His father had given up his position as an Alcan aluminum sales rep and accepted a desk job at the head office. Sometimes on his way home he picked up takeout Chinese or Kentucky Fried Chicken. The rest of the time it was Swanson frozen suppers or canned spaghetti. Barbecued steaks on Sundays. After supper, instead of disappearing into the third-floor office as he’d always done before, he poured himself a rum and Coke and sat with Ron in front of the television.
Here, a complicated undercurrent of decorum came into play, based on his strict and, to Ron, still largely mysterious views on life. Jokes at the expense of drunks and confused old people weren’t funny, but it was all right to laugh at overweight people getting stuck in doorways and blind people knocking over priceless vases. When Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was on, you rooted for the lion, not the gazelle, the wolf, not the deer. During commercials his father sometimes came right out and declared his positions in the form of warnings and words of advice along the lines of “Never do business with a man who wears jewellery” and “Bad poker players blink a lot”—flat, open-and-shut statements not necessarily connected to what they’d just been watching and often hinting at an acquaintance with the seamier side of life. One of his favourites was, “Nobody wants to hear the unvarnished truth,” which Ron took to mean that there were things that he, Ron, wouldn’t want to hear. What could they be? Was he adopted? Had his father killed somebody? Was his aunt Doreen, who said, “Holy shit” and “Kiss my ass,” a sex maniac?
In the hour or so before his bedtime Ron liked to take apart and reassemble one of their small appliances. He had discovered that even without the expectation of his mother’s praise to spur him on, he could still tap into pleasure, only of a different kind, hypnotic and private, which his father’s casual interest hardly grazed. “Everything under control?” his father would ask. “You sure you can get that all back together?”
One night, as Ron began to dismantle the vacuum cleaner, the question was, “How many times did your mother break that thing?”
He sounded good-humoured, but Ron’s instinct to shield her prevailed and he said, untruthfully, “She never really broke it.”
“Pretty quiet around here,” his father then said. “With just the two of us.”
That his father might also be missing her came as a surprise to Ron. “Sometimes,” he admitted.
It must have been only a few days later that his father brought up the subject of Margaret and Jenny. He asked if Ron’s mother had ever talked to him about her old friend from high school Margaret McGraw.
Ron wasn’t sure.
“I thought she might have mentioned her,” his father said. “Margaret’s grandfather, Arthur McGraw, was the coinventor of the pop-up toaster. Before then you had to open up the sides to get the toast out.”
“I never heard of him,” Ron said, struck that it had taken two grown men to invent a simple release mechanism.
Ron’s father went on to say that a couple of months ago he had run into Margaret McGraw—now Margaret Lawson—and found out she’d buried her husband the same week they’d buried Ron’s mother. Mr. Lawson had been a rich chicken farmer but had died without a cent. It was possible, Ron’s father said, that he and Ron had eaten Mr. Lawson’s chickens, which were called Jenny’s, after the daughter. “You’d like Jenny,” he told Ron. “She’s really smart.”
Ron couldn’t imagine liking a girl, no matter how smart she was. “Smart how?” he asked with a prick of jealousy.
“Well, she’s only eight and she’s in grade five. They’ve got her in a school for gifted children. On a scholarship, fortunately, because there’s no money.”
Ron wondered why, if his father knew so much about these people, he’d never mentioned them before. It wasn’t the kind of question he felt comfortable asking, though. He asked how Mr. Lawson had died.
“Choked to death,” his father said.
“How?”
“On a chicken bone.”
“A Jenny’s chicken?”
“I guess the man ate his own chickens.”
“Holy smokes.”
His father didn’t seem to find this particularly remarkable. He wanted to get back to Mrs. Lawson’s money troubles. He said that Mr. Lawson had been a compulsive gambler, a poker player. Eventually he’d lost everything—the chicken farm, their savings, everything.
“He must have blinked a lot,” Ron noted.
It took his father a minute. “Right. He probably did.” What it all boiled down to, he said, was that Mrs. Lawson could no longer make ends meet. The salary she earned as a receptionist for a foot doctor hardly covered the interest on her debts. Just last week, after holding off as long as she could, she sold Jenny’s horse to the people who’d been boarding it. Ron’s father didn’t learn about the horse until too late. “If I’d known,” he told Ron, “I’d have tried to work something out. I said to Mrs. Lawson, I said, ‘Listen, before things get any worse, you and Jenny had better come and live with my son and me.’”
Ron was still back with the husband. “What?”
“I told them they should live with us. Until they can get on their feet again.”
“How long will that be?”
“We’ll have to play it by ear.”
HIS FATHER drove to get Jenny and Mrs. Lawson late Sunday morning, returning a few hours later with a U-Haul trailer in tow. Ron, who’d been waiting on the front porch, thought that they’d picked up the horse; somehow they’d managed to get Jenny’s horse back. The truth was more incredible. They’d brought the furniture, and not just odds and ends but beds, dressers, chairs, tables, a gigantic dollhouse, plus boxes of dishes and towels and then all their clothes, in garbage bags and falling off hangers.
Under Mrs. Lawson’s direction, Ron and his father unloaded the trailer and placed the furniture around the house. Their furniture, if Mrs. Lawson felt it didn’t match or was in the way, got banished to the basement. Far from being the sad, rundown lady Ron had been expecting, Mrs. Lawson was high-spirited and young looking, a lot younger looking than his mother, though they would have been the same age. Where his mother had been on the heavy side, Mrs. Lawson was thin, with no hips or chest. She had wispy light brown hair, slanted eyes, and a small, flat nose, like a baby’s. In a few weeks Ron would learn that she was part Chinese.
She called his father Clarkson, their last name. Ron she called Constantine, though his father had introduced him as Con. Ron never went by his full name, and hearing it said, especially in front of Jenny, was torture. For most of the afternoon Jenny sat on the porch bench holding a pen and notebook and watching him as if this were her house and she resented the intrusion. Never once did she smile; she hardly said a word. When Ron’s father told one of his blind-man jokes she narrowed her eyes. She wore yellow shorts and a puffy white blouse that looked too big and a yellow plastic watch, also too big, which slid around her wrist and which she kept checking. Off and on she jotted something on her pad, giving Ron the idea she was making a list of their belongings, but then he passed near enough to see entire sentences. He saw her chewed nails and the ladybug clips in her hair. Her hair was as fine as her mother’s, only reddish blond. Otherwise, except for a birthmark on her cheek, she and her mother looked alike: the eyes, the thinness.
It was evening by the time everything was moved in. Ron’s father offered to pick up some Kentucky Fried Chicken, but Mrs. Lawson said, “Your fast food days are over,” and in her own frying pan made a mushroom-and-cheese omelet, which she served on her own white china plates. Over supper his father told stories Ron had heard many times before about the characters he used to run into during his travelling salesman days: the woman outside of St. Mary’s who swept the highway in front of her house; the trucker who travelled with a pet squirrel in his glove compartment. Mrs. Lawson laughed. Jenny, as before, remained stony, and in her cool, lidless eyes and the clink of the spoon against her teeth, Ron sensed danger, not necessarily to himself but as if she were a wild animal that, for the time
being, accepted the company of humans. She had changed into an old-fashioned-looking dress, navy blue and cone shaped. It had a white frill at the neck and in the middle of the chest a large pocket, like a door, in which the outline of her notebook showed. As his father began clearing the plates she removed the notebook and turned to Mrs. Lawson and said, “Mother, should I read my new story to them?”
“Maybe they’d rather hear it after dessert,” Mrs. Lawson said.
Ron’s father waved a hand. “Let’s hear it now. Fire away.”
“Jenny reads and writes at a grade-six level,” Mrs. Lawson informed Ron.
The story was called “Moving Day.” It was about how their furniture had been in an aunt’s basement but was now arriving at the Clarksons’. The way Jenny read, in a singsong voice and with hand gestures, was astonishing, as if she’d practised over and over. She said that the weather today was lovely, not a cloud in the sky (an upward gesture), and that at the sight of the house, her heart (she patted it) leapt with joy because the brick was the same yellow as her old place. At this point she trailed off. She squinted at the page.
“Can I start over?” she asked, not looking up. A blush began to climb her face.
“Sure you can,” Ron’s father said. “You can tell it any way you want.”
The blush had Ron enthralled. It was like a natural calamity. It drowned out the birthmark, then seeped away, like water into sand.
“Constantine—” she said. His attention snapped back. She was talking about how he’d almost dropped her dollhouse. She said she’d trembled with fear (a shake of her shoulders) but luckily nothing fell out. “All and all,” she finished, “it was an exciting day of work and fun.” She closed the notebook. “There’s more,” she murmured, “but it’s not ready yet.”
Ron’s father said, “Well, that was great.” He looked at Ron. “Wasn’t that great, Buddy?”
“Yeah,” Ron said.
One corner of Jenny’s mouth twitched. She slipped the notebook back into the pocket of her dress.
Ron went on looking at her. Her bent little head with its strands of pinkish hair.
Chapter Ten
IIT’S FRIDAY NIGHT, nine thirty. Rachel is lying on the porch sofa, listening to Evanescence. The iPod is Mika’s, as is the penlight she’s waving around. She directs the beam at her feet. After almost an entire week her nail polish is still perfect, not a single chip.
Inside, at his dining room table, Mika marks exam papers. Rachel can see the top of his head and his white hair—his flaxen hair—flitting up in the breeze from the rotating fan. Her mother is at the motel and won’t be back until late because Bernie Silver is on holiday, so she’s playing his sets.
At ten o’clock, her mother is going to call. Rachel can’t decide whether or not she’ll talk to her. Felix was the one who knocked over the lemonade, but her mother blamed her for putting the glass on a pile of books. And then she wouldn’t let her help clean up. “I’ll do it!” she yelled, grabbing the paper towels Rachel had raced to get from the kitchen.
As she was leaving she said she was sorry for losing her temper, and Rachel said, “That’s okay,” but only to avoid more aggravation. When you don’t have a father, it isn’t fair to have a mother who gets so mad. Maybe Rachel will tell her. She pictures her at the motel, her spiky hair and nobody putting money in the vase, and she lets out a frustrated moan to feel her anger softening. She turns onto her side, facing the street.
This next song is her favourite, “My Immortal.” She sings along: “And if you have to leave, I wish that you would just leave…” She switches the penlight off and on to the beat. In ten days she’s going to music camp. She wonders if Mika will let her take the iPod.
“GO AHEAD and fire me,” Nancy says. She sinks onto the stool next to the chopping block and lights a cigarette.
“Forget about it,” Frank says. “Nobody got splashed. Only one glass broke.”
“By some miracle,” Nancy says.
“You provided the entertainment.” He gives the grill a last swipe with the wire brush, then tosses the brush in the sink. “Did you see how Andria clapped?”
Andria, his one-year-old daughter. He has four kids under the age of seven, and every Friday night his wife, Bianca, brings them to the restaurant for supper. Their tray of drinks was what Nancy dropped.
“She’s so cute,” Nancy says about Andria. “You’re so lucky.”
“I thank God every day.” He pulls off his chef’s hat and rubs his head. He’s a large, bald, pink-faced man with round blue eyes that widen when he’s listening to you, as if he’s never met anybody more interesting. Even with his wife he does this.
“Are you okay to drive?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure.” She rubs her knee. “Anyways, when I’m sitting it never—”
“Never what?”
She waves her cigarette. She’s crying.
“Hey. What’s going on with you?” He comes over to her. “Is it Ron?”
She shrugs.
“You still think he’s fooling around on you?”
“No.” She dabs her eyes with the hem of her apron. “I don’t know.”
“He’s not hitting you, is he?”
That makes her laugh. “Ron? Are you kidding? He’d have to see me to hit me.”
“Okay, look. Take some time off. Go visit your sisters. Relax.”
His eager pink face hangs in front of her like a party balloon, and she finds herself ashamed of her unhappiness, and of her bad leg, too. She comes to her feet. “I’m good now, Frank,” she says. She tells him to run on home and tuck in the kids, she’ll close up.
When he’s gone, she starts lowering the blinds in the restaurant windows. The Korean variety store across the street is still open, and the old man, the grandfather, is out watering the flowers they have for sale on the sidewalk. Big crayon-coloured flowers in the shape of birds’ heads and scorpions and feather dusters. They sell black flowers, too: black tulips and lilies. Who buys those? Devil worshippers?
Devil worshippers make her think of her psychic pouch, and she takes it out of her apron pocket (she’s glad she never got around to throwing it away), presses it against her heart, and goes through the rigamarole of chanting, “Red is your blood, red is my heart…” and so on, while trying to imagine Ron smiling at her lovingly. When was the last time he smiled at her lovingly? She can’t even remember. No, she can: it was the night he said he wanted to adopt. They were so happy, weren’t they? She was. But then he got all wrapped up in renovating the basement apartment, which she understood…sort of. Well, now the renovation is done, it’s perfect, there’s even baby shampoo and Ivory soap in the bathroom, and instead of taking the next step he’s drinking hard again, and every time she tries to talk to him about phoning adoption agencies, he puts her off. He’s says he’s too busy to think about it right now, he’s behind in the shop.
If he has changed his mind about wanting to adopt, which she prays to God he hasn’t, why did he buy the soap and shampoo? A couple of nights ago he wanted the two of them to watch a National Geographic DVD about cheetahs, and when she suggested that they watch it on the new bigscreen TV, you should have seen the look he gave her!
“I don’t mean have sex or anything,” she said. But she thought, So what if we do? It’s not like it’s our little girl’s bedroom or anything, not yet.
She puts the psychic pouch back in her pocket and lowers the last few blinds. Maybe Frank’s right, she tells herself. Maybe she needs to go away and leave Ron alone to work through whatever it is he has to work through.
“YOU DON’T know what love is,” Celia sings to the businessman across from her. On a red ribbon around his neck he wears the plastic identity badge from whatever convention he was at earlier. Things couldn’t have gone all that well because here he is, getting plastered all by himself. He moans along to the songs, occasionally shouts a lyric or two.
Except for him and a pair of hectically smiling middleaged women who glance at t
he door whenever Wanda, tonight’s waitress, comes in (it would seem they’ve been misled about the Casa Hernandez’s eligible-bachelor population), the place is empty. At night, as Celia is discovering, people show up for Bernie, and when they find out he’s on holiday they go either to some other bar or outside to the patio for the breeze off the lake.
She finishes the song with a little riff she picked up from Diana Krall. The man claps twice, two whacks of his outstretched hands, as if he were summoning slaves. The women smile apologetically and stand to leave.
Celia starts in on “Love for Sale.”
“For sale!” the man blares.
Wanda comes over to pick up Celia’s empty wine glass. “Cheapsteaks” she hisses, referring to the two women and meaning, of course, “cheapskates.” She’s from Serbia; she’s only been in the country a year. Since the time she was tipped a hundred dollars by a table of French-Canadian hockey players, her idea of a reasonable tip has skyrocketed. She wags Celia’s glass: Refill?
Celia shakes her head. At the end of this set she’ll have a beer down in the kitchen with George. Before that, though, she’ll phone Rachel. She can’t believe she jumped down her throat over spilled lemonade. She can only think that the heat in their apartment is getting to her.
RACHEL AIMS the flashlight in his direction and switches it off and on. Is she signalling somebody? Ron checks his rearview mirrors. Other than a woman climbing into her SUV, the lane’s deserted.
Helpless Page 6
