Johnny Kellock disappeared on August 1, 1959. Or, at least, that’s the day after the last day anybody ever saw him.
The rest of the world was lined up on Barrington Street, trying to get a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, on their first trip to Halifax. The Queen wore a pink dress and a white hat, and she looked a lot like television pictures of the Queen but in colour.
Meanwhile, my cousin was disappearing.
Whoosh. Poof. Gone.
No one knew why exactly Johnny did what he did. It’s like if you pulled on a bit of yarn, and you pulled and pulled until the whole sweater’s come unravelled and you’ve got a mess of yarn at your feet and then someone has the bright idea that you should try to find the end you started with.
Anyway, as Mama says, a person should stick to their own story. Mine starts when Johnny had already disappeared. And it ends with us Normans doing what we always used to do whenever something bad happened. Or something good. Or every Sunday afternoon if nothing’d happened in between. We gathered round Mama’s kitchen table in the usual order, oldest to youngest—Freddie, Margaret, Doris, Young Lil, Martha, and me, Rosalie—and we smoked.
It was my twelfth birthday, and it was my first and only cigarette.
And it was the last time we all sat together like that.