The Secrets Men Keep

by Mark Sampson

  It was a story the boys would relay to each other over and over again, forever. How Donald managed to make a frantic call to Grilse with one hand while wresting control of the Tercel with the other. How Grilse had sprung into action (oh, that army training!), how he had called the other boys and mobilized them so quickly. How Donald got the home invader to crash the car in the park and then gave chase. How he was able to get a single mass text out to the boys: in park just south of tennis crts. How they all came running then and ganged up on the home invader, subdued him. And how they were already having a chuckle about it by the time the wives arrived, the police. Hey buddy, they said. Hey rapist. Stop squirming. You ain’t going nowhere. Do you hear what we’re saying, rapist? You. Ain’t. Going. Nowhere.

  Yes, it was a story they told over and over—to the point where Celine got sick of hearing it. She’d do that thing that Donald secretly loved, where she’d roll her eyes at him and smile at the same time. “That’s not what happened,” she’d say. “You guys keep changing the details. You keep changing the story.” And they’d just smile back and say: “Oh Celine. Of course we keep changing the story. Otherwise, how else would we remember it?”

  THE SECRETS MEN KEEP

  Uncle Reggie helped build Detroit and then Uncle Reggie drank himself to death, so we’re driving down from Toronto to go to his funeral. In the back seat, my sister Beth sips a Tim Hortons as big as her face and gazes out at the passing business parks and big-box inns of the QEW. Her husband, Curtis, riding shotgun with me, cruises the radio for music. We’re on the road early and already dressed in our funeral best. This is our first road trip since Beth and Curtis moved back to Toronto from Montreal, and I got divorced.

  Curtis lets the radio’s scan do its annoying thing, pausing on a station just long enough to give us a taste before moving on, and I catch snippets of stuff—some tolerable rock, a nice trill of classical—that I’d be happy to listen to. Beth sits up in the back, the knobs of her knees touching as she leans between our seats, and for a moment I think she’s going to tell Curtis to knock it off. But instead she addresses me, a chide curlicuing her voice.

  So Max, she sings, and I know exactly what she’s going to say. When you see your cousins today, please don’t talk politics. No I-told-you-sos about Bush; no goading them on the virtues of Obamacare. They just lost their dad and they don’t give a shit. Beth has always been closer to these cousins—Ray and Jake and Kevin—than I have. It doesn’t help matters that I’m once again coming into Michigan in a Japanese car, what with all three of them now working for GM or Ford.

  But this is not what Beth says. What she says is, So Max, do you think I could drive on the way home tonight?

  I sigh dramatically. Ten years in university and Beth’s driving skills have deteriorated to the point of incompetence. Since she and Curtis moved back to Toronto, she’s treated my Corolla like her own sandbox to get her abilities back up. This car is the only tangible asset I got out of my divorce, and I like to pretend I’m sentimental about that.

  I’ll think about it, I tell her.

  You’ll think about it, she replies. She sits back, but then leans up again. Oh, and speaking of cars, she says. When we get there today, for God’s sake please don’t make the toothbrush analogy again.

  Curtis smiles. The toothbrush analogy, he chuckles.

  Beth, I’m not an ogre, I say. Don’t worry, I won’t make th—

  But I stop. It’s then I realize the car has filled, and stays filled, with the twangy croons of Dwight Yoakam. I turn to Curtis, my brow twisting in disbelief. He just grins and gives me a bashful shrug.

  Seriously? I ask. Dude, you work as a ‘genius’ at the Apple Store.

  Oh it’s true, Beth calls up from the back. Your brother-in-law is a closet country music fan.

  Well not today, I snit. I reach across his legs to the glove box and dig out a CD. We are listening, I tell them, to Cake.

  ~

  There is a mammoth lineup at the Ambassador Bridge, bumper-to-bumper vehicles flooding up to the border. I have only a moment to choose which lane I want, and when I do I’m convinced I’ve backed the wrong horse. Curtis stretches up in his seatbelt to see what’s going on. Wow, he says, nothing is moving. Where did this lineup come from?

  Beth begins digging our passports out of her handbag. She hands them up to me even though I won’t need them for a while, and I stuff them in the crevice between the cup holders. Jeez, she smirks, I hope it’s not this bad when I drive back. I scowl at her through the rearview before returning my attention to the walls of chrome in front of us. We halt. We lurch one car length. We halt again. Then we don’t move for what feels like hours.

  We’re going to be late, I sigh.

  We can’t be late, Beth says, a bit too forcefully. We have to get there on time, Max. Aunt Lois needs us today.

  But as we suffer this fitful heave up to the border, I begin to wonder if that’s even true. A large swath of the family has descended in the last 24 hours onto Reggie and Lois’ suburb of Livonia, one of the vanilla coatings that surrounds Detroit’s dark chocolate centre. Not just my parents on a plane from Nova Scotia, but aunts and uncles, Cape Bretoners all of them, driving in from Oakville and St. Catharines and Niagara, where they’ve lived for decades. Everyone wants to be there for Lois. I suspect it’s collective guilt that now compels that whole generation—since none of them, as far as I know, had the balls to say anything to Lois about Reggie’s drinking. Our appearance there will feel almost perfunctory, though I know Beth disagrees. She’s very protective of her relationships on that side of the family; she’s the favourite niece, and relishes the role. Over the last few days, through emails and phone calls, she and I have been arguing about this colossal one-day road trip, these four hours down and four hours back. We’re going, she barked at me, and that’s final.

  I pitch the car forward. We’ve moved twenty feet in fifteen minutes. And in the silence of our wait, my mind wanders and I begin to mull over Aunt Lois, so much the traditional homemaker. She dedicated her whole life to Reggie and the boys, did everything for them. And that’s got me—perhaps, got all of us—wondering now:

  How could she not have known?

  It isn’t until I hear Beth shuffle in the back seat that I realize I have—finally—spoken this question aloud. She leans forward yet again.

  Max, just shut up, would you.

  But I’m already in for a pound. I mean seriously, I say. You’re married to a man for forty years, spend every day together. You cook his meals and clean his house and raise his children—

  Max, she says, shut the fuck up!

  —and yet you’re oblivious to the most dominant part of who he is. To the cornerstone of his existence. How does that happen?

  Curtis, squirming under this exposure to family laundry, leans into his window again. Hey guys, he says, I think this lane over here has a gap.

  Max, that isn’t a question we should be asking right now. In the end, it doesn’t matter that she didn’t know—

  It does matter.

  It doesn’t. Why does this bother you so much? Why can’t you just leave it alone?

  Oh this lane is totally opening up. Max, put your dinker on.

  Because I just don’t get it. I don’t understand how someone could be that blind to what’s happening right in front of th—

  Max, put your dinker on.

  I look across Curtis. He’s right—there’s a hole in the line next to us. I deploy my signal and yank the wheel down. There’s a squeal of tires, a halt of brakes behind us, then a honk of a horn. But it doesn’t matter. I’m already in the new lane. It moves much faster than our old one, and before we know it we’re next in line at the toll booth. A chilly quiet falls back over the car. I take the passports from the cup holder and hand them over to the customs agent. She examines the pages in each and then asks us a slew of questions about o
ur trip. Before long, she returns our passports and lets us go.

  We sail up and up into the great parabola of the Ambassador Bridge. Beth sulks back into her seat, folds her arms over her chest and throws a tetchy glare across the water. What would you know about making a marriage work, anyway, she murmurs.

  I don’t respond to that. It’s not about Aunt Lois at all, I want to say to her. It’s about Reggie himself. What I want to know is: How did he hide something that big from his wife? What I want to know is: How did he pull it off?

  ~

  The toothbrush analogy. As soon as I made it, I knew I had overstepped some unspoken boundary.

  Here’s how it happened. Aunt Lois had invited me down to Livonia that first Labour Day weekend after my marriage broke up. Beth and Curtis were still months away from moving back to Toronto, and rumour got around to Lois—most likely from my mother—that I was friendless and alone in the big city. I decided to accept Lois’s offer, mostly because I needed a break—a break from my new neighhourhood downtown and my supreme sense of displacement there. So with Google Maps printed, I made that first trek into Michigan, navigating its alien highway signs with their asinine use of imperial measurements. I eventually got myself to Livonia and found Reggie and Lois’s suburban home. I pulled into the driveway to discover Ray and Jake and Kevin enjoying a smoke on the front stoop. They had ball caps pulled down over their eyes and their faces sported the unshaven look of a long weekend. As I parked and climbed out of my Corolla, the first thing I heard was Jake say:

  Holy crap, he’s driving a Japanese car.

  Oh man, added Ray. Why would you buy anything but a Ford?

  I laughed uncomfortably, tried to shrug off their taunts as Reggie and Lois came out the screen door to greet me. But the boys wouldn’t let it go. Three hours later, with the six of us sitting around the dinner table, they were still talking about the superiority of American cars. They each went on about how anxious they were to trade in the vehicle they currently loved so they could get another one they’d love slightly more.

  I tried to participate in this conversation. I ventured with: I dunno, guys—to me a car is like a toothbrush: you use it till it wears out, and then you get a new one.

  I thought this comparison fairly benign until forks froze in front of mouths and everyone blinked at me. Aunt Lois emitted a small peacemaker’s chuckle a split second before all three cousins began shouting at me at once. Uncle Reggie leaned in from the head of the table, his big jowly face smirking as he wondered how I was going to backpedal out of this one. For weeks, the ‘toothbrush analogy’ would flow through the gossip channels of my family (“You won’t believe what Max said at the dinner table”) and resulted in an angry voicemail from Beth in Montreal. Even my father chimed in. You really stepped in it, shithead, he told me. You should watch your mouth around people who work in manufacturing—considering you’ve never built anything in your life.

  Fair enough.

  By the morning of my departure, I was still feeling guilty about the toothbrush analogy. So I accompanied Reggie on his daily trek to the 7-Eleven for coffee and lottery tickets to talk about my faux pas. In the car I apologized for the umpteenth time, and Reggie said not to worry about it, the boys were just playing with me anyway. When we got to the store, Reggie insisted he pay, so I wandered off to the magazine rack to see if they had a copy of that week’s New Yorker. I would later marvel at Reggie’s stealth, considering he was alone with the coffees for a maximum of two minutes. We got back to the car and he squeezed them into the cup holders between our seats. I reached down, accidentally picked up his, and took a sip. The poison stunned my throat. I halted, then put the cup back slowly.

  I think that one’s yours, I said.

  He wouldn’t look at me as he pulled out of the parking lot, and I was suddenly nervous about him being behind the wheel. But he got us back to the house no problem, driving flawlessly the whole way, as he did every morning.

  ~

  The funeral home is at the tail end of a Livonia strip mall. We park under its billboards and get out, stretch the last five hours from our bones and adjust our finery. Beth, in one fluid motion, yanks her pony tail out, spreads her hair around her narrow shoulders, and takes Curtis’ arm. We hustle into the austere lobby and quickly locate Reggie’s chamber. Through open French doors we see a viewing room packed with family and strangers. As we step in, I spot Aunt Lois, dressed in a sombre black frock and ensconced in a horseshoe formation of loved ones. Her face is dry and, in that moment, lit up by a small, pleasant distraction. She laughs at something someone says—a generous laugh, a graceful one—but it never reaches her eyes. She turns and catches the three of us standing there. When she does, her face crumbles like an old building. Oh my God, you made it! she exclaims, and glides towards us with arms outstretched. She can barely get her whispered words of thanks out as we embrace. Beth speaks to her in a sing-songy tone: Hey you, of course we came, did you really think we’d miss this?

  And just like that Lois is done, wiping her face and smiling again. Your mom and dad are here, she says, grabbing Beth and me by the wrists and pumping them up and down. Go on and see them. Go go go. And say hello to the boys, too.

  Beth and Curtis head off in one direction and I head off in another. I watch as Beth races up to where Ray and Jake and Kevin are standing in their suits. They open their arms and the four of them group-hug wordlessly and for a long time. Beth’s skirt hikes up a little as they lift her off the floor.

  I wander off to find my parents: they’re gathered near Reggie’s casket—which, for the time being, is still open. Predictably, my father is wearing a short-sleeve shirt with his tie, the ashen Virgin Mary tattoo on his forearm plainly visible. His Cape Breton ducktail, a holdout from his adolescence, sits atop his head in Brylcreemed perfection. My mother has donned a black dress with floral patterns around the V-neck and cuffs. Hello dear, she says, and gives me a squeeze around the neck. You guys finally made it.

  We did, I nod. I look past her to the casket, where Reggie’s face and shoulders lie in ultimate stillness. If there’s any trace of the jaundice that overwhelmed him in his final days, the mortician has done well to hide it. My parents turn and glance briefly at the casket, too. We sigh in unison, a sigh of great disappointment, then look away. There’s not much else to say.

  You guys were late getting here, my father points out.

  We ran into some traffic at the border, I explain. But whatever. We’re here now.

  And just then Beth appears at my side with Curtis in tow. I’m going to drive on the way back, she says, barely restraining her glee. Right Max?

  ~

  How to fathom it—to wake up one morning and discover your husband has turned bright yellow overnight. No, not yellow. A golden brown, like the richest butterscotch pudding, like a body left on a tanning bed too long. Lois told us all this later—how Reggie woke early that first morning feeling ill, and they turned on the light to discover he had been burned bronze in his sleep.

  By noon in the emergency room the diagnosis was confirmed. The sudden and complete shutdown of his liver. I don’t know whether the reason for it, the secret Reggie had been keeping, hit Lois in an hour, or a day, or a week. He might as well have been keeping a mistress from her, for years. I suppose he had.

  ~

  They wheel Reggie’s casket out to seal it up, and Lois and the boys follow it to take their last looks. The rest of us are shuffled into the adjacent chapel. Aunt Lois and the boys soon return and take their place in the front pew. The now-sealed casket is wheeled in and set at the front of the room. A minister takes the podium, his grey hair wavy and his collar tight around his crepe-like neck. He tosses one of those squishy, comfort-the-widow half-smiles at Lois before beginning. I wonder how he’s going to handle the sensitivities of the situation. But of course, he doesn’t. He speaks of Reggie’s work ethic, his commitment to his communi
ty, the love he had for his wife and three sons. Around the pews, a few tissues travel to eyes, a few heads nod. From here, I can see Lois’s face is wet with tears, though she’s not exactly crying. The minister goes on, doling out a vague philosophy about death and renewal. There are no epiphanies. No braiding together of any of Reggie’s loose threads.

  And then it’s over.

  The graveside service will happen later, in private. We’re told to head to Reggie’s union hall, which is just a few blocks down the street, for a reception. I fend off Beth’s query about driving as we get to the car. When we arrive at the union hall, the atmosphere is almost jovial. The conversations are lighter than at the funeral home and there is even laughter tossed about, echoing off the hardwood floor and tall curtained windows. I find Aunt Lois in another horseshoe formation near the refreshment table. Her face, while still sad, has taken on an air of determined hospitality. She motions me over, scoops my arm and laces her fingers into mine. Ray and Jake and Kevin wander over. I shake hands with each of them, nod my condolences. Across the room, I can see Beth and Curtis standing with slices of coffee cake. Beth forks an eyebrow at me, but she need not worry—it’s the boys, not me, who fire the first shot.

  So how’s your toothbrush? Kevin asks.

  Workin’ pretty well, I shrug. Considering it’s got 180,000 kilometres on it.

  What’s a kilometre? Ray says, and we all laugh. We laugh as Reggie’s spirit hangs there above us, and then recedes away.

  I soon feel the ache of the hour. The light has started to slant through the union hall windows. I get Beth and Curtis’ attention, and they nod their agreement. We gather the necessary parties—Aunt Lois, the boys, my parents—and tell them we need to hit the road. The women are gushing. The hugs and goodbyes take twenty minutes and everyone tells us to drive carefully. When Aunt Lois embraces me one last time, I search her face for evidence of the anger that has eluded us all afternoon. Part of me wants to see it, the glare that says, It’s okay, Max. You can look me in the eye, even though you knew. It’s okay. You all knew. You all knew, and you all said nothing to me. But it never comes. Her grace is pristine to the very end.