1

THE RHUBARB LEAVES HAVE GROWN UP TO THE FIRST-floor windows. From the bottom of the driveway, I spy a juice pitcher and some plastic cups sitting on a table on the porch. I strain my ears for voices, but all I’m picking up is the buzz of insects and power lines.

When I get closer, I see cobwebs binding the table to the railing and a grey feather sticking out of the jug. A wool sweater hanging over the back of a chair doesn’t stir with the breeze. I squint up at the windows and fight the urge to bolt, pushing my fists into the back pockets of my jeans to anchor myself. A crow starts a staring contest from the roof and I look away first, glancing around at all the beer cans scattered in the grass, wondering what debris was left behind and what’s been brought since by kids using the house as a party place.

It’s hard to focus with those beady eyes boring into my forehead, so I give up and walk around the side yard to the garage. Thorn bushes catch the hem of my jacket on the slight incline and it takes a few good kicks on the door before I can squeeze inside. Grandpa’s shotguns are rusted out and there’s a lonesome smell of oil over everything. The dirt floor next to the deep-freeze Daddy used to throw chunks of deer meat into is stained black from years of spilled blood. The wall hook is empty. All the keys are gone, even the one for the disassembled tractor.

Something slides past my foot and vanishes behind a metal jerry can. I push the can aside with my boot, squat down and spy a garter snake coiled back beneath the shelves full of dusty tools. It darts past me and slips outside, and as I’m tracing its path through the weeds I notice the long grass is flattened near the kitchen entrance of the house. As soon as I start wading down there, the crow alights on the awning to keep me in its sights.

I get a familiar jolt as I approach the small round window in the kitchen door. Back in the day, this was the porthole to whatever shitstorm was in swing if Daddy was home. If it was getting dark and my stomach was growling, I used to drag over a sawhorse to stand on and press my face to the glass. Sometimes I could make out a figure slumped over in a chair or catch the shadow of a bottle tipping back. Once, Daddy surprised the hell out of me with his eyeballs right up to mine. I fell backward onto the grass, crawled through the bushes and from a safe distance watched him lurch out the door and trip over the sawhorse, hollering that I was dead meat. While he lay there passed out in the moonlight, I shivered in the trees for an hour until my older brother came home. I watched Bird poke Daddy with a long stick and when Daddy didn’t twitch, I sprinted out from my hiding spot. Bird pushed me into the house and locked the door behind us. We stood at the window watching Daddy’s belly rising and falling. “Stupid shithead,” Bird said. “He won’t even remember how he got there.” He turned around, snatched Daddy’s glass off the table, and I watched the few amber rivulets that missed his mouth go trickling down his neck.

Now I only have to stand on tiptoes to peer inside, but all I can make out are blurry shapes. I try the knob and it’s unlocked, so I slowly walk in.

The walls and countertops are scarred with cigarette burns. There are butts on the floor, glasses of mouldy liquid and a shrivelled mouse on a plate. It’s like someone hosted the tea party from hell.

I hold my nose and search the room for something familiar. After a few seconds, I spy the rooster clock, the one we got free from an offer on the back of a cereal box. It used to “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” until it startled Daddy one day and he bashed it with his fist. After that, it would only whisper “Cock” every hour followed by a garbled noise like it was being choked. I take it down off the wall, wipe off the grime and wind the little pin in the back, but that bird’s finally out of its misery. I carefully hang it back in its place and wander to the next room.

My boots on the floorboards set off a chain reaction of groans and rattles throughout the whole house. In the murky green light, everything looks as if it’s under water. The hallway is a jungle of coat hangers and unravelled cassette tapes, piles of fallen plaster and broken Christmas-tree ornaments. Someone booby-trapped the main staircase by nailing a flannel sheet over a missing tread.

Upstairs, the floor’s given way in spots. I find where a beam shows through and walk the length of it into the master bedroom. Two white cats are lying on a bare matress. They stare at me, wide-eyed. In the closet, Ma’s yellow dress was a banquet for moths. The buttons she kept in the Mason jar on her bureau are stuck together. There are water stains on the walls, wings flapping in the attic. Even the clouds are creaking outside.

I pick a sturdy spot and slowly rotate, taking it all in. Before I can even begin to wrap my mind around this mess, I hear a car door slam. I make my way back down the stairs and peer out a window. The RCMP officer I spoke to earlier is parked down on the road and coming up on foot. I open the front door and quickly undo the top few buttons of my blouse. I’ll need a place to sleep, and it sure as hell won’t be in this house.

“Had to see for myself,” I say once he’s in earshot.

He takes his hat off. “Sorry, I don’t have any more information for you.”

He’s lying. I can tell by how fast he drops his eyes. I walk down off the porch and ask, “You know if anyone in town needs a waitress?”

He stares hard at my red boots, tries not to let his eyes slide up my legs. I see he’s wearing a wedding ring. A voice cuts through the static on his belt radio and he flicks the volume down with his thumb. “Just head to the tavern. West knows everything anybody knows. You’ll get all your answers in one place.”

“Who’s West?”

“He’s been running the Four Horses since Clutch passed.”

“He got a girlfriend?”

“Listen, Tabatha.” The cop fidgets and puts his hat back on. “Things have been quiet around here.”

“You going to give me a ride or not?”

I hear a rustle of feathers and look up to see a whole flock of crows now perched on the rusty telephone wire. They seem to be waiting for a signal. I raise my arm and give them the middle finger, but that wasn’t it.

THE MAIN DRAG WAS NEVER A WELCOME PLACE FOR Saints. My stomach tightens as we pass the convenience store I used to steal from right out of the register, and next to it the barbershop with the dirty candy-striped pole Bird once licked on a dare.

Up ahead, I see the big town history mural painted on the stone wall. There’s a trick to it where, if you stand in a certain spot, you become another face in the crowd of people cheering for the men come home from war. As we pass it, I see that all the townswomen have been defiled by spray paint. They’ve all got big tits and tongues hanging out, ready to jump any soldier who still has his legs.

The cop lets me out at the stop sign and drives off without a word. I need to clear my head, so I duck down an alley into the Doyle Street Country Club. That’s the name the cops gave to the back lot where kids started congregating to pass around cheap bottles of Great White. By the look of all the empties, the club’s still swinging, though the new house beverage is something called Dory 72. The label has a cross-eyed cartoon fisherman with the slogan Get It in Your Gills.

I trail my finger along the wavy green line that the big flood stained along the back walls of the buildings, remembering how bits of algae and garbage were stuck to everyone’s houses and cars. The day after the storm, my father paddled our family down Main Street in a canoe, pointing out floating baby doll heads and whisky jugs, hooking in the stuff Ma wanted with a ski pole. The cemetery was submerged except for the tallest crosses, and later we heard that some of the bodies went for a ride. One of them floated face up beneath Grandma Jean’s kitchen window. She was sure it was Jim Weir, whose funeral she’d been at two weeks before. When she got sick of looking at him, she paid some kids to tether him to their rubber dinghy and tow him down to the station.

I light a cigarette and smoke it down to my fingers while I search for my old graffiti. Someone carved I fucked your mother last night into the dumpster, and beneath it someone else scrawled You wish, Dad. I wish a few of these kids were hanging around so I could tell them about some of our old hijinks. Like the time some church nuts marched down here preaching the light of the Lord, handing out pamphlets and T-shirts that said, JESUS LISTENS. We ripped the sleeves off the shirts, stole some permanent markers from the pharmacy and added TO METALLICA in thunderbolt letters. Then we sat on the church steps Sunday morning and gave them back to all the people walking in.

I crush out my smoke, crack my neck a few times. Then I pop a piece of gum in my mouth and head back through the alley. I start up the main drag, but I only get as far as the beauty parlour before my stomach seizes up again. One time, my mother and I were walking hand in hand and she stopped short right in front of this door. She had a green and yellow bruise on that day and it was almost pretty, like a fireworks display across one cheek. She said, “I’m going to get me a job and get us out of here.” She grabbed my hand, burst through the door and said, “You need workers? I’ll do anything that needs doing. I can work sixteen hours a day for the price of eight.” And without even looking up from putting perm rods in some old lady’s hair, the woman who ran the place, Beula Dean, said to no one in particular, “I’d sooner hire that stray dog that hangs around the library with one eye hanging out of its head.”

It was moments like those that forced me to be who I am. If ever I drifted just an inch from being a Saint, something always snapped me right back in my place. The thought of it makes me want to duck into the beauty parlour right now, slice Beula Dean’s throat with a razor blade and have a skating party in her blood. But the only person inside is a bored-looking black lady sitting behind the counter reading Wedding Bells magazine. She looks up and beckons for me to come in, but I keep moving.

The funeral parlour is boarded up and moved around the corner into what used to be the bowling alley. I don’t see any reason why I can’t just walk in and ask if anyone in my family cashed in their chips. There’s a loud bell that jangles when the door opens and organ music playing on a little boom box behind the desk. I nose around, touching all the display coffins and urns, until a young man with big glasses and hair all combed over to one side emerges from the backroom.

“Hi there. I’m Tabby Saint. I’m curious if you might have buried anybody from my family in the last eleven or so years. I’m just back in town and haven’t exactly kept in touch.”

“Saint?” The way he looks at me, so spooked, I figure he’s going to tell me they all burned up in a fire or something. “We haven’t provided any services for Saints.”

“Is that because no one died or because they’d sooner dig a hole in the woods than pay your fees?”

He can’t seem to pry open his jaw.

“No offence,” I add. “I can see them doing that.”

“One moment.” He opens a door and goes down some stairs. When he comes back, he clears his throat and says, “My father says no Saints have passed on since Jack Saint in 1971.”

“People always said we were hard targets. Speaking of which, what’d you do with all those pins and balls when you moved in?”

“We boxed them up and put them out in the parking lot. Some kids carted them off.”

I imagine my brothers and sister laying down planks of plywood and setting up their own little bowling alley in the front yard, charging other kids lane fees.

He straightens his glasses. “Anything else?”

I take a last look at all the half-open coffins with pink linings and little pillows so shiny they give me a headache. “Just like luxury cars,” I say, running my hand down the side of a black casket. “I’ll bet the typical dipshit who goes down in one of these showboats spent his years driving a Pinto with bald tires and a driver’s-side door that had to be duct-taped shut.”

He looks at me blankly.

I wink. “I think I liked the place better when it served beer.”

I push the door open and step out onto the sidewalk, and there’s this little ringlet-headed thing coming toward me. She’s about six years old with a flat nose and juice stains on her neck. She stops and says, “Are you lice? My mother seen you this morning, and she said you’re lice.”

“That was nice of her.” I spit my gum out on the pavement. “Who’s your mother?”

“Nancy Roth-MacDonald.”

I know that name. Nancy Roth was in my grade. She told her friends my parents were brother and sister and it spread around school like a bad fart. There were a lot of nasty things said about my family that were true; that girl had no good reason to be throwing extra stink into the pot. I bend down to this kid’s face and say, “When I was fourteen, my hair hung straight down to my ass and poor Nancy Roth had these little curls stuck to her head like pubic hairs.” I wrap a strand of her hair around my finger and wind it up to her scalp. “The meaner she was, the tighter and frizzier those curls got. You think about that.”

She hesitates, then pulls away like I scalded her with a hot curling iron.

“Tell your mother I said hi.”

THE TAVERN HAS A BRIGHT NEW PAINT JOB, BUT THE men inside are worse than ever. Or maybe they’re the same drunks a decade older and uglier, but I can’t distinguish one fat ass hanging off the back of a stool from another. I march up to the bar and the bartender finally pries himself from the television set they’re all staring at.

“You’re West?”

“I am.”

“I’m Tabby Saint.”

His face twitches like there’s a bug crawling across it. “So?”

“So nothing.” I take a stool. “Give me a beer.”

He doesn’t move. The chalkboard on the wall behind him says, Today’s Special: Two Drinks for the Price of Two Drinks.

“I lived here till I was fourteen years old,” I tell him. “I don’t remember you.”

“I’m from Cable.”

“Did you know my father?”

He spits sideways into the sink. “Yeah. I knew your father.”

“Where’d he go?”

One of the men snorts and shakes his head. The room falls silent except for the dart game on the television. I eye a basket of stale-looking pretzels sitting on the bar. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten.

“Where’s the rest of them gone to?” I ask, taking a handful.

West uncrosses his arms, grabs a bottle of Ten-Penny from the fridge behind him, twists the cap off and smacks it down hard in front of me. “They were smoked out ages ago. Got run across the bridge.”

“What for?”

He shrugs, turns back to the television. I can tell I’m not going to get anything more out of him. Not in here, anyway. He’s got a broken tooth on the bottom row, but other than that he’s decent-looking. Strong arms under his black shirt, full head of hair, copper-coloured eyes.

I wash down a mouthful of pretzel with a swig of beer. “I need a job.”

“Oh yeah?” West motions down the line of pasty faces. “Why don’t you join the club?”

I hang around for hours watching darts, then pool, then bowling, then darts again, until the last wino picks himself up, takes his ball cap off the coat rack and stumbles out the door. West goes out to empty the trash, comes back in and locks up the fridge, gathers some dirty glasses and sets them in the sink. “You’re still here,” he says over his shoulder, buttoning his coat.

“You hadn’t noticed?”

He leans over and crosses his forearms on the bar. “That guy who left just before Carl came in here wearing a leather jacket that belongs to a friend of mine whose truck was busted into. He must have ripped the tabs off and scuffed it up a little, but it’s the same one.” He glances down at my cleavage. “Asshole paid me with a hundred-dollar bill, which means he just sold something, and he said his name is Dave. Course, when I pretended the phone was for Dave, he didn’t react until I said it twice, and after that he knew I was on to him. Know how I know?”

I shrug.

“Because buddy left right then with a third of beer in his bottle whereas the previous two he drained to the last drop just like you and every other loser in this dump.” He takes a mint from the glass dish next to the register and pops it in his mouth. “I notice everything.”

“I saw the hundred he paid you with,” I say. “I also saw the two fifties in his wallet and the driver’s licence that says his last name is Graves. And for the record, I’m no loser, and I don’t appreciate you making assumptions based on my last name.”

He bites down loudly into the mint. Then a smile creeps into his lips as he reaches out and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear. “Okay then.”

THAT NIGHT I WRAP MY LEGS AROUND WEST AND ONCE he’s done and snoring I lie awake and walk through each room of our house again in my mind. I can’t imagine what would make Daddy leave the place to rot. He used to brag that his father built it with his own hands, which wasn’t even true, but he seemed to believe it.

After Grandpa Jack fell drunk in the river and drowned the year I was born, Daddy talked him up like he was the Messiah when really he was a demented alcoholic tyrant who used to beat Daddy with this black horse statue that sat on the mantle. Once, we were riding in our old station wagon and passed a black horse grazing in a field. Daddy started rubbing the left side of his head with the palm of his hand and pressed his boot down on the gas pedal so hard that all the trees slurred together outside the windows. My baby brother Jackie started screaming and Daddy slammed on the brakes, wrenched the car to the side of the road and told Ma she had ten seconds to shut the little bastard up. He pushed in the cigarette lighter as she jumped out and hauled Jackie from his car seat. The lighter popped and Daddy held it up where she could see it as she stood on the side of the highway cooing in Jackie’s ear. Then Daddy turned around and stared at Bird and me as he pressed the burning end to the passenger seat, melting a hole where Ma’s head had been. I grabbed onto Bird so tight my fingernails made little red half moons in his arm.

WEST MUMBLES A STRING OF WORDS IN HIS SLEEP. I TRY to make out what he’s saying. Something about drywall and getting a good deal. Last night when we got back to his place, he told me he’d been waiting a long time for a woman like me to walk into his bar. I asked what he meant by that and he said someone with half a brain. I don’t recall saying anything brilliant. Except maybe when I suggested he’d get more women in there if he made a rule that customers have to wear pants that fit. “Just try it for one week,” I said. “Put up a big sign: NOW WITH FEWER SWEATY CRACKS.”

My eyes are still open and sore when the sun comes up, so I slip out the door and walk down to the river. I manage to find my old spot between the blueberry bushes and the Space Invaders arcade console. I can’t believe that thing’s still here, lying on its stomach like a beached whale. The neon colours have leached and all the wiring’s been gutted, leaving just the box frame. I always wondered how it wound up here. Maybe some kids heisted it, dragged it down here to bash it up for the quarters. Quarters were a hot ticket back in the day because Doreen who worked the corner store used to sell single cigarettes to kids for twenty-five cents. She loved children. She’d knit little leg warmers while she was waiting for customers, had a big stockpile ready in case anyone in town gave birth. “Need a light for that, Baby Bear?” she’d ask, stretching over the counter with her Zippo. She had a script for everything. If someone asked how she was doing, she’d say, “Just another day in paradise.” If a man purchased a lottery ticket, she’d say, “If you win, I’m single.” Every time. And then she’d laugh so hard it loosened the phlegm in her throat.

The grass is soggy after endless cold spring rains, so I lay my jacket down to sit on. I used to come down here all the time for no reason other than to watch the eddies twirl. Once in a while some flotsam would flash by, like a Dr. Pepper can or a piece of car body. I’d stay until the tide went out and there was just a big bowl of mud. Insects would crawl up and down my arms and I’d pretend I was just another blade of grass.

I tried to disappear on a city bench once, but my face must have a sign on it. Some woman tapped me on the knee and wanted to know if I’d seen her ghost. I told her I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about, and she lowered her voice and asked if a woman who looked identical to her went by about twenty minutes ago, perhaps on a bicycle with lightning streaks down the side and a white basket. She took a pen out of her purse and drew me a picture of herself.

At least in small towns, everyone knows who the crazies are and what their deal is. Someone new walks into a corner store and they get the lowdown right away: “Don’t say hello to Angus out there or he’ll make you listen to him play the spoons for hours.” In the city, crazies float around like balloons. You don’t know one till she’s hovering over you on a park bench.

There’s something different in the air here now. When we were kids, the breeze always smelled like the car factory. Maybe it’s shut down, because all that’s wafting my way is the scent of the pines on the other side of the river. Daddy used to hide out in those woods when the law was on him. I asked Ma once what he did to pass the time and she said something like, “Oh, he’s making sure all the birds know he’s the king, getting drunk and shitting in the river, probably dreaming up a whole new way to make me wish I was dead.”

When I was three years old, I tagged along with Bird as he went trudging in to look for Daddy. He had to tell him that our furnace broke down and Ma needed money to get it fixed. My legs were bare and we didn’t get far before some wild animal sunk its teeth into my shin. Bird told everyone it was a king cobra, but it was probably a muskrat.

I squint in the other direction across the old bridge, but I can barely make out the few cars and trucks rumbling through the morning haze.

Grandma Jean, who is my mother’s mother, always said that the town of Solace River was a waste of nails from the start, that its sole purpose was to collect assholes. She used to tell us stories about Irish rumbles, grown men pummelling each other over who owned what, everybody taking sides. Her father, Cleary Foster, was a brawler who challenged boxing champs from as far away as Boston to street fights. He’d go around begging shopkeepers to put up the train fare, and when the boxer left Solace River with his face punched through his head, they’d get their money back and more. There were legendary parties every time he won a fight. Cleary himself would preside, buying rounds and throwing bills around, placing small children on his biceps and hoisting them in the air.

After his bare-knuckle days, Cleary bought an automobile, the first Nova Scotian to own one outside of Halifax. He’d drive it around to different towns looking for barroom fights, but no one would take him on. Eventually, he got depressed and crashed the car on purpose, fizzled out his days drinking mouthwash and yelling at the radio announcer. Grandma Jean’s mother took all the kids away, and by the time she came back, the house had been looted and there were flies everywhere. Someone had even stepped right over Cleary’s corpse to snatch his Crosley radio. The church took up a collection, but she blew it on a flashy car of her own.

“She said it was her due for having put up with all them brawls,” Grandma Jean said. “But everyone knew there weren’t nothing that woman loved more than the smack of a fist into a jaw. She used to pick up the bloody teeth off the floor and keep them for souvenirs, show them to us kids at the breakfast table while she re-enacted the fight. You’d be sitting there eating oatmeal and the next thing you knew, she’d have you in a headlock.” She clicked her tongue. “Point is, the mayor, the farmers, even my own crazy ma weren’t nothing but thieves, every last one of them. People say all the trouble started with your father’s people, but that’s just sweet-smelling bullshit. Garnet Saint didn’t invent crime in Solace River.”

We used to have a self-portrait of Garnet hanging in our house. I can still see that big nose and the boxy black hat slipping to one side of his head. From what I heard, he was a teenage runaway who wormed his way into a small crew making rum runs from St. Pierre Island to New York during Prohibition until he got kicked out for having a big mouth. Then he tried to break in with the moonshiners on McNabs Island but wound up running a crooked Wheel of Chance on the pleasure grounds.

Grandma Jean said Garnet Saint probably wasn’t even Grandpa Jack’s real father, but that Jack’s mother abandoned him in a Halifax rooming house and Garnet offered to take him off the landlady’s hands. He skipped town with little Jack and headed for the Annapolis Valley, never staying in one town long enough for people to catch on to his monkeyshines.

“The baby was his meal ticket,” Grandma said. “Garnet fed him nothing but rotten fish and sips of hooch so he’d always be passed out or spitting up. He’d moan that his poor Jack was dying so ladies’ charities would give them money for medicine.”

They arrived in Solace River around the time Garnet’s knees began to wear out. Jack was about seven years old by then. They’d come looking for an old carny buddy of Garnet’s, but the man was long dead. They squatted in the old schoolhouse, started stealing chickens and piglets until they had enough of a farm to feed themselves, and for the next ten years scraped by on just the odd con. Garnet had a shed full of painted rocks that he sold to passersby as Genuine Meteorites! He also touted his services as a sort of hillbilly clairvoyant, a walking talking farmer’s almanac who could tell with a sniff of the air and a coin slapped to his palm which crops would do well that season. Of course, that ruse lasted only one season. Next, he concocted a tincture of pig’s blood and tree sap and tried selling it door to door as a cure-all, but by then no one was buying his crap. Garnet swore the joke was on them, claimed Saint’s Elixir restored not only the cartilage in his knees but also the muscle in his pants. He and his new-found vitality went around molesting people’s wives and daughters until someone did the whole town a favour and beat him to death with a tire iron behind the gas station. Jack was only a young teenager at the time. He went off to war to earn a wage and came back with a sickly little waif who died with my father still inside her. They had to cut Daddy right out of her stomach.

Grandma Jean stitched this all together from jagged scraps of memory and town gossip. My father was like a period at the end of the story, but of course it didn’t end there. Why the hell Ma married Daddy, I’ll never understand.

After about an hour, I’m sick of thinking about it. I stand up, spit in the river and head back up the road.

WEST IS STANDING BARE-CHESTED IN THE KITCHEN when I let myself in. He gets a hard-on as soon as he sees me. We screw for a while on his reclining chair before he goes to work. A couple of things I learned about him overnight are that he doesn’t have a last name and he doesn’t drink coffee. I don’t think I can trust anyone who doesn’t drink coffee.

The door slams and for fun I yell, “Have a good day at work, honey!”

His house is all right even though it hasn’t got an upstairs. It’s damp and the ceilings are low, but he has some houseplants and you can tell he pushes a mop around now and then. I pour myself a glass of water and read all the magnets on his fridge. Tim’s Autobody. 2-4-1 Pizza. There’s one shaped like a fish that says, Do Unto Others. I survey the kitchen and try to imagine it with a nice tablecloth and curtains on the windows. The walls are bare except for a calendar and a small wooden shelf holding a cookbook and a framed picture of an auburn-haired woman with nice tanned legs and her arms around West. I wonder how he messed that up.

I open the cookbook and read the inscription: Merry Christmas, West! Now learn how to cook and stop mooching scraps at our house.

In the bathroom, I wipe down the mirror. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good hard look at myself. After I got off the bus in Halifax, I hitchhiked up the 101 and met a nice family from Paradise who offered to let me crash in their teepee while I decided where to go next. The “teepee” was a homemade contraption draped in My Little Pony comforters and tarps. Instead of a firepit, they stuck an electric space heater in there and ran extension cords up to the house. The whole thing was a fire trap and smelled like nail polish remover, but the droopy mattresses piled on top of each other made for the best sleep of my life.

I had high hopes for Paradise based on the name and hung around a couple of weeks to see if anything was going on. Nothing was. Unless you count glow-in-the-dark karaoke in a church basement. The microphone shone electric pink and a heavy-set woman sang “The Rose” into it with such passion that sweat soaked through the underarms of her caftan. She seemed to think I was a secret talent scout from New York City, kept looking over during the solo break to gauge my reaction. Eventually I just admitted to myself that I was inching my way back home, walked to the side of the highway and stuck my thumb out.

I look more like my mother now that I’m finally here. We’ve got the same stringy hair and that caged-animal look in our eyes. She creeps into my mind more than usual these days. Quick snapshots of her. She used to paint tiny hearts and things on my fingernails before that was popular. She hardly ever laughed, but when she did, it sounded like a rusty motorbike starting up. We’d start imitating it and she’d clam up again.

I poke around in his cabinets. I figure if there’s a chance of that redhead coming back and catching me here, finding makeup in a drawer would be a good sign. Women leave behind pots and pans, sometimes clothes, but never makeup. Once you find that shade of lipstick that subtly distracts attention away from the rest of your face, you’d crawl down an outhouse to retrieve it. There’s no trace of her.

I fish my purse out from under the bed for my own crusty makeup tubes and use them to freshen up a little, but then I figure I could do with a shower, so I wipe it all off again. The stall is tiny and the walls are wood panelled instead of waterproof so the wood’s gone all grey and soft and there’s mould in between the slats. The shower head just gives a trickle and the water smells rank. It takes me half the time I’m in there to figure out how to make it run hot, and when I get out, the phone is ringing and ringing.

“Hello?”

“You find the towels?”

“You watching me on a surveillance camera?”

“What?”

“I just got out of your shower. I’m standing here dripping.”

“There’s a clean towel in the hall closet.”

“It’s the only thing clean, then,” I lie.

“I had to rip off all the tiles to get at the pipes.”

“And you still didn’t manage to fix the pipes.”

“You’re welcome to leave any time. Thought you’d left this morning when I woke up.”

“You didn’t seem disappointed that I hadn’t.”

“Well, anyway. Wipe the floor up when you’re done.”

“What? A fancy place like this doesn’t have housekeeping service?”

“The door’s through the kitchen.”

“You home for supper?”

“And lock up when you leave. I like my television.”

I hang up and look out the window at a few scraggly trees I don’t know the name of. The leaves brushing up against the window are polka-dotted with brown holes and it reminds me of seeing Ma’s dress all chewed up in the closet.

Ran out of town.

I sit on the bed staring at my bare thighs and wonder what’s happening in Blood Rain. That’s the reserve I was living on for a while before I wore out my welcome. I was staying with this guy, Jared, but it didn’t work out between us. It wasn’t my fault, but they weren’t very nice to me when they had that big meeting. A medicine woman there told me I have a soul like a feather and if I don’t attach myself to something I’ll be floating forever. She said I needed to hang off a cliff or nearly drown to get some weight and when I told her no thanks, she said fine, float forever then. See if I care.

She was probably hoping I’d kill myself by accident. It wouldn’t be the first time a stranger tried to put one over on me. I was in a taxicab once headed to a casino and the driver said, “Oh, you’re headed to the casino? You might not believe this, but I’m a psychic. If you promise to give me half of what you win, I’ll tell you where to put your money down.” I know, I know, it sounded like horseshit, but I can’t ignore anyone who claims to see the future. Like, if, instead of her floating feather crap, that medicine woman had told me I would someday be impaled by a flying candy cane, I swear I’d have been looking over my shoulder every Christmas. It all goes back to the big flood. A girl even younger than me ran all over school telling everyone to tie a boat to a tree and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. It wasn’t even supposed to rain that night, and the next day half the town was standing on their rooftops.

So I said to the cabbie, “All right, fine,” and he said, “Twenty-six.” I went in and put down every cent I had on the number twenty-six, and I couldn’t believe it, I won six hundred dollars. I ran whooping back out to the parking lot, handed over his share, and he laughed his ass off at me, said he had nothing to lose either way so he just pulled a number out of his ass. He said, “If you’d lost, I’d have known it as soon as I saw your face. I’d have just taken off and left you standing here.” Then he snorted. “Dumb bitch. If I had the power to see winning numbers, why the hell would I be driving this cab?” I stuck my face right up to his and said, “Buddy, if you hadn’t played your little trick, I wouldn’t have three hundred dollars in my pocket, so how about you take your half and go buy a whore to listen to this crap?”

I take another quick glance at the trees before I stand up. As I’m pulling my clothes back on, I think about how Ma had her yellow dress on all the time because she liked the way it smelled like lemons and so did I. But maybe it just seemed like it smelled like lemons because it was so yellow.

WEST COMES HOME AT A QUARTER AFTER MIDNIGHT. I had planned to greet him lounging naked on the sofa like Cleopatra, but he catches me while I’m rummaging around in his fridge with the cat under my arm, a piece of toast in the other hand and a smoke dangling from my lips.

“I brought you a bouquet of beers,” he says.

I kick the fridge door shut and drop the cat. “It must be our anniversary.”

“People are talking.”

“That’s nothing new.”

“Everybody wants to know how you turned out.”

I prop my cigarette on a pickle jar lid. “Were they all craning their necks to see if I had my chauffeur drop me at the tavern?” I pluck a Schooner from his outstretched hand and wipe the condensation on my blouse.

“I guess because you grew up somewhere else, they wonder if you might’ve turned yourself around. Who said you could smoke in here?”

“Trust me, I was already grown up when I left here. I got sent to go live with another family, but it wasn’t long before they passed me on to Raspberry.”

“That home for girls up in New Brunswick?”

“Home for damaged goods is more like it. Everyone in there was either a violent whore, a suicide freak or crazier than the wind.”

“I don’t think people know about you being in there.”

“Guess not. You’d know if they did, right?” I sit down on the sofa and the cat leaps up into my lap.

“So, which were you?”

“What?”

“Violent whore, suicide freak or crazy as the wind?”

“Probably all three.” I pick up my smoke, look him over as I inhale. He’s gotten handsomer since he left this morning, taller or something. “I had you pegged wrong.”

“How so?” he asks.

I chew a fingernail. “Thought you didn’t like talking.”

“I’m just getting warmed up.”

“Aren’t bartenders just supposed to listen to people?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call reaching into a broken beer fridge fifty times a night bartending.” He stretches out on the recliner and finally notices I rearranged his living room set. “Christ almighty, you’re making yourself at home, ain’t you?”

I HANG OUT AT HIS HOUSE AGAIN THE NEXT DAY. THE paperboy tosses the Solace River Review into his neighbour’s driveway and I run out and grab it. There’s an article on the front page about a local woman who made a fortune selling old junk she found in her basement. I root through West’s closets to see if he has any hidden treasure, but he hasn’t got much more than a bag of rolled up nickels and a gold chain with an eagle pendant hanging off it. As I’m fixing myself a cup of tea, I notice that the photograph is missing from the shelf, the one of him with the hot redhead.

He comes home early while it’s still light out and I make spaghetti from a can with some garlic-buttered toast. We actually sit down at his little table. His chairs don’t match; one’s wooden country-style and the other’s the metal fold-up kind you find in church halls. I wonder if he ever had two matching chairs and, if so, where’d the other one go? I try to picture him getting pissed off in a poker game and cracking it over someone’s head, but he doesn’t seem the type. This morning he tripped over my purse and apologized even though I was the one who left it lying in the middle of the floor. He bent down and starting picking everything up, and when I tried to explain why I have a rear-view mirror in there, he said it was none of his business and just tossed it in with my toothbrush.

“This is tasty,” he says between bites. He picks up his bowl so his fork can reach his mouth faster.

“This? A monkey could make this. You should get some real groceries so I can cook you a roast.”

He takes a few bills out of his pocket and tosses them across the table, which is just what I’d hoped he’d do.

“Listen,” I say, shoving the money down my sock. “I need to know things.”

“Then ask.”

“I’m not spreading my legs again until you give me some information.”

“Jesus!” He chokes on a noodle and coughs, slams his bowl down. “What the hell is the matter with you? I said ASK.”

“Who made my family leave?”

He wipes his mouth on a paper towel and scowls. “Some guys were hired to go out to the house.”

“Why?”

“Your father was running some kind of scam.”

“So? He was always running a scam.”

“I don’t know the particulars. He got himself tangled up in a dope rope. Told some rich guys he was going to triple their money. I guess he’d done it before.”

“And?”

He shovels another mouthful of food. “And he lost it. Or spent it, or whatever.”

Something hits the window and West runs to the door, opens it and hollers out, “Did one of you little turds just throw something at my house? Well, what’s that in your hand, then? Yeah, you better run.” He comes back to the table, looks at me blankly.

“Then what?” I prod. “After he stole the money.”

He sits. “These men were out for blood, sent a posse out to the house to shake him down.”

“Where did my mother go?”

“I don’t know, and even if I did, I think I ought to be the one asking the questions.”

“Fill your boots.”

He leans back in his chair. “You say you haven’t seen anyone in your family in, what, ten years?”

“Eleven.”

“So, why now?”

“Why not?” I shrug, but it turns into a shiver. “Maybe I want to see them.”

He raises an eyebrow then leans forward again, scrapes his fork up the side of his bowl for the last bit of sauce.

I look down into my glass. “Daddy ever rob you?”

“Not really. I cut him off after he stopped paying his tab and he started sneaking beers from the backroom when I wasn’t looking. I kicked him out a few times, but he came in one day and settled up, so I told him I’d let him back in as long as he paid cash beer-for-beer. Then I shortchanged him a few times when he was drunk to even things up.”

“Well, you’ve got a bit of thief in you too, then.”

I reach over to brush the hair out of his eyes, but he pulls away, balls up his paper towel and tosses it onto his empty side plate.

“I was just getting back what’s mine. I ain’t no thief.”

The house fills with the sound of kids squealing outside and screen doors snapping up and down the street like Christmas crackers. Something hits the window again.

Jared Smoke never sat across a table from me like this. He had a mind like I don’t know what, like it was all broken up in sharp pieces flying around in his head. He didn’t like it when I looked at him too long or too hard. He had a million secrets. I get the feeling West doesn’t have a ton of those. He’s staring back at me with those copper-penny eyes and I feel a blush spread across my cheeks and start creeping down my neck. I practically crawl across the table into his lap. Within seconds his belt’s undone and we’re tangled up on the floor.

MY SISTER POPPY WAS THE BABY OF THE FAMILY, BORN two years after Ma thought Jackie wrecked her womb for good. I can still see the big brown ponytail bobbing on top of her head. We never spent much time together, partly because she was so much younger than me, and partly because she was a crazy little bitch. I remember one afternoon before she was old enough to go to school, she met me coming up the driveway and asked if I’d trade the rocks in her hand for my school bag. I said no, so she whipped the rocks at my face and grabbed it from me. That was Poppy.

She had this squeaky voice and she hated taking baths more than anything. She was always covered in burdocks from running through bushes chasing boys and biting their chins. She had a vast collection of dead things: squirrels, raccoons, beetles. There was always a bird drying out on a windowsill or a caterpillar in the freezer.

Once, when she was about four, she slammed her fist on the dinner table and told Daddy to shut his dirty trap. He looked at her as if he might smash her through the wall, but then he reached across the table, hoisted her out of her seat and planted a big raspberry on her belly. When he plunked her back down, she crossed her arms and said, “And I mean it, Buck.”

Another thing she loved, I mean besides dead things and biting people on the face, was marshmallows. Daddy came home once with a stale bag and Poppy inhaled them like they were crack cocaine. Marchellos, she called them. She only had them that one time, but for two years she brought up marchellos to anyone who came to the house, asking if they knew how she might get her hands on some.

I’m trying to remember more stuff about her when West rolls over, sits up and rubs his head. He’s done the same thing in the same order every morning since I got here: rolls over, sits up, rubs his head.

“Time is it?” he grunts, guiding my hand to his erection.

“Around nine. Hey, did you know my sister, Poppy?”

“Seen her a few times, but no.”

“She pretty?”

“Yeah.” He lies back down. “Nice long legs.”

“Good for her. I guess Kool-Aid and Cheezies don’t stunt your growth after all. Was she still living at home with Ma and Daddy when the shit hit the fan?”

“How come you don’t know any of this? You never even phoned them?”

“They never owned a phone.”

“So you just left to go live with some other family and that was it?”

My eyes travel to the ceiling. “I’d been arrested a few times. Not for anything serious, just for stupid stuff like stealing underarm deodorant and busting windows. The cops threatened Ma, said she had to pay a fine for something I did, which was bullshit because I had the right to work it off in community service. But she was a jumble of nerves about it. And she was convinced I’d have a better life if I got far from here. She got this infection in her ears, and while she was in the hospital she met some woman who was bringing her elderly parents back home to live with her in New Brunswick. She confessed to Ma that she didn’t know how she was going to get by without some help, so Ma talked me up as some Mother Teresa bed-sitter. Next thing I know, I’m in the back seat of a car headed who knows where.”

“What was the woman like?”

“She was adorable. She matched her dress to her earrings, God love her, but I wasn’t Mother Teresa. She took one look at me and knew she couldn’t leave me alone with her goldfish let alone her parents, so I ended up just being bored and in the way. I stole from her, lied to her, lied about lying. I gave a hand job to her plumber for a ride into the city, came back about a week later high as a shelf, tried to sell her parents some pills. I scared the shit out of all her neighbours. I don’t know why she didn’t kick me out sooner. I think she felt sorry for my mother. She took me on like some kind of pet project, even tricked me into her church one Sunday.”

West fights a smile. “What did she tell you was in there?”

“Her name was Barbara Best. She used to correct the way I talked. If I said I seen her mailman coming, she’d say, You saw him. I’d say, What difference does it matter? And she’d say, You mean, what is the difference, and why does it matter?”

“Worked, though,” West says. “You got good grammar.”

“One time, we were in town buying milk and she caught me checking out a guitar in a store window. She asked me if I was interested in learning how to play. I told her what my mother always said, that Saints aren’t musical people, but Barbara Best said that isn’t true, that all people are born musical from the moment they break out of the womb and open up their lungs. She told me, ‘Music is everywhere, Tabatha.’” I pause, remembering her face. “I still say that in my head sometimes: Music is everywhere.”

“Music is everywhere,” West murmurs.

“So we struck a deal that I could have that big red guitar for my birthday if I’d behave until then. My birthday’s in June and that was January. I lasted two months until I stole this stupid paperweight shaped like the Eiffel Tower off a teacher’s desk and sold it to a student in another class. I didn’t think that would count, but it did.” I reach my foot up to push back the curtains and sunlight spills into the room. We lie there squinting. “I wish I’d held out. Nobody’s ever given me a birthday present my whole life.”

“Really? Not even your own mother?”

“She’d bake a cake.”

“That’s not the same as a big shiny box with your name on it. What about Christmas?”

“Sometimes we had Christmas, if Daddy was around. But our presents weren’t wrapped and they didn’t come from any store.”

“Where’d they come from, then?”

“Other people’s houses.” I bring my foot back beneath the covers. “Why are you asking me all this?” I ask, and at the same moment he says, “You really gave a hand job to a grown man when you were only fourteen?”

We look at each other.

“Never mind,” West sighs. “Don’t answer that.”

WEST DRIVES AN ORANGE PICKUP TRUCK WITH BLUE doors that probably came off another truck. When we get out and shut the doors, something metal falls off somewhere. Some men would stand around until nightfall searching for the thing, slamming stuff and getting you to “look here” and “hold that” until you have grease all over you, your picnic’s ruined and he finally says to just goddamn forget it. But West just circles the truck a few times, pokes his head underneath and shrugs it off.

He follows me through the trees to a wide band of sand where the sun is actually shining for once and, as soon as he glimpses water, strips down and starts running. I sit on a rock and watch his bare ass vanish into the lake. He surfaces with a howl, flicks his hair back and comes shivering back out with one hand over his crotch, shaking icy water on me as he plunks down on the sand.

“Cold enough to freeze the balls off a pool table, but beats swimming in the river with the townies,” he says. “How come you know this spot and I don’t?”

“Ma and Daddy used to take us here in summertime. They’d get frisky right in front of us. We’d cook beer-can chicken over a bonfire and Daddy would throw us in the lake over our heads and make us swim back to shore. One time, my little brother Jackie had a leech stuck to him and wouldn’t let anyone pull it off. We chased him up and down the sand until Daddy yelled, ‘Look at the fucking mermaid!,’ ripped the leech off Jackie’s leg and took it over to the fire on a stick. We all cheered while it fried.”

“Sounds like good family fun.”

“Everyone was less of an asshole here. Even Daddy. At home, his moods could change on a dime. If he came through the door, one of us would put this plastic shark toy on top of the mailbox so the rest of us would know to stay gone. He used to sit us down and make us tell him all the bad things we did while he was away. If we said we hadn’t done anything, he hit twice as hard. One time, we saw a cop car coming and ran up to the house, but instead of warning Daddy, we told him Poppy fell down the cellar so he’d go check it out and have no escape when the cops busted in. Things were always better when he was gone. But we paid for that stunt when he got out. He whipped Poppy and me with her skipping rope, tied Bird and Jackie up in a blanket and dropped them out the second-floor window.”

West takes my hand in his and squeezes it. I sit there with my hand trapped under his until I can’t take it anymore. I slide it out and pretend to slap a mosquito on my neck.

“Come on.” I jump to my feet.

We splash around knee-deep until the sun starts to sink and paint the lake in all my favourite colours. Our eyes follow all the gold threads sewing up the clouds and it’s only when West says, “I think I’ll drive home like this,” that I remember he’s still buck-naked.

He takes the long way back, past hidden driveways and an abandoned church with a tree growing out of its roof. A hitchhiker appears out of nowhere and West slows to pull over.

“You’re not wearing any clothes,” I remind him.

“Shit!” He accelerates, sticks his head out the window and hollers, “Sorry, buddy!”

BACK IN THE FIRST GRADE, WE PLAYED A GAME CALLED musical chairs. It was stressful as hell. I was convinced if I was the one left without a seat at the end of the song, it’d mark me an outsider for life. My heart would pound out of my chest, and when the music stopped I’d lunge for those orange plastic seats like a mountain lion on bennies. There wasn’t even a prize except to sit there looking smug, but I’ve got to hand it to those teachers: it was good practice for getting your hands on what’s up for grabs.

I wake up after West’s gone to work and it takes me a while to realize the thumping noise I’m hearing is the wind beating itself against the back wall. Through the window, I spy a huge pair of panties float past and get twisted up in a hedge. I sit up for a better look and see all kinds of clothes drifting into West’s yard. There are blouses and skirts in near flight like flat, deranged birds.

I run out in just an old T-shirt of West’s to chase after them, and when my arms are nearly full, I run back inside and drop my little pile on the floor. I try on a few things, but nothing fits right, so I find some rusty kitchen scissors and a sewing kit in a drawer and spend hours cutting and ironing and sewing. By the time West comes home, we’ve got a new set of yellow curtains and an apron.

“What’s this?” he asks.

I put the apron on to show it off.

“Where’d you get all the fabric?”

“It blew into the yard. The wind must have stripped somebody’s clothesline.”

“Tabby!” He glances down at the leftover sleeves and zippers on the table and bites his thumb. “You can’t go around swiping things from the neighbours. What do you suppose some woman’s going to think when she walks by and sees her favourite dress hanging in my window?”

“Don’t the curtains look nice?”

“Yes, they’re real nice,” he says, softening. “That ain’t the point.” He throws his coat over the chair. “Sit down. I got something to tell you.” He plunks himself across from me then leaps back up and starts unloading beers into the fridge.

“You’re making me nervous,” I say.

“I got a lead on your sister. She’s turning tricks in Jubilant. It might not be true, but that’s what people are saying.”

I went to Jubilant once. My mother had a friend named Bev who got married and moved there with her husband, and we drove four hours to go visit her. She had one of those macramé owls hanging on the wall and used a scallop shell as an ashtray for her roaches. The way she pronounced her husband Daryl’s name drove me nuts. “No, honey, that’s Deerull’s chair.” Nobody was allowed to sit in Deerull’s velour chair, even though he was out in the middle of the Bay of Fundy on a lobster boat. She even vacuumed where I sat and made sure all the grooves went in the same direction. Her little house was right on the shore where it smelled like sulphur. We spent the night and I kept sneaking out of my sleeping bag to look out the window. I saw mermaids in the shadows pulling themselves up the sand by their forearms and woke Ma to tell her. She told me I was dreaming, but I was certain that in the morning we’d see their silvery paths and find them all lying bloated and sick on the concrete basement floor.

I imagine Poppy lying under some fat, hairy trucker as I watch West admire the new curtains out of the corner of his eye.

“West, you’re a good person.”

“Why can’t I get a roast, then?”

“I needed an apron first. You can’t cook a roast without an apron.”

“You’re running out of excuses.”

“You’ll get your roast.”

ON SUNDAY, I GET UP BEFORE DAWN AND PACK US A lunch of bologna sandwiches and apples then climb back into bed. West had a bad night at the tavern. A couple of guys got into a fight over a woman and he had to break it up. He came home late in a rotten mood all covered in blood.

“It’s this town,” I say. “I’ve been wanting to stab someone since I got off the bus.” I roll over. “So, was she gorgeous?”

“Oh, Christ. She had an ass down to her ankles and a big old camel toe in front.”

“Sounds like you had a good look.”

“You can see her in all her glory with your own eyes if you ever come down to visit.”

“Yeah, right. And have to listen to what everybody has to say?” I lift his hand to inspect the bandages. “You want to help me find my sister or what?”

“Not really.”

“How about I go on my own?”

“In my truck?”

“What—you scared I’ll take off with it?”

“Something like that.”

“You think I want your piece-of-shit Frankentruck? I used to drive a Mustang, asshole.” I find my panties in the sheets, shove them into my purse and pull on my jeans, yanking the fly up so it makes a good loud ziiiiip. West walks out of the room and I figure that’s it, but then he comes back in and tosses the keys on the nightstand.

“Fine.”

“Forget it. I don’t want it.”

“Take the damn truck before I change my mind.” I move to grab the keys and he adds, “Just leave something behind so I know you’re coming back.”

I dump out my purse on the bed and rummage through the pile. I find the little red plastic envelope and gingerly remove my autographed Randy “Macho Man” Savage card.

“Sentimental value,” I say, handing it over.

“Jesus Christ,” West says. “That’s not going to cut it.”

“Why not?”

He turns it over a few times. “This means that much to you?”

“Did you know that Macho Man’s real name is Randy Mario Poffo?”

“No.”

“Do you know who Leaping Lanny Poffo is?”

“Ain’t he the WWF wrestler who used to write poems on Frisbees and chuck them out to the crowd?”

“Did you know that the Poffo brothers got their start right here in Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling?”

West massages his eyebrows. “No.”

“Before WWF, they fought each other in an International Title Match in Truro, and guess who got to see it? It was the only time my family ever left Solace River. I was only six years old, but I still remember every move. You know what a moonsault is?”

“No.”

I stand up on the bed. “Want me to show you?”