One Good Hustle (3 page)

How can you tell a guidance counsellor shit like that? You’d sound like a whiny pathetic jerk, snivelling for attention. Sam says that serious people don’t talk, they act.

But after I left Walters that day, I was pissed off that I couldn’t say anything to him. I’m pretty sure that is when I first started to actually
plan
Marlene’s suicide. She could wash a couple of Valium down with vodka. Maybe she’d forget and I’d give her a couple more. When she passed out, I could lay the pillow on her face and slowly push down. What would be so wrong about it? She kept on insisting she wanted to die, and I could help. I could be the one to make things right for her. I started to think that this was the only way out for Marlene and me. She couldn’t bear to be alive and I couldn’t bear to watch her misery any more. I would be a strange kind of angel.

But I had to figure out the money situation. I’d need enough to get me through for the first few weeks at least.

What if I endorsed the welfare cheque over to me when it came? Or I could deposit the cheque into her account and write myself a new one.

I couldn’t stop thinking how it would work.

I remember it was one-thirty in the morning and I was in my room, sitting up in bed, practising Marlene’s signature in my school binder. I had started by tracing her name from an old cancelled cheque. Then I went freehand. I’d done two nearly full pages of
Marlene Bell, Marlene Bell …

It was quiet that night. No sirens in the distance. No voices in the halls.

I thought I heard muttering and I glanced at the wall that separated our bedrooms. It almost sounded as though she was crying. Then nothing.

I went back to my signatures.

A screech ripped the air.

Jolting up from the page, I knocked my head against the wall.

Marlene
.

I stared at the wall between our rooms again. Her scream became a crying wail and I ripped the signature pages out of my binder and crumpled them up. I switched off my lamp and stared into the dark, my heart banging away like a monkey in a cage.

The wailing turned into loud gasping sobs and I jumped out of bed just as my mother’s door flung open. I heard her stagger against the wall as she rushed toward the kitchen. I chased after her.

As I came round the corner, she pulled a butcher knife out of the sink. In just her bra and panties, she turned the point of the blade toward her stomach. Then she let it drop.

“It’s too dirty,” she said. She sank to the floor, choking on her tears. “And I’m too fat. It’ll never go in. How did I get so fat?”

I tried to help her up, but she pushed me away.

I went back into my room, took the crumpled pages out of the wastebasket and ripped them into pieces and more pieces. Miserable confetti.

The next morning while she was sleeping, I got up the guts to phone my dad in Toronto. We hadn’t heard from him in months. I thought maybe if Sam knew how shitty things were, he would come and get us.

Sitting in the living room I filled him in as quietly as I could. “She threatened to stab herself in the stomach last night. Last
week
she swallowed a bottle of pills and then called the ambulance. Another time she said she was going to drown herself.” I had decided before I picked up the phone that there was not going to be any crying, but that went out the window as soon as I heard Sam’s voice. “I can’t stay here,” I said.

It was silent on his end. I waited for him to say something. Something about a plane ticket for me.

“I’m goin’ out of town,” he blurted. “You got friends you could stay with?”

Not much to talk about after that.

When I came home from school to pack my bag before going to stay with Jill, Marlene came into my bedroom and sat on the floor with her back to the wall, tears rolling.

“I just can’t—” She wiped her nose with a Kleenex. “I don’t know how to fill another day. It’s such a relief to go to sleep and so horrible when I wake up and know I have to drag through another one, like a thousand pounds of dead … until I can sleep again.”

I sat on the edge of my bed and watched her. Mascara had streaked down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. She dug her fingers into my bedroom rug.

“I wanted you to know because—” She swallowed. “I always thought it was cruel when I heard a woman killed herself and let her kids find her like that. I didn’t want that.”

I said, “If you want help trying to get pills together, I’ll try. But, um, I have to go. I’m not going to watch.”

I couldn’t look at her. I kept tweetzing the sheet on my bed. Tweetzing is this thing I do where I rub a fold of the cotton between my fingers. Marlene says I’ve been doing it since I was a baby.

I nodded to myself. “I can’t be here for—” I lost the words then, as if I had already begun to seep away, long before I stood up to leave.

THREE

JILL’S LAST EXAM
was earlier in the day so she was long gone by the time I got out.

Except for Jill, I don’t have a crowd at school. Part of the problem is, like my dad, I don’t drink or smoke. Sam says addicts are weak. People in this school don’t hold that opinion, though. The halls are full of alkies and heads who think the fact that I don’t drink or smoke weed means I’m a spineless little suck. A chick named Crystal Norris actually shoulder-checked me in the hall once and called me a suckhole. I didn’t do anything about it so maybe she had a point.

When I come through the front door, I hear Jill squeal, “She said what?” Jill’s front door opens into a tiny vestibule with a few coat hooks. Two steps forward and you’re in the living room.

Creeping onto the braided rug, I pause, listening as Jill and Ruby cackle in the kitchen. The hair on my arms prickles.
They’re talking about Marlene. I know it. Laughing at her.

I keep still, listening as I glance around. There are two little paintings on the wall over the couch: a happy clown and a sad clown. I hate those clowns. Even the happy one looks miserable.

The furniture is old, but everything’s tidy. Clean. Maybe some dust on the TV screen but that’s about it. Marlene likes to say, “I don’t mind clutter but I hate dirt.” What a laugh that is. My stomach lurches when I think of what Ruby and Lou probably saw over there today. At least Jill wasn’t with them.

“She’s a piece of work all right,” I hear Ruby say.

“How did Dad react?”

It’s quiet a moment. Ruby calls, “Sammie? That you?”

Shit
. “Yeah,” I yell through the wall at them.

When I come into the kitchen, Ruby and Jill are at the table, an ashtray and two cups of coffee between them. Smoke wafts out of Jill’s mouth.

“Hey, sugar,” she says. “What’s shakin’?” Bright purple lipstick greases the filter of her cigarette.

“Nothin.’ What’s shakin’ with you guys?”

“My thighs,” Jill says. “Like a Jell-O tree in a windstorm.”

That’s a favourite line of Jill’s. She probably says it five times a week.

Ruby titters and taps ash off her cigarette. “Were you eavesdropping, Sammie?”

My mouth opens. “Excuse me?”

Another one of Ruby’s
gotchas
.

She bounces her skinny eyebrows. “You snuck through the front door like a cat burglar.”

“No. I just dropped some stuff out of my purse so I was—”

Ruby laughs big. Making me squirm is a total riot, I guess.

Jill picks her compact up off the table. Gold bangles jangle up her arm as she checks out her purple lips in the mirror, snaps it shut. She drops the compact into her purse.

“Well, just so’s you know, we have no secrets around here,” Ruby says. “Sit down so we can talk about you to your face.”

Jill laughs. She brushes some chalky face powder off the strained denim on her thigh. Her
thunder thighs
, she calls them. Jill is what Marlene would call “built.” About five-foot-ten, she probably weights a hundred and sixty pounds. Boobs out to here, hips out to there. I look like a boy next to her.

“There’s fresh coffee if you want,” Jill tells me.

I go to the counter and pour a cup. I used to only drink tea but coffee’s the thing around here.

“So, I met your mother today,” Ruby says.

I sit down at the table with my mug and dump in extra sugar. Extra cream. I want extra everything lately.

“I called her before I went over and she didn’t seem too interested in company.” Ruby is wearing her ironic face.

“
Really?
” Jill slaps a hand to her chest for extra mock-value. “How strange!”

Ruby grins. “
Very strange
. I told her that we were worried.”

I chew off a bit of skin inside my cheek and start in on my bottom lip.

“So, Lou and I went over there.” Ruby takes a drag off her smoke and shakes her head as she exhales. “She hadn’t bothered to get dressed. Just lay there in this old stained negligee, saying
her head ached, her back ached, she couldn’t find
Freddy
’s number—whoever that is—she had the shakes, she needed a drink. She actually asked Lou if he would pick her up something at the liquor store. She said she was scared of getting the DTs. Food didn’t even occur to her. And
every
thing was filthy! Dirty dishes piled in the sink and on the counters. How she can live like that … or let her
daughter
live like that …” Ruby flicks her cigarette. “Poor Sammie.”

My jaw clenches. “I was going to clean up,” I say. “Before I left … Vacuum. And wash the—”

“Sammie, that was two weeks ago.”

Stop saying my name. “So?”

“So, what self-respecting person—” Ruby stops. “Well, I guess that’s the problem, she’s not a self-respecting person. Or she wouldn’t talk about killing herself when she has a daughter to look after.” She sighs. “The sad thing is, she was probably a nice-looking woman at one point.”

Probably?
Fuck. “She’s still—She’s
depressed
.”

Ruby pats my arm. “Sammie, she doesn’t need your sympathy right now. You did her a big favour when you left.”

Jill eyes me and plucks the gold chain off her chest, plays the little gold cross back and forth with a look that I can’t make out.

“I guess you know she’s drinking pretty hard,” Ruby says. “There was an empty bottle on the coffee table. Nothing in the fridge but sour milk and some condiments. Mouldy bread on the counter. Pill bottles all over the place. I picked a prescription bottle up and she says to me, “Mind your own business, you tubby little dyke.”

I choke back a laugh. Even fucked up, Marlene kicks ass.

Jill giggles and shakes her head theatrically. “Tubby little dyke,” she repeats.

Ruby butts out her cigarette. “
Then
she started hitting on Lou.”

Jill’s eyes widen like she just can’t believe it. I know the look on her face now—as if Marlene and I are on one of those TV shows with the white trash characters that make everyone giggle and gag.

“She says to him, ‘What’s a gorgeous hunk of man like you doing stuck with
that
.’ ” Ruby puts on a drunken, haughty face that looks nothing like Marlene’s. “ ‘Maybe you should come visit me on your own.’ ”

Jill says, “Wow. This chick is, like, not mellow at all.”

Ruby joins in, mimicking the hippie-girl voice. “Totally
unmellow
.”

I’m glad Marlene hit on Lou. Ruby asked for it. Tubby little dyke.

Ruby takes a fresh cigarette from her pack. Her face becomes suddenly stony as she says, “Seriously, though, Sammie, your mom’s got problems.” She lights the new smoke and thinks for a moment.

Still fiddling with her gold chain, Jill sets her elbows on the table, nudging the coffee cup with her boobs. “What did Dad say when she hit on him?”

“He said
no!
” Ruby eyeballs the ceiling and then looks back at me. “We did pick her up a few groceries. Milk and bread, cheese … Did you know your mom still holds a torch for your father?”

I huff through my nose.
As if!

“Oh-ho, yes. She sure does.”

Ruby doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. I am almost offended to think that Marlene is trying to find Fat Freddy’s number, though. Freddy is the last thing she needs.

He called our place a couple months ago to ask if we’d seen Sam. “He was in town,” Freddy said. “I thought sure he’d’ve called you!”

He knew damn well Sam never called us. He just wanted to rub it in, get even because Marlene had put him on the back burner again.

Now Marlene can’t find his number. She must be really out of it. I don’t want her calling Freddy. Is she planning to go work a few hustles with him? In the shape
she’s
in? Or does she just want him to bring her a bottle? That weasel would only show up for one reason. The thought of any quid pro quo with Freddy makes me want to spew.

FOUR

FAT FREDDY IS
a fence who used to work with Marlene and my dad back when we were a family. After Sam was out of the picture, Fat Freddy weaseled in close to Marlene. I’m not crazy about Freddy. I was happier when he was out of our world, even though she and Freddy used to make pretty good coin together when they ran the Birthday Girl Scam.

It worked like this. Marlene would sit at the bar in a hotel lounge. She’d order herself a drink and ask the bartender his name. Flashing some cash around (“Can you break a hundred?”), she’d say that it was her birthday. Then she’d confide that her boyfriend let her pick out her own present and she’d hold out her arm to show off her new diamond bracelet. The bartender might say, “Whoa, what’d that run the poor bastard?” She would scrunch up her nose when she whispered, “
Six thousand, two hundred, and twenty-five dollars!
”
Meanwhile, she’d actually bought it for six bucks off some street vendor.

When she finished her drink, she’d gather up her things and surreptitiously drop the bracelet under the bar stool. A few minutes later, Fat Freddy (it used to be my father) would walk in and take the seat Marlene had just left. Not long after that, Marlene would phone the bar, all frantic. The bartender would look for the bracelet. Freddy would move his foot—“You mean this?”