…
Well, don’t forget you asked. Truth is, we had troubles because of you. Well, not you, but that we couldn’t have you—we couldn’t have a baby. I never really wanted kids. I don’t suppose that’s the sort of thing a father says to his son, but it’s the truth, and probably not something you’re too surprised to learn. I just knew I wouldn’t be very good at it, and you can keep your opinion to yourself on that. But Viv wanted a gaggle of kids. She was an only child like me, but she’d always dreamed of having brothers and sisters. We tried for a long, long time. She lost a few along the way.
…
Yeah, miscarriages. Always pretty early on, but each one harder on her than the last. Killed me to see her sad like that. We never spoke about giving up on trying, but somewhere along the way I guess we made our peace with it. Eventually things got easier between us. I can’t say exactly when, but we figured out how to get on and be happy. We’d take trips to Florida in the summer and found ways to keep busy when I was in town during the season. We had a lot of fun those years in Toronto, and even the team got a bit better. We didn’t win no Cups, but we were respectable near the end, I think. It was a good time, so when I was eventually traded, it came as a bit of a shock to us.
CHAPTER FOUR
I can’t find my mother’s grave. We buried her in the back row, but it looks like the cemetery has added several rows in the years since. Pennington has been burying people here for nearly a hundred years. What happens when they run out of room?
We buried her on an unusually hot day in May—me sweating in my suit, noticeably too small, tight across my shoulders, pant cuffs riding high revealing the white socks covering my ankles. Today, the grass is brown and flat against the cold, hard ground. A thin frost coats everything, making all the gravestones sparkle in the morning light. It would be beautiful if it weren’t so depressing.
I finally find her about five rows from the back and farther from the east edge of the cemetery than I remember. Just sort of in the middle, lost in a sea of vaguely familiar names. Maybe she knew some of these people, her eternal neighbours. I prefer to think of her spending forever near people she might have been friendly with. The stones vary in size and shape. My mother’s is plain and grey and square and cold. Entirely unremarkable if you didn’t know the person beneath it.
VIVIAN ANN MACALLISTER
1950–1996
LOVING WIFE AND MOTHER
Loving wife and mother? Who the hell picked that? I haven’t been back here since the interment, and this is the first time I’ve seen the stone. It’s the epitaph you use when you have no idea who the person was. It’s stock—a placeholder—and unbefitting a single mother. Etched here for a decade and I had no idea. I don’t know what I’d have suggested instead, other than something more.
Planning her funeral happened around me—to me, even. People were too nice and too polite, and took care of all the details. I didn’t have to deal with anything. I suppose everyone thought they were helping me by keeping me uninvolved. People—some I knew, some I didn’t—came and went from our apartment at all hours of the day. They brought casseroles, meat pies, jars of pickled things, and vegetable plates, but mostly they brought egg salad sandwiches. After a day, the pungent egg smell would waft into the apartment every time someone opened the fridge. I can’t imagine why people thought a thousand egg salad sandwiches would be any help to someone grieving. Maybe it’s just a stage I’m unfamiliar with: denial, anger, bargaining, egg salad, acceptance. To this day, egg smells turn my stomach.
Dave’s mother, Carol, spent whole days directing traffic and keeping an eye on me. Not that I was hard to watch over, stuck on the couch as I was. I know the TV was on, but I don’t remember watching anything in particular. Occasionally, someone would sit next to me, ask me how I was doing. How was I supposed to answer? I’m completely and utterly devastated. I want to crawl into a hole and wallow in profound sadness until I rot. If bludgeoning you with this remote control and cramming egg salad down your throat until you suffocated would bring her back to life, I wouldn’t hesitate. Thanks for asking. How are you?
I just said “I’m all right” a lot.
One of my mother’s cousins came by and sat with me for a long time. Until that moment, couldn’t remember having ever met him. I know my mother didn’t like him. She rarely mentioned him, but I remembered her once calling him “Roger the Twat.” He was a small man with thick black eyebrows that didn’t cooperate with the rest of his face. When he was sad, they made him look angry. When he tried to furrow his brow and look pensive, they acted surprised. When he said to me, “You know, everything happens for a reason,” they did a little dance, as though he’d just told a dirty joke. Drowning in the kind of depressive nihilist thinking any teenager who just lost his mother rightfully experiences, I told Cousin Roger that I didn’t believe everything happened for a reason. Instead, I told him I thought shitty things just happened sometimes, and while that sucks, not everything needs to have a point. Cousin Roger smiled and said, “Well, I guess some people are just more spiritual than others.” Mom, you were right—Cousin Roger is a twat.
When people in small towns die, it’s an event. Especially when they’re relatively young, like my mother. Everyone knew when Vivian Macallister passed away, leaving her poor only child behind. It felt like the whole town came to her wake. Everyone except my father. The stone may read “Loving wife and mother,” but I stood alone next to her casket that night, shaking hands with everyone she ever met and then some, as they came to pay their respects. Many told me if there was anything I needed, all I had to do was ask, because that’s what they were supposed to do. I nodded solemnly and said thanks because that’s what I was supposed to do.
In life, my mother kept things simple. She liked wearing jeans. She kept her long, frizzy hair in a bun with one of those leather things you jam a stick through. I’m sure she owned makeup, but I don’t remember ever seeing her use it. After she died, her body was handled (a word I overheard someone at the funeral home use) by J. C. La Marsh & Sons. I don’t know which of the sons “handled” her directly, but he got everything wrong. It was bad enough losing my mother (never mind the vague and unpleasant awareness I was standing only a few short feet from a corpse that seemed to take barely perceptible breaths if I stared long enough), but I also had to deal with the fact that Mom’s hair was straight, flattened across her shoulders, her lips and cheeks red with paint, and she was wearing a frilly dress I’d never seen before. She looked ready for a spring wedding, not her own funeral.
Carol spent the entire evening there with me, sitting nearby and offering to get me a glass of water every fifteen minutes. Dave came by the wake with some other guys from school. He stopped at the casket and bowed his head. Then he turned and shook my hand. He’d said nothing the whole time my mother was sick, or at any point after she died. Dave and I hadn’t spoken to each other at all from the morning my father peeled him off me.
That my father didn’t show up for the wake made people pity me more than they already did. I could see it in their eyes and hear it in their hushed whispers. He didn’t show up the next morning for the funeral either. I sat in the front pew at St. Patrick’s with Carol, my great-aunt Peggy, and a few random cousins—Roger the Twat among them. Some neighbours who served as pallbearers filled out the row, while the rest of Pennington crowded in behind us. It was a full house for the service. From St. Patrick’s, we went to the cemetery to put her in the ground, and that’s when I finally cried. I mean, I’d cried before that, but like everything else, I’d cried because of some imprecise feeling that it was what I was supposed to do. But when they lowered the casket into the ground, I shook with panicked sobs.
After some time, the crowd thinned around me, the odd person patting my shoulder before leaving. Eventually, it was just me and Carol. She would have stayed forever, but I told her I wanted to be alone. A few minutes later, I sensed someone coming up behind me.
I didn’t turn to look, because I knew who it was. Sure enough, my father sidled up into my peripheral vision. I had long stopped spending weekends at his house and, once I’d quit hockey and stopped going to the rink, I hadn’t seen him much at all. During my mother’s illness, he’d stayed away. When she died, he’d stayed away. He missed the wake, and the funeral service. He wasn’t here when they put her into the ground. But during my last private moment with her, of course my father decided to make an appearance.
We were quiet for a long time, staring at the hole. Anyone passing by might have looked at us and thought our pain was equal. But I didn’t think that fucker had any right to feel the same as me.
So I hit him.
My father’s been punched countless times, and few were as feeble as the one I threw. He was standing to my right, so I wound up my left hand and smashed it into his collarbone. It was an awkward hit; I had no clue how to throw an effective punch—the only fight I’d ever been in was with Dave, and he kicked my ass. My father’s eyes went wide with surprise, but he didn’t even stumble from the blow. A few seconds hung between us while I waited for him to do anything at all, but he just looked confused, so I came at him screaming, fists swinging wildly. He grabbed my wrists and held them as I struggled to hit him again. Were it not for his gimped hand, he’d have easily kept me at bay, but he couldn’t manage a solid grip. I shook my right hand free and swung it with everything I had, this time connecting with his jaw.
“Stop it!” he yelled, letting go of my other arm and taking a few steps back, rubbing his face with his fingers. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Where were you?” I asked.
“When?”
But I wasn’t being specific. It wasn’t about one moment. I was filled with a lifetime of disappointment. “Whenever. Always. Where have you been?”
He just stared, hand pressed against his cheek. I wanted to hit him again, but couldn’t work up the strength. I was too tired, too sad, too done with it all. I left him there alone, standing next to my mother’s grave wearing a weird mixture of hurt and confusion. It was the last time we laid eyes on each other, until I knocked on the door of his apartment at the rink a couple days ago.
After the funeral, as I was trying to sort out my next move, my bank account unexpectedly filled up with money—just over fifty grand. I was surprised my mother had that much to leave behind, but also relieved. That money meant I was free. My high school decided that in light of my circumstances and good academic standing, I would be excused from my final exams. I already had my St. Mary’s acceptance, so there was nothing left binding me to Pennington. I stuffed some clothes into an old hockey bag, made arrangements with good ol’ Cousin Roger to store a couple boxes of things in his basement, and left a note for Carol to do whatever she wanted with everything else in the apartment. I probably owed her more courtesy than that, given how kind she’d been to me, but I just wanted to go. I bought a bus ticket to Halifax and, telling no one, left early in the morning just over a week after the funeral.
I thought I’d made my peace with all of this years ago, but now that I’m here, I’m not sure I’m okay with any of it. I hate that her stone reads, “Loving wife.” I hate that she’s buried in that dress. I hate that there are no flowers on her grave. I hate that I haven’t been here in so long. But mostly what I hate is that I can’t remember what her voice sounded like. Not really. I can remember what she looked like, but not how she moved or laughed or sang. The problem with the past is that we’re constantly moving away from it. I’ve been letting her slip away and it took coming back to notice how much.
•
I leave my truck parked on the cemetery road and take a walk. It’s Monday morning, a couple hours after most people have gone to work, deep enough into November that the leaves have long fallen from the trees and now linger in clumps like trampled garbage in the empty streets. There aren’t many sidewalks along Pennington’s residential streets, just road and grass, usually with about a foot of worn dirt separating them. Most front yards dip into shallow ditches that are connected by culverts running under each driveway, warping the pavement after a few years. A good culvert bump guarantees that kids on bikes and skateboards will use your driveway for jumps. A few of the houses here have been painted and others look odd, though I can’t place why. They’re the same, but different.
The cemetery is only two blocks from the elementary school, so I follow the route Dave and I used to take every day, heading toward our old apartment building. One year for Christmas, our mothers got us each a hockey net, which we set up in a cul-de-sac about half a block away. All the nearby kids would come and we’d lose whole days and weekends and summers playing. Back then, to get from the cul-de-sac to home, I’d cut through a couple yards and go in the back of the building. Today, I stay on the road and stop directly in front of it. Twenty-six Jasper Street is an eight-unit building that’s perfectly symmetrical in the front, except for the things people keep on their small balconies—barbecues, chairs, one bike. The balcony on the top right—the one that belongs to the apartment where I lived with my mother—has a small table and chair, and even from street level I can make out an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts.
After a few minutes, I realize standing in the street staring at a building is a creepy thing to be doing. I start to go and when I look up the street I see Carol walking toward me, a small punter of a dog pulling at the leash in her left hand, a long cigarette in her right.
“I thought that was you,” she says, smiling as she approaches, her voice rough from years of smoking. “Even from far I could tell.” She tosses her cigarette to the ground, not bothering to stamp it out, and comes in close for a hug. She’s shorter than I remember and I need to lean into her tight squeeze. The smell of menthol clings to her hair in the cold and her little dog scratches excitedly at my shin.
“Come in, come in, come in,” she says.
•
“You really gave us a bit of a scare, disappearing like that,” Carol says.
I’m sitting on the couch in her living room, which has ten more years of crap crammed into it. All the units in this building are identical, but Carol and Dave’s place always felt much smaller than ours because it was so full of stuff. There’s an unmatched couch and loveseat, a recliner, and more end tables than ends. Knick-knacks cover every surface, loosely grouped by theme: ceramic rabbits, crystal animals, miscellaneous coasters and statuettes and candle holders everywhere. There are busts of funny-looking men lining the wall above me: a policeman, a fisherman, a pirate, a Viking, at least two guys in turbans, and, I think, Friar Tuck, along with a dozen others.
Carol hands me a glass of Pepsi I didn’t ask for, so I thank her for it. Her hair is still short, but greyer. Otherwise, she looks mostly the same, including her colourful, flowery blouse. The dog is different. She introduces me to Jerry, who is standing on my lap, trying to lick the condensation from the side of my glass. He looks like an oversized rat, with stringy brown hair, crooked whiskers, and small beady eyes. When I was growing up, the dog that lived here was Brutus, a bloodhound mix with stubby legs and a fat belly bald from dragging along the ground.
“People shouldn’t vanish like you did,” she says with a scolding tone while settling into the recliner. “We worried about you. You coulda been dead, for all we knew.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything. Really. You did so much when Mom died.” Carol nods in agreement, and I understand that all she wanted was an acknowledgement.
“Well, word did get back to us, eventually. You went to Halifax, not Mars. Someone spotted you and let us know.” She takes a sip of her own Pepsi, scrunching her nose. “I understand why you left, Adam. It didn’t surprise me all that much, I just didn’t think you’d stay away quite so long. I was hoping you’d come by when I heard you were in town.”
“Dave told you I was back?” Did he tell you he punched me in the face, t
oo?
“David? Ha! That boy doesn’t tell me nothing. I just heard it in the wind. There’s no secrets here, love.”
“I keep getting reminders about that.”
“So you’ve been to see your mother?” This is the sort of thing that’s important to Carol. It’s not even that she believes my mother’s soul or ghost or whatever would know if I was or wasn’t there. It’s just how people are supposed to behave. Visiting the grave of your dead mother is good manners.
“I just came from there, actually.”
“Good, love. That’s good.” A minute passes with only the sound of ice clinking in our glasses. “So. You don’t look married.” I get what she means, and she’s right—whatever married looks like, it isn’t what I’ve got on. I’m too unkempt and scruffy. I have the distinct look of a guy who doesn’t have his shit together. “I assume no kids neither. So what is it you’ve been doing with yourself?”
I give Carol the same condensed version of my story I’ve given most everyone else and once I’m done with the highlights, all she says is, “Sounds lonely.”
Carol has always been concise and direct. She was that way raising Dave, too. When we’d get into trouble for staying out too late or disobeying teachers or whatever, Carol always gave Dave a very specific punishment: three days without TV, or no bike all weekend, or a straight-up week-long grounding. Crime came with a tangible cost, which made it easy for Dave to choose when he was willing to break the rules. He always knew where he stood. My mother was more free-form when it came to doling out discipline. Guilt was her favourite weapon and she wielded it like a goddamn battle-axe.
“What do you think a fair punishment is?” she would say to me.
Having a good sense of what Carol would inflict on Dave for similar or, most times, exactly the same delinquency, I’d suggest similar punishments to what he had to endure. “No video games for a week?” I’d say, mistakenly inflecting it as a question. Invariably, my mother would narrow her eyes and wait for me to pile on to my own penance. And I would, every single time. “Okay, two weeks?” I’d say, like it was an auction, and she’d nod and that was that. Dave thought I was an idiot for continually falling into that trap.
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