Sunny Days Inside

by Caroline Adderson

  “It’s homework, dude,” Conner said under his breath.

  With a sigh and a shake of his stubble, Dad went outside.

  He was in a better mood when he returned. Conner should have known not to say anything to him before that first smoke.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “Here’s what’s happening. You guys are going to school. Here.” He meant the kitchen table cluttered with breakfast dishes and cereal boxes. Nobody had put the milk back in the fridge. “I’m going to be the teacher. Eden!”

  She came running. He told her what was happening, ordered them to clean up and get their school work together, then poured himself a coffee and went to dress.

  They decided to start with math. “Get the worst thing over with, right?” Dad said.

  Conner printed out Eden’s worksheets and she attacked them. He looked at his own on the screen. It took about ten seconds for him to push the laptop away and cross his arms over his chest.

  “You barely looked at it,” Dad said.

  Dad pulled the computer across the table. They were word problems, which were the hardest because you had to be a good reader as well as good at math. Dad’s eyebrows sank as he read. When you don’t have hair, just stubble from shaving off what hair is left, your eyebrows are more obvious.

  Those eyebrows made it obvious that Dad didn’t understand the questions either.

  He closed the laptop. “You know what always helped me back when I had to suffer through this? Doing real stuff. Stuff that has a point. Not a bunch of abstract questions about people driving from A to B, or buying apples in the store.”

  “Can we go to the grocery store with you?” Eden asked.

  “No. It’s not safe. And you’re in school at the moment, remember? I’m trying to teach you some useful math. Eden, get a roll of toilet paper from the cupboard. Conner, find an empty box.”

  Now Conner was curious. He had a bunch of shoeboxes in the room he shared with Eden, for storing hockey cards and other stuff. He emptied one out and brought it back to the kitchen.

  “Perfect,” Dad said.

  Eden came back with the package of toilet paper. Three rolls left.

  Dad’s useful math activity? Take a roll of toilet paper, tear off two squares, put them in the box, and keep doing it until all the toilet paper is piled in the shoebox. They were supposed to count how many double squares went into the box.

  Halfway through this inconceivably dumb exercise, Conner quit.

  Dad’s eyebrows lowered again, this time with disapproval.

  Conner pointed to the package sitting on the table. “It says right there. Two hundred and forty-two sheets per roll. You just have to divide it by two.”

  “I can’t divide hundreds,” Eden said.

  “Break it down,” Conner told her. He flipped her worksheet over and wrote: 242 = 200+40+2. “If that’s too scary, you can even go smaller.”

  He wrote: 100+100+20+20+1+1.

  Eden’s eyes grew big. It was like a magic trick to her, especially when Conner told her it would be even easier if she made the last zero disappear when she was adding and made it reappear at the end.

  “Is that allowed?” she said.

  “Yeah. Mr. Faizabadi showed us.” Faizabadi was actually a pretty good math teacher. Conner gave him that.

  Dad interrupted. “Do you want to teach this class, Conner? Because if you do, go ahead.”

  He stood up from the table and stalked back out onto the balcony for another smoke.

  •

  At the end of the day, when Mom came home from work, Eden went running to her. “Daddy’s our substitute teacher! We’re doing school at the kitchen table!”

  Mom looked so happy until Eden said, “And Conner got in trouble just like at real school!”

  Conner was lying on the sofa watching skateboard videos on the laptop. He pretended not to see Mom’s disappearing smile. If Conner hadn’t chased it away, the fact that Dad hadn’t cooked dinner would have.

  Dad was in their bedroom. Mom knocked and opened the door. “I thought you were going to cook now that you’re home.”

  From inside, Dad said, “I was teaching the kids.”

  Conner snorted.

  A few minutes later Mom came back, out of her UPS uniform now, and started making dinner herself. She called Conner over.

  “I’m going to show you how to use the rice maker. Things are really busy at work and we could use the overtime pay.”

  “Why can’t Dad do it?” Conner asked. “He’s only teaching us for about an hour.”

  She turned to him and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. She used to kiss the top his head, but he was as tall as her now even though he was only in grade five.

  “I need you to help out and not get on Dad’s nerves. This could be a special time for you two. Okay?”

  Conner nodded. He’d try. He really would.

  •

  The next day Conner realized there was another reason for Dad’s toilet-paper exercise. They were running out. There wasn’t any toilet paper at the store either. Dad had gone into three stores and none of them had TP.

  He said it was called hoarding and that it was stupid because there actually was plenty of toilet paper to go around.

  “I mean, before this virus thing? Did you ever go into a drugstore or supermarket that had no toilet paper?”

  After they finished putting away the groceries, he picked up the shoebox with the toilet paper.

  “This is called rationing. They used to ration everything during the war.”

  “What war?” Conner asked.

  “Can you speak to me in a respectful tone for a change?” Dad snapped.

  Conner winced. He was just asking a simple question! There had been a lot of wars!

  “We’re only going to use two squares of toilet paper at a time,” Dad told Eden.

  “But what about number two?” Eden wailed. “Two squares aren’t enough!”

  “Obviously if two don’t do the job, you can use more. Rationing is to stop you and your mom from using half the roll every time you pee.”

  Conner smirked. Quickly, he straightened his face before Dad noticed.

  Except Dad did see the smirk. This time, instead of snapping, he smirked back. Rationing was for the girls. So Conner and Dad were a team again, with regards to toilet paper, anyway.

  Conner felt good about that — as good as when Mom stroked his cheek. Maybe life wasn’t so different after all.

  If they did run out of toilet paper, though, life would be inconceivable.

  Dad clapped his hands together. “Time for school. I’m just going for a smoke first.”

  He’d only been out on the balcony a couple of minutes when Conner heard him calling.

  “Look,” Dad said, as Conner stepped out. Smoke spurted from his nostrils, dragon-like. What happened to his good mood?

  Two ambulances were parked in front of the hospital across the street, one with the back door open. They must have just brought somebody in.

  Not for the first time, Conner wished they lived on the other side of the building. He felt bad whenever he saw a stretcher lifted out of the ambulance. He didn’t know what to do with the feeling. Usually he went inside and found Eden and sat on her because it was easier to deal with a screaming seven-and-a-half-year-old than to see somebody who might be dying. Who might already be dead.

  But Dad wasn’t talking about the hospital. He pointed to the street below. Conner leaned over the railing and saw the white top of somebody’s head.

  It was Mrs. Watts, who lived on the first floor and gave out the most candy at Hallowe’en. She was fishing in her purse for her keys, a wheeled shopping cart beside her.

  Sticking out the top of it was a 12-roll package of toilet paper.

  “Do the math on that TP,” Dad said.r />
  “For the whole package?” Conner said. “I’d need a calculator.”

  “Eyeballing it, I’d say she — one little old lady who lives all by herself — is hoarding toilet paper at the expense of a family of four. I saw her a couple of days ago with toilet paper, too.”

  “If we run out,” Conner joked, “I know whose door to knock on.”

  “Don’t,” Dad said. “Don’t have anything to do with people like that. Go tell your sister school’s starting.”

  Conner left his father staring down at Mrs. Watts, an ugly lemon-sucking expression on his face.

  •

  In Mr. Faizabadi’s next email he recommended that they all watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on Netflix starting at 1:00. Then it would be like their Last Friday of the Month Movie Club.

  Conner was missing school by then and would have watched, except Dad took the laptop into the bedroom and closed the door. He said he was educating himself on all this “crap” that was coming down.

  Conner was even starting to miss Mr. Faizibadi! Up until the virus, which was officially ruining his life now, he’d thought being a teacher was a wussy kind of job. All you had to do was stand in front of a bunch of kids and tell them stuff you’d learned yourself way back when. If they didn’t listen, you were twice as big. You could just sit on them or something, like Conner did with Eden. How hard could that be?

  But now Conner knew there were actual skills involved.

  One was dressing like a teacher.

  Mr. Faizabadi always wore a shirt and tie. Conner had made a lot of sarcastic comments about his ties even though some of them were pretty cool, like the soccer ball tie and the one with the solar system. One had a twisty ladder on it that Mr. Faizabadi explained was the double-helix of DNA. DNA was the genes you inherit from your parents that made you who you were.

  Unlike Mr. Faizabadi, Dad wore sweatpants and a T-shirt when he taught them. The same sweatpants and T-shirt every day.

  At first Conner was even worse. He didn’t get out of his pajamas the whole day! But then he looked on the school-board website for tips to help Dad with his substitute teaching and read this: Disruptions in routines can be stressful. Keeping to a schedule helps maintain a sense of normalcy and stability. Get your children dressed and ready for school even though they’re at home.

  So Conner started dressing every morning. He brushed his teeth, too. He might have been the only person in the family doing this, other than Mom. As he brushed, he tried to imagine which crazy tie Mr. Faizabadi had on that day. The DNA tie? A few times he thought about emailing and asking him to send out a picture every morning to help with class morale, but Mr. Faizabadi would probably think he was being sarcastic.

  Another teacher skill was patience. Mr. Faizabadi had learned that on the job. At the beginning of the year, he used to send Conner to the office. One day he lost his temper and yelled.

  Later, he apologized, which was weird.

  “I think I’m starting to get you, Conner,” he said.

  After that, whenever Conner was “disruptive,” or about to be, Mr. Faizabadi would saunter past and tap Conner’s desk. For some reason, it always shut him up.

  Dad had about as much patience as he had hair. After the incident with Mrs. Watts, he got frustrated helping Eden with fractions. Instead of trying to explain them a different way, he just explained louder. Conner rolled his eyes, which was when Mr. Faizabadi would have expertly deployed the Tap.

  Dad said, “What’s your problem?”

  Conner pointed at his own homework on the screen. “These problems are my problem, dude.”

  “Yeah? Well, try this one then, Loudboy.”

  Dad grabbed the saltshaker, unscrewed the lid and poured out a pile in the middle of the table. “I want you to count every grain and keep your mouth shut while you do it.”

  “Counting isn’t math for somebody in grade five,” Conner said, to which Dad replied, “How would you like me to pour all that salt down your throat?”

  “Daddy, don’t!” Eden said.

  Conner put his head down and pretended to count. His hands shook, which made separating the grains harder.

  •

  The day after the salt incident, they didn’t have kitchen-table school. Conner got dressed and brushed his teeth for nothing.

  Dad wasn’t like this before — mad all the time. Mostly he was a nice guy. Conner knew he was acting like this because he’d lost his job, because, like the school-board website said, Disruptions in routines can be stressful. And no hockey!

  When there was no normalcy and stability, sometimes it affected a person’s mental health. Conner said jerky things too when he felt stressed, which happened whenever he didn’t understand something they were doing in class. It was like somebody else’s tongue took over his mouth. He felt smart as he was saying the jerky thing, but not when he saw the other person’s face.

  This might have been in his DNA because Dad had the same problem. And not just with Conner.

  The grocery stores decided that old people should be allowed to shop before everybody else because they were more likely to die of the virus. This meant that Mrs. Watts got first crack at the toilet paper at a time when everybody in Conner’s house was starting to worry about wiping with store flyers or leaves off the houseplants.

  Dad was having his first smoke of the day out on the balcony when Mrs. Watts came home from shopping. There probably wasn’t even any toilet paper in her cart. It looked pretty empty.

  Still, the sight of her pulling her cart along set Dad off. He started pelting her with insults.

  Thankfully, it was Mom’s day off because it took both her and Conner to drag Dad back inside. He stormed out of the apartment, though everybody was supposed to stay home. So no school that day either.

  After Dad left, Conner couldn’t stop thinking about Mrs. Watts. He kept picturing her shocked face looking up at them, white and wrinkly like one those crepe paper flowers Conner made in art.

  They worried all day about Dad. Mom tried calling his cell phone. It rang in the bedroom.

  Around suppertime, he finally showed up. Though he didn’t apologize, he brought pizza, which was sort of the same thing. Mom convinced him that he would feel better if he had a shower and changed his clothes before they ate, which was when Conner slipped out.

  He went downstairs and knocked on Mrs. Watts’s door. Her apartment faced the playground, wrapped in yellow tape now. In the summer she always sat on her little patio with her flowers and watched the kids play. She wasn’t officially babysitting. Nobody paid her. But some of the parents in the building let their kids play on their own because they knew Mrs. Watts was close by.

  Standing at her door, Conner felt even more terrible than when he saw her shocked paper-flower face.

  He felt ashamed, for Dad and for himself.

  Finally, he knocked and, after a minute, he heard steps. Then the scrape of the peephole cover.

  “Mrs. Watts? It’s Conner from the third floor,” he began. “I want to apologize for those things my dad said to you this morning. We are in a stressful situation like lots of people. He didn’t mean it. I’m really sorry.”

  He waited for her to say something back, but she didn’t, so he pressed on with the other thing.

  “Mrs. Watts? One of the stressful things is that we only have thirty-four squares of toilet paper left. I know because we’re counting. If you have any extra, could I buy it off you? I have twenty dollars with me and a lot of change.”

  A long pause. The peephole scraped closed.

  Why would she sell him her toilet paper? Dad had yelled horrible things at her loud enough for the whole neighborhood to hear. Conner didn’t blame her one bit.

  He was already walking away when he heard the chain rattle. Mrs. Watts’s door opened and a jumbo package of toilet paper slid through th
e gap. The door closed again.

  He ran over, babbling, “Thank you, thank you, thank you! How much —”

  “No charge,” he heard.

  When he got back to the apartment, he didn’t say anything about scoring the TP. He was afraid it would set Dad off again. He just left a roll on the back of the toilet and put the rest in the cupboard.

  They had a pretty normal supper after that. “Before normal.” Not “now normal.”

  It scared Conner to think that the “now normal” might become just “normal.”

  While they ate, they talked about how lucky they were. Mom was still working. They had an affordable place to live even though it was a bit cramped. They were healthy and if anything did happen, there was a good hospital right across the street.

  After dinner, Mom suggested playing UNO, which kept Dad away from the news. The rising number of cases stressed him out even more. So did the wails of the ambulances on the news reports mixing with the real ambulances outside.

  If there had been hockey, they could have watched that instead.

  •

  Conner was waking up early now. He didn’t use to. Before, Mom had to call a tow truck to drag him out of bed. But now that he didn’t have a place to get to on time, his eyes popped open.

  Everybody else was still asleep, including Eden in the bunk below him.

  He just lay there thinking, Wow! Nothing bad has happened yet. Or if it had, he didn’t know about it yet, so he stayed in bed for as long as he could.

  Apart from the ambulances, the city was quiet now that everybody was staying home. There were hardly any cars, even downtown. The main morning noise was birds. It would be totally silent. Then one of them started belting it out. Conner guessed that first one was like an army bugler. Suddenly, they were all singing away, la la la, not giving a cheep for all the messed-up humans.

  That morning, the day after Dad took off, it seemed like the happiest sound in the world.

  Mom was first up. She showered and dressed in her uniform. When Conner came out to say goodbye, she told him to call her if he was worried about anything.