Born Weird (11 page)

“Vote,” Lucy said.

“This is bigger than a vote!” Richard said.

“Who’s for Angie’s deal?”

Richard was the only one not to raise a hand. “You don’t understand …”

“Richard—the vote has been taken,” Lucy said.

“You guys are gonna be sorry.”

“Exactly why are we going to be sorry?” Kent asked.

Richard didn’t have an answer. He took the front handle and pulled the casket towards him. Abba went to the right side. Lucy and Angie took the left. They walked forwards and then the coffin came off the track and out of the hearse and Kent took hold of the back.

What happened next was the intersection of two unrelated factors. The first was that the caretaker had just watered the lawn, which none of the Weirds had noticed. The second was that Kent’s shoes, which had been their father’s, were extremely worn at the soles. Six steps down the slope, Kent’s slippery shoes met the wet grass and, without warning, he went down. The back of the coffin fell with him. Lucy and Angie were suddenly carrying more weight than they expected. Knocked off balance, they fell too. Abba went next. This left Richard, trying to hold the casket all by himself.

At first it looked like he might do it. He turned quickly. He put his right shoulder under the corner. He steadied the side with his left hand and slid his right arm as far underneath it as he could. His forearms flexed. His fingers curled. For a split second the casket seemed to hover in the
air, defying gravity. Then the far end began to descend, pulling it out of Richard’s hands.

It twisted as it fell, and struck the ground at a 45-degree angle. The lid sprang open, revealing to everyone present an aqua-blue satin interior and nothing else.

If just one of the Weirds had been able to see the absurdity in this tragedy, the rest of them would have as well. But none of the Weird siblings were, in this moment, strong enough to be as outrageous as the circumstances they found themselves in. They just stood there. And then they scattered.

Richard ran as fast as he could. He ran towards the cemetery gates. He kept running after he ran through them.

Abba kicked off her shoes. Barefoot, carrying her footwear by the straps, her naked pink toes curling in the grass, she walked back up the hill towards the hearse.

Kent beat her to it. He sat in the passenger seat of the hearse.

Lucy followed Richard towards the cemetery gates, but she did not run. She walked at a leisurely pace. Those close to her heard her humming. No one realized that the song was “Temptation” by New Order.

Only Angie stayed where she was, forgiving them, instantly. Stepping forwards she closed the lid. Her knees were still bent. She looked at the tiny, mortified crowd. Only her grandmother was looking away. Angie caught the eyes of John Winters, the dispatcher of the Grace Taxi
Company. Mr. Winters gathered four of the men sitting around him. They stood and surrounded the casket. They lifted it easily. They carried her father’s empty coffin to her father’s empty grave.

T
HE GATE TO THE
U
PLIFFTIAN
Royal Cemetery was unlocked. The graveyard was surrounded on three sides by a black iron fence and on the fourth by the ocean. The fence was not rusty. Despite the damp sea air, no moss grew on any of the headstones. Several of the graves were dated from the 1800s, yet they looked no worse for wear than the stones from the 1900s. Abba was the only one who didn’t notice these things.

Holding a lantern, Abba led the way. Behind her, Richard carried a shovel. Next came Lucy. In her left hand was a crowbar. Angie came last. She carried only her daughter. At the foot of the grave closest to the water Abba set down the lantern. Her husband’s monument was an enormous black stone. The epitaph read:

Angie couldn’t help notice that the epitaph was in the present tense. She did not mention this. She looked at Richard. He held out the shovel.

“Don’t be an ass,” Lucy said.

“Okay, you’re right,” Richard said. He nodded, turned and raised the shovel to Abba.

“Don’t be a bigger ass!” Lucy said.

“Then you do it!”

“Richard!”

“But …” Richard said. Then he fell silent. The propane lantern hissed. He turned his back to his sisters. He looked at the ocean. His shoulders were hunched up. They stayed this way for several moments. Then they relaxed and he turned around and pushed the shovel through the grass and he began to dig.

Angie stood for as long as she could. Then she sat on the grass, which was wet. She watched Richard dig. The bigger the pile of dirt got, the less of him she could see. Only the top of his head remained visible when the shovel hit something solid. Richard reached up, Lucy passed him the crowbar and Angie looked at her hands. She counted the blades of grass that were stuck to her fingers as she heard the wood splinter. Then no one said anything, which made her look back up.

Abba was on her knees at the foot of the grave. “Thank God,” Abba said, quietly, and then she began to sob.

Nobody helped Richard climb out of the grave. There was dirt on his face and under his fingernails. The crowbar was
still in his hand as he walked towards Angie. He tossed the crowbar. It landed at her feet.

“At least we know where one father figure is,” Richard said.

He walked to the cemetery gates and through them. Lucy began shovelling dirt back into the hole. Abba silently wept. Angie put her hands on her stomach and she did not look away. She didn’t join them either.

A
LARGE PORTION OF THE
departures area of the Upliffta International Airport was roped off because a truck-sized chunk of concrete had fallen from the ceiling. Inside the perimeter two men worked a jackhammer. They were attempting to break the large chunk into smaller pieces and succeeding in creating a lot of dust and noise.

Covering their mouths, Angie, Lucy, Richard and Abba walked around the mess. They were almost at the other side when Angie saw the man who was waiting for them. Or at least for her. He held a bouquet of the purple roadside flowers. His suit was well tailored but rumpled. As Angie’s siblings rushed ahead, he ran up to her.

“Angie!” he called, loudly. The jackhammering continued as he got down on one knee and extended the flowers. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

Angie neither looked down nor stopped. She walked around him and joined her siblings at a special ticket counter that had been opened for the queen and her family. She continued ignoring him, even when he appeared at her side.

“HEY! JUST TALK TO ME!” he screamed. The jackhammer fell silent and his raised voice echoed off the concrete roof. At the front of the line Richard turned around. He looked at the guy and then he looked at Angie. Dropping his suitcase Richard stepped between his sister and the man she was pretending not to know.

“This guy bugging you?” Richard asked.

“I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” Angie said. She wished that the men operating the jackhammer would get back to work.

“This guy. This guy right here.”

“I don’t see anyone.”

“Right here! The one with the flowers.”

“Ah, Richard, sometimes you can be so thick!”

“Excuse me?”

“Who is this guy?” Lucy asked, having wandered back from her place in line.

“Who are you?” Abba demanded, having followed Lucy.

“I’m her husband!”

“You are not my husband!”

“Well, you can’t deny I’m the father of your unborn child!” he said. He looked at her siblings who had all gathered around. “Who the hell are you people?”

Angie’s undeniable compulsion to instantly forgive everybody made love very difficult for her. Her heart had been broken over and over again. The men she fell in love with
tended to take advantage of her forgiving nature. Eventually they lost respect for her, thinking that she had no respect for herself.

Angie had become afraid of love. Her solution was Paul. He was, in fact, her husband as well as the father of her unborn child. She definitely was in love with him. But he was also someone she could keep at an emotional arm’s length. Or to put it another way, treat like shit and be assured that he would never leave her.

At the time, Angie thought Paul let her treat him like this because he had low self-esteem. She had no idea it was because he loved her more than anyone ever had, or ever would.

Angie walked past her husband, stepped up to the counter and checked her luggage. The rest of the Weirds did the same. Leaving Paul behind, they proceeded to security. Angie presented her boarding pass to the uniformed official. She did not look over her shoulder as she put her keys and change into a plastic tray. She took off her running shoes. The metal detector didn’t beep as she passed through it, but the baby gave her stomach a good kick. Then another one, which turned into a series of kicks, each one slightly harder than the last.

“Okay,” Angie said, looking down at her stomach. “Okay, okay, okay,” she repeated. She looked through the metal detector. Richard and Lucy hadn’t walked through it yet.

“Really?” Angie called towards them. She held her shoes with her hands. The laces flapped around as she spoke. “Not one of you is going to do this for me?”

“Do what?” Richard called.

“Really?” Angie continued. “Really?”

“What?” Lucy said.

“I’m really going to have to say it? I’m going to have to ask?”

“What are you talking about, Angie?”

“Jesus!”

“What? What aren’t we doing?”

“Just go get him! Will you not just go get him?”

“The guy with the flowers?”

“Who wasn’t your husband?”

“Yes. That guy. Please go and get him.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s my husband,” Angie said. “He’s the love of my life.”

Neither Lucy nor Richard said another word. They nodded their heads. They put their shoes back on. Stepping out of line, they walked back towards the front of the airport. “His name is Paul. You’ll probably have to buy him a ticket,” Angie called after them.

K
ENT
W
EIRD PUSHED A SHOPPING CART
dangerously overloaded with empty beer and wine bottles up the middle of Palmerston Boulevard. His clothes were dirty. His beard was long and unkempt. The cart bounced over every crack in the road. The bottles rattled. He steadied the empties with his left hand and he steered with his right hand. Yet the majority of his attention was given over to finding an imaginative way to kill himself.

He knew the method had to be unique and original and unlike anything that anyone had ever done before. It had to be everything that Kent felt he wasn’t and wished he were. His current favourite plan involved placing eight running chainsaws at the bottom of a tall building. Then Kent would swan dive from the top and land on the chainsaws. Another idea was to stand at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas as four garbage trucks, each one travelling at a great speed and from a different direction, crashed into him at exactly the same time. Kent also imagined freezing himself inside a block of ice and setting it beside the Henry Moore sculpture
in Nathan Phillips Square. He’d do this in January. His thawing in April would be a materialization of the false promise of spring renewal.