I Was There the Night He Died Page 12

  “Hey, Scott,” I say, instinctively offering him five fingers before realizing that squirrels don’t shake hands. Scott bumps his paw against my fist.

  “What the fuck are you doing back here in Chatham, you fucker?” he says without pausing from his labours, which seem to consist in handing out flyers detailing the bank’s assorted saving accounts, all of which guarantee interest rates so attractively high, you’ll be able to save your hard-earned money like the world’s most frugal—and largest—squirrel.

  “Just visiting. You know.”

  “Hey, I heard you’re a writer or something. Mum says she sees you in the Globe and Mail sometimes.”

  “Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes when I write something for them.” Which is so tautologically obvious it makes very little sense, although it suffices for Scott, who nods his massive squirrel head several times in understanding. Out of respect for the many times he did show up as promised in the Monte Carlo and saved me from a Friday night watching Fantasy Island followed by an episode of Hart to Hart with my mum, I don’t ask Scott what he’s been up to for the last couple of decades.

  “Well, I better get going, but it’s good to see you again, Scott.”

  “Fuck, yes, Sam. We should get a fucking brew sometime. Get caught up.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m in the book.”

  “Right.”

  “The phone book.”

  “Right.”

  “So don’t be a fucking stranger and call me.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “And don’t work too hard. You fucker, you.”

  “Right. You too.”

  While getting what I need from the menswear section at Sears I remember why Scott dropped out of CCI and why we lost touch. Airplane glue is substantially cheaper and easier to acquire on a Saturday night at eleven than a twelve pack of Canadian, but it does come with side-effects slightly more debilitating than the premature development of a belt-high Molson muscle. After I get my underwear and socks I give in to the mall’s somnolent flow, eventually find myself at Coles, where I learn that Chatham’s only bookstore doesn’t carry any of my books, but does have an ample supply of Nora Roberts and Tom Robbins novels.

  I’m on my way out of the store when I almost don’t recognize Samantha, so used to always seeing her packed into her winter jacket. She’s sitting by herself at a table for two in the food court eating a piled-high plate of poutine while listening to her iPod and reading what looks like a fat textbook. I stay where I am, just inside the entrance to the bookstore, until I realize that someone could easily misconstrue what I’m doing as watching her. When she looks up from her book to brush a long strand of hair out of her face and behind her right ear, she recognizes me, seems as surprised to see me here as I am her. I return The History of the Electric Guitar back to the shelf and walk over. She thumbs something on her iPod but doesn’t remove her ear buds. I motion with my chin toward the book.

  “How can you concentrate in here?”

  She shrugs. “I’m usually listening to music.”

  “How can you concentrate with music on?”

  She shrugs again. They should call her generation Generation Shrug. “It’s just physics.”

  “And what kind of music goes best with physics?”

  “At the moment, Jim Bryson.” She can tell I have no idea who that is. “He’s sort of neo-folk. Sort of a post modern singer-songwriter. Don’t feel bad—even if you did occasionally listen to people who were actually still alive, you probably wouldn’t know his stuff. He’s pretty underground.”

  “Do you know who Jim Osterberg is?”

  “No.”

  “As it is written, a Jim for Jim. I guess we’re even then.”

  She pulls out her right ear bud and offers it to me. “Do you want to check out what my Jim sounds like?”

  “Pass,” I say, picking up her textbook instead. The cover is different from the copy I had in high school, but inside is familiarly incomprehensible. “I dropped physics,” I say, thumb-flipping through to the end. You forget sometimes—there are compensations for growing old. Like not having to understand how the universe works.

  “Why did you drop it?”

  Closing the book and putting it back on the table, “I was failing.”

  “Really.” She seems genuinely surprised that anyone could be so dim; curious even, like a psychologist might wonder at a child who has difficulty fitting round blocks into round holes.

  “Let’s just say my strengths were elsewhere,” I say.

  “What, like phys-ed?”

  “No, like … ” I stop before I threaten to march home and get my grade thirteen report card.

  Samantha drinks from her can of Diet Coke through a straw. “What’s in the bag?”

  “Just towels,” I say, swinging the Sears bag behind my back. Not that shopping for underwear and socks is anything to be embarrassed about. “I ran out of towels.”

  “I meant to ask you. If your hot water heater isn’t hooked up, how do you get water to take a shower?”

  “Actually, I just got it turned back on. Before that, I took baths. I just dumped a few kettles worth of boiling water in with the cold water.”

  “It might have been easier to have just gotten the gas turned on when you got here.”

  “I didn’t think I was going to be here long enough for it to be worth it.”

  “And you do now?”

  “I guess. Maybe not. I don’t know.” Wanting to both change the subject and have someone listen to me gripe, “I asked the kid working in menswear if they had any blue jeans that didn’t fall apart like these”—I point to three separate dime-sized holes that have sprouted in the expensive pair of jeans I bought in Toronto less than six months ago—“and he asked me how often I washed them. ‘Whenever they’re dirty,’ I said, and he said, ‘Oh, you can’t do that with good blue jeans. Only wash them, like, every two months, max.’” When I don’t see the head-shaking confirmation of the absurdity of teenage sales staffers/modern manufacturing values I was looking for, I deliver the cuckoo coup de grace: “So I asked him, ‘If I don’t wash them, what do I do when they start to smell?’ You know what he said to me?”

  “Put them in the freezer?” Samantha says.

  I give up, shake my own head. This is why we have friends our own age. So we can complain and commiserate about people younger than us.

  Samantha pokes her white plastic fork into the swamp of brown crud covering her Styrofoam plate. Before I can get too Thou Shalt Not, though, I remember that I used to sit where she’s sitting now, used to take my lunch break at this very food court when I worked at Sears. Mr. Pong’s was my preferred half-hour destination, what the three chicken balls that came with the Number Two Lunch Special lacked in chicken they more than made up for with plenty of deep-fried dough and sweet orange sauce. And compared to kids today, who can’t even remember a time before recycling, my teenage carbon footprint is probably deeper than hers and all of her classmates combined.

  “This is lunch,” she says. “I’ve got class in twenty minutes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Lifting her fork, “You said you don’t eat meat anyway, right?”

  “Even if I still did, I wouldn’t be eating that.” Yes I would. Christ, since when did I start sounding like my mother?

  On the way to her mouth an overloaded forkful of poutine plops onto her left forearm; in the process of grabbing for her napkin, she knocks over the can of Diet Coke which soaks the same shirt sleeve.

  “See?” I say. “Karma.”

  “Do you believe in karma?”

  “No. But I do believe you’re going to need some more napkins.”

  When I return from the A&W counter Samantha has pulled up her shirt sleeve and is doing her best to wring it dry. There are sharp red welts travelling al
l the way down from her elbow to just above her wrist.

  “You didn’t get those from spilling poutine,” I say, offering her the napkins but still staring at the scars on her forearm.

  “Asshole,” she says, yanking down her shirt sleeve. “Asshole stalker spy.”

  “Hey, c’mon,” I say, looking around to see if anyone heard her. I’m still holding out the napkins, although she’s busy yanking on her coat and grabbing her books. “Sorry,” I say, although for what, I’m not sure.

  I follow her through the food court and down the escalator and onto King Street, but without calling out her name or imitating her half-jog. Even asshole stalker spies have their dignity. I decide not to trail her all the way to CCI, as forty-four year-old pursuant men on high-school property are never a good combination, regardless of their appeasing intentions. She crosses against traffic—narrowly avoiding a honking pick-up truck—and I watch her go.

  * * *

  Ding dong and hello hello, and is this the original roof and are the fridge and stove included and what are your hydro and gas bills like in the wintertime and how old is the roof and what type of foundation is it and does the house have insulation in the walls and attic and what are the schools around here like and how much are the property taxes and how long has the house been on the market and how do you find your neighbours?

  By walking out the front door, I want to say. Real estate etiquette dictates that ordinarily I wouldn’t even be here while Laura was showing the house, but apparently the prospective owners requested that I be present so that they could get a horse’s mouth yea or neigh regarding the child-friendly nature of the neighbourhood.

  “Like I said, it’s my parents’ house and I didn’t grow up here, but from what I can tell, the neighbours are very quiet, I haven’t heard a peep from anyone since I’ve been around. And there’s the park next door which would be great for kids.” When no one’s using it to guzzle wine or smoke pot, anyway.

  “Uh huh, uh huh, right, right.” The woman, the one asking all the questions, marches off with Laura, clipboard in hand, to have another look at something in one of the bedrooms, the man staying behind with me in the living room. Laura made coffee and brought donuts and the husband and I sit on either end of the sofa while the adults go about their mysterious adult business. If only the man would ask me about the house, we’d have something to talk about, even if I really don’t have any answers.

  Instead, grinning, “Records, eh?” he says, gesturing with his coffee cup at my eBay purchase, five records received in the morning mail, leaning against the living room wall. “Haven’t seen any of those in a while.”

  He’s younger than me, but not by much, likely first-time house-hunting, the calloused, scaly hand I’d shaken half an hour earlier testament to a good-paying factory job. For now, at least.

  “I can’t really afford it, but there were a couple of things I couldn’t pass up. And once you get your credit card out … ” And once you already owe the credit card company fifteen thousand dollars plus interest, what’s $150 more?

  “Where’s your record player? Didn’t know they still made ‘em.”

  “I don’t have one.” The man looks confused. “Not here, I mean. I have one at home. Two, actually.” The man looks alarmed. “Home in Toronto, I mean.”

  “Oh, right.” The man looks relieved, then embarrassed. “You’re here because of your … your family business.”

  Laura must have filled them in, probably didn’t spare them a single familial tragedy, hoping, no doubt, that their heartstrings will get tangled up with their purse strings. I just nod into my empty coffee cup a couple of times. The man does the same.

  Looking up, “But now you’ve got to take your albums all the way home with you,” he says. “Too bad you couldn’t have bought them when you were there.”

  “I couldn’t take the risk of someone else getting them.”

  The man grins. “Good ones?”

  “Real good ones.”

  Which they are; but, except for Willie P. Bennett’s Tryin’ to Start Out Clean, a copy of which I already own, nothing so special I couldn’t have waited to buy once I’m back in Toronto. Buying records, particularly rare, expensive records on eBay, is something I haven’t done since Sara died. I bought these five last week after talking with Samantha in the park. Drinking wine and talking with Samantha in the park. The internet equivalent of drunk dialing, I suppose.

  I hear “perfect for a nursery” and “but the sun in the morning” and Laura and the woman are back. The man sets his cup on the coffee table and stands up. I follow suit, stretch, and manage to spot Samantha’s dad wobbling down the middle of the street at 10:30 in the morning, a red-nosed, gargantuan baby in a flapping-open grey overcoat just learning to get from here to there without tipping. From what I’ve observed over the last few weeks from the snooping perch of my parents’ front window, he’s either up-and-out-of-the-house-at-seven-am sober or scarcely-vertical plastered, his obviously senior position at his law firm meaning that the underlings who occasionally come by with papers for him to sign when he’s too tanked to make it into the office are occupationally compelled to ignore the stumbling elephant in the room. Laura’s the certified real estate agent, but I know a deal-breaker when I see one, so announce a little too enthusiastically, “You haven’t seen the shed yet.”

  Which does cause everyone to turn and look at me, but which also keeps everyone from looking out the front window. I’m talking (“There’s room enough for a lawnmower and a snow blower if you didn’t want to keep them in the garage, which you could also do”) while simultaneously watching Samantha’s dad almost make it inside his house before stopping short and swaying in place, as if teetering in the bitter breeze. C’mon, just a little further, keep moving, keep moving …

  “Well, great, that’s good to know, Sam, thanks,” Laura says, clapping and clasping her hands and pulling the attention back to her. “And do you two have any other questions?” The man and the woman look at each other, Laura looks at me like she hopes whatever’s suddenly taken possession of me can somehow be suppressed for at least a few more minutes, I look out the window trying not to seem like I’m looking out the window, Samantha’s dad now stationary, but with his nose in the air like a scent-smitten hound. Until Samantha’s brother bursts through the door and nearly bumps him off the step, eyes down and knapsack slung over his shoulder and both thumbs busy texting. Samantha’s dad looks more bewildered than upset, like he can’t quite believe his son didn’t see him when passing less than a foot from his face.

  “No, I think we’re good,” the woman says, smiling and nodding at the man who takes his cue and does the same.

  “Well, okay, then,” Laura says, sticking out her hand. “It’s been great meeting you both, and you’ve got my card and number if there’s anything else you need from our end.” Handshakes, smiles, and thank yous, and we just make it, Samantha’s father closes his door behind him and we’re all a happy neighbourhood again.

  Laura and I walk the man and the woman to their car and wave them off, and if they do notice Samantha’s father looking out of his front window at Samantha’s brother, all they would see is a father watching his son walk to school, the latter perhaps paying a little too much attention to the text he’s reading and not enough to where he’s going.

  * * *

  You don’t need Darwin to know that human beings are foremost fornicators. Just observe a married man suffer a room full of attractive women, his wedding ring suddenly a cramping, unnatural appendage. And fucking really is like riding a bicycle, all you need to do is climb right back on and pump away and enjoy the ride. As odd as it is being with a woman again, it’s odder still being with a woman who isn’t yours. Your woman with her singular smells and preferred positions and inimitable loving ways.

  “Making yourself at home, I see,” Rachel says, padding into her apartment’s sma
ll kitchen, back in her jeans and sweater, a white towel wrapped around her head, barefoot and shower-fresh. I stay where I am, kneeling in the adjacent living room in front of the black plastic CD tree next to the small bookshelf that, though white and made of thin plywood, looks as if it was purchased from the same store, the kind of place that sells not only cheap furniture for lonely single professionals, but scented candles and potpourri bowls and just about everything else no one really needs. Instead of books, one of the shelves is covered with neat piles of Keep-CCI-Open petitions, safe-copy Xeroxes of the real thing.

  “Just checking to see if your musical taste has evolved over the last twenty-five years.”

  “I’m pretty sure I hid all of the Duran Duran CDs when I knew you were coming over. Find something you like and put it on, okay? I’m going to start dinner.”

  Sara cooked and I did the dishes, but Sundays I was mostly on my own, Sara lengthwise on the couch with a paperback novel and dinner not even a consideration until the last page was turned, usually no earlier than seven or eight pm. We didn’t go to church and there were no big family dinners to attend and we weren’t the sort of couple to meet friends for brunch, but Sundays were Sundays because Sara was not to be bothered until she was finished reading her Sabbath day paperback.

  “How does a pork chop and a salad sound?” Rachel says.

  “Actually, I don’t eat pork.”

  “Okay.” Rachel opens up the refrigerator, looks inside. “How about if I throw together a chicken stir fry?”

  “I don’t actually eat chicken, either.”

  Rachel lets the fridge door close on its own. “What do you eat then? Actually.”

  I stand up from my snooping stoop. “Look, don’t worry about it, okay? I didn’t expect dinner to be a part of the deal anyway.”