Bow Grip (6 page)

I nodded. “I’m even going to see if my mom can take the dog, since I can’t fit him and the cello into the cab of the truck at the same time.”

“As long as you don’t leave the beast with me. Last time he shed all over my suede couch. That dog never liked me. Go, Joey, have a good time. Buy yourself something new. Get into a bit of trouble. Find yourself a friendly cello teacher, maybe learn a few other things.”

I had been imagining the cello teacher looking like a matronly older lady, with spectacles and grandchildren. But what did I know? I was the only guy with a cello I knew. I’d have to stop by the library on my way out of town, get an instruction book. Say hi to Marion. It had been a long time since I’d been out of Drumheller alone. Since before Allyson and I got married. Maybe I’d even buy a new CD for the road.

My mom came to the door with a tea towel in her hand. The smell of bread in the oven wafted past her and mixed with the chill I brought in with me. It was starting to smell like it could snow.

“Joseph. It’s nice to see you. You want some fresh bread with raspberry jam?” Then she narrowed her eyes at me. “How come you’re not at the shop? Everything okay?”

“It’s slow. I’m taking off into the city for a couple of days. I packed up the rest of Ally’s stuff. I’m going to save her the postage and drive it into Calgary.”

“That’s very kind of you. I know Allyson has been busy, and money is tight with her school. I talked to her the day before yesterday, and we both agree it’s best if you two take care of things.”

Was there anybody in Alberta that my mother hadn’t talked to recently?

“I know, Mom, I’m already doing it.”

She passed me a plate with a thick slice of hot bread and jam on it.

“Don’t I-know-Mom me, you. That reminds me. I have to hear from Franco my own son is playing the viola?”

“It’s a cello, Mom. I only got it last week. And while we’re on the subject, I have to hear from Whit Nelson that my own mother has a boyfriend? From what I heard, he’s not even all that new.”

She sat back in her oak chair, one of a set of six that matched the table. Light Oak, to go with the new cork floor, just like Sarah’s. Rick Davis was making a fortune off our family’s new flooring habits.

“That Lily Nelson never could keep her big yap shut.”

“Does Sarah know?”

She didn’t answer me. I knew it.

“Why wouldn’t you tell me, Mom? It’s been four years since Dad. I wouldn’t judge you. You’re your own person, it’s your life. How come you can tell Sarah and not me?”

She stared down at her teacup. “I know you wouldn’t judge me, Joseph. You’ve never been the type. It’s just you and your father were so close, I guess I worried you might…. I didn’t want you to feel like I would ever stop loving your father. I won’t, but I’m learning that I can love someone else, too. That’s the God’s truth, Joey. I love Jeffrey, he’s a very kind man, and we enjoy each other very much. That’s the other reason I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to step all over your heartbreak with my new romance.”

“Just because I’m alone doesn’t mean I don’t want you to have a friend, mom.”

“Jeffrey is more than just a friend.”

“You know what I mean, Mom. We don’t need to talk about sex.”

She drew in her breath, held it for a minute. Gave me
her I’m-going-to-give-you-a-lecture look. I knew that look. My sister had inherited it. My father used to go mow the lawn or something whenever she leveled it on him. I braced myself with a sip of hot tea.

“Joseph, has it ever occurred to you that the reason some people never tell you things is that you don’t want to hear them? Getting you to talk about yourself has always been a chore. I don’t know where you get it from, because it certainly wasn’t me, or your father. We used stay up all night sometimes, the two of us, right here, around the old table, just talking. Solving all the world’s problems over a bottle of wine. Your father always stuck up for you, said you were just more private than the rest of us, but I worried it might be something else. Wondered if it was healthy.”

She paused, waited to see if I had anything to say in my own defense. I didn’t.

“What I’m trying to tell you is it can be hard for a person to open up to you, Joey, and tell you their heart. Talking is a two-way thing. People can’t trust their secrets to a guy who doesn’t seem to have any of his own.”

“How can I have secrets in this family? In this town?”

“I don’t mean those kinds of secrets, Joseph. Maybe dreams would be a better word. I’ve known you for more than forty years, you’re my only son, and I’ve never known what you dream about.”

“I used to dream about me and Ally getting a place out of town one day. We talked about having a kid, maybe.”

“And then what happened?” She asked me like she already knew the answer, like a grade school teacher might. I studied her face. She knew about my problem, I could tell by how she was looking at me. Ally had spilled it. Ally was
the only person in the entire world I had told, except Rick Davis, and I couldn’t see Rick talking about my low sperm count to my mother, ever.

“Ally told you about that? I can’t believe it. That is my own personal medical information. Why would she have done that?”

“I’m her mother-in-law, Joseph. Her family. I always will be, divorce or not. Her own mother passed when she was so young. We were talking about my grandbaby. Who else would she come to? At first she thought it was her who couldn’t….” Her voice trailed off. “Women talk about these kinds of things. She told me how much you wanted a baby.”

I sat there for a minute, collecting the breadcrumbs on my plate with my finger. I felt like crying right then and there, at my mother’s kitchen table. I remembered those few weeks after the specialist had told me the news, after the million little humiliations inside the tiny room next to his office, the wrinkled girly magazines, the little see-through plastic cup that had Cooper, J. Jr. written on its masking tape label. It was me. Ally had eggs and ovaries, all in working order. I was it. The last Cooper in the line. My sister Sarah and the Broussards would be the end of us.

I watched as a kind of sly grin crept into my mom’s face. “No wonder you never got that sleazy Sandra Jennings knocked up in high school. We worried about that, you know.”

I laughed. That part was kind of funny.

“I have to admit, Mom, I thought about Sandra, too. All this time I thought I’d just been real lucky real early.”

“I never liked her. Neither did your father. She’s a
Horseman now. Three little girls, she married that Aaron kid, didn’t she? The middle one, with the noisy motorcycle. You should count yourself lucky. She’s not as kind on the eyes as she was when you two were little. Hasn’t taken care of herself, and it starts to show. Ages a woman earlier than it does men.”

I got up and put my plate in the sink. She was starting to get on a roll, and I had stuff to do. I was hitting the road first thing.

“Can I leave Buck Buck with you? Franco has a new girlfriend and can’t take him. I’ll be back in a couple of days.”

“Take as long as you like. He’ll be fine. I like the company.”

“I thought you had plenty of company lately.” I kissed her on the top of her head and half-hugged her. She stood up and turned to lay a full body hug on me. She smelled like lavender, and her bones seemed light in my arms. Mom felt smaller now, and greyer.

“Drive safely, Joseph. Say hello to Ally for me. And Kathy.”

“Her name is Kathleen, Mom.”

“Kathleen. Well, her, too. Give her my regards.”

“I will.”

“I like your haircut. You are handsome as ever.”

“I’m going now, Mother.”

“So go. Take a loaf of bread with you. Make some sandwiches. Mind you, listen to the weather report. It smells like it could snow.”

I let myself out the front door, before she got going again with the questions. I tried to sneak out without waking
Buck Buck up, but I heard his nails on the hardwood floor as I escaped down the stairs. He sat in the window as I drove away, barking sharply. Then my mom in the window too, shooing him with the tea towel to get down off the couch.

I
t was still dark when I got up, and there were fingers of frost on my bedroom window, first time that year. I put on my good grey pants and a white shirt, and my leather coat my good grey pants and a white shirt, and my leather coat instead of the Stormrider. I didn’t know if the cello teacher was going to turn out to look like the matronly grandmother I imagined or Franco’s version, but either way, I felt like I should scrub up.

I backed the truck up in front of the garage and loaded Ally’s books into the lock box behind the cab. Tossed some clothes into my bag, then hauled the cello out and put it in the passenger seat. It was weird not having the dog underfoot.

I swung into the library parking lot just after eight-thirty. No one in the place at all except an old lady and a pink-haired woman at the checkout desk. I guessed it was Marion Bradley’s day off. At first, all I could find were books on how to play electric guitar and tin whistle, but after a couple of questions and a bored finger point from the librarian, I found one book on stringed instruments, and a fingering chart for the cello.

“You learning the cello?” She flashed the scanner’s red light over the stickers on the backs of my books. “Cool. I play the concert marimbas.”

“Is that a kind of drum?”

“It’s like a giant xylophone. You should come out and audition for the orchestra. We’re kind of light in the strings section.”

“I’m just learning. I can’t even read music yet.” I tucked
my books under my arm. “Haven’t even figured out the bow part yet. So far I sound like a dying moose on the thing.”

“Maybe you need to tune it up. It’ll tell you how in the blue book you’ve got. You’ll need a tuning fork, or something.”

I thanked her and jumped back in my truck. Tune the thing. Why hadn’t I thought of that? And since when did Drumheller have an orchestra?

Even taking my time along the back roads, it took less than two hours before the road widened and turned to chip seal and then tarmac and fed me on to the #1, straight into Calgary. I smoked as I drove and listened to my new Johnny Cash CD all the way there. Johnny Cash always reminded me of the smell of the stuff my dad used to put in his hair, and the taste of those little wine-tipped cigars, and Old Spice aftershave. He used to put Johnny Cash on the record player in the front room when he and my mom were heading out on the town for the night. She’d be up in their bedroom, fixing herself up. He would swirl the ice cubes in his drink and tell me stories.

“Never rush a lady out the door while she’s doing herself up,” he’d tell me. “Shows a lack of foresight.”

The Capri Motor Court and Inn had only non-smoking rooms left. I gave the guy my credit card and he wheezed around behind the counter, printing up the papers. A tiny television droned from his desk in the corner, next to a plate of ravioli impaled by a plastic fork.

“Check-out time is eleven a.m.” He slid the form across the counter for me to sign. “Your room is around back, overlooking the pool. Which is closed to the public right now, until spring. Ice machine is on the first floor, east side of the building. Off-sales are available from the lounge until
eleven p.m., unless she takes a shine to you.” He surveyed me, from the boots up. “And she might just take a shine to you. Cigarette machine is in the hall right outside the lobby.”

I pulled the bedspread off the bed closest to the heater, folded it, and put it into the closet. I had seen more than enough episodes of
CSI,
when they use that blue light to show where all the bodily fluids were hiding. The place seemed clean enough, though. I liked the smell of the shampoo in the little bottle on the counter. I hauled in the cello and my bag, put them both on the other bed.

I needed some lunch, a newspaper, and a street map of Calgary. Plus, I was running out of smokes. I left the truck in the parking lot around the corner from the row of identical turquoise motel room doors and walked several blocks until I found a little strip of street with a couple of stores and a tiny restaurant. The guy behind the counter had short dirty-brown dreadlocks and a silver ring through his eyebrow. I ordered and grabbed a table in the sunny window, next to a woman wearing a poncho and scribbling in a sketchbook. None of the newspapers were less than a week old.

I borrowed a pencil from the guy with the eyebrow-ring and started with the classified ads. There were classical guitar lessons, piano lessons, drum classes, and three serious players looking for a bassist with strong metal influences. No mention of cellos at all. I folded up the paper and ate my chicken salad sandwich. There were green grape slices in it, and the mayonnaise had curry in it, which at first I thought was weird, but I liked it anyways.

I figured I should get a map and find Allyson’s place. Get it over with. The thought of seeing her hung around my
neck like a lead scarf. What would a guy say?

I called her from a payphone outside a barber’s shop. It picked up right away, went straight to the machine. Both of their voices, speaking in tandem:
Hi there, you’ve reached Kathleen and Ally’s place.
I hit the number key so I didn’t have to hear the rest of their message, what they were doing instead of answering their phone, what I could leave after the beep.

“Hi, um, this is Joey. I’m in Calgary for a couple of days, and I’ve got the last of your stuff in my truck. You can call me at the Capri Motor Court, room 119, and leave a message when you’ll be around. I guess that’s it.”

I hung up hard, wishing I didn’t always sound like such a fucking idiot on the voicemail. For some reason, answering machines always made my heart pound. Something about my words being on a machine; a permanent record of me not knowing what to say.

I bought a pack of smokes, a map, a box of crackers, some cheese, and a chunk of summer sausage. A paperback novel, and a new toothbrush. Something about a road trip that called for a new toothbrush. Took them all back to the motel. I pulled back the pumpkin-coloured curtains in my room, and blocked the front door open with the wooden wedge I found next to the wastepaper basket. I sat down on the chilly blue bench that was bolted to the concrete sidewalk outside my front door. I smoked, staring at the scabby patch of grass between where the sidewalk ended and the chain link fence around the swimming pool began. The water had been drained out, the bottom covered with a layer of once orange and red leaves, and a flattened Styrofoam hamburger box.