The Agony of Bun O'Keefe

by Heather T. Smith

  We sat on opposite ends of the couch. Busker Boy stood in the doorway.

  “Do you two want to be left alone?” he asked.

  We answered no at the exact same time.

  Then we said nothing. For a whole load of Mississippis.

  “Your father wants to take you out,” said Busker Boy.

  And then I knew what he meant, about me being too abrupt. It didn’t feel nice to be jolted by words.

  “You don’t have to,” said the man with the red beard.

  I looked at Busker Boy. “Can I?”

  “It’s okay with me.”

  “Should I?”

  “That’s up to you, Nishim.”

  I stood up. “Okay. I’ll go.”

  My father stood up too, jingled his keys in his pocket. “Only if you’re sure.”

  I hugged Busker Boy tight. “I’ll be back,” I whispered.

  “I know,” he said. Then he spoke to my dad in a voice that rumbled through his chest. “Two. Hours.”

  We drove away in a white convertible with shiny, red seats.

  “Is this new?” I asked.

  “Nope, 1974. I just take really good care of it. It’s my pride and joy.”

  As soon as he said it, his face went funny. He opened his mouth but then closed it again.

  When we hit the highway I wished I’d asked for a braid. I had to shout over the wind. “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To get you a new pair of glasses.”

  Another jolt. This time in my eyes. The wind would help hide the tears.

  “Your friend, he said he’d wanted to take you for ages. Didn’t have the money though.”

  I ran my hand along the smooth upholstery. “He takes good care of me,” I said.

  “Yes. I can see that.”

  We pulled off the highway. At a red light he pressed a button and the top went up. It got so quiet I could hear him swallow.

  We drove up to a small building with an RX on the door.

  “The optometrist’s office is above the pharmacy,” he said.

  “RX comes from a Latin word meaning ‘take,’ ” I said. “As in, take your medicine.”

  The way he looked at me, it was like I was speaking another language.

  My seatbelt got stuck. His hand came close, to help.

  “I can do it.”

  He pulled his hand back and said he was sorry.

  Then he added, “For everything.”

  I pushed my thumb firmly on the button. When the buckle was freed I looked up and said, “Where were you?”

  He looked away. “I went back to Nova Scotia.”

  “Back?”

  “That’s where your mother and I were from.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Newfoundland was supposed to be our fresh start. I thought country living would help, you know, with the shopping. But she still found a way to fill the house with junk. I couldn’t take it,” he said. “I had to get away. That place, I couldn’t breathe.”

  “Maybe you have asthma,” I said. “That’s what I have. I figured it was environmental, you know, ’cause of the dirt and the mold and the dust, but maybe I got it from you ’cause asthma is hereditary too.”

  He turned back to face me with watery eyes.

  “What did you do,” I asked, “in Nova Scotia?”

  “I started over. From scratch.”

  Erased, I thought. Like a drawing. And I was a tiny speck of rubber that he blew off the page.

  “We could have started over together,” I said.

  He put his face in his hands and sobbed.

  Above the glove compartment there was a brown panel, trimmed in silver, and on it there were raised silver letters. I traced them with my finger. M-U-S-T-A-N-G. I traced them over and over till he stopped crying.

  He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and cleared his throat. “When I moved to Halifax,” he said, “I remarried.”

  “You did?”

  “I have a little girl now. Samantha. She’s five.”

  Samantha. A good name to say out loud if you haven’t used your voice in a while. Samantha. SA-man-tha. Sa-MAN-tha.

  “Did you ever come back?” I asked. “To check on me?”

  “I called until the number was disconnected. She said you were fine.”

  Fine.

  “Does Samantha go to school?” I asked.

  He looked at me funny. “Yes. She’s in kindergarten.”

  “How nice for her,” I said.

  I didn’t mean to sound mad. Or maybe I did.

  “Your mother said she was homeschooling you.”

  “My mother barely talked to me.”

  “I thought you’d be okay.”

  “I suppose I was. I mean, what’s the definition of okay? Satisfactory? I didn’t die or anything. And it could have been worse. Look at Anne Frank.”

  “Look, Bun, I’m sorry. I really am. It’s just, when I left, I didn’t have a plan. I thought you’d be better off—”

  I opened the car door. “Whatever. Just get me some glasses and we’ll call it quits.”

  My legs were like jelly as I walked to the building. Call it quits? Who was I and what the bleep was I saying?

  He waited outside while the doctor tested my eyes. After, when I was choosing new glasses, the assistant kept saying, “What do you think, Dad?” and he flinched each time, like he’d stuck a knife in the toaster.

  The frames were called tortoiseshell but they reminded me more of my kitten, the one with the brownish-gold fur that got killed by a barbell.

  Back in the car he said, “I’d like to take you to Dairy Queen,” and I said, “How wonderful, I haven’t been there since I was five.”

  We brought our chocolate-dipped cones to a picnic table.

  “There’s more I need to say,” he said.

  I wondered how often he took Samantha for ice cream.

  “Then say it,” I said. My voice was horrible and nasty, and I actually started to wonder if I was possessed.

  I took a lick of my cone.

  “This tastes awful.”

  I dropped it on the ground.

  He looked like he might cry again. And I had no Mustang to trace.

  He stood up and walked slowly to a trash can. He tossed in his cone and paused.

  Hurry the hell up.

  I don’t have all day.

  Come back and say what you have to say, you mother-bleeper.

  I was possessed.

  By memories.

  Memories of a life without him.

  He sat back down, cleared his throat. “The police had a hard time locating me once your mother died. Otherwise I would have come for you straight away.”

  And what? Taken me to live with Samantha?

  Hi. I’m Bernice O’Keefe from Halifax, Nova Scotia. I live with my father in a clean, tidy house. I go to school and have lots of friends. My father, he takes great care of me. I have a sister. She might have freckles too, but I’m not sure ’cause I’ve never bleepin’ met her.

  He picked paint flecks off the picnic table with his fingernail.

  “I was confused,” he said. “When they called, they made no mention of you.”

  “That’s ’cause I didn’t exist,” I said. “She told everyone I was with you.”

  “Still. Surely someone would have seen you when they went to collect the body.”

  “I wasn’t even there when she died,” I said. “I’d already left ’cause she said, ‘Go on! Get out!’ ”

  “But I didn’t know that, did I? As far as I knew you were still there. I kept picturing you, alone in that house.”

  I was always alone in that house.

  “My head was spinning. I had so many questions. Were you with her when she died? Were you scared?” His voice got thinner and thinner, like he was running out of air. “Were you all alone with a dead body, not knowing what to do?” His sandy colored eyelashes, usually barely there, were dark with dampness. And then he said something th
at gave me a pang.

  “My baby girl,” he said, his eyes scanning the whole of my face. “My poor baby girl.”

  The pang reminded me I was human so I reached out my hand.

  He looked at it, but his own didn’t budge.

  “Relax,” I whispered.

  His big, freckly fingers wrapped around mine.

  “I wasn’t sure what to do,” he said. “If I told the police, they’d take you into care. They wouldn’t give you to me, not after I’d abandoned you once before, not after I left you with her, in that house. So I took off to find you myself. I drove for two days. I thought about you the whole time. And when I got to the house and saw you—oh God, Bun—I was so, so relieved.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything? When you saw me?”

  He shrugged. “I was in shock, I guess. I needed time, to think about what to do with you.”

  “Do with me?”

  “Well, I can’t leave you here alone, can I?”

  “I’m not alone,” I said. “I have friends.”

  He rubbed his thumbs along my fingers. “You’re thirteen years old.”

  I pulled my hand away. “Fourteen.”

  “Either way you’re a minor.”

  “So?”

  “You need to go to school, lead a normal life.”

  “You suddenly care about me leading a normal life?”

  “I’m worried about your future.”

  “I have a future. I’m going to study hard and someday I’m going to knock the whole world dead.”

  “I’m sorry, Bun. You can’t stay here. Not with a bunch of twenty-year-olds.”

  “Then why did you say you’d pay our rent?”

  “I need time, to go back to Halifax, to sort a few things out.”

  A lightbulb went on in my head. “They don’t know about me, do they?”

  “I didn’t want to complicate things.”

  “So why start now?”

  “Things have changed.”

  “They won’t like me, you know.”

  “They’ll learn to.”

  “They’ll look at me funny, just like you do.”

  He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

  “I won’t fit in and you know it.”

  I gave him time to disagree.

  I knew he wouldn’t.

  “If you take me away,” I said, “you’ll ruin both our lives. I’ve never asked you for anything. I just want this one thing. I want to stay.”

  He looked at me, all over my face, back and forth and all around.

  “Those people you live with,” he said. “They treat you good?”

  “Yes. They filled up my insides. They peeled back my layers and taught me how to feel. They told me stories and called me ‘my ducky.’ They fed me till my pants got tight. They laughed at jokes I never made. They said, ‘I like you, Bun O’Keefe,’ and helped me breathe again.”

  My words were his escape route.

  “You’re going to be fine, aren’t you?”

  I gave him the answer he wanted to hear. Luckily, it was the truth.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll miss you, Bun.”

  In a weird way, I knew that was the truth too.

  He took my hand.

  “I’m going to be checking up on you, you know. Phone calls. Pop visits.”

  He liked wearing his Dad hat. Too bad it didn’t fit him right.

  “I’ll pay for the house, as long as you need it. Food, clothes, whatever. All you have to do is ask.”

  I didn’t want to talk anymore. “Can I have another chocolate-dipped cone?”

  He told me about Samantha while we ate. She had lots of friends and a great sense of humor. It gave me this weird feeling. Like I was shrinking.

  He pointed at his watch. “We’d better go or I’ll be in big trouble.” And then he imitated Busker Boy’s chest-rumbling voice. “Two. Hours.”

  I said, “You’d better watch out. He almost killed a man once.” And then I added, “Just kidding,” in case he believed me.

  On the way home I sang the song he used to sing about love being strange. I said, “It’s okay that you quit; I forgive you.”

  “Bun, I—”

  “She would have quit, too, if she could have. ’Cause I’m a strange alien being. But she didn’t have a chance ’cause you left first.”

  He took his eyes off the road, just for a second, to look at me. “Is that what she made you think? That I left because of you?”

  “She told me I was retarded.”

  His gripped the wheel. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t believe her.”

  He glanced at me again. “I left because of her, not you. I can promise you that.”

  I wondered if he was faithful, like Horton.

  When we pulled up to the house, with its gables and moldings and fancy trim, he said, “You look real smart in those glasses, Bunny,” and I said, “Thanks, thanks a lot.” Then I shut the door of his pride and joy and ran inside to my constant.

  —

  He was relaxing on the couch, reading, but when I squeezed in next to him I could feel the thump of his heart.

  He laid his book on his chest. “Well?”

  “I felt like I was shrinking at one point.”

  He turned on his side to make room. “Shrinking?”

  “Yeah. But I’m back to normal now.”

  “So everything’s okay?”

  “Yes. Everything’s really clear now.”

  “I like them a lot,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Your glasses.”

  I reached up and touched the kitten-fur frames. “He said they make me look smart.”

  “You are smart.”

  “I have lots to tell you. But not now, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I closed my eyes and listened to his breathing, waiting for the spark to burst.

  —

  I crouched near the stream collecting stones.

  Busker Boy played his guitar. He stared into the distance, and I wondered if he was thinking about going back to his community, and I wondered, too, if white people could live there ’cause I knew he wouldn’t go there without me.

  I had three stones in my hand. One for Busker Boy, one for Big Eyes and one for Chef. A shiny stone glistened from under the water. I lost my balance reaching for it.

  “Be careful,” said Busker Boy. “That water is cold.”

  I caught myself and said, “I’m all right don’t worry about me, don’t worry. I’m all right,” and he smiled ’cause we’d watched Jimmy Quinlan together and he knew I was doing Arthur O’Malley.

  He sang a song about dreams coming true if you want them to. I liked that.

  We stayed for ages and when it got dark we walked back through the trees. It was a damp and dirty spring but I could see a silver lining—everything was melting and soon there’d be color all around us. I showed him the stone I’d chosen for him. I said, “It’d be heart-shaped if it weren’t for this dent in the bottom.” He reached out, ran his finger along the edge. “It’s perfect.”

  The brown grass crunched under our feet and it was like the beat for our walk and when the ground beneath us became a tangle of overgrown shrubbery and fallen branches Busker Boy said, “Take my hand, Nishim.”

  So I did.

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to my agent, Amy Tompkins, for embracing this story, and to my editor, Lynne Missen, for strengthening it. Thanks also to the Ontario Arts Council for their generous funding; to Duncan and Rosie for their generous feedback; and to John W. Smith for his belief in me as a writer. To April, although you are too young to read Bun’s story, your blind admiration keeps me motivated. Finally, special thanks to Innu artist Mary Ann Penashue for her steadfast support of this work. In the immortal words of Bun O’Keefe, “Thank you, thanks a lot, wow, thanks.”

  Heather T. Smith, The Agony of Bun O'Keefe