“Yes.” It smelled of gas back here. They should get the car checked.
“That banana split was a trick. That’s how people get kids to trust them. One step at a time.” He picked up the basketball, threw it through the hoop. Passed it to Josh.
“So?” Josh threw the ball, his arm extending above his shoulder, elegant, confident. The ball fell neatly through the hoop.
“Nice shot. Josh, my parents look fine from the outside.”
“Uh huh,” Josh said, aiming again. You wouldn’t know from his voice that this conversation mattered, but the tips of his ears were red.
“People can put on a good act. Lots of people respected my parents. But the fact is that they were abusers.”
“Like they hit you?”
“That. And other stuff. There was no way we were going to let them get to our kids.” The we was a slip. But it could mean him and Dan. Nobody ever picked up on that kind of thing. “Your dad is a good guy. I’ve watched him in action. But given where I come from, I don’t even trust him a hundred percent. You can’t take anything at face value, not even your girlfriend or her folks. You don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors.”
“But Mom, we talk all the time. Like real talking. Deep stuff.”
“So you feel like you really know Cathy and everything about her?”
Josh nodded.
“And she never said anything about herself that you wouldn’t expect.” Alec dribbled the ball, jumped, made the shot. Dribbled again. Josh got the ball away from him.
Josh grinned. “I told her that you and Aunt Eleanor went to the shooting range. She thought that was cool and she asked me if you’d take her. That surprised me! Would you, Mom? Teach me?”
“You really want to?” He spoke casually, not wanting to expose his own astonishment: that he had anything of value to give this boy, that his son was eager for it. And so he became distracted from the matter at hand. The girl, her problems, her peculiarities, her family’s were all forgotten as Alec threw the ball through the hoop nailed to the shed, glancing sideways at Josh.
“Seriously,” Josh said.
“Okay, we’ll see.” They might even go hunting, him and his son. Camp overnight, get up before dawn. If it was clear, they’d look at the stars. He’d need to buy a rifle, but first he’d have to get a license for possession of a firearm and another for transporting it. “I’ll talk to Dad about it.”
They played for a while. Counted points, Josh relishing his twenty to his mom’s six. Seven. Eight. Alec was on a roll, but Josh got the ball away from him. “You going to throw or just hang onto that?”
“Mom?” He was standing there, hugging the ball. “Did they, you know, sexually abuse you?”
Alec paused, but there was no other answer. “Yeah,” he said.
Josh threw the ball wide. It slammed into the shed. “I wish I was there. To help you.”
“It’s my job to stand up for you, Josh. Not the other way around.”
“Not always, Mom. Not anymore.”
Alec looked at his son, a boy still and more than a boy, moving toward the wall of his mother’s protection, asking the bricks to open up and allow him to pass through. Not yet. Not yet. But soon. In the darkness, everything looked larger, merging with its own shadow. His son’s smooth cheek was roughened, his shoulder broadening in an outline of the honourable man he was becoming while the moon flew over the roof from east to west, the earth turning under their feet.
Dan had had a hard day. His newest client, a referral from Rick, was Families Against Guns. The phone campaign, which had kicked off its fundraising, had brought in an adequate number of pledges, if not what he’d hoped, but the mail-out that followed had been screwed up. The printer claimed that they’d printed the list as received. The vendor of the list claimed that all the duplicates had been eliminated at their end. He’d spent the afternoon in a stuffy mailroom at the printer’s, sorting through hundreds of envelopes with two employees who then left early for the Easter weekend. But even after all his efforts, the mailing wasn’t ready to go out. In dense holiday traffic, he’d driven home along the highway, kicking himself for dealing with a company in the suburbs. Finally the turn-off to Crookshank’s Lane and down to the railway bridge. All he’d wanted was a hot shower, a good supper and then a good book. But it was Thursday. After therapy, Sharon always had to nap. On the table were a pizza box, dirty napkins and glasses half full of pop going flat. Josh had stacked the plates in the dishwasher and he’d done it all wrong.
After chomping down a slice of cold pizza, Dan had inspected his wife’s money jar, removing the cheques for deposit, and got back into his car. At the ATM he’d got a call from Rick on his cell, wanting to know whether the mailing had gone out. There were a lot of fundraisers to choose from, Rick had said, but he’d believed in Dan, and had recommended his company to other charities. Rick’s voice was clipped, each syllable enunciated with cold correctness. He’d been too hasty, counting on friendship, he’d said. This charity was important to him and he’d thought it was just as important to his friend, but aside from any personal feelings, his professional reputation was on the line. Perhaps it would have been wiser to have seen presentations from other fundraisers before making a decision. But what was done was done. For the time being.
When he’d got home again, Sharon was awake. Dan had retreated to his office and gone to bed alone as per usual while his wife talked to other people on the computer. But even the blessing of sleep was taken from him this night as sometime after midnight he was rudely woken up by the sound of a drawer being unstuck, then rummaged. “What is it?” he asked, sitting up.
“I’m looking for the application I printed off. I put it in here.”
“What application?” Dan said. His wife was looking through the drawer in the dressing table.
“For a firearms license.”
“What are you talking about guns for?”
“Josh wants me to take him shooting. Ingrid’s invited me to go hunting. I could take him along. What do you think?”
Dan turned on the bedside lamp. “I think it’s asinine.” The mailing would be delayed until some unspecified date after the long weekend. When it finally did go out, the mailing would cost the client extra even though Dan had spent hours negotiating on their behalf. And now he was up in the middle of the night with his wife, this wife, wanting to take his son hunting. Nobody had even asked about his day. His awful, crappy, worrisome day. His eyes fell on the target taped to his wall. Something he would never put there, nor would the Sharon he knew. He hated it. For no reason at all he hated it and he wanted to tear it down, and he hated the unreasonableness rising in his chest.
When printers screwed up and your client blamed it on you, didn’t you have the right to expect your own wife to be in your own room? A man had to have some small order in this world. Stack the dishes the right way. Set his alarm for seven a.m. and shower for fifteen minutes. Go to bed at eleven p.m. and watch the news. Turn out the light. Have bills paid and cheques deposited. He shouldn’t be only hoping that the person who comes into his bed is someone he knows. Not this stranger, inexplicably taller, jaw thrust forward.
“Would you take that down? I don’t want to open my eyes and be staring at a target,” Dan asked in as reasonable a tone as he could muster while his nostrils widened to take in more oxygen, expanding his lungs sufficient for the hoarse half-whisper, half-shout of parents fighting at night. He walked over to the wall where his wife was leaning, an arm resting against the target, covering it protectively.
“That’s mine,” Alec said.
“You don’t tape things to the wall like a kid.” Dan tapped the wall, dark eyes narrowed. If that hand got any closer Alec was going to knock it down. “Especially not that.”
“What the hell do you mean?”
Dan was on a roll, and he went with it, like a train at top speed, and he was not the conductor, not even a passenger. He was standing on top of the train, riding it. “H
ow does it look if my wife has a gun when my client is Families Against Guns? I just met with Rick yesterday.” Assuring him that the mailing would be out today though he already knew about the screw-up and Rick’s pale blue eyes were looking at him skeptically. Dan was not nearly as persuasive as the business professor who had talked a stingy real estate developer into sponsoring a renovation of the arena. “Not to mention the man’s grief about his daughter’s suicide. With a gun!”
“You hunt with a rifle,” Alec said, “not a handgun.” He was tired. Therapy had been rough. He was so damn tired, keeping everything in. Dan better move. He was not going to step away from him. “Fuck Rick,” he said. “This is not his house.”
The train was heading for a tunnel. Dan could feel it coming, the darkness, the coldness, and he couldn’t stop himself. “This is my house. I work hard for my family. And I’ve tried to be supportive. Not that you appreciate it. I’ve never complained about the amount of money, time and space taken up with knitting and sewing. And when you do have a small job, you don’t even bother to deposit your pay. If I hadn’t gone and done that tonight, there would have been stale-dated cheques. But I guess it never occurs to you that someone else besides me could bring in some money. You don’t give a shit, do you?”
“Got other things on my plate.” Alec couldn’t waste words because he was busy clamping down on the inside, not letting anything show. Not letting anything be said. Not letting a freak show unroll before this man. Inside had to stay inside: folks crying because they were bad; the husband was mad; they didn’t make money for him. “Whatever. It’s yours.” He ripped the target off the wall, and thrust it at Dan. Alec had to get away from here, talk to people who got who he was, who they were. “I’m going downstairs.” He could feel Dan behind him, following him, too close. One more step and Alec wouldn’t be held to account. He turned around. “Will you lay off? I gave you the fucking target. What more do you want?”
“You’re going to talk to those special people. Too bad I’m not special. I guess I’m just the moneybags. I come home and I never know who is going to be here. Or what you’re going to do. Or even who you might run off with.”
“That’s what you think of us?” So it finally came out. This was the husband’s real opinion of them. Alec didn’t know whether to stay out or run inside and put his arm around Lyssa, who was weeping in shame. Sharon—nowhere to be found.
“You’re always on the computer,” Dan said. “You don’t want to talk to me. One day you’re one thing, another you’re something else. I don’t know what you want. How can I be the man you want if I don’t know what that is?” Dan sat down in the chair near his wife’s dressing table. “Why would you stay with me?”
“Shit.” His wife sat on the end of the bed, facing him, astounded. “You want us?”
“Don’t you know?” Last summer when they’d put in a new a/c unit upstairs, he was surprised by his wife’s unaccustomed helpfulness. How come you’re so handy all of a sudden? he’d asked. The answer sat before him. Dan raised his eyes to meet his wife’s, the green of malachite.
“The thing is, I can’t be her,” Alec said. “I’m not her.”
“I know.” Dan looked sad. Maybe he thought it was better to have her some of the time than none of the time. But couldn’t he like the rest of them a little?
In the dimness of a room he hadn’t made with its puffy fluffy velvetiness, Alec didn’t try to sound like Sharon. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. None of us is.”
Dan couldn’t speak because if he did he might weep. So he just nodded and they sat knee to knee, his pajamas, his wife’s jeans. The target was on the floor. Dan picked it up, clearing his throat. “I think there’s a frame in the office somewhere,” he said. “It might fit.”
And so in the middle of the night, they looked through the office for a frame. They found two, one on the closet shelf, one in a filing cabinet under F. Simply constructed with dark wood, the second frame fit. And when the target was behind glass, they propped it up on the dressing table so the kids wouldn’t be awakened by the pounding of a nail. Dan went back to bed and Alec joined him, though he couldn’t fall asleep. He lay on his back, steadfastly shoulder to shoulder with his husband as Dan slipped into slumber.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
For Easter and Passover, Sharon had put flowers, chocolate and matzo on the table, as well as glazed carrots, potatoes, a roast, tofu and a mixed green salad with bok choy, but no rice. The leaf was in the blue table to make room for Ingrid and Amy, while the kids crowded around the folding table. The spring bouquet that Amy had brought was on the counter in the vase that Josh had made out of a jar for Mother’s Day when he was ten.
Ingrid had insisted on contributing to the meal, and had delivered the venison, which Sharon had cooked. Compliments were exchanged for the cooking, for the meat, Dan thanking Ingrid while looking down the table at Sharon and smiling happily. His house smelled just right: gravy, baking, flowers. He wore the log cabin sweater she’d knit for him, she wore her shift dress and the jade heart he’d given her for their first anniversary. It was the only jewellery she’d ever wanted though he thought she deserved more. Everyone was dressed up. Even Bram wore a jacket, though not a tie. He dug into the roast venison and potatoes with good spirit.
“Where’s the rice?” Mimi asked. As her husband had gained a little weight, she was willing to put a sliver of roast beside the prescribed vegetarian fare on his plate, but it wasn’t a meal without rice. She was sitting in her usual place beside him on Sharon’s left, opposite her daughter and her daughter’s husband, the other guests seated at the end near Dan.
“I thought potatoes would be a nice change,” Sharon said. There was nothing to be gained in arguing with a force of nature. Better to be a reed, bending with the gale force wind, letting the rains wash over. For example: the dining room was still a mess, and though Sharon couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d lost something in there, she didn’t react to her mother-in-law’s clucks and tsks. Nor did she take offence when Mimi saw the table set for five kids. Mimi had plenty to say about that and Sharon let her say it all again. Josh was too young for a girlfriend. They didn’t match. He was dark and she was blonde. (Sharon didn’t interrupt to point out that she was ginger and Dan dark, or that Eleanor was big and her husband slender.) Mimi went on and on: the tangerine looks gold on the outside but is rotten inside. She didn’t come from good stock; her sister had committed suicide. If the wind blows from an empty cave it’s not without a reason. The girl should be at home with her parents. Holidays were for families. Only at the end, when her mother-in-law’s arguments were exhausted, Sharon had said that Cathy’s family wasn’t in a holiday mood so wasn’t it nice that they were letting her spend the evening here?
“The five grains are more precious than jade or pearls and number one is rice.” On the word “rice,” Mimi clapped her hands together.
“For the first peoples who settled in the Great Lakes region, wild rice is a sacred food,” Ingrid said.
“Smart people.” Mimi shook her head at Sharon who was offering Jake a choice of drinks. He had to have wine to warm his blood. Didn’t she remember? He was overflowing with yin, a superfluity of dark and wet and cold, altogether too much of the female principle. And who did they have as guests? Women and girls.
“Mom, did you see the target up in Dan and Sharon’s room?” Eleanor asked. She smiled innocently, waggling her eyebrows at her husband, grinning into his dinner. At last—nothing about going back to school! “It’s hanging next to the scroll painting. You know, the one with the classical poem brush painted on it?”
“What target?” Mimi asked. Sharon glanced at Dan, happily occupied in pouring gravy over his potatoes. He shrugged and ploughed into his food. He’d played handball with his brother-in-law and won two out of three games this morning.
“We went to the shooting range,” Eleanor answered, all the more enthusiastically because it would annoy her mother. Finally a
family dinner with entertainment.
“Shooting what?”
“Bullets. I didn’t do badly for the first time,” Eleanor said. “But Sharon was amazing.”
“Next time will you take me?” Cathy asked.
“I don’t think your parents would like it,” Sharon murmured.
“A Nobel Prize is amazing,” Mimi said. “Not grown women playing cowboys. What do you achieve from shooting a gun?”
“When I held a rifle for the first time I realized that I wasn’t afraid. As a woman I felt secure. Equal,” Ingrid replied, taking Mimi seriously, not realizing that this was a family conversation and so had nothing to do with the words being said but with other matters entirely, things far under the surface, swimming like fish in the pure yin of the ocean depths.
“So.” Mimi pushed up her glasses. “When I marry Jake, I tell him, don’t think you are Confucius. You get dumplings, not an obedient wife. I left China. I can leave you too.”
Happily eating matzo with margarine, Jake was unaware that he had left his wife or of the effort she exerted to get him back. He wondered aloud if matzo wouldn’t go better with fried chicken fat, wiggling his little finger inside his hairy ear and then, to make conversation with Ingrid, he said, “So you’re a lesbian?”
Eleanor rolled her eyes at Bram, who diligently ate his salad, even the bok choy, used to all this by now. He was slender but his cholesterol was high. The greens were supposed to lower it.
“Yes I am and part Native too.” Ingrid smiled, the relief of securing a new place to live making her as friendly with the world as an old man with a dubious brain.
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