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It took her a couple of hours. We were in the family room, sitting across from one another. The TV was on to a sitcom but I had pushed the mute button long ago, pretending to listen to her. Then her tone changed and I really did listen.

“Why?” she asked.

“I got a postcard from him. I thought … maybe he really did still care about me. See, Mom, when the postcards stopped coming, I thought he didn’t care about me any more. So I wanted to go and, I don’t know, say hello, see what he looks like now.” I didn’t add that I wanted more than that. Like explanations.

My mother was staring into her lap and picking with long painted fingernails at the nubbly upholstery on the arm of her chair. She took a deep breath and said softly, “You got others.”

“Other what?”

“Other postcards.” She cleared her throat. “He’s been sending them all along. He never stopped.”

“He never stopped? But—”

“Don’t be angry, Stevie. I … I did it for you. I found them in the mail and threw them away.”

“What do you mean, you did it for
me?
What the hell—”

“Don’t you remember that day you ripped up all the cards he sent and threw the pieces down the sewer? You were so upset, it broke my heart to see you. After that I just threw them away. I didn’t want to see you hurt again.”

“So—now let me get this straight. He’s been sending me postcards all these years, every month or so, like, he never stopped, and you let me think he did stop. And,” my voice was real calm, “and you let me think that he’d forgotten all about me. My own father. And you did it for me?”

She sat there, her head down, linked her fingers together and squeezed. “I thought it would be better if you just forgot about him. Just put him out of your life.”

“I
can’t
forget about him, don’t you see that? Just because you didn’t want a husband you decided I couldn’t have a father. I hate him sometimes, but I can’t forget about him.” I jumped out of my chair. “Sometimes I hate both of you!” I shouted as I ran from the room.

Hawk and I were snacking out at a doughnut shop on the Lakeshore one afternoon after school. Hawk had a passion for carrot muffins and every few days he’d tell me, “If I don’t get a CM I’m gonna die, Wick,” so we’d slip down to the doughnut shop and take care of his habit.

The doughnut shop was so hot inside the windows were steamed up. Not many people were there at that time of day; a bag lady by the window, munching on an oversized chocolate chip cookie, a lonely-looking salesman type wearing a trench coat over his suit, sipping coffee, a portable phone beside him on the table. We placed our order and took our food to an empty table, hanging our school wrestling team jackets on the backs of the plastic chairs.

“The Fanatic was a bitch today, eh?” Hawk commented, putting down his glass and wiping away a milk moustache.

“Yeah, he must have had a flea in his jockstrap, all right.”

Usually Coach Leonard was a pretty good guy, but not that day. “You’re wrestling like a bunch of geriatrics! The cheerleaders could kick your butts! Put some muscle into it, Richardson! Chandler, you move that slowly in a competition and you’ll spend the match looking at the lights!”

“You know what I’d like to do?” Hawk said as he popped the last bit of muffin into his mouth. “I’d like to get some suds and go down by the lake and watch the waves for a while.”

“Sounds good to me.” I knew he didn’t mean it. Hawk was death on drugs and alcohol ever since that time he got sick as a dog when we killed a six-pack and pierced my ear.

“Ah, the hell with it,” he said bitterly.

“Take it easy, Hawk. The Fanatic was just in a bad mood.”

The bag lady got up from her chair and shuffled to the door, pulling her thin coat tight to her neck. A couple of leaves blew in as she left.

Hawk was looking into his empty glass. “No, it’s not him, Wick. It’s … Do you ever wonder where your old man is?”

Hawk’s change in direction caught me off guard. “Yeah, sometimes.”

“Well, at least you know
who
he is. Me, I don’t even know my mother’s and father’s names.”

“Does it matter? I mean, the only people you remember are your mom and dad, right? How old were you when they adopted you? Three months or so?”

“Less than a month.”

“So what’s the problem? There was no relationship there. There’s nothing to remember. No memories, no loss. Right?”

“I don’t know. Its hard to explain. My mother gave me up right in the hospital. I don’t know anything about her. Or about my father. All I know is that one of them must have been a real short-ass.”

Hawk had made that comment more than once. He was a little sensitive about his height, even though he was pretty good-looking—straight black hair, clear pale skin. I hadn’t known him as a little kid, but I figured he
got more than his share of abuse from other kids. I also figured that was what got him into weight training and sports. Now he was muscular enough that you could tell, even if he had his jacket on, that he wasn’t the kind of guy you threw insults at.

Talking about his birth mother like that, he set off some painful Replays in my head, scenes that played themselves behind our conversation the way images dance and weave behind a TV show when the cable isn’t working and you’ve got two stations competing for the screen. I wondered what was worse, having memories that robbed you of sleep and hurt you like broken bits of glass lodged in the back of your mind, or having nothing except the knowledge that your own mother gave you away without looking at you, and that your father wasn’t even around when it happened.

“I don’t even know,” Hawk’s words broke in on my thoughts, “if they were married. Or if they lived together. Or any damn thing.”

“Why not ask your mom and dad?”

“Don’t you think I have? They don’t know anything, either. The adoption people won’t tell the new parents anything.”

“You can find out, though,” I said. “I saw a show on TV about it. You can go and ask the adoption people and they have to let you look at the records. You could search your mother out.”

“Yeah, I guess. But I’d be afraid of hurting Mom’s and Dad’s feelings. So no matter what I do, I lose.” Hawk laughed without mirth and shook his head. “You know, Wick, you take a guy like Leonard today, babbling on and on about commitment to the team, and
responsibility. Those are his two most favourite words, right? Commitment and responsibility. ‘You guys gotta learn these two things if you want to be treated as adults,’ he says. I think he’s talking to the wrong crowd, that’s what I think.”

“You and me both.”

I got up and ordered another coffee and a glass of milk from the woman behind the counter. I took them back to our table.

“Maybe your mom and dad would understand,” I said. “I think they would. They’re pretty good that way.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“So why don’t you do it? Find out where your birth mother is. Go see her. Ask her about your father. I’ll go with you. Finding your parents can’t be that hard.”

“I guess not. The thing is, though, I’m a little scared of what I’ll find out. What if it’s worse than not knowing?”

“Nothing’s worse than not knowing,” I said.

R
OMEO WAS STANDING
in a silver patch of moonlight in Juliet’s garden, telling her, as near as I could make out between the thees and thous and wherefores, that he wanted to climb up the trellis onto her balcony, shove her into the bedroom and jump on her. But Juliet wouldn’t shut up. She was yapping away so much that I knew Romeo would never get near her.

“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” she complained. What the hell was he supposed to say? “I didn’t like the name Humphrey”?

Just as old Romeo started into another long hearts-and-flowers speech, a tinny voice from the front of the room cut in.

“Excuse me, is Steve Chandler present this morning?”

Ms. Cake, our English teacher, stood and pushed the pause button on the VCR, freezing Romeo with his mouth open. “Yes, he is,” she said to the intercom speaker.

“Would you send him to the office immediately, please?”

Cake looked down the row of desks to me. “They’ve tracked you down, Steve. Away you go.”

When I got to the main office the secretary told me to sit down and wait. It was at least twenty minutes
before Mrs. Davis, the vice principal, came out of her office behind a scared-looking niner and, when the kid had left, she ushered me into her office like a stuffy head waiter in a snobby restaurant.

She closed the door behind me and I sat in the chair opposite her desk. She sat down too and began to look through the file in front of her.

Davis was one of those middle-aged women who thought they had to be tough or you wouldn’t take them seriously. She dressed very severely—a dark skirt and jacket, white blouse buttoned up to the neck, a short no-nonsense hair-do. There were granules of make-up in the crows-feet at the corners of her eyes.

She closed the file and looked up. Her voice was flat and her look was firm. Boy, was I intimidated.

“Where were you the last couple of days?”

“I wasn’t here,” I said.

She offered me a cold smile. “That is obvious, Steve. That’s why I asked where you were.”

My mother had refused to give me a note to keep the school off my back. She said I had skipped school and would have to pay the price. I wasn’t going to lie about where I was. I wasn’t going to say anything. It was none of Davis’s business.

She gave a hard stare to scare me to death and waited for me to speak. I looked out the window at the cars moving down Kipling Avenue.

She gave in first. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Look, Steve. Let’s not fool around. You were truant for two days. You’re in deep trouble,” she said in a tone that suggested I had just murdered all the janitors in
the school with a chain saw. “Now, where were you?”

Teachers are really funny sometimes. Just because they think something is a big issue they figure you feel that way too. If they think you’ve committed some major crime like skipping school for a few days, they think
you
should be sorry. You’re supposed to look contrite—we learned that word in vocab study before we started
Romeo and Juliet
—and you’re supposed to feel guilty. The thing was, I didn’t feel guilty at all. I was glad I’d gone to Quebec City, even though I went all that way for nothing, so why should I pretend otherwise?

But let’s face it. I was an athlete and I knew a game when I saw one. I also knew how to play it. You didn’t have to be a genius.

“I admit I skipped, and I’m ready to take the punishment,” I said. “I had to go somewhere important, but I’m not going to talk about it.” I gave her what I hoped was a hurt, I-need-understanding-not-discipline look. I had seen Hawk use that look a dozen times. He was a master at it. “It’s … it’s not something I can talk about.”

Davis picked up a pencil and tapped the eraser end on her desk blotter. Her voice softened a little. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you? Drugs, maybe?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s something personal.” Then I tried a line that always seemed to work on TV. “Please try to understand.”

She tapped her pencil some more. “Okay, Steve. I’ll go easy on you this time. One day’s suspension.”

The system made me laugh sometimes. I mean, Davis was sitting there at her desk with two framed
university degrees hanging on the wall behind her, telling me that, as punishment for missing a couple of days of school, I was going to have to miss a day of school. Figure that one out. That’s like saying the penalty for stealing a car was to go and steal another car.

But what the hell. I had a creative writing assignment due in two days, so now I’d have lots of time to work on it I’d have to explain things to Coach Leonard, though. He was training me hard for a big invitational tournament in Thunder Bay in July and he didn’t like me to miss practice.

After the postcards stopped coming I gradually got used to things the way they were. That’s what little kids have to do—get used to things. They can’t change anything. They can’t control things or make things happen. Most of the time nobody asks them what they think or feel or want. Parents, teachers, others, but especially parents, do things, and the little kid’s job is to adapt, to fit himself into a world somebody else made for him.

I
T WAS A WARM SUNNY SPRING AFTERNOON
. A
S
soon as I came into the house my mother started shrieking. I was late. I had forgotten, hadn’t I? Where had I been, anyway? I never thought of anyone but myself.

Well, I
had
forgotten that we were supposed to go to my grandparents’ for Sunday dinner, but it wasn’t like I’d been down at Sick Kids’ Hospital selling crack to the patients. I had been over at Sara’s working on a science report, which meant her doing all the work and me listening to tapes and talking to her. I dumped my books on my bed and headed for the shower. Fifteen minutes later I was ready to go.

“You’re not going in
that
, are you?”

I was wearing jeans, a Rush T-shirt and unlaced high-tops. My mother had on a dark blue pant-suit over a white silk blouse with a red scarf at the throat. We didn’t match too well. I didn’t feel like an argument so I went back upstairs and threw on an old corduroy sports jacket.

When I came down again she was already out in the car with the engine running, smoking a cigarette. As she backed out of the driveway I turned on the radio. My mother immediately switched it off. “You know I can’t concentrate on the road with that thing blasting,”
she complained, carefully putting the BMW into Drive. I slipped a Bruce Cockburn tape into my Walkman.

I knew my mother was nervous about going to her parents’ place. She always seemed uncomfortable around them, as if she was still a kid trying to measure up. To tell the truth, I felt kind of sorry for her—when she wasn’t driving me batty with her passion for making money and doing the right thing. She smoked heavily, chewed Rolaids as if they were candy, and went through a bottle of powdered organic laxative every two weeks. She hardly ever laughed. She was good-looking and dressed sharp, but never had time to date. She was skilled at her job—she was a partner in her accounting firm—but didn’t know how to relax when she got home from the office. Her briefcase was always stuffed with extra work. She constantly worried about what other people thought—her colleagues, the neighbours, my teachers. When it came time for the cleaning lady to come, my mother would fly into a panic and tidy up the house so Mrs. Nadimi wouldn’t think we were slobs. Who cleans up for the cleaning lady? What kind of logic is that?