One Good Hustle (21 page)

I nod and then whisper a thank you as I do up my laces. “I have to go back inside before I get in trouble.”

The two of us stand up.

“Hey, Sammie,” Maggie says. “You and Drew should come out to the farm and go riding this week.”

Drew turns to me, his mouth opens a little, and I can hear him breathing.

“I have to go,” I tell him, and start back up to the landing. “Thank you. And Maggie, too, um … nice to meet you.”

Drew stands where he is, halfway down the steps. One pant leg rides up a bit and shows a sliver of his bare foot. It looks so vulnerable, like the soft spot on a baby’s head.

I spend the rest of the night trying to stick with muck-work in the kitchen, scraping plates, dumping out chafing dishes, wrapping up leftovers.

Soon the music slows again. When the door swings open I see couples on the dance floor swaying to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” She sounds as if she’s been crying all night and hasn’t slept in days.

It’s the slow songs that mess you up. It’s the slowing down that gives your mind time to sink into a cold sad sea.

TWENTY-TWO

SATURDAY MORNING, I WAKE
in the camper and the air is stifling. I move as quietly as I can, trying not to shake the whole thing as I step outside.

When I come into the house it feels quiet and empty.

I call out, “Hello!”

Silence. It’s funny how you can always tell when there’s someone in the house. Even if they’re dead quiet or asleep somewhere, you feel it in your gut. Ruby and Lou are definitely not here.

One of the bandages from last night is flapping on my heel. I reach down and peel it off, stand on one foot so I can get a look at what’s underneath: red circles of raw skin and scabbiness. Pink radiates out from the red and yellow foot-guts.

That dorky church movie flickers through my mind again: millions of people taken up in the Rapture. I’m glad I didn’t see that movie when I was seven or eight years old; it would’ve
scared the crap out of me. As it is, I’m imagining Drew and all the other good people thumbing a ride to heaven with Jesus. Everyone but me. And Jill—I just left Jill in the camper, out cold, arms framing her face like a pin-up girl. I’ve never known anyone who can sleep like Jill can: ten or eleven hours straight.

In the kitchen, the coffee pot is still warm and half full. I shuffle back to the front room and look out the window—Lou’s big black truck is gone.

Back in the hall, I look at the phone, the pad of paper on the wall.
Gone to Safeway
, it says.
Mom and Dad
.

I wander into the bathroom to pee.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been completely alone in this house. Sitting on the toilet, I gaze at the blue dolphins on the shower curtain—The phone rings sharp through the quiet and I jump.

It rings again. I look up at the crown moulding and consider whether Ruby and Lou actually own this place.

The phone rings a third time. I grab some TP and wonder how that must feel, owning your own house. Sam owns his own house.
Houses
.

Holy shit. What am I doing? That could be Sam.

I wipe and flush and haul up my pyjama pants as I go.

Rushing into the hallway, I grab the receiver off the wall. “Hello?”

The line clicks dead.

I hang up and stare at the phone, wait for the ringing to start up again.

I should just call. A normal daughter would call.

I pick up the receiver and run my dad’s number in my head. I check my watch. Sam sleeps late. Sometimes he doesn’t get in from work until five or six in the morning. It would be after 2 p.m. in Toronto, though. He’d be up.

When I was little, in the days before you could unplug your phone, Sam used to take the receiver off the hook and bury it under a mountain of pillows and blankets so that he wouldn’t have to hear the crazy whining noise that phones make if the receiver gets knocked off for too long. I stand holding the phone so long that it actually starts up with that crazy whining noise. I push down the hook switch. When I get a dial tone again, I start dialling: 1–416 …

After four or five rings, someone picks up. There’s rustling and then a sniffling. “Hello.”

Shit. Peggy. She always sounds as if she’s got a bad cold.

“Hi, um, this is Samantha. Is my dad home?”

“Oh.” She pauses as if this is pretty strange that I should be calling her number. “Hello, Samantha. He’s out of town, working.”

I try to think of how to say this. “Well, um, well … I just wondered if you might have a number where he could be reached.”

“What for?”

“To talk.”

“Aren’t you in Vancouver?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s where your dad is. I’m flying in to meet him tomorrow.”

I stare at the pad of paper on the wall:
Gone to Safeway
. “Can I leave my number?”

She coughs as if her cold has turned into pneumonia and it’s all my fault.

I read the number off the phone to her. My insides are winding tighter and tighter and I start to feel as if I might scream. I say, “Fat Freddy wants to get in touch about this thing of his. I have the details. Thanks. Bye.” I hang up before she can say another word.

He’ll have to call me now.

The phone rings. My skin jumps.

My hand hovers but I don’t pick it up. What if it’s Peggy again?

But it could be him.

Taking a big breath I clear my throat, clear out the gravel and the venom. “Hello?”

It’s quiet on the other end.

“Dad?”

There’s a
clunk
and
whirr
and then I hear a Fleetwood Mac song: Stevie Nicks singing “Storms.”

Drew. This is Drew’s music. On the day that he gave me the straw hat for my birthday, he also gave me a mix tape. He’d put all his favourite Fleetwood Mac songs on it: “Dreams,”

“Rhiannon,” “Tusk.” The song that was especially for me, he said, the one that made him think of me whenever he heard it was “Storms,” because, he said, “You’re always in storms.”

I hug the receiver to me and let my forehead fall against the wall as I listen. In my ear, Stevie Nicks says she has never been a blue calm sea, she’s always been a storm.

Where is my tape, the one that Drew made for me? I need to listen to the whole thing again and think of that day, sitting on the bench in Stanley Park together, eating cheeseburgers and drinking Orange Crush and listening to the tape on Drew’s portable cassette player.

“Drew?” I say, as the song ends. “Can you hear me?”

There’s some shuffling and then the
clunk
of the cassette player stopping. More shuffling and then the line goes dead. I put the phone back in its cradle. Maybe he didn’t want to actually talk to me. Who could blame him?

At least he phoned. My own dad won’t phone me. Drew keeps on being Drew, no matter what I do. And Sam keeps on being Sam.

I pick up the receiver again and stare at it a moment before I dial Drew’s number. When he answers, I say, “Can’t I hear you talk for a sec? Please? I mean … what I mean is, can I see you today?”

TWENTY-THREE

DREW AND I
step off the bus in the middle of shit-kicking nowhere.

Across the two-lane highway, a half-dozen Holsteins munch grass in a wide flat field. Only a handful of houses are visible from where we stand and each of them is set way back, its own private little dirt road leading out to this half-assed highway we’re on.

I watch the bus roll back onto the pavement and lumber away from us.

Drew inhales deeply.

“Smells like cow shit,” I say.

“Seems like there’s less
bull
shit out here, though.” He laughs a little.

“Shouldn’t’ve brought me if you didn’t want bullshit.” I laugh too and then stop short.

It feels crunchy between us. Took an hour to get here on the bus. I told him that I didn’t bring his socks with me because I had to wash them first. Drew told me not to worry about it. That was the sum total of our conversation.

“Maggie’s place is just over there,” Drew says, and nods across the massive field behind us. We’ll have to trudge another quarter-mile until we get to a smaller road, turn left and walk until we can’t go any farther.

“Can’t we cut across the field?”

“S’posed to be a bull in there.”

All I see are two or three black and white cows spread out on acres of grass. No point in arguing, though. I follow him down the gravel shoulder. There are fresh bandages on my heels and my own thick socks in my old gym sneakers.

“She’s going to think I’m a goof,” I say, “for not having riding boots but—”

“I’ve just got running shoes on too, see—oh shit, your feet.” He stops and looks down at my shoes. “The blisters. I wasn’t thinking. It’s almost a mile to Maggie’s place.”

“I’m fine.”

He looks doubtful, but I start walking again so he does too.

We walk for about five minutes and the silence is killing me. Bits of last night flash through my head: Drew putting his socks on my feet; Maggie so golden-haired and serene at the foot of the stairs.
Battle of the battleaxes! Ha ha ha!

“So …” I say, just as Drew says the same.

“Go ’head …”

“No,
you
go.”

“When did you get that job at the banquet hall?”

“It’s the catering company who hired me. Last night was my first—”

“Right, right. You said that. I forgot.”

More silence. The gravel crunches under our feet. Then somewhere in the distance one of those cows gives a loud moan and another answers.

“
The cattle are lowing
,” I say.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

I loved “Away in a Manger” when I was small. I really liked the part where it said that the cattle were
lowing
. It sounded cozy. You could almost smell the hay. I also liked the bits about the little Lord Jesus laying down his sweet head. And how the stars looked down where he lay asleep on the hay. All that stuff sounded like the best thing in the world when I was six or seven, even though I didn’t really know who the hell the little Lord Jesus was. I figured his parents must have been rich people—a royal family who had recently lost everything. They were still kind and gentle, though, even now that they were all stuck sleeping in a barn. Even the cows and horses loved them and stayed close to keep them warm.

I don’t tell Drew any of that. Used to be, when I remembered that kind of story, I’d say it right away and Drew would laugh and tell me some goofy thing that he used to believe when he was a little kid.

“Maggie seems nice,” I try, finally. “Funny, I mean, and, um, down-to-earth. She’s a real hippie-chick, huh?”

“Yeah, Maggie’s cool. She can get along with
anybody
.”

“ ‘Battle of the battleaxes’!” I quote out loud. “So, was that, uh, how’d she—? What’d she mean? By that.” Jesus, I can’t even talk. I am the idiot child of Farmer Lug.

“It’s stupid. Just my mother—She means my mother is friggin’
nosy
. Hey look, goats!” He points as we turn the corner and head down the narrow back road toward Maggie’s farm.

Outside a beat-up shed, a kid head-butts his mother’s backside and she turns around and bleats at him. Sounds as if she’s laughing when she gives him a shove. The kid laughs along and comes back for more. Three or four more goats graze beyond them. Part of me wants to stay here, just sit on the fence and listen to these little goats
ha-ha-ha
at each other.

“Maggie’s brother … Shaye doesn’t live out here at the farm, you know,” Drew says. “Even, like, before he got married. He had a place in town, down in the west end, with Maurice.”

I nod.

“There was this sort of joke going around,” Drew says, his voice suddenly tight, “or rumour or whatever, that Shaye and Maurice were boyfriends.”

“Maurice is gay, right?”

“No!” Drew looks offended, which makes me want to disappear into the ditch. “He’s a Christian. Shaye and Maurice are both Christians. So how can they be gay? That’s not—”

“Can’t you be into Jesus-stuff and be gay?”

“No! I mean, you could, but it’s a sin. A major one. Like a—a hell sin, you know.”

I’ve never heard him so emphatic about the sin stuff.

“Anyway.” Drew looks rattled now. “My
mother
gets into the fray and she starts calling Aunt Katy and saying that her and Uncle Ralph should get Shaye out of that apartment and into therapy. She actually started talking about kidnapping him and getting him deprogrammed. Like they do with the Moonies. I mean … Fuck!”

I flinch. It’s not as if Drew never swears but it’s kind of a big deal when he says
fuck
. Way more impressive than when I do it.

“Meanwhile, Shaye’s dating
Trudy
. And Trudy, she goes to Broadway Tabernacle and those people are really, you know—those Broadway Tab people are hard-core! Trudy couldn’t even say the word
gay
. The next thing you know, Shaye and Trudy are engaged and the plan is to get married right away, which, I admit, seems suspicious, but what do I know?”

“You think they rushed the wedding just to shut people up?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “And neither does my mother. She phones up Aunt Katy and this huge battle breaks out. And, of course, it all got back to Trudy and she got so freaked. Poor Trudy. She’s really pretty but did you see her face last night? She’s got a rash all over her cheeks right down onto her neck. It’s all over her hands—she’s covered in eczema or something. From the stress. In the end, my mother refused to go to the wedding because she’s convinced that Shaye and Maurice have an ‘unnatural’ relationship. It’s good she stayed the hell home, as far as I’m concerned, because it’s none of her friggin’
business!
”

“Well, I hope Shaye’s not gay,” I say. “That’d be shitty for Trudy.”

Drew stares at his feet as he walks. “He’s not gay.”

“Well, what if he is?”

“Then he should knock it off.”

“What if he can’t help it? Some babies are born with both sets of stuff, you know—like a hermaphrodite. What if a boy baby was born with a girl brain? He’d probably like guys. Then what?”