The new school was closer to the city and near a mall and a Kentucky Fried Chicken where the kids would go sometimes at lunch and get the box lunch, and there were older kids who walked around the back field at lunch and I saw some of them smoking and I told my dad and he said I should follow them and get some of the cigarette butts and bring them home after they were done so he could look at them because they could be smoking bad things. When I asked what kind of bad things he said, “Dope,” and he said some of those guys who hang around his barbershop did dope, and he said to one of those guys when he was shaving him, if he ever heard of him selling either of his boys dope the next time the guy came into his barbershop to get a shave Dad would use his straight razor to cut his throat, wouldn’t even say a word, the guy would just be dead.
I never did gather up any butts to show him but I often did hang around with the older kids when I first started because I didn’t know anyone and they seemed to like me when I did my falls and acted stupid, for that was my favourite thing to do. I would clown around and pretend to fall with my legs going up in the air like I saw old comedians do on TV, and the kids would laugh, and oftentimes when I diddled I would imagine that I was the star of my own TV show, and pictured myself dressed in a grey jacket and hat like Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies and I would picture the image of me with my family, me making a goofy face while above the picture it would say The Tim Hendricks Show and below it would say will be back soon… like shows did before they went to a commercial, and when I diddled I thought of how I would be the star of my own comedy show, and it was so obvious to me how great a thing it would be when I grew up that I couldn’t help but think all other kids felt the same way and I feared the competition there would be when we all grew up and wanted our own TV shows. I’d imagine the show and the storylines and the gags, and it was almost like the show was already happening, that I was creating the show and broadcasting it as I diddled on the bus home and in my chair in the living room after school.
On the bus was an older boy named Tom Such, who didn’t mind me diddling beside him on the bus, just like Andrew didn’t mind, he just sat there and looked out the window, but he didn’t have water on his mouth like Andrew, he had thick glasses and the kind of skin where he had round patches of pink on each of his cheeks and he had no trouble talking and didn’t have to go to special classes at school like Andrew did, and I would sit beside him and diddle and imagine I was broadcasting my comedy show to my audience, sometimes even explaining to them what happened in the last episode.
Dad didn’t like me doing the comedy. When he saw me doing it in front of my cousins at a family gathering, he said it was “acting stupid” and his angry face told me that “people should laugh with you not at you,” which I didn’t understand because he made people laugh at his jokes all the time in his barbershop, and I thought what was the difference, and I know the men would laugh with genuineness at his jokes and the look of happy surprise before their laughter actually started. Then it would come out with heavy dark sounds from their stomachs, but still my dad’s laugh would ring out as loud and longer like a string of tin cans rattling out after his joke, and he would gaze around at all the men laughing with his comb in one hand and his scissors in the other. I thought: they are laughing at his joke but also maybe laughing at him laughing, made to laugh even more by his laughing, and if so are they laughing at him rather than laughing with him?
Some of the clowning around I did for the older kids at the school was just to get their attention, like when they asked me to kiss the bottoms of their shoes and I did it, until one time I met a big, fat boy named Pete Sanders and he asked me why I kissed the bottoms of their shoes and he said that was a silly thing to do and he became my friend like Andrew was, though he didn’t have water on his mouth like Andrew did, though Pete didn’t do well at school either, which he didn’t care about because he was going to be a trucker like his dad, and I hung with Pete and a squat girl named Kim Hoswell. The older kids we spent our recesses with out at the wooden steps by the fence would laugh and say she was my girlfriend, and say we should kiss in front of them, and sometimes we did, and I’d recoil and do a funny fall on the ground, and sometimes they asked me to put my arm around her and touch her, and they’d laugh, but I wondered what a girlfriend meant, was it a girl who was a friend, or something else, and did it have something to do with the way my dad and the other men would look at each other and make a noise when girls would walk past the front window of his barbershop?
It was even better for my diddling on the school bus when my mom, who was worried about me now having to cross a busy paved road that was almost like a highway in front of our house when the school bus dropped me off, asked if possibly the bus could drop me off when it was coming the other way, so that I wouldn’t have to cross the road to get to our house. In order to do that I had to travel and wait till all the other kids on the route were dropped off, and then the empty bus turned around and went back to the city so I was the only one on the bus for a long time, and I could sit and diddle, and then I would creep up the bus to the front where the driver Mrs. Harrington sat and talk with her as the only passenger she was driving, and she’d ask me questions about my day, and I looked out at the winter snowscape as the sun was going down and told her the clouds looked like mashed potatoes, and one time I told her I hated the national anthem and she said, “You can’t hate the national anthem!” and I said I did because at night when my dad fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV I was always awakened by the national anthem playing louder than anything else that came on and it scared me, blaring out marching and warlike, and I would leap out of bed and run down the hall to where the national anthem blared as images of fighter jets streaking through the sky filled the bright screen.
I’d race across the carpet in my bare feet to the TV, panic rising in me, because as much as I was horrified by the booming noise of the national anthem, and the images of fighter jets and marching soldiers that accompanied it, even worse was afterwards when the images would disappear and the screen would break apart into chaotic white roiling insanity, the imageless video storm and the accompanying crackling, cackling hiss and ripping sound of interference and white noise opening a hollow, whistling void at the centre of me. I was always too late it seemed to shut it off before the anthem ended and the witless static madness began, the crumbling busy devastation that sounded like a thousand angry hornets’ nests—and a voice signalled the end of another day of broadcasting, which seemed to me to also signal the end of the world and all creation. “No,” said Mrs. Harrington. “You can’t hate the national anthem, you have to be proud of your country,” and she said the one that began, “O say can you see…” was the American anthem anyway, and I agreed, while in truth I hated the Canadian one too, which came on exactly after the American one, and was the one I was always racing to stop before the end of the world.
Mrs. Harrington dropped me off at my house, the sky now darkening because the longer ride made me get home so much later, and I walked up the shorter lane to the house my mom and dad had to do so much work on, and it was Monday, my dad’s day off, so they were both at home painting the kitchen because the house needed a lot of work, and it was by a farmer’s field on the outskirts of the city, across a field from where the train tracks were, and you could see the stacks of oil and chemical refineries on the other side of the tracks, and on some days you could smell an acrid fart odour from the refineries, and at night you could hear the trains as they crashed and uncoupled in the railyard, and at night you could also see an orange glow from the stacks, particularly from one that had an angry flame burning from the top of it all the time, and some of the others looked almost pretty, like the gathering of several of them that seemed to glow with purple light through a mist that I could see from my bedroom window that I fantasized looked like the castle at Walt Disney World.
Dad had to work hard at the house, fixing it up after he got off work at the barbershop, and for a while we ate every night at a picnic table in the kitchen while the walls were being stripped down and then painted, and it was on Mrs. Harrington’s bus that I saw, scratched into the metal back of one of the seats, the words eat my meat, which I thought to be the most hilarious sentence I had ever read. The idea of someone offering another person the meat off their bones to eat was one of the most delightfully, insanely ghoulish concepts that was possible to be thought of, and I went into hysterical laughter each time I thought of it, the rhyming of the phrase making it seem almost casual and therefore all the more bizarre, and I repeated it over and over again, and I even made a little song that went, “You can eat the fruit that grows on my tree, you can eat the meat that grows on me!” and I sang it to my friends and to the older kids at school who were always trying to get me and Kim Hoswell to kiss, and I would sing it to our babysitter and then Mom told me it wasn’t a nice thing to sing, and I didn’t understand. Nobody was upset about the idea of eating the meat of an animal, not even the meat of a pig at a pig roast where the pig was on a pole and you could see where they were cutting your meat off the pig’s body, so why was it so offensive to laugh about the idea of eating human meat, which was so ridiculous that it was funny?
It was like when I heard the older kids at school say cocksucker, which seemed to me the funniest thing I’d heard because I knew that cock meant penis and the idea that anyone could or would suck on your penis was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard, the image of one guy sucking on another guy’s penis was so silly that I started calling my brother a cocksucker and he started calling me it back. One morning when we were supposed to be getting ready for school and we were wrestling on the floor, my mom told us not to use that word and we asked why, and she said our dad would tell us when he got home that night. That night after school and work Dad sat down at the dinner table and told us that sucking on another’s penis was something a woman could do to a man but it was a private thing between them and rude to talk about. We asked why and he said because it was private. We asked did it being private make it bad and he said no, but we still didn’t understand, so he said cock was a bad word. So we asked if we could say penis sucker and he said no in a way that made us not ask anymore questions.
Sometimes I stayed home from school when I was sick though I wasn’t really sick. It seemed to happen every couple months that I woke up in the morning and knew I couldn’t go to school that day. In general, I didn’t like school. The only happiness I got was from making the kids laugh at recess and the rest of the time it was boring and then also kids would pick on me which I would try to defuse by clowning around, even to the point of letting them hit me, and reacting in a clownish way so that they’d hopefully stop hitting me. When I played sick I always had to remember to put in a little acting as the day went on, so that when 3:30 rolled around my dad wouldn’t say, “You don’t seem so sick now!” because when my brother or I stayed home from school we had to get taken to work by either my mom or my dad.
This one time I got taken to work by my dad, so I sat at the back of the barbershop drawing pictures. At the back of the shop there was a room that my dad rented out but he was re-modelling, so I would also sometimes go back and play with the tools. At one point my dad was in the bathroom for a while and a bunch of men were waiting for their haircut so I went in the backroom and got a saw in order to entertain them. I got up in a barber chair and made like I was playing it, bending back the blade and acting like it was hitting me in the face, and I thought some of them thought that was funny, so then I went out on the street in front of the big front window and did an act in which I pulled down my pants and tripped on them, falling over onto the street. When Dad came out of the washroom and saw me, he went straight through the barbershop, picked me up from the sidewalk under his arm with my pants still down around my ankles, strode back through the shop to the back room, pulled down my underwear and slap-spanked me across my bum till I cried. Then he went out to motion to the man next in line to come to the barber chair and started cutting his hair.
I stayed in the back room the rest of the day, or at least until the men who were there when I was spanked left. My bum felt like it was burning but just as much or maybe more so there was a burning inside of me that made me cry, something that was both burning and broken that made hot tears flood my eyes as I tried to distract myself by playing with some nuts and washers and bolts on a table in the back room, my mouth straining as I tried to hide both the sound of my sobbing and the compulsion or need to sob, as I looked down at the blurry nuts and washers.
But as bad as it was, it was better than those times that my dad got mad at me, or my brother and me, and we didn’t know whether he was going to spank us or not, and the anticipation and dread of the spanking was just as bad as the spanking itself, if the spanking happened. We did something wrong and we could see it first in his eyes, in the way he looked at us, and we both knew. It was an anger that flashed in his eyes then turned dead, like there was death in his eyes, like burning molten steel poured into a form that then dries and solidifies into something harder than can be imagined, and sometimes his hand would even go up to his belt at his waist for a particularly hair-raising supplement to the dread he had sparked in us, and then in a hard voice he would ask a baffling and unanswerable question like “You want a lickin’?” or “You want a lickin’ eh?” which further frightened and confused me because it seemed to me these questions were riddles, that they were trick questions that had no right answers, and the air gathered round and pressured me till I felt I couldn’t breathe, as though I couldn’t get the air into my lungs to float the answer out on, and in a way there was no right answer since it seemed it would all end in a lickin’ anyway, but still maybe if I had the right answer there was the tiniest chance the lickin’ could be evaded so my mind raced in a confused frenzy which of course made it more impossible to come up with any kind of answer, for what was the answer to “You want a lickin’?” but to say “No”?
But that was so obvious there had to be a trick somewhere. For a while my confusion about the meanings of yes and no extended into other areas, not really sure what to answer if someone asked if I wanted some lemonade. If you said you didn’t want a lickin’ and got it anyway, what did the question mean? Obviously you did want a lickin’ if you acted in a way you knew would make your dad give you a lickin’—even if the real truth was that you’d hoped to act that way undetected. “Tim knows, he can see it in my eyes,” I heard him say to his friends. “He knows—he knows when there’s a lickin’ comin’.” And it was true: if there came a time when my brother and I got in trouble, I would immediately start pleading. I would go down on my knees at his feet and start crying and begging him not to give us a lickin’—while my brother Jason just stood there. Sometimes we would hear the dreaded question, another unanswerable puzzle, as he would ask us right out of the gate, “Alright—who wants it first?”
Who wants it first? Was it better to get it over with and run from the room, or was it better to wait until maybe his hand would get tired from spanking the one who went first, or maybe the sight and sound of the first spanking only served to increase the panic and dread of being spanked, and sometimes you let your brother say he would go first just to put off your spanking, on maybe the slightest sliver of a chance that something might happen that would cancel your lickin’, but really, you were just looking to stall it, to have just a few more moments unlicked, knowing it was coming anyway, knowing that the panic and dread of watching your brother get a lickin’ was almost as bad as getting the lickin’ yourself, if not worse, but not caring, because whatever the dread and panic, getting a lickin’ was getting a lickin’ and not getting a lickin’ was not getting a lickin’, and not getting a lickin’ was better than getting a lickin’, however many milliseconds the reprieve was before you got the lickin’.
It seemed always to me that my brother got it worse anyway, as when he and I were wrestling and yelling and making a lot of noise in our room and our dad came in and without saying a word to either of us lifted Jason by his arm and tossed him across the room, plopping him against the sliding door of our closet which caused it to clatter in its runner. Jason slid down to the floor and just lay there crying softly for a while unbeknownst to my dad as he’d turned and left the room right after the tossing. Or the other time when after school my brother and I got a bunch of grocery-store brand cans of ginger ale from the cupboard at the back of house and we shook them up and sprayed them at each other and all over the place, then seeing the mess, tried hurriedly to mop it all up, but the shining glaze of the drying ginger ale on the wooden cupboards and on the floor and on the ceiling escaped our notice, and Dad came home later, not after work, but later than that, and he had the look in his eyes which was made worse by what I was gradually identifying as different mannerisms he would have when he came home from a day of curling or golfing on a Sunday afternoon, which seemed to happen more often since we’d been in the new house, and he’d come in walking slower with a swagger that made him angle with one shoulder after another into a room, and his mouth would be downturned, and his right eye squinted up like he was looking through a telescope with the other one, and he talked in a low, sarcastic, mean-sounding grunt, carefully saying his words with a strange emphasis, like he was talking around some piece of food that was hot on his tongue, and he came up to us and said, “Did you guys spray that ginger ale all over the laundry room?”
At first we said “No,” since we thought we’d cleaned it up so good, and he repeated in a low, gravelly, animal voice without any joking niceness you could sometimes get even from his angriest words when he was in another mood or state, and then he said the dreaded words: “Alright,” he said, his hand moving to his belt and beginning to unbuckle it, “who wants it first?” doubly mad now since we’d lied to him, and this time I didn’t even bother to fling myself at his feet and beg for mercy because the anger and the immediacy was too big. It wasn’t a question of if the lickin’ was going to happen but when, and the answer to that was right now, the belt was practically whistling through the air already, and we were in our parents’ room, and without even knowing how it happened, my brother volunteered himself.
The pants came down and he laid across the corner of my parents’ bed as my mother stood in the doorway, and if the downside of being the second in line for a lickin’ was that you had to endure the painful yelps of the sufferer before you, it was of no consequence here as my brother just laid and took the lickin’ without making a sound, the belt slapping across his bum cheeks, and then just as soundlessly when the lickin’ was done, getting up, pulling his pants up and running from the room, and then it was my turn and I cried and yelped as I was spanked and found out later that one of the upsides of being second in line, the idea that the spanker would wear out some of his energy and passion and anger on the first lickin’, was proven true when after a few days my mom said to my dad that my brother still had black streaks across his backside from where the black had come off his belt.
During this time my dad more often than not came home in the mood of having his right eye squinted up, and he would argue with Mom and she would shout back about his drinking which I never understood since everybody drank, we all had to drink in order to live, then later recognized it was drinking a particular thing that made him act differently, that gave him a particular smell, that I tried to identify so I could be aware of how he changed and how I should act so I wouldn’t get in trouble with him. On the Sunday afternoons after he went to golf early in the morning we’d wait for him to come home and the hours slowly floated by till most of the day was gone, and then his car would drive unnaturally slowly down the driveway, and another identifying characteristic was he would smoke a different brand of cigarette than he would on every other day. One time he came home and sat under a tree in the front yard smoking his weird brand of cigarettes, and another time he went around hammering nails into the trees in the front yard, and later in the week he started giving hell to my brother, thinking he was the one who hammered nails into the trees. My brother said, “I didn’t put those nails there Dad, you did!” and then I overheard him telling a bunch of his friends in the barbershop, “And I thought, by Jesus, maybe I did, all pissed up out there on a Sunday afternoon!”
The way he’d act when he was drunk was so far different from the way he’d act other times that they were like two different planets that had nothing to do with each other, no common language or even a knowledge that the other existed. One day he’d look at you with hatred, his voice and words stabbing out from an understanding that all is hell and that you are to blame for all being hell, yet the next day he’d come home from work and greet you with a broad smile, like the way he greets his customers in his barbershop, and say, “How y’doin’, partner?” Yet sometimes his behaviour was good for me when he’d been drinking, when he would come home with a friend and then shuffle down the hall to my room and ask to have some of my drawings to show to his friend because I’d been getting some attention at school for my drawings, and my dad would take the pictures out and show his friend in the living room.
“Look at that! In grade two and he’s in the newsletter for the whole damn school,” and from my room I’d peek down the hall and see him leaning from his Laz-Z-Boy to his friend, showing him a drawing, pointing at it and saying, “Look at the detail there—now the average person might not see that, that kinda detail there, and he put that in,” and he was praising and appreciative as he was at no other time with my brother or me, and I would pull my head back in from the hall, feeling the warmth of his praise, feeling it pull at the muscles in my face, and my mother would notice and say, “Now you know he’s just saying that because he’s been drinkin’. You know he’s not going to be talking that way tomorrow,” which made me feel weird because if I felt scared and disturbed, panicked by the way he acted when he was drinking and mean, why couldn’t I feel warm and happy when he was drinking and complimentary?
Was the good untrue in a way the bad was not? Or did they both mean nothing, happening in a dream that you were powerless to change or affect but which settled all around you and comprised your reality totally, for the entire time he was in your presence or in the house, and not a moment more or a moment less, no matter what you thought or felt, or what you did or didn’t say or do? So to feel warm at being praised was wrong in such a circumstance, like being comforted by lies, or eating poisoned fruit, yet being panicked or disturbed or hurt by his meanness wasn’t wrong or right, but simply was, in a way you couldn’t help, so thoroughly did it infiltrate your heart and stomach, you had no choice but to adjust your animal instincts to the temperature of his moods.
Yet my drawings drew genuine admiration from my classmates as they sometimes gathered around my desk, and one of the students even said out loud to the teacher, “Why can’t I draw like Tim does?” and the teacher said, “Well, Tim can’t play soccer like you do,” and the kid said, “That’s right, we get out on the field and he won’t even take the ball—he lets the other team have it!”
“You see?” said the teacher. “We all have our strengths—it all evens out.” Still the older kids would pick on me, and I would take a hit rather than run away, trying to make the kids laugh so they wouldn’t bother me anymore. But with some kids that would piss them off even more. When he started school that fall, Jason saw the kids picking on me and me letting them push me around. He ran in to defend me and got a punch in the nose that made it bleed, and the teacher on recess duty had to take him to the school nurse.
Recesses were problems for me because of the kids picking on me so the alternative to that was to hang out with Kim Hoswell, the short, squat girl who the other kids would say was my girlfriend, or else sometimes I would hang with my friend Carl Plympton who shared my interest in cartooning, but he also was interested in playing sports like all the rest of the boys so often he wanted to do that instead of hang with me, or to talk about sports, or to trade hockey cards in the endless ritual of the winter months, which I didn’t do, so my task was to convince him to be with me and do what I called walk-and-talk, which consisted of walking around the fence of the schoolyard and talking for the whole recess, which is what I wanted to do, but which he only wanted to do, or could be convinced to do, sometimes.
Mostly I was stuck back with Kim Hoswell, as she was another kid that most other kids didn’t want to hang with. She wasn’t as fat as Gabby Ferguson who literally was as wide as she was tall, and whom teachers nonetheless made do the kilometre run with the rest of the class even though she couldn’t run in any real sense, her ball-like rotundity causing her to rotate her body one side at a time to put her short, stumpy legs one ahead of the other, her shoulders likewise taking turns swinging ahead and her long straight hair swinging side to side like a cantering horse’s tail, all while she wore an inexplicable, eager-to-please smile. She persevered far, far behind the rest of the class till you could barely see her behind us as we ran the circumference of the field and the teacher called back to her across the chasm, “Come on now, Gabby, pick up some speed. You can do it!” and later when everyone came in panting back to the classroom, there would always be a ten-minute interval before Gabby came in, panting and sweating, slipping behind her desk, still smiling her eager-to-please smile.
Kim wasn’t as heavy as her or as separated from everybody else like Gabby was, just as I wasn’t separated from everyone else the way that some other boys were. But whenever Kim asked for an indoor recess because she said she wasn’t feeling well, I asked for one too. That was the kind of recess I preferred anyway, the empty silent classroom and the other kids visible out the window, laughing and running and playing in the field, and me glad to see them out there and doubly glad I wasn’t with them, maybe in my heart feeling superior to their childhood outdoor raucousness as I sat at my desk and drew pictures.
In addition to Kim Hoswell during one indoor recess there was Mary Hiemstra, a girl who I thought really was sick and sat doing her homework at her desk in her dress, for she was of that religion where the girls had to wear dresses and keep their hair long down their backs all the time, and the boys had to wear real shirts with collars all the time, and pants that weren’t jeans, and had to keep their hair really short all the time. Sometime toward the end of the recess Mary came by to look at my drawings and asked why I drew all the time, and as a joke she took one of my drawings and ran through the room, and I chased her laughing and Kim came too, and somehow we ended up on the floor in the cubby beneath our teacher’s desk and Mary asked me to show her mine, and I was nervous, looking over at the door when she offered to show me hers, and she pulled up her dress and I began to see her underwear, and Kim, laughing, undid her jeans, so I decided it must be alright, so I pulled down my pants, and from the front of my underwear I let out my penis, and both the girls giggled nervously, but also in their eyes was something still and interested and serious, and shaking myself I made my penis jump around a bit, and then in a jarring blast somehow there was a figure standing at the side of the desk, a figure that was a shadow that then resolved itself into Mr. Goodearle who’d been walking down the hall and heard us, then came into the classroom to the side of the desk, and called out, “Tim!”
And then hastily fumbling my penis back into my underwear, and then the horror-filled instant when we were all marched by Mr. Goodearle out of the classroom and down the hall to the principal’s office, me feeling sick as we approached, thinking of how everyone would now know that I pulled out my penis, thinking of my dad and how he was so mad that I pulled down my pants at the barbershop, and the huge door of the principal’s office loomed before me, the principal’s office where the lickin’s took place, where we’d heard there was a wooden case of various leather straps increasing in length and size and thickness in order to fit the appropriate punishment to the crime, and this principal in particular, it was said, had the unique habit of pulling a hair from your head before the administering of a punishment, of laying it across the palm of your hand, then lifting the leather strap and bringing it whipping down upon the hair on the palm of your hand so that there was a precise slit-like bleeding cut across your palm exactly where the hair had been, and we came into the office ushered by Mr. Goodearle to where the principal sat behind his desk, looking up impossibly placidly as we shivered and Mr. Goodearle told him what we’d done.
The principal’s face frowned with severity as he looked at us, then looked at me in particular and said, “Tim, why did you take your privates out of your pants?” I pointed at Mary Hiemstra and said, “Because she told me to,” and Mary Hiemstra looked at me and said, “If I told you to jump off the Bluewater Bridge would you do that, too?” because the Bluewater Bridge was the nearby bridge over the river to the US and one of the highest bridges in the world. The principal looked at me with what I thought was the smallest hint of a smile and at the same time with the smallest flicker of his eyes over to Mr. Goodearle said, “Well, Tim, if anyone ever tells you to do that again, you come and tell me, alright?” the tiny smile of which panicked me for I thought its ridicule was directed at my lame and cowardly attempt to blame Mary Hiemstra.
“But try not to do it again,” the principal said, and dismissed us and we went down the hall and back to our classroom, Mary acting mad since I said she told me to do it, but she did tell me to do it, and in my relief, and in all our relief at not being given the strap, I felt the gathering dread that the principal was going to phone our parents, that in particular my dad would find out about me showing my penis and he would be enraged as he was at my pulling my pants down on the street, or at my diddling, or at me not wanting to play with the ball mitt Fred Scott gave him when I was born, or at me for acting stupid and playing the clown and making myself someone who people laughed at rather than with, and it would be another thing where I wasn’t normal enough—like Andrew—and I wasn’t boy-like enough and he would be embarrassed by me being his son.
But when I got home, let off by Mrs. Harrison to tread up the laneway, and my mom came home from work a short time later, she gave no sign of knowing about that moment in the cubby. She was only tired and asking the same questions she asked every night as she sat in the La-Z-Boy smoking her cigarette and my brother and I watched Three Stooges and The Flintstones and The Brady Bunch in the living room, then she went to start to make supper, and later my dad came home and drank the beer he drank before supper, and then one with supper because he didn’t have to drink milk like we had to, because he said, “Only women and children need to drink milk.” The same way I’d search the expressions of his face to see if he was drinking and how I should act, I searched him every minute for any indication he’d heard from the principal, and even after supper, when he went out to lie on the couch in front of the TV and fall asleep the way he did every night, I waited in that interval because that’s when sometimes he’d talk to us about serious stuff like when he told us not to say cocksucker, but still he acted in his usual calm, tired, kind of grumpy way, and I was a little relieved, but when I got in bed I thought he could still find out, that once something happened, anything happened, anyone could find out at any time, if not now, next week, or a year, or twenty years from now, and the only way for someone never to find out something happened is for it never to have happened in the first place, I thought in the darkness of my room as I heard the trains rumble and crash in the yard across the field across from my house.
It was still on my mind a couple weeks from then when Parents Night would be happening at the school, and as the day grew closer I got uneasy because surely Mrs. Robbins, my teacher, had been told by the principal and Mr. Goodearle what had happened, and maybe she’d be obligated to share it with my parents, and though my dread had lessened the further we got away from it, I was still hyper-aware as we strode to my class in the impossibly bright lights that shine in classrooms at night, and we went up to the very desk I’d shown my penis under, and Mrs. Robbins gave a rundown on my progress that year to date, and my brother stood looking wide-eyed at the classroom since he was only used to the different-looking classroom of kindergarten, and Mrs. Robbins suggested some exercises we could do at home to help me to learn to tie my shoes—like letting me practise on a larger, adult-sized shoe—since I was still lagging behind the other students in that regard, and then she said at different moments when the class has quiet time she notices that Tim sits at his desk and moves his fingers in a strange manner in front of his face, and she accompanied her observation with an acting out of the movement, her hands rising to wriggle her fingers in front of her eyes, and did he do such a thing at home, she asked them, was it something they too had noticed?
Mom said that was something they’d noticed, yes, and Dad looked over at me with an angry look because I’d failed to stop this habit—that I continued on with it purposely, it seemed, to embarrass him and to make myself abnormal, making myself into what would never be a man, and his eyes shamed me and I’d embarrassed him, embarrassed them, again, though Mrs. Robbins said that in every other respect I was doing very well, particularly with my drawing, I just needed to focus on neatness and tying my shoes, and concluding the meeting, we went down the aisle and there was Paul Roughton without his parents for some reason, standing in his plaid shirt with his hands in his pockets, and a cowlick of jet black hair darting down over his forehead and shadowing his freckled nose.
He looked up at my parents as they approached and he said, “So you’re Tim’s mom and dad, huh?” in his hoarse voice that seemed more like a teenager’s or an adult’s than a little boy’s. I had always avoided him because he was derisive toward me. He wasn’t the kind to physically bully but would sneer sentences that seemed to have unpleasant meanings. I never knew just what was supposed to be meant—I only knew that it was negative, insulting and mean. He always wore a contemptuously amused smile that caused his eyelids to half-drop over his eyes and it was with these eyes and that smile that Paul Roughton looked up at my mother and father and volunteered in a strangely weary and dry, croaking voice, “Yeah, Tim’s doin’ pretty good, havin’ a pretty good year,” he rasped, with a cock of his head that silently added, all things considered. “Only thing, though,” he continued, “is that sometimes we notice him sittin’ at his desk, doin’ this.” He raised his hands to his face and flapped them around grotesquely. “Dunno why he does that,” Paul Roughton shrugged. “Other than that, he’s doin’ fine.”
“I’ll bet you do real good in school too, don’t ya?” my dad asked him.
“I’m doin’ alright…” Paul Roughton began, his odd, adult-like confidence in his small body preparing to continue—
“Yeah, I’ll bet you’re the type who really keeps outta trouble—a real genius student,” my dad blurted, his dismissive bitterness vanquishing that of the comparatively inexperienced young boy’s as he brushed past him and led us out of the room.
On our way home and later at my house my dad didn’t look at me or speak to me, but when I went to bed my mom came into my room and said she knew Paul Roughton was being a smart aleck because she’d gone to school with his father and he was a smart aleck too, and as a matter of fact all the Roughtons were smart alecks, and they were tough, hard people, and she thought it was mean of him to try to embarrass me in front of her and my dad, but maybe I didn’t have to do that diddling thing when I was at school in class, and then she turned out the light and left the room and I lay there waiting for sleep, thinking of Mrs. Robbins raising her fingers to her eyes and asking my parents if they were aware I did this, which was bad but still not as bad as it would’ve been if she’d told them I showed Mary Hiemstra my penis in the cubby beneath her desk. Then shadows clouded around the image of my teacher and I fell asleep.
Dad still had to work hard on the house. It needed a lot of repairing, and so one weekend Mom and my brother and I took a train to visit some friends of Mom and Dad’s who lived in a city a couple of hours away, so Dad could get a lot of work done while we were gone. Don Regnier was an old friend of Dad’s and his wife was a friend of Mom’s and they had four kids that my brother and I played with. Don and his wife had a waterbed that I would secretly go and lay down on, but we weren’t allowed to sleep there, and I slept with my brother in a spare room down the hall and in the night, in my sleep, I saw myself and my brother and my father in our kitchen back home, and I was fighting with my brother, and I bit him on the arm, and my brother cried to my dad, and Dad came over to me angrily and his mouth opened, and it kept on opening as the blackness within it engulfed me entirely, and I felt the massive jaws closing around my head as if to say, “You bit him and so I’ll bite your head off,” and in an instant I was awake in a foreign bed as if blasted by an electrical shock to find I was already crying, howling and screaming in the strange room till Don Regnier came through the darkness from the waterbed in the next room and said with sleepy-eyed alarm, “Hey, hey, hey, what’s the matter?” and I was sobbing too hard to speak, yet even when I could speak I couldn’t tell him because he was Dad’s friend and I didn’t want to tell him I’d dreamed of Dad biting my head off, and he kept saying, “Jeepers creepers, what’s the matter? You’re gonna wake the whole house up,” and he hugged me to try and get me to quiet down and after a while I did.
The next day Dad was coming to pick us all up and drive us back home, but we were all surprised when he came not in our usual car but in a small sports car he only used occasionally because it didn’t have any back seats but only a space for me and my brother to crouch, and also because it was a Triumph Sprite and was always breaking down and needing parts that were hard to get. When we asked him where our other car was, he said he’d been driving late at night across a bridge and all of a sudden a deer came into his path, so he was forced to steer the car off the bridge and it sank into a creek.
As we rode home, my brother and I wedged in and crouched behind the bucket seats, and he told the story again and I imagined the deer suddenly appearing in the silvery ray of the headlights out of the blackness of the night. I imagined the slivery ray suddenly swerving into further darkness, the low guardrail providing no barrier to the car as it tilted into the creek, but as much as I could see this, I couldn’t help but imagine there was never a deer at all, that something else had happened to our car, or that yes, maybe it had gone off the road and over the guardrail and into the water, but a deer had nothing to do with it, and the thought seemed inescapable, though each time I entertained it the guiltier I felt, at doubting my father, and also diverging from the story that everyone agreed was true. Something down deep in me knew that my suspicion wasn’t just a nasty reinterpretation of events, but was itself reality—and what claimed to be reality was a play-acting performance by the rest of the family to make themselves and each other feel happy or simply okay.
Yet my dad did get a lot of work done on the house, and in the work that he did he seemed to take more pleasure and pride than in the hair-cutting during the day, though it took him a long time because he wanted it perfect, and we had two bathrooms and one of them would inevitably be out of service most of the time, and I was allowed to decorate the unfinished wall of the kitchen with a long parade of Disney characters I drew on a roll of paper Mom got at her work. He also liked to cook, using the Mondays he took off work to make elaborate dinners for the family when we got home, and sometimes apple and rhubarb pies, and when he called you out to the kitchen and got you to taste something he was cooking, he’d watch you intently as you ate it, and when you gave the reaction he wanted he’d respond with a high-pitched, hooting laugh and I noticed the fingers at the ends of his arms when he laughed, and they’d wriggle excitedly as his body shook with laughter, as they sometimes did when he laughed after telling jokes in his barbershop, and I’d think maybe he was feeling some of the same excitement I felt when I diddled, and maybe that’s why he got mad when I diddled, because he was scared of his own diddling, which only came out sometimes.
Those times he cooked, Mom would say he cooked so good that he should open up a restaurant, and I would get excited about the idea, imagining my dad working in the kitchen, people sitting at the tables we’d set up in the living room and dining room, and my brother and I bringing the meals out to them from the kitchen, their cars parked out in the laneway and on the lawn. As much as I enjoyed the idea of our house being transformed into a restaurant, I enjoyed even more the idea of my father doing something he loved and got pleasure from, picturing him proudly bringing out some of the pies he made for his favoured customers, because it seemed to me the reason he was not coming home nights and staying out, or not coming home at all, so that I got up and went to check and see if my dad was beside my mom in their bed in the mornings, the more often he would stay out longer on Sundays, golfing and coming home angry with his right eye squinted up to have a fight with Mom, was because he didn’t like his job, because he always came home from it depressed, to drink a couple of beers and go to sleep in front of the TV.
I wished somehow a sudden gust of inspiration would lift and compel my parents to turn our living room into a restaurant, though I knew it would never happen, still the thought was so appealing I couldn’t help but hold out the tiniest hope they would choose to leave their uninspired lives behind to start a dream where the man who watched you tasting his food—looking with anticipation to see the expected response of delight—was my father, not the man who lay defeated on the couch. But I knew that it would never, could never happen, that the sun-dappled living room restaurant was only a dream.
Dad was coming home later on the Sundays, as he did on the day he promised to take us to the Point Edward Ex-Servicemen’s Club Picnic that was put on by the club he went to drink cheap beer most Saturday nights. This event was the one time these old, chunky, ruddy-faced gentlemen emerged from their mottle-floored clubhouse to commune with their respective family members at a gathering in Canatara Park and set up their picnic tables to serve their traditional delicacy of turkey burgers, taking turns to man the immense vats of shredded turkey on the gas burners, plopping the hot turkey on hamburger buns for the kids and the wives, as a little old man dressed as Popeye wandered the grounds handing out candies and suckers “for the kids.”
Yet as the day wore on it seemed Dad wouldn’t get home in time to take us to the Ex-Servicemen’s Picnic, and about mid-afternoon Mom said, “Well, it looks like he’s not gonna get home in time to take ya,” which was too bad because our cousin Chris was with us, Chris who still lived out of town on a farm and with whom we shared many weeks of our summers, us going out to his place for a week, sleeping in the rooms at the top of the old farmhouse which still had a hole going through the ceilings and floors for the pipe of the now-absent old stove, then us running through each day in games of war in the hay mow where we built forts with the bales and swung out on a rope from the high window over the cow pen.
But now Chris was staying at our place and we’d told him about the picnic and the turkey burgers, and we sat in the desolate hum of the waning afternoon till suddenly our new car came edging up the driveway and we jumped up and shouted, but Mom said, “Don’t get too excited, he’ll be in no shape to take you,” and the sight of my dad getting out of his car with his slow, disgusted gait and his looking around with his right eye squinted up like a mean and merciless stranger made me realize she was right, and he came in the door and Mom said, “You promised these boys,” and he said huskily, hoarsely, “Well, alright… Let’s go!” Jason and Chris and I got up excitedly even though I saw Dad wasn’t in the best type of mood to take us, but I so much wanted to go to the picnic, riding on the enthusiasm of the two other boys, that I ignored the warning signs as maybe they did, though they seemed to have nothing but excitement as he scoffed to my mom, “We’re still gonna go—come on, let’s go!”
We ran to the door and she cried, “You’re in no shape to take them!” but out the door and down the short sidewalk we went to the driveway where we all got into the front seat and my dad got in behind the wheel and for a moment he just sat there with his hands on the wheel, staring down, and then he got up out of the car, walked swiftly back into the house and after a moment emerged with a beer in his hand. As he walked to the car my mom appeared at the door calling, “Oh, yes! Don’t forget to take your beer! Always got to have your beer!” and Dad gunned the engine, pulling out around our curved driveway, making the gravel jump and click as we zoomed out onto the road at a speed that made Chris and Jason and me tumble into the footwell at the bottom of our seat as we cruised into the city, my brother laughing and my dad looking at him with a wicked, ecstatic face as the speed made a hopeless wind sweep through the heart, at which point I tried to laugh too even as I felt compelled to clutch at the mats on the footwell of the car in search of solidity and stability as we whisked past all the other cars and trucks on the avenue, their roofs and hoods passing unnaturally fast at a cockeyed angle from where we huddled on the car’s floor, and then we eased for a while into a normal speed, only to have my dad hit the gas again, so we lurched suddenly into a higher speed and my brother who had been laughing suddenly began crying with no apparent transition as my dad, whose face was against the side window and its whizzing landscape, looked at us with both eyes squinted up, the corners of his mouth lifted in a smiling laugh that wasn’t sinister so much as beyond all concept of sinister and innocence, and in fact seemed to have no human feeling in it whatsoever as he laughed at us clutching each other and huddling together on the car’s floor.
We got to the park where the picnic was just as the turkey burgers were shutting down for the day and Dad made sure we got the last ones. We also got to see Popeye, who seemed in a less than energetic mood, passing out his candies and suckers with exhausted sullenness. After we ate the turkey burgers in the fading sun as Dad sat on a picnic table and smoked a cigarette, we got back into the car and he seemed to fall into a different, quieter mood, driving us down unfamiliar streets without gunning the engine. We asked him where we were going but he didn’t answer, and we pulled up to a neat little house that I recognized but my brother and of course my cousin didn’t, and Dad led the three of us up to the door of his brother’s house, where we never went, even though we lived in the same town, and only in the dimmest memory could I remember us being there before, and the handful of words my uncle ever spoke to me.
I remembered my uncle’s wife only as a nervous person who worried about my brother and I touching things in her house, or dirtying them or breaking them, with big fat cats that she didn’t want us to bother. This time she came out the side door with the green garden hose reeled on the wall beside the door and we were led down into the basement rec room where my dad’s brother sat watching TV from his easy chair, and my dad sat down on a couch with us three boys sitting down beside him, and he asked pointedly for a beer, and his brother went and got one, and my dad sat there silently drinking his beer and smoking a cigarette on the couch as everyone looked at the sports on TV, and every so often my dad would look over at me or one of the other boys and make a face mocking his brother and his brother’s wife, and the whole situation, and he’d blow out a gust of smoke disdainfully as if to say, “Well, isn’t all of this pathetic and stupid, isn’t this proof positive of what a miserable farce this whole thing is?” and after a silence I could feel as a tightening vice in my chest, we got up to leave, following my father after—and only after—he’d entirely finished his beer with a satisfying smack of his lips from the bottle as he sucked out its final drops then laid it on the coffee table and made his way up the stairs of the shadowed rec room to the evening still illuminated by the sun as we got back in the car, leaving as wordlessly as we’d arrived.
But just as it wasn’t every Saturday night he would go straight from work to the Ex-Servicemen’s Club without calling, leaving my mom worrying and waiting for supper, on Sunday he didn’t always go golfing and curling and drinking away most of the day. Sometimes he would just get up and laze around the house, or on one Sunday we all went to Green Valley Trailer Park, for that’s where Kim Hoswell lived, and we’d found that Kim Hoswell’s dad and my dad were old friends, and though I worried my dad would find out from Kim Hoswell’s dad that I had showed my penis to her and Mary Hiemstra, I wasn’t entirely worried, since for Kim Hoswell to tell her dad she’d have to admit that she got into trouble and had to go down to the office too. We had gone over to Green Valley Trailer Park to use their pool, and my dad leapt in from the diving board so it made the water jump up over the sides, then he shot across the pool with slashing strokes from one end to the other—because he’d grown up by the water, by the river and the lake, and spent his whole summers in a bathing suit, he said, and made money from jumping into the lake and retrieving coins flung from travellers on the old SS Hamonic cruise ship.
And when he came out of the pool after his swift swim—for adults didn’t stay playing in the pool all afternoon like kids did—he sat with the other adults in their lawn chairs with their beers and they joked about me and Kim, about us kissing and holding hands at school, and at one point Dad said, “Yeah, Tim does pretty good at school, but he’s got this habit—you ever see him doing this, Kim? He lifts up his hands and starts flappin’ them around in front of his face…” He paused to demonstrate the action. “Looks like he’s got a mental problem or somethin’—you ever see anything like that?”
Shame mixed with a surprising blast of anger shot through me and grasped my stomach. “What’re you doing?” Mom asked him. “Why do you say that in front of all these people here like that? You’re embarrassing him,” she said as my face was growing hot and Kim and all other kids of the trailer park were looking at me and the beer-drinking adults were gazing at me with impersonal curiosity.
“Maybe he should be embarrassed,” my dad said. “Nothing else works to get him to stop—maybe he won’t do it anymore if he’s embarrassed to do it.” Later in the afternoon he went in the pool again, and Jason leapt in with him, and they were swimming around the deep end and my dad called out to me to get in, but I didn’t want to, and he called me in a more stern, commanding voice, swimming to the edge of the pool and glaring at me, so I walked to the edge of the pool, and he treaded water in the deep end, holding out his arms to me and said, “Come on! Jump in!” and I stood there, and even though my little brother was in with him and smiling up at me, and though I knew my dad could swim as good as anyone I knew, and had even saved my life in a pool once, I couldn’t make my body jump into his open arms over the pool’s glistening surface, for there beneath it, and beneath him, were the darkening untold depths of the water which had no safeguard or escape clause. There were my father’s arms and his increasingly angry face, and his increasingly harsh voice beckoning, demanding that I jump.
I froze on the pool’s edge and tears began gathering in my eyes, the same kind that gathered when I tried to tie my shoes and couldn’t, or tried to solve a math problem and couldn’t, or tried to do some commonplace task that everyone else could do but couldn’t, and he would stand there sighing, the frustration coming off him in waves as he looked down at my fingers fumbling, failing and trying again, my panic dooming my efforts once again. And now shivering with my arms folded around me on the side of the pool, I felt the same again with the tears starting in my eyes and my dad hissing through his teeth “Don’t cry… DON’T cry...” and all the people of the trailer park, Kim Hoswell and all the other kids, and Kim Hoswell’s father and Dad’s other friends, all looking as Dad treaded water with his arms stretched out saying, “Come on! Jump in!” his face and head and shoulders welcoming me above the water’s surface, his legs pedalling down below, and the more he demanded and needed his son to jump into his arms in the pool in front of the other adults, the more impossible it became for me to entertain the idea of doing so, and finally he gave up, shaking his head and floating away with the same expression he had when he talked about me never using the ball mitt Fred Scott gave him for me when I was born. He whooshed away in the pool as though departing some small, undignified, ignominious death.
I put on my shirt and joined Kim Hoswell and the other kids who were now playing outside the pool enclosure around a picnic table. Before long, Kim began telling the story of how I pulled down my pants and showed my penis to her and Mary Hiemstra at school. I wasn’t worried or embarrassed, though, because the adults were far away and the other kids seemed to think it was really funny, so afterwards I was encouraged to provide a repeat performance, and there on the top of the picnic table it was easy enough to pull down my bathing suit and show my privates, and do a little dance to make them bounce around, and it was then that my dad came around the corner with a towel around his shoulders and saw me and the smile disappeared from my lips and all the light drained out of his eyes as he strode towards me, lifted me from the top of the picnic table with one sweep of his arm, plucking me from the centre of the kids and transporting me with calm swiftness into our car, and we departed from the Green Valley Trailer Park immediately.
It was a week after that that I woke up one morning before school and went down the hall to see if my dad was in bed. When he was there, I always tried to figure out if my parents had an argument the night before. I figured if I found them both sleeping turned away from each other they must’ve had a fight just before going to sleep, or if my mom was turned away from my father, yet he was turned towards her, it meant she had been mad at him, but he had been imploring her to reconsider when they went to sleep. Or if my dad was turned away, and my mom faced him, they had gone to sleep with her begging his forgiveness. But of course, if I found them both turned towards the other then there was nothing to worry about.
This morning the bed was empty, and I walked out to the kitchen where my mom was making me and my brother sandwiches for our school lunch, and I asked where Dad was and she said he was in the hospital. He had a bad pain last night, so Howard his partner at the barbershop came over to pick him up and take him to the hospital, and there they told him that he’d had a heart attack. Then they said he’d had another heart attack once they got to the hospital, and I asked when he was coming home and she said they couldn’t say, and as she put the sandwiches together her bottom lip was shaking like it did when it looked like she was about to cry, and then she bit the inside of her lip at the side of her mouth which she did at times like this, I guess, to stop from crying, and that made me not want to ask her any more questions. I walked back down the hall to look at my parents’ unmade bed, to look particularly at my dad’s side of it. Then my brother got up and I told him what happened, and my mom told him, and then we got ready and went to school. For show and tell, I got up and told the class my dad had two heart attacks last night.
The Simpsons’ older daughter was there to look after me and my brother when we got home after school so that Mom could go visit Dad in the hospital after she finished work. Jason and I weren’t allowed to see him because kids couldn’t go, and for a while they didn’t know how long he’d be in there, then they said it would be three months, and as the days went by I would go into my parents’ room and look at their wedding pictures, and remind myself of the way his face looked, and try to think of how his voice sounded as I looked at his younger face in the pictures.
The older Simpson girl sometimes stayed overnight as she helped look after Jason and me, but I didn’t like her, the way she told us what to do as though she was taking over for both Mom and Dad. I didn’t like or trust the food she made for us, or the way she barked like a seal in her laughter at The Brady Bunch or other shows that weren’t funny, and especially at shows Dad didn’t think were funny. I kept asking my mom for the Simpson girl to leave but she said she couldn’t leave, and she told me to behave and stop making trouble, but still my brother and I would get into these terrible fights, and one night after school my mom said she would take us to the new McDonald’s that had just opened up and even on that night, in the car ride over, my brother and I got into a kicking fight in the back seat so that my mother, just as she was turning the car into the parking lot, backed up, turned around and headed home, giving us a clear lesson that she wasn’t going to tolerate the acting up we did when our dad was away, even at the very threshold of McDonald’s.
Mom kept saying Dad might be moving into a different room where my brother and I could visit him. Sometimes Dad would send home little slips of paper that had the meal ingredients for his new diet with no salt and no butter, or he’d send home the little Styrofoam suction cups they used on the machine to test his heart, and we’d play with them. But as the weeks went by and I kept going into the bedroom to look at the pictures of him, his voice grew fainter in my mind, and the features of what he looked like now were harder to grasp and make out. One night Mom took us and the Simpson girl up to the hospital, and my brother and I stood on the lawn waving up to my dad’s window, where we could see his tiny figure, almost impossible to make out, wave down at us from above.
Don Regnier and his wife and their three children came to stay with us for a week to help Mom as she was going back and forth to visit Dad, and I didn’t like the way they invaded the house, and the way the oldest girl got peanut butter on my Snoopy plush doll, and the way Don Regnier’s wife told me what to do, and I didn’t like the way Don Regnier sat at the head of the table during suppertime. But Don Regnier helped out by completing some of the work Dad had started on the renovation, and he even installed a light fixture in my parents’ bedroom that they had picked out: a fixture of two globes hanging on chains suspended from the ceiling over their bed, the chains looping through rings on the ceiling then draping back to connect to a medallion on the wall above the centre of their headboard.
Mom took advantage of their being there to go back and forth from the hospital more and I’d have to watch different shows with the Regnier kids who like the Simpson girl laughed at different and stupid things, and on the Sunday before they were leaving we were all having a big meal in the kitchen, and that was the day a phone was installed in Dad’s room for the first time, and he made his first call during supper, and Mom passed the phone to Don Regnier and my brother and then to me and his voice came with all the familiarity I had forgotten existed until I heard it, the feeling of something fitting into a space which conformed to its every dimension and shape: “How y’doin’ partner?”
And the strange shock of his voice down the line mixed somehow with my anger at the Regniers and the Simpson girl so that my throat suddenly ached, and I couldn’t talk right away.
“Partner? How y’doin’?”
Finally I said, “Good,” my voice catching and my eyes smarting, but I wanted to tell him I wasn’t good at all, that Don Regnier was here sitting at the head of the table where he shouldn’t have been, eating off our dishes and shoving our forks into his mouth, and his whiny mean kids were here, and his wife was telling me what to do in a voice you don’t use on a friend’s kid but the one you use for your own kid when you’re really mad at him, and all of a sudden there were hot tears in my eyes, and I turned from all the people in the kitchen though I couldn’t leave the room because the phone was mounted on the kitchen wall. I hunched up my shoulders to try to hide my crying, and I tried to control my voice to answer when he said, “Try and help your mother out now—just another month, the doctors say.”
I ached with rage as I wanted to tell him that Don Regnier hung the light fixture over his and Mom’s bed, and I wanted to tell him that Don Regnier shouldn’t have been there, it wasn’t right, he was in a place he shouldn’t have been, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, but also conscious of having to hide my tears I felt even further away from him than when I couldn’t hear his voice or talk to him, or hear him talk to me as his voice came down the line, saying: “Alright, partner, you be good now,” and he clicked off.