Few Kinds of Wrong (19 page)

Dad still hadn't shown up by seven that evening. I'd been doodling in the office for a couple of hours when Bryce took me across the street to the A&W for supper. We drank thick chocolate milkshakes and ate juicy onion rings and whistle dogs. I could barely suck the milkshake through the straw.

“This is the best milkshake I've ever had in my whole life,” I told Bryce.

He smiled and said, “Me too.”

We sat in silence, neither of us seeming to know what to say. After I finished my onion rings and whistle dog, Bryce bought me a small apple pie.

“My mom left.” I suddenly felt like I had to say it.

“Oh?”

“Yes, but she didn't leave me.”

“No?”

“No. She's leaving Daddy. Not me.”

He sucked on the now milky milkshake. “Does that make you feel better?”

My eyes started to fill with tears and I swallowed hard. I looked down at the table, then to the floor and nodded.

“It will be okay,” Bryce said, his hand on mine for just a second, long enough for me to feel the calluses there. And, for just a second, I saw his eyes and something I would not understand until years later. I saw there the question: How could someone possibly leave their husband and home without leaving the child who lived there?

Silence again, until I asked the question I'd carried with me all afternoon, “Is that where Daddy is? Is he gone to look for Mommy?”

“He's dealing with it,” Bryce said.

After the pie, we returned to the garage. Dad was waiting there. I ran to him and hugged his legs and told him, “It's okay, Daddy, I'll never leave you.”

He stood straight and patted my back. “Let's go home.”

When we pulled up to our driveway, I squealed, “Mommy's home,” because there, sitting in our driveway, was Mom's station wagon. But as we neared it, I could see that the small stuffed elephant I left on the dash was not there and there was rust over the back tire well.

I looked at Dad.

“It looks like Mom's. We don't want people to talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“It's best we not tell anyone that Mom is gone. No one will really notice. At least not if the car is in the driveway.”

“Mrs. Murphy will. They have coffee every day.”

“Mrs. Murphy knows your mother is gone. But she knows not to say anything about it.”

I knew Mrs. Murphy and Mom would talk about everyone in the neighbourhood over their coffee, and I knew Mrs. Murphy would normally talk about it to someone else. How Dad could prevent that was a mystery to me. But I didn't ask. I didn't think I wanted to know the answer anyway.

Inside the house that first night, the phone rang four or five times. Each time, my heart would race with excitement, sure this call was Mom. Dad walked out into the kitchen for each call. I heard him speaking, the conversation shorter each time until I heard him pick up the receiver then hang it up. He left the phone off the hook until I could hear the loud, fast beeping sound, and when I told him about it he said that if I waited, it would stop.

“But Mom's going to call. She said she would.”

“She's not going to call tonight. It's too late. That's a customer bugging me about a bill and I can't take it anymore.”

Dad let me stay up late and I fell asleep during
Kate and
Allie
. On the couch, not in my bed, where my mother made me go every night at nine, no matter what.

When Dad shook me awake the next morning, I mumbled that I was too tired to get up. And I was. At least until I realized that Dad had woken me. His hands on my bare arm were rough compared to Mom's gentle waking with her soft, lotioned hands. The realization that Mom was gone jolted me to wide awake.

I got dressed and went downstairs to the table where Dad was drinking instant coffee and swearing about how awful it tasted.

“What you want for breakfast? Cereal?”

I thought about it for a few seconds. “I'd like some chocolate chip cookies.”

“Okay,” Dad said.

“And some hot chocolate.”

“Okay.”

“With marshmallows.”

“Sounds good. Better than this bloody coffee.”

At school everyone, including my teacher, noticed the bag of roast chicken potato chips and Snickers bar I had in my lunch box, along with a bottle of Pepsi.

“I've been a good girl,” I told them. “And I'm allowed a treat day.”

“Apples are a good treat,” my teacher, Mrs. Crane, whose husband was a dentist, told me. “Sugar will rot your teeth.”

“Apples are high in sugar,” BJ said, without looking up from her own peanut butter and jam sandwich.

“But they're nutritious and the sugar is worth it.”

BJ shrugged. “Sugar is sugar.”

That night, after working until almost 7:30, Dad and I stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way home and picked up a bucket with fries and creamy coleslaw. We brought the chicken back to the house and ate it in the living room in front of the TV. We munched on Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

The phone rang twice in the evening. Wrong numbers, Dad said. Still no call from Mom. After watching
Growing
Pains
, Dad asked me if I wanted to go to bed and I said “yes” because my eyes kept going together. My bed seemed like a great refuge from the tiredness I felt, and I asked Dad if he could carry me. He did and lifted me up in the moment before I drifted off.

I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and saw light from the living room. Dad was sound asleep on the sofa and test pattern filled the screen. He was sitting up with his feet on the coffee table, his head bent over and slumped a little to the side. I wished I could pick him up and put him in bed the way he'd done for me. I turned off the TV and the lamp on the end table. He didn't budge. I thought about waking him up but knew Dad couldn't get back to sleep once he was woken up. That's the reason I knew I had to go to Mom's side of the bed and whisper when I needed something, rather
than wake Dad up. So I let him sleep.

Before I left the room I stared at him a long time then tentatively kissed him on the cheek. It was the first time I had kissed him, the only time I recall kissing him, and I remember the feeling of the scruff on his face against my lips.

The next morning I watched him rub his neck while I ate my McCain Deep and Delicious chocolate cake and cream soda for breakfast.

“Slept funny?” I asked.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

I went to the bathroom and stopped at Dad's room to peek in. He had pulled the bedspread up over the bed, but it looked lumpy. I went in the room to try and fix it. As I straightened out the bedspread, I saw the receiver off the hook of the phone on Mom's bedside table.

“Dad,” I called, running out of the room. “The phone is off the hook in your room.”

“What are you doing in my room?” he shouted, startling me.

“I was just straightening—”

“Stay out of my room.” His voice was still loud.

“But your phone was off the hook.”

“I must have knocked it off this morning when I was making the bed. I'll go put it back on.”

He walked to his room then came back. “There. Phone's on the hook.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, as we did again and again every morning for the next two weeks. Two more weeks of late TV shows, exhausted mornings, eating junk food for breakfast, dinner, and supper, and going to Nan's to get my clothes washed. Two weeks of falling asleep on the couch every night. Of the sound of the phone not ringing.

Every night I'd go to sleep and wonder where Mom was and when she would talk to me again. I imagined her having an exciting life, dancing and going out and having fun, forgetting I was at home and how I might miss the cadence of her voice, how it lifted at the end of my name and went down when she laughed. I pictured her putting on her White Linen perfume and going out somewhere with a group of people. I saw her doing everything I had never seen her do before and was sure the only reason she could do that now was because she was no longer with me. And I told myself that her absence did not bother me, even though she was the last thing I thought about before I went to sleep at night and the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning.

One morning, as I ate my strawberry pop-tarts, Dad came out of his room dressed in the good black pants he wore to important meetings and funerals, and a wrinkled, white dress shirt. As he walked out, I saw him fiddling with his cuffs. He kept trying to put in cufflinks by himself, the pair Mom had given him on their wedding day. I finally grabbed the cufflinks and managed to put them in myself.

Dad smiled. He touched his shirt. “Too bad you can't iron.”

“I can try,” I said.

“Nah, I'll cover it up with my jacket.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just a meeting,” he said. “More of a negotiation. But I'm pretty sure I'll win.” He smiled.

“I know you will,” I said. And I believed him.

After school Dad was waiting for me in the car outside. I could see someone on the passenger side, but it wasn't until I got close that I saw it was Mom. She waved and smiled. I walked slowly toward the car, torn between being happy to see her, confused about why she had suddenly come back into our lives, and wondering where she had been.

“I love you, baby,”Mom said when she hugged me, and I said the words back, even though I wasn't sure I believed what she said.

The first full night of vigil with Nan, I insist on staying and tell Mom and Aunt Henrietta to go home. I know I won't sleep, so what's the point in going home?

It is so hard to watch this broken woman in her bed and not be able to make things right. She is a shell of herself — drugged, moaning, the piercing blue eyes only peeking through half-opened lids from time to time, sparkling with fear at times, resignation at others. I brush her hair three times, rub lotion on her elbows, the way she did every night she remembered to do it. I read to her from a magazine I found down the hall, pausing over and over to wipe the blur away from my eyes. I pace the floors, sit down, stand up, and even lie next to her in her bed, holding her, breathing in tandem with her breath.

I catch small naps until Aunt Henrietta bursts into the room at around 8:30, barrelling past me and straight to Nan's bed, wailing with great loud shouts of “Oh God” and “Oh Lord Jesus, help her” between sobs as she rests her head on Nan's bed. Thankfully, Nan is asleep.

I smile. Right here in this room with my dying Nan in the bed, my aunt weeping all over her, I smile and fight the urge to laugh. The scene brings back a memory of Nan at our house, one evening after Henrietta had visited.

“The scientists should study her brain,” Nan said, nodding after Henrietta.

“What?” I asked, a chuckle in my voice.

“She could take the best of anything and make it something bad. There must be a part of her brain for that and if the scientists could see it they'd figure out a way people could not be like it.”

I nodded then and as I watch Henrietta sobbing on the bed I wonder what Nan would think of the show.

“I'm going,” I say.

Henrietta doesn't stop her wailing. I'm not even sure she realizes I'm in the room so I just leave.

Outside the hospital, the day is cooler than yesterday, fog hovering over the city like a symbol of how I'm feeling. I'm beyond tired and know I still won't be able to sleep. I need something real to cling onto. I want to fix something, so I decide to go to the garage again. The pain in my side is tolerable, especially when I take a couple of Atasol 30s.

When I get there, the garage is bustling. It fills me to walk in the building. The guys all ask me about Nan. I can still feel leftover tension in the air and I wish things could be like they used to be. I wish I could feel like the guys would do anything for me. But they've already chosen Bryce over me so the feeling is gone. Jamie is under a car up on Ray's ramp. He's holding a wrench. He looks comfortable. Jamie is becoming. I'm not sure what he's becoming but I think I like it.

Bryce sees me and follows me to the office.

“Got an engine job in here?” I ask him.

“You need some sleep.”

I look at his baggy eyes, the dark circles, the shoulders hunched just a little. “So do you.”

“Go home.”

I stare at him, fighting back the urge to tell him to get out. But I want something else.

“I need something hard to do. I need to get in there and figure something out, maybe take a whole car apart. A nice, big, engine job. Understand?”

And I know he does. He stayed at the garage for fourteen hours the day after Dad died. He worked for two weeks straight, weekends and all, after his wife died.

“No engine job,” he said, shuffling through the work orders, “but there's a mystery electrical problem here. Everything shuts down when this car goes up a steep hill. Something's loose somewhere. Might be a long time to figure out where.”

Wires and fuses make minutes then hours pass. Tilt the car, she stalls. Put her level again and she's fine. Tracing connections from spark plugs to engine to dash to sensors, to the Electronic Control Unit. Nothing. Most times this would frustrate me, but three hours pass and I'm in blissful oblivion.

“Hey,” I hear outside the car door. I look up to see Jamie standing there with an egg sandwich off the snack truck and a Pepsi. He passes them to me and I shake my head. “Not hungry.”

“Tough. You have to eat.”

“Nan can't.”

“You're not her. Listen, I promise if you were seventy-a nine years old with Alzheimer's and after having a stroke, I wouldn't give you this sandwich and drink, but you're not, so please eat.”

“Put them in the office. I'll get to them when I finish this.” I point to the car.

“What's the trouble?”