Few Kinds of Wrong (3 page)

I walk to the answering machine and press play anyway, knowing there is one message there. It waits every night for me.

“I finished the Tobin job, so no need to come in tomorrow. Mom is cooking dinner anyway so we'll see you then.” Dad's voice echoes through death and to my ears. His strong, deep voice speaks offhandedly, unaware how many times I will listen to his message.

Twenty-two words preserved on my answering machine's cassette and duplicated on two other tapes in case I might lose one. They were not Dad's last words, but they are the only ones I have left.

I pour Bacardi into a tumbler Jamie bought when he moved into the house. He decorated everything, always having a better eye for things like that. If not for Jamie, I'd still have the old green couch Mom and Dad gave me from their rec room and milk crates with a sheet over them as a coffee table. Instead, I have a maple cocktail table and a plush, navy living room set of sofa, loveseat, and chair.

Jamie insisted I go with him to pick out the furniture, so I went along and nodded my agreement with whatever he suggested. At least until he wanted the beige couch. Looking at the fabric, I recalled years of my mother's frustration with trying to keep everything clean from dirty hands. I remembered the sound of plastic squeaking when I sat on Mom's light-grey sofa because Dad said a man should not have to change his clothes before he sat on his own sofa. I looked around the furniture store and told Jamie to find something darker or none of my money would be used to pay for it. Since I was the only one with any money, Jamie relented. My one and only decorating choice in the whole house.

I turn on the TV and flick through the channels, stopping on a biography of Jane Fonda for a moment before moving on and finding an old black-and-white movie on AMC. Katherine Hepburn is in a boat with a greasy-looking Humphrey Bogart.

The rum tastes good and before I know it, half the bottle is gone. My eyelids are heavier than I can manage to keep up. Just before I pass out on my usual place on the couch, I think maybe Bogey looks a little like Dad and don't even bother to fight the tears I have struggled against all day.

2

A
T SIX THE
next morning, I clear off a small space on my dining room table, pushing aside piles of bills and junk mail. I put my coffee on top of a coupon for Subway and open up a small notepad I dug out from a kitchen drawer. I write my name on a page then write it again, continuing for two 4” x 5” pages of my name. More than five years of writing Jennifer Flynn and initialling everything JF, means I have to relearn my old signature. You would think that writing Jennifer Collins again would be like riding a bike, but more often than not, the C in Collins, despite my best efforts, looks like it started as an F.

Although I haven't legally changed my name back, I decided I don't want to use Flynn anymore. I really haven't been Jennifer Flynn in a while. I stopped being married to Jamie more than three months ago.

That morning had been warm for February. The fog was so thick I couldn't see the cars in the parking lot outside the garage. I was working, when I heard a song on the radio. “Happy” by Bruce Springsteen. Our song. The song we had played for our first dance at our wedding reception. The song Jamie so often sang to me after we made love. I finished the job I was working on, showered in the garage, and decided to see Jamie before going out with the girls for our usual Saturday afternoon brunch. I just wanted to see him and to talk, maybe even something
more if time and mood permitted. I used my key and walked in. I knew Jamie would be surprised.

I heard a sound coming from the back of the apartment and didn't realize right away what it was. It was a moment later, when I got closer to the sound and saw a stiletto shoe in the hall, then a bra in the bedroom doorway, that it all made sense. I had heard the same sound many times before. Despite not wanting to, in spite of knowing it would change everything if I walked through that door, I did. I saw. Jamie's naked body bent over someone who was on all fours on the bed, banging on her, each movement accentuated with his groan. The back of this nameless woman's head snapped back with each forceful thrust from Jamie, her long hair flicking around like a whip slapping Jamie's face. His back glistened with sweat. I knew if I could see his face, his eyes would have that hungry look I thought was mine, and I thanked God his back was to me.

They had no idea I was in the room. I was quiet, unable to speak because they had stolen all of the air from my lungs. I just stood there for two or three minutes, staring, hurting, dying, suppressing a scream until something seemed to snap and rage took over where the pain had been. I went straight from denial to anger in seconds, a new record for Kübler-Ross's stages of grief.

I could tell from his pace of movement and panting that he was about to finish. I thought about screaming to stop him before he could, but then my eye caught the other shoe, the twin from the one in the hall. I looked from the shoe to Jamie, back to the shoe, back to Jamie.

The scream Jamie let out a few seconds later was not one I had heard before, and it was not the natural culmination of the act he'd been consumed by. It was the sound of footwear hitting the back of his head, and I left before he could turn around. I could still hear his swearing and crying when I walked out the front door with a smirk on my face and tears in my eyes.

I return to the notepad. If only getting back to who I used to be was as easy as learning to sign my name again.

A couple of weeks after Jamie started work, I walk into the garage and see Aunt Henrietta waiting in my office. This is the third time she has been here in the past month. Bryce calls her a hypocardiac and she isn't alone in her obsession with her car. A few of our customers have the same problem and, although they make us a lot of money by coming in so often, dealing with them is rarely worth the income.

“Morning,” I say. Bryce nods. Henrietta doesn't bother with the formality of hello.

“That back tire is making an awful racket and Bryce is going to have a look at it. He says it's probably the hubscrew.” She nods and furrows her brow, reflecting the seriousness of announcing that she has cancer or that the sky is falling.

“You want my car so you can go shopping or something while you wait?” I ask.

“Will it take a while to fix the hubscrew?” She glances at Bryce but her questioning stare lands on me.

“Umm.” I look to Bryce. He returns a small grin.

“Nah,” Bryce says. “Loose hubscrew shouldn't take more than ten minutes.”

I nod.

Aunt Henrietta doesn't pay for any of the work we do on her car. She never has. Bryce was the first one to come up with our fake repairs on her car. He spent several hours looking for a strange sound Henrietta had heard in her car, including removing the centre console between the seats, and the lower dash. Then he finally figured out that Henrietta had been hearing the movement of a Coke can with the pull tab inside, which would roll forward and backward under the seat, rattling as it did. He swore that he would never waste that kind of time again.

The next time Henrietta came in with a vibration, Bryce checked to make sure all was okay. When he could find nothing wrong, according to the story that has been told over and over, Bryce told her she had a broken stilt assembly. Dad, who had been there, looked at Bryce with question marks all over his face. Dad didn't crack a smile but he and Bryce laughed for a straight half hour after Aunt Henrietta left with her car exactly the same as it was when it came in.

Over the years Aunt Henrietta has had hundreds of repairs done to her car, many of them real but the majority fictitious. The hubscrew has been used before, but it's a good one and it makes Henrietta happy.

Jamie walks in fifteen minutes later, when Henrietta is showing Bryce and me the latest pictures of her five-year-old Sarah. Henrietta refers to Sarah as her miracle child. She was conceived when Henrietta was forty-six years old, after doctors had assured her, years before, that she could never have a baby. No child has ever been as smart or kind or beautiful as my cousin Sarah, at least that's what Henrietta thinks. I think she always has a runny nose and spends way too much time styling her dolls' hair.

When Jamie sees Henrietta through the office window, he turns around and is walking away from the office when Henrietta spots him.

“Jamie,” she shouts, her voice jolting me. “Did you take my Tupperware container on Sunday?”

I feel like I've fallen through a rip in the universe and landed somewhere else, maybe in another time. Is Aunt Henrietta having a stroke or something? Why is she talking to Jamie about Tupperware?

“What?” I ask.

Aunt Henrietta turns to me. “I think Jamie took my green cookie container. You know, the one that used to be Mom's.”

No, I don't know. I don't know the colour of anyone's Tupperware. Ever. I turn and catch Jamie making some kind of signals to Aunt Henrietta.

“Where would he have been to take your cookie container?”

“Mom's.” Henrietta shrugs.

I turn to Jamie who has come up next to me. “You were at Nan's? Why?”

Before Jamie can even open his mouth, Aunt Henrietta pipes up. “He goes there every week. Every Sunday at two like clockwork.” She looks around and must notice the faces on Bryce and Jamie. They look like someone has just blurted out the non-existence of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny to a four-year-old.

“What?” Henrietta says, looking to Jamie and Bryce. “She's not a youngster. I don't see what the big deal is.”

“How long have you been visiting Nan?” I ask Jamie, close enough to his face that I can smell the coffee on his breath.

“Since you split up,” Henrietta answers.

“Are you a ventriloquist, Jamie? Because whenever I ask you a question, this one answers and it's getting confusing.”

“Excuse me?” Aunt Henrietta says, her voice up an octave on “me.” “I will not be spoken to like that. I'm just telling you the truth. That's more than anyone else. Big deal. Jamie visits Mom. Who cares?”

“Then why didn't you tell me?” I ask her.

“Because everyone figured you'd be angry if you knew about it.”

“Well, I am now. Because you kept it from me. Like I'm too fragile to hear something as simple as that. Wonderful. Glad to know my family thinks so much of me.” I start to walk away, to get out of the office before I smack something when the question hits me.

“Did Mom know this?” I turn around and three faces have the wordless answer written on them.

In my bay, I pick up a cloth and start to clean a wrench. I don't have a work order and I don't want to go back in the office. I think about the Sundays I suggested to Mom that we visit Nan and how she always talked me out of it.

I can't believe they wouldn't tell me something as simple as this. Like it's a big deal or something. Like I'd be upset. Just because I told Jamie never to show his face around me or my family again. Just because I may have told Nan that Jamie died, made her cry before she forgot my stupid lie.

I suddenly feel gripped by a panic, wondering what else has been going on. There's been a concerted effort to keep something from me. A minor thing. Something that shouldn't really
matter. What if there are other big things? Maybe Mom has cancer or they all helped Jamie get part of the garage. They obviously still kept in some form of contact with him since we split. Maybe he's over at Mom's house for dinner regularly and Bryce goes to hockey games with him.

Bryce comes out to my bay and I jump on him with questions. “What else are you not telling me? Is there a whole load of stuff I don't know?”

“No.”

“Swear on Dad's grave.”

“I don't swear on anything, let alone a dead man.”

“Then why should I believe you?”

“Because I said it.”

“Yes,” I say. His words, the sparseness of them brings me back to reality. Sometimes the truth doesn't need a lot of frills.

I turn away and pick up my air gun, ready to turn it on and drown him out if he pisses me off.

“What's the part that's bothering you?” Bryce asks after a couple of minutes.

“Nothing.”

My hand is on the trigger. Bryce reaches around me and lays his hand on the air gun. He gently pulls it out of my hand.“

That even you didn't tell me,” I say, turning to him. “You kept it from me.”

Bryce stares at me, face unchanging. If he blinks, I don't see it.

“ And I wish Jamie wasn't so nice. I wish he could be a bastard everyone hates. We could all hate him together.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Bryce lays down the air gun.

“Why'd he have to be so nice. To visit my nan in an Alzheimer's unit. And everyone likes him. Even you. I saw the way you put your hand on his shoulder the other day. You like him, don't you?”

Bryce knew Ray for three years before he got a shoulder clap. Some of the guys still haven't gotten one.

“He tries hard. He don't have a goddamned clue about cars, but he tries with everything he got. And he'll do whatever you ask. No matter what. I'm after giving him the dirtiest, greasiest, stinkiest jobs I could find and even made some up, but he does every one of them with a smile.”

I think back to Jamie's second day when he showed up looking too good for an ex to look. Bryce had told him I'd be showing him paperwork so he should dress appropriately, but when he got to work, things had changed.

“Got a Mercedes for you to work on first,” Bryce said. “Very important customer.”

“Oh. Should I change?”

“Nope. No time. Need this done ASAP.” Bryce knew the customer was out of town for the weekend and wouldn't need the car until Monday. “Seems Mrs. Dwyer's keyless entry is not working.”

“Keyless entry?”

Bryce stared at him and I watched his right hand curl into a fist at his side.