was named not for the precious gem but for a variety of tomatoes: Ruby Red. Her brothers called her Cherry because she was so small. In the end, an agribusiness ketchup outfit bought their land and all the farms around theirs. Ruby’s only surviving brother lives in Clearwater, Florida. His Christmas cards always include an invitation to visit him and his second wife in the Sunshine State, but Wendall and Ruby can’t imagine living in the same state as Donald Trump.
As for Wendall’s family, he shook their proverbial dust from his sandals—their money, their white-privileged ersatz-conservative politics, and the Vietnam War—on his eighteenth birthday. He fled to Toronto, where he and Ruby met in Yorkville at a church basement coffee house. Now, New Hampshire seems like a recurring nightmare he had as a child. Toronto has changed, and is no longer the place he remembers falling in love. Ruby lightly drums her fingers on Wendall’s chest. Her knees are bent, pressed up against his thigh. Her breathing slows, and she drifts off into her first sleep of the night. She wakes fifteen minutes later.
Wendall kisses her lips. “I love you. Sweet dreams.” “Sweet dreams.” Ruby’s words overlap his. She kisses him. Even when they are irritated with one another, they are faithful to their bedtime routine. When at odds, the ritual is more perfunctory but never entirely neglected. Wendall stretches out his arm so Ruby can roll over onto her good hip. He follows her and aligns his body against her back. He wraps an arm around her. He kisses the back of her neck above her cotton nightgown. They have spooned like this, like slow dancing, every night as far back as he can remember. Their bodies have grown softer with age and fit together more easily.
Ruby begins to snore. Softly at first. Over the years, she has become a veritable orchestra of snoring, a sound as somniferous as melatonin for Wendall. Her snoring may not put him to sleep, but it does put him at ease.
He carefully frees his arm, rolls onto his back, and pulls a sleep mask over his eyes. He is willing to try anything that improves his odds of sleep. He pulls the quilt up to his neck and begins to count his blessings. Occasionally, gratitude, combined with Ruby’s snoring, helps him solve the puzzle of sleep. His mind settles. If sleep eludes him, stillness is the consolation prize he has learned to appreciate.
The phone, perched on its tripod on Ruby’s dresser, glows like a wide-eyed owl. Its light blends with the moonlight sneaking into the house around the edges of the blinds, like a thief in the night. This ominous illumination bathes Wendall and Ruby in an unnatural shade of blue.
Excerpt from the novel The Upending of Wendall Forbes (Latitude 46, 2025)
David Giuliano is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction. His first novel, The Undertaking of Billy Buffone (2021), was awarded the 2022 Bressani Prize for fiction. His collection of short stories, Postcards from the Valley, was a Canadian bestseller. David lives on the north shore of Lake Superior.
Photo: © Ecophoto | Dreamstime
