by Tina Chaulk
Bryce arrives in the office. “Jesus, are you trying to piss him off more? He thinks you’re laughing at him.”
“We are,” I say through another laugh and start again.
Tears are running down Jamie’s face too and he wipes them away, straightens up and tries to act serious, only to lose it again and start guffawing. He sits on the floor, half under the desk so the customer won’t see him. Thinking it a good idea, I join him.
Bryce surprises me by sitting down too and asking us to let him in on the joke. Between giggles, Jamie and I tell him, but Bryce just stares at us like we’re crazy. “Why is that funny?”
“You?” Jamie and I start again and Bryce stands up.
“Guess I had to be there,” Bryce says. “I’ll offer him a full cleaning?”
I nod, laughing too much to answer with a word. I wave my hand for him to go ahead. He leaves and it’s another minute or two before Jamie and I start to have longer pauses between the laughter.
“It’s so good to see you laugh,” Jamie says. “To laugh with you.” His face is mostly smile.
The comment makes my laughter stop. We’re still sitting on the floor, leaning against opposite walls, the floor we made love on between us.
“What’s different?” He looks right in my eyes before I can look away, before I can make them say something other than the truth. Denying that anything is different is futile.“ It’s hard to explain.” I look down at my clean hands. Even the pores are free of grease. “Impossible really.”
“Will you ever be able to explain it?”
“I don’t know. I’m processing stuff.”
“Can I help?”
“You always do. Somehow. Even when you don’t do anything, you’re the voice inside my head.”
He stares at me a long time. Outside this room air guns roar; someone is smacking a brake drum that sounds like gunshots. Fumes — carbon monoxide, Varasol, grease, oil, brake fluid, antifreeze — permeate the air. Nothing, though, distracts me from his eyes. We have a wordless conversation and he finally closes his eyes, turns his head away, perhaps having seen what he had to see.
“I better go see how Bryce got on with Mr. Clean.” He chuckles.
“Okay.” And even though he is no longer there, I stay on the floor and smile.
Later that afternoon, I’m a little disappointed that her car is in the driveway. My determination is too great to avoid the task at hand but I wouldn’t mind a little forced procrastination. The Toyota Echo sitting in the paved drive takes away that hope.
I know she is watching Days of Our Lives, think that maybe I should have decided to come here later, after her show, when maybe she would be gone out somewhere shopping for groceries or walking along Rennie’s Mill River. But she is here and part of me knew she would be, the part that wants this more than I don’t want it.
I knock. She peeks out the corner of the living room window before coming to the door.
“What’s wrong? Why didn’t you use your key?” Momasks.
“Nothing’s wrong.” I hand her the coffee I have brought for her. “Thought you might want a coffee.”
She takes the coffee, stares at me a moment then tells me to come in.
In the foyer she stops and turns around. “You’ve never brought me coffee in the middle of the day before. What’s really going on? Did you and … Bryce have a fight?”
I shake my head and wonder why she paused before his name. “No. I just want to talk to you.” I walk past her and sit on the couch, motioning for her to sit too.
“Sunday,” I say, after she sits down.
“Yes?”
“Any plans?”
Her mouth drops a little and her eyes blink faster than usual. “Bagel Cafe sound good?” I ask.
A smile spreads across her face and into her hungry eyes. “That sounds wonderful.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to say.” I stand up. “I’ll see you then.”
“Jennifer,” Mom says as she lays her hand on mine. “What did you really come here for?”
I weigh the options. No matter what, she knows I didn’t come here to confirm our Sunday date. But I can still walk out of here without saying anything else. So easy to say nothing. To do nothing. To let things happen. I reach into my pocket and feel cardboard. Carl’s card with Joan Craig’s number on it. Carl’s words come back to me: How’s doing nothing been making you feel?
“It’s just. Well, you know. You must know. I mean, I’ve been awful to you.” I look down and search the burgundy shag carpet for something to help me find the right words or even to tell me a way to say them.
Mom hesitates, lets go of my hand, her other hand on the coffee cup. She shifts around on the couch. Her mouth opens and closes twice with no sound until she decides on the simple word “oh.”
“I’m not good at this, Mom. I don’t think I ever will be but I want to say I’m sorry. I said awful things and thought awful things. And the truth is—” My voice breaks. I clear my throat and try again, open my mouth but my words wobble in my throat.
“It’s okay.” She reaches out again and I know she wants to make everything okay. But it’s not.
“No, it’s not okay. The truth is … that you don’t know the truth. That when you left Dad, when you left us, I didn’t know you called for me. Dad didn’t tell me. He didn’t ask if I wanted to speak to you and I didn’t say no. He told me that you probably forgot to call, probably forgot about me.” A sob grabs my voice and it comes out as a gasp.
Mom’s hand goes to her chest. “Oh my God.”
I watch her as the truth settles in.
“Oh my God. Jennifer. You must have—” It’s her turn for her voice to break.
“When you came home, I didn’t understand. Not until that night at the hospital when you told me.”
“Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Because I wasn’t sure I believed you at the time. I couldn’t believe he’d do that. Not to me or to you.”
Mom closes her eyes. “I can.”
Her words stab me, confirming that I really don’t know the man I’ve mourned, that I haven’t really been mourning him at all. I’ve been grieving the loss of someone I don’t even understand.
“He liked to control, ”Mom whispers. “He always did.”
“Not me. At least not when I was growing up.”
The pity on her face as she looks at me makes me want to run out of this house and to something warm in a bottle. But before me is something warm and kind and loving. I sit down.
I breathe deep, sucking in what feels like every bit of air in the house. Mom stares at me and our coffee is long gone before either of us speaks.
“I don’t know what to say.” Mom’s voice seems small. She looks away, looks down at her fingers, and I see now that she isn’t wearing her wedding ring. She definitely had it on at Nan’s funeral. I remember feeling it as she held my hand. I stare at her hand, can’t take my eyes off the white line around her finger where her ring once was. It reminds me that mine still sits on my dresser, in the little dish I always put it in while I worked. Thinking of the ring still there makes me think about Dad’s message on my answering machine and the whiskey in the office filing cabinet — the multitude of things holding me firmly in place, keeping me from budging, let alone moving.
There are words inside me waiting to be released. “Mom, I love you, you know?”
She pulls her head back and blinks, like I’ve just smacked her in the face. But the smile on her face shows me something different.
“I adore you,” she says. “I always have.”
“I know. But I don’t know if you realize that I always loved you.” I don’t say the awful truth that is in my mind. That I’m not sure I always knew it myself.
That night, I find myself outside BJ’s TV studio, a shaking inside me becoming more intense, a want becoming a need. I’m in my car and I wait until she comes out in the parking lot and beep my car horn.
She stop
s still, stares at the car a moment then walks over. “What’s up?”
“Want to go for a drink?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Want to go for a drink?”
Her mouth stretches out to a disapproving line. “Coffee?”
Without a word, I reach out my hand. She and I watch it tremble.
“Let’s take my car,” she says and closes the door.
“I thought a restaurant, maybe,” I say, when I see that she’s driving to her house.
“I don’t want the hassle and I don’t want to be noticed.” She glances at me. “Don’t think you do either.”
“No.”
We drive to BJ’s house in silence. Inside, she takes a bottle of rum from her cupboard and pours me a drink before we sit down. I gulp it down and pass the glass back for a refill. She complies.
“This is really not good,” BJ says.
I pull out Carl’s card and turn it over to show her the name written on the back.
“Who’s Joan Craig?”
“A counsellor. I got her number from Carl. Father March.”
“What do you want from me?” BJ says, an anger in her voice I didn’t expect. I had imagined a pat on the back.
“What?”
“What do you want from me? Why are you here? You could have bought a drink for yourself. You didn’t need me.”
“I do need you.” I shake my head. “Not for a drink.”
I watch the beautiful face that looked hard and cold a second ago morph into someone soft and kind.
She shakes her head. “I’m not going to watch you go down. I will watch you get help and I will hold your hand but I will not watch you go down.” She points at me and flashes a wry smile. “You are worth keeping and I won’t let you go.”
“You won’t have to.”
After I finish the drink and BJ fills my glass again, we move to the living room where I sit on a recliner chair and BJ sits, as she often does, on the floor.
“When are you seeing this Joan Craig?”
“I haven’t made an appointment yet. But I’m going to call.”
She nods but the way she looks away tells me that she doesn’t believe me. I want to make her trust that I’ll call the counsellor but can’t find a way to start to do this. I can’t even find a way to make me know for sure that I will. I just know that in this moment I intend to.
“You don’t open up to people. I find it hard to believe that you’ll open up to a stranger.”
I nod and take a deep drink. “I want to tell you something about my dad. Something I’m trying to get my head around.”
As I start to tell her, I’m not sure if it’s because I want to prove to her, and myself, that I can open up, or if I really want to share this burden.
On Sunday morning, I leave Jamie in my bed and go to the garage. There are no windows in the main area, so it’s dark as I enter from the front customer area. I turn on a light but it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t. I could find my way around here blindfolded.
I need to see clearly to do this. A strange sensation of dread and exhilaration comes over me as I stand in the centre of the garage, eyes focused. Mind focused. Body refusing to move.
I know I’ve been here a while before my body kicks in. I’ve been talking to myself, out loud, the whole time.
“Just like a band-aid. Do it quick. Tear it off and then you can’t go back.”
I know I can’t do it all fast. It will take time. But the first step can be done with three movements. Three, easy, swift movements I’ve done so many times I know that if I had Nan’s memory loss, in the last stages, I could still do it. As automatic and easy as breathing. Yet all three seem so difficult now.
The breathing. I’m trying not to be aware of it, but I can’t stop speeding it up, slowing it down, trying to make it normal but not knowing what normal is.
“Just do it. You’ll do it and then you’ll sit on the floor and cry and it will be easier. It’s not that big a deal. Stop making such a big deal about it. Just step ahead and do it.”
This is like the pivotal part in a movie, I think. The heroine stands and is about to make the big move and then everything will be fine. All the wrongs will go away. But this is not a movie. This is my life and, even if I can do this, it will change one thing, it won’t change them all. It won’t make me look at Bryce and Mom together and not feel a little sick to my stomach. It won’t stop this trembling inside of me that makes me want to go back home, stopping to get a bottle along the way. Ripping this band-aid won’t see Joan Craig for me and bear my soul at my first appointment with her next week. It will close one door and allow me to stand in front of another, waiting to step into something new. If I thought it would make everything better, make everything bad go away, just like in a Hollywood movie, I wonder if I’d even want to do it.
In my mind, the camera pulls back on the scene. It watches me step forward and walk the few steps to the toolbox. I close the top drawer, close the middle drawer, then pull down the door cover and snap it into place.
Band-aid off. But I don’t slump to the floor and cry. I don’t lean against the toolbox. I just stand there and nothing feels different.
“Big whoop. You closed a box,” I whisper.
I unfasten the cover again then slowly open the small drawer on the bottom right corner. A Kit-Kat bar sits there, looking deflated. I pick it up and feel that it has been melted and hardened so many times that, without the wrapper, it would be unrecognizable as a Kit-Kat bar.
I open another drawer. Dad’s chain stares at me. I lay the bar down and pick up the chain. It feels so light in my hand yet so heavy.
“Your father would want to be buried with it,” I remember Mom saying in the days after Dad died. “You should go get it.”
“Then he should have died with it on,” I snapped. “He left it in the box, so it stays in the box.” My angry words were not meant for her. They were, I know now, directed at him, at his leaving me.
I slip the chain around my neck and try to close the clasp but can’t. I pull it off and try to turn it around so I can see the clasp and close it.
“Need some help with that?”
I freeze. I’m torn between wanting to tell him to get out, to get angry at him for interrupting the moment, and running to him.
“Yes.”
I don’t turn around. I put the chain around my neck again and feel the slight weight taken away from me. I lift my hair up and out of his way. I don’t feel his hands, only the sensation of the chain and pendant as they hang on my chest, settling there in their rightful place. Connected.
He turns me around. “It looks right there.”
“Feels right too.” I intend to speak in a regular voice but it comes out as a whisper.
“The drawers are closed,” he says.
“The whole box was closed for a minute. But I knew I had to take some things out first.”
He just stares at me, looking down at the pendant from time to time.
“We have a new tech … mechanic starting soon,” I say. “I figured it’s about time to make room.”
“Making room sounds like a good idea.”
Jamie smiles. His warm hand finds mine, folds around it. As I grasp his hand back, I notice something for the first time. Something that almost makes me pull my hand away. But I don’t. I let it stay. How could I not have noticed? It makes me feel a new certainty that this hand is supposed to be in mine.
Through days and nights of lovemaking, of him holding me, touching me gently at times, fiercely at others, of his gripping me in the shower that night. Of all the times he has touched me in the past days and weeks, it’s the first time I feel the roughness of his now calloused hand.
Many thanks to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council for their support of this book in the form of two Professional Project Grants; the Newfoundland Writers’ Guild for critique and encouragement, especially to Helen Fogwill Porter — every writer should have a mentor like Hele
n; the 2007 Winterset In Summer Literary Festival Committee for their generous New Writer’s Grant which helped with the writing of this book; to everyone at Breakwater Books for encouraging me and believing in this book, especially Rebecca Rose and Kim O’Keefe-Pelley, as well as Annamarie Beckel who is a kind, supportive, and thorough editor, and Rhonda Molloy who always makes things look so good; to Father John for advice and a sharp eye; to all my friends but especially Kim Wiseman — no one could have a more thoughtful friend — Kathy Skinner, Pam Hollett, and the Strident Women—this book would not be this book without you; and to all my family, especially the ones who have to put up with me every day: Sam, Ben, and my first and most important reader, Vince.
Tina Chaulk lives in Conception Bay South, Newfoundland and Labrador, with her husband and two sons, while writing and working in a variety of freelance technical roles. a few kinds of wrong is her second novel.
ALSO BY TINA CHAULK
THIS MUCH IS TRUE
Is it okay to tell a lie? Lisa Simms thinks so. this much is true is a romp through the 1980s, about a fish out of water struggling to find her place in the world, all while sheltering her parents from the truth.
FICTION
ISBN-13: 978-1-894377-18-8
FORMAT: Softcover, 296 PP,
5.25 x 7.25, $19.95
