Light Lifting (24 page)

“You guys go on,” he said. “Then we'll come in a second. No need to make a big show.”

That's what I remember most clearly about it, that last part, with Reggie bossing us around, solving it and telling us what to do next. The rest of us, even me, way older than he was, we did exactly what he said and went to school. I turned my back and I left him there with my little brother. I let him work it out all on his own.

AFTER THAT, things were different between us, between the four of us and Reggie. He played road hockey with us all the time now with our uneven teams, our three on twos, and it really didn't matter. We lent him a pair of old sneakers and it turned out that he wasn't that bad at all once he got the hang of it. He still went on with the cabbage rolls and the rest of it, but everything was different.

Through the remainder of the fall and into the winter and on past Christmas it went pretty much the same. Then in January and February it started to get too cold outside so we had to move everything in. Down in the basement of our house we started this intricately-organized league of tabletop gear hockey. We kept stats and we followed a schedule, and we posted our rankings on a piece of Bristol board taped to the wall. For about a month that was all there was, thinking up clever passing plays, sawing back and forth with those metal rods and working on our one-timers from the back defenseman. Reggie was great at this kind of hockey. When it came to pushing those little plastic guys around, and shoving the goalie back and forth in his limited little one-line crease, nobody was better. We also watched a lot of games on TV. It was that period of New York Islander and Edmonton Oiler dominance, a terrible time to live where we lived. It might have been great on the Prairies, but around here the Red Wings and Maple Leafs were both terrible. It was the John Ogrodnick, Rick Vaive era, a time when halfway decent guys like that could score fifty goals on a team that didn't have a chance of making the playoffs. They were so terrible we didn't expect anything from them and we could just sit there and watch our nothing teams doing nothing in a game that meant nothing. Reggie was absorbed right into that. He still never slept over and he only ate with us on Tuesdays, but when I think about that time, I remember him always being there, sitting on the couch with us or getting ready to drop the puck out of his left hand while the fingers of his right swivelled the centre man and set him up for the face off. The coldest weeks passed quickly and it wasn't long before we were back outside in the spring and starting to think about baseball.

Then one day after school, in April or May, I think, I answered the door. I opened up our front door and that ended it. I barely recognized her because I had never really seen her close up before. She was wearing white sweatpants and white running shoes and one of those blue nylon windbreakers that folds neatly into a pouch. She seemed very skinny to me and her hair, which was pulled back into a ponytail with one of those pink bobble elastics, was that colour that goes right in between blonde and brown. I remember that she was wearing a lot of makeup so her face looked more dressed-up than the rest of her, and I couldn't decide if she was a young person who looked old or an old person who looked young.

“Is Reggie home?” she said, sort of tentatively and just from the way she said his name, just from the way she said “Reggie” I knew that he belonged to her.

I stood there with the doorknob in my hand, and, for a second, I tried to figure it out. I tried to run through all the possible explanations for her and for Reggie. I tried to imagine what they ate on all those other nights, and what shows they watched together, and why they had moved here in the first place and why, after all this time, she was finally here, standing on our porch. I looked at the Velcro straps on her white sneakers and I wondered if it meant anything if a grown-up lady wore Velcro shoes and jogging pants while her son only wore dress clothes. For a little while, I thought maybe this was a clue for something else, the key detail in a sinister mystery I was supposed to solve, but after two seconds, I decided it probably wasn't. I didn't know what to do.

“Dad,” I said. “There's somebody at the door for you.”

“No,” she looked at me and whispered it kind of frustrated. “I want Reggie.”

But then my father was there and my mom came right behind him and the two of them stood there with me on our side of the threshold.

“Is Reggie home?” she asked again. And my father answered right away, “Yes, yes he is, just a second.”

He went over to the basement door and called for him to come up.

“Just one second,” Reggie's voice came back. You could tell he was concentrating on something else and didn't want to be distracted.

“Just one more second,” he said.

“No, Reggie, come right now,” my father said. “Stop playing and come right now.”

Then he turned and shook hands with Reggie's mom. He told her his name and said it was nice to meet her. And then my mom did the same thing.

“Your son is a very nice little boy,” she said. “You've sure done a good job with him.”

“Yes,” my dad agreed. “That is a very nice little boy you have there. A very kind, very generous boy. He has never been a bit of a problem to us, never made even a little bit of a fuss.”

He spoke slowly, like he was trying to make sure it got through, and she looked at him very carefully and nodded her head slowly.

“Yes,” she said, “I know. Thanks. Thanks for you guys too. He likes you, you know. You're all he ever talks about over there. Thanks for being nice to him and thanks to your boys, for playing with him, and being nice to him and taking care of him and everything.”

And then Reggie was there and the rest of them had come up the stairs too. I don't know what I expected or what I wanted, some big moment maybe, but nothing happened. When Reggie saw his mom on our porch, he ran right over to her with this big smile and gave her a hug. Then, he showed us off, one at a time, and did the introductions all over again.

“Yes Reggie,” she said patiently. “I know. I already talked to them. Come on, we have to go home now.”

“Okay,” he said and he ran and got his coat and then he was gone.

“See you later,” he said and the two of them went back across the street.

They left in the middle of the night and I think there must have been a problem with the rent because the house was empty for the whole summer and the landlord never took in another family after that. He got greedy and that's when he started rotating the students through, a different bunch every year. They came and went so fast you could never keep track of who was really living there and he packed them in so tight, there must have been eight or ten guys crunched in there at the same time. For the first few weeks, we could still pretend the students were just a set of temporary stand-ins who were only going to hang around for a little while until the real permanent replacements arrived, but then they let one of the front steps rot right through and the grass went a whole year without getting cut. Even before the cats arrived, I could tell that things had changed for good and that Reggie probably wasn't going to come back and fill us in with all the details about this great trip he went on with his mother and all the adventures they had along the way.

The students were all the same, very nice and polite if you met them in the daylight hours when they were on the way to class, but not so good at night. Everything about them was so obvious. They piled up a monument of their accomplished empty beer cases on the front porch and they had curtains made of Confederate flags and Union Jacks hanging in their windows. If they had a particularly good night, a flock of stolen pink flamingos might end up perched on their lawn in the morning. I remember a time when they hauled off one of those heavy-duty steel newspaper boxes from a street corner, the kind where you're supposed to put in your money and they trust you to take only one paper. The box must have weighed a couple hundred pounds and we had no idea how they had managed to carry it all the way home. For a while they worked on it, trying to crack open the lock with a screw driver or saw through the steel casing so they could get into the part where they'd get rich on a couple rolls of quarters. Eventually they gave up, but the box stayed there on the porch right beside the beer cases. In big letters it said, “Get the News Here.”

They did the normal things: taped a long, larger-than-life poster of a swimsuit model on their front door, played their music too loud, watched horror movies or porno flicks late at night with all the windows open. Those guys would pee on your lawn at one in the morning and then throw-up on your lawn at four. And they'd never apologize. They seemed to get off on the whole public display of it.

“Someone should call their parents,” my mother said once, sneering again as she stared across the street. “I don't care how old they are and I don't care if they do go to the college. If those were my boys behaving like that – if that was you over there – I'd give you such a thrashing you'd never forget it.”

When we were finally forced out, it took us almost a year and a half to get rid of the house. My parents hired a real estate agent, a lady with tight curly hair who wore a lot of heavy jewellery and seemed to own a never-ending series of matching pant suits. She had a sign with a glossy picture of her face on both sides and she hammered that right into the middle of our front yard. After the first few months passed without any offers, she told my parents the house wasn't selling because we lived in what she called a “mixed neighbourhood” and that nowadays most young families wanted to raise their kids in a quieter type of place, somewhere with a nice backyard and maybe a deck.

“Look around,” she said and she stood on our porch and waved her hand in a slow semicircle from one end of the street, past Reggie's house, all the way to the other side, like she was giving a tour and wanted my parents to drink in the beautiful scenery. Everything was quiet.

“We have to be realistic,” I heard her say, in one of those too-loud theatre whispers. “You know how it is. There's only three things that really matter: location, location, and location.”

She suggested a new asking price, a much lower number for my parents to think about, and she told them time was already tight.

“We have to get while the getting's good,” she said. “Or you could be stuck here forever.”

My parents stared at her and didn't say anything. Then my dad reached out and he squeezed my mother's hand and they sat down on the step close to each other and stayed there for a while, thinking it all the way through. The real-estate lady said she wouldn't leave without a decision and she stood over them, reciting a list of all the things that were wrong but could not be changed. Our bedrooms were too small and the basement was too low and there weren't enough cupboards in the kitchen. The furnace was on its last legs and the shingles were pretty well shot and no one, no one anymore, could live in a house with only one bathroom. She was one of those sales people that everybody hates, the kind who can guess how much you make in a year just by looking at your shoes. She'd been through this before, hundreds of times, and she understood the choices. Now it was only waiting. I watched her sliding her eyes up and down over my parents and my brothers and our house and all we owned and I could tell that she thought she had us figured out completely.

The Number Three

T
he single fried egg might be life's loneliest meal. He listens to the sizzle of unfertilized yolk and waits another second before lifting away from the heat. The timing is important. He wants the skin starting to harden but everything else still shaky and runny inside. It quivers on his spatula before sliding onto the plate slimy and wet, like a living thing. Half a shake of salt, a full shake of pepper and good to go. This is supper. The toaster pops and he looks over. Watches the filament cooling, turning black again. He butters and dips and mops. The room is almost silent. Only the occasional gurgling coming from deep inside the fridge. A single fried egg, he thinks: enough food for one person, as long as they aren't hungry.

He checks the cordless telephone again but there is no change. The phone is a smug little bird that refuses to sing. Words on its tiny screen say
No new messages
. There is a button for
Talk
and a button for
End
.
Redial
and
Flash
and
Clear
and
Mute
. Nothing from it all day. He looks at the calendar. One day until the day. Already one year. It goes and comes so fast. Only these hours left. You better call. He says it out loud. You better know what you need to do.

The house is too big for him now. He feels like the marble in one of those tilting wooden labyrinths and he has to try not to bang off the walls or fall through the holes. The space is crowded with things that should have disappeared, a thousand items that should have been wiped away and deleted, all at the exact same moment, while the body was flying through the air. Instead, they stayed and registered nothing.

When it gets like this, the kitchen is worse than the bedroom. More intimate. Always something else waiting behind a cupboard or rolling loose in a drawer.
The World's Greatest
Mom
mug – a last-minute gift from a lazy kid – hanging on its hook. And stuck behind a magnet is the reminder card for a dentist's appointment they never made it to. The secretary from that office left messages for a month, trying to reschedule a semi-annual cleaning. The boy's favourite deep cereal bowl and her preferred paring knife, the only one that stays sharp.

Scattered clothes and mismatched socks. Filthy T-shirts he washed only eight months later when the last of the smell was gone. The bristles of their toothbrushes, fanned by his thumb. Her half-completed plan for renovating the basement. Magazines flopping through the slot every two weeks.
Style at
Home
and
Canadian Living
. His son's password-protected laptop. He knows there are messages in there.