I don’t recognize the grocery store right away. The photo is black and white, the parking lot is edged with flowers, and the painted wooden sign says Gwen’s General Store. Not Smith’s. Two people stand in front of the store, a tall man with a bushy beard, and a boy a little younger than me with thick glasses and shaggy hair. My dad. Uli is beaming and has his arm around Dad’s shoulders. Dad looks uncomfortable, like he feels the way I do about photo ops.
Uli Becher’s popular local store provided Thanksgiving dinner for 180 people at the St. John’s soup kitchen this past weekend, the caption says.
I frown. Uli’s store?
It was late. Dad had already gone to bed, but I’d known I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d looked through the photo albums. So I’d brought William’s cardboard box into my bedroom and closed the door. Most of the albums were labeled by year (Our Family 1977–1983) but some had specific titles. I turned the pages and saw Dad as a chubby baby, a serious toddler and a smiling boy. His mom was almost always with him. I guess Uli was behind the camera. Below each photo was a small white tag with the date and usually the place, written in a graceful handwriting. The last date was in 1988, the year before my grandmother died.
Garden began the year after she died and had fewer photos—one of Uli’s yard, all lawn like at Victor’s place; my father at about twelve, crouched down among seedlings; both him and Uli with an enormous pumpkin. It must be the one that Dad talked about at the memorial. I set the photo aside to show to him later. After that the photos were more random. None of them were labeled with dates.
I hadn’t known what to expect from Sailing. The first pictures were close-ups of docked boats and dotted horizons, all labeled with dates in the early 1970s. A few pages later, the photos were from the mid-eighties. Every one was of my grandmother, steering, raising masts or relaxing on the deck in the sunshine. Most were badly composed and out of focus, but near the end of the book, they got better. She was paler and thinner though.
At the bottom of the box was a stack of photos and newspaper clippings held together with an elastic band. I flipped through. Vegetable pictures, an apartment building I didn’t recognize and the clipping about the grocery store.
“Dad?” I’m out in the hallway and knocking on his door. I don’t care that it’s late and I should be asleep and that he probably already is. A few hours ago I was fine waiting until Dad was ready to tell this story, but now I have too many questions. I’ll never fall asleep with all of them flying around in my head. “Dad, wake up.”
I hear a loud snort from behind his door. “Huh? What? Chloë?” He opens the door, blinking in the hallway’s brightness.
I hold up the newspaper article. “Uli owned the store?”
He passes a hand over his face. “Chloë. It’s the middle of the night.”
“But I don’t understand. How did Uli go from owning the store to not setting foot anywhere near it?”
He squints at me for a few more seconds. “Okay, I need a coffee. Let me at least get a coffee first.”
I sit in the living room and wait. When he sits down with his steaming mug, he takes a deep breath. “You know part of the story already. Your grandfather grew up very poor. He came to Canada an orphan, his uncle was an alcoholic, and his aunt was crazy, so after a few years, he took off and hitchhiked west.”
I tuck my knees under my chin. “Yup, Uli told me that part.”
“By then, he spoke English well, but he didn’t have any skills that could earn him money—nothing except what he’d learned on the farm with his uncle. He got a job with a landscaping company and started gardening. He also started gambling. And he was lucky at first. By the time he was twenty-one, he had saved enough to buy a house. He learned about investing. He knew how to stretch a dollar.”
He always drank tea from old, chipped mugs as if he couldn’t spare a dime, even when he had pots of money, William had said. I guess when you grow up with nothing, saving every penny becomes a habit. But then why gamble? It doesn’t make sense. “At some point he bought the grocery store too?”
Dad nods. “Eventually he owned a lot of things—that store and all three houses across the street.”
“The entire block?” Just like Victor.
Another nod. He knocks back the rest of his coffee. “He got the first house and the grocery store before he married Mom. Then he stopped gambling. He didn’t start again until she got sick.”
“What?” I ask. “She was dying of cancer, and he went out gambling?”
He lets out a long, slow breath. “It’s an addiction, Chloë. Addictions are hardest to resist when we’re scared and trying to cope. When Mom got sick, he was terrified, and he did what he’d always done when he was scared. He played poker. She died, and then he gambled even more.”
“Until he lost it all.” It’s weird to know the beginning and the end of the story before hearing the middle.
“First he lost the grocery store. He wagered it. In a poker game.”
No way.
“He was drunk that night, and he wanted to win an apartment building. For me.”
This is making less sense all the time.
“He knew I wanted to sail around the world, and he figured that if I owned an apartment building and everyone in it was paying me rent, then I wouldn’t ever have to worry about money again. He was trying to help me live my dream. I see that now, but I didn’t see it then because that poker game is when he lost the store. Without that income, he had to start selling off other stuff. Like my sailboat.”
What? “You had your own sailboat? How old were you?” I can’t believe I never knew these things about him.
“It was my mother’s first, but Dad hated being out on the water. So after she died, he gave it to me. Mom had been taking me out sailing since I was a few months old. We were going to sail down to Mexico someday, but then she got sick.” He looks down at his hands.
I feel like everything I thought I knew about my grandfather—and my father too—is shifting. Like the kaleidoscope I had when I was three. I used to love looking inside, twisting the end and watching the bright little pieces shift to form new shapes. But I hate this changing image of Uli. How do I match my gentle gardener grandfather with this drunken gambler who risked everything? I guess that’s why Dad never wanted to tell me this story. Would I have wanted to spend time with Uli if I’d known what he was like before?
“Dad hired someone to look after the boat. He paid for sailing lessons too, and it wasn’t the same as being out on the water with Mom, but I still felt close to her out there. Everything—her death, Dad’s gambling—was easier to handle when I was sailing. I told Dad I was going to Mexico someday, just like Mom and I had planned to, and I started saving every cent. I even started racing. There was serious money in that.”
“But then he sold the boat.”
“Exactly.” Dad pushes up from the sofa and takes his mug back to the kitchen.
“Wait,” I say. “How did Victor wind up with everything?”
“He won the store. Then Uli lost a few bets with other people. Victor offered to buy one of his houses. After that, each time Dad had cash-flow problems, he went to Victor. One day, when he had to sell his own house to make ends meet, Victor bought it but agreed to let Dad stay there as a tenant until he died.”
I know how this works, Victor had said. Your grandfather kept a toehold by living there. Now that he’s gone, you want to keep a toehold by gardening there. But the law is on my side. I bought the land fair and square. It makes sense now. “But at some point he stopped gambling, right? I mean—”
“Yes,” Dad says. “He went to some program or something. It worked, but by then he had lost everything. He never had much money again after that.”
“Did you ever talk about it with him?” I can guess the answer, but I still want to hear what he says.
“I think he wanted to,” Dad says. “He sent me a pamphlet about the addiction program he went through. It said that part of the healing process was to talk with family about the problems that the addiction had caused in everyone’s life. I think that’s why he came to see us in Montreal. He probably saved for ages to afford that trip. But I didn’t want to talk. It felt like too little, too late. I still remember the look on his face when we said goodbye at the airport that time. Like he was a little boy trying not to cry.”
And now Dad’s crying. He sits down on the sofa with his head in his hands. I put an arm around him. “He knew you loved him,” I say. “You came here when he needed you, didn’t you?”
“I hope he knew,” Dad whispers. “I really hope so.”
“I’m sure of it.”
“I’m sorry, Chloë,” he says. “I wish things had been different.”
Back in my bedroom, I pin the newspaper clipping to my wall. It’s a picture of a man who would eventually sell his son’s sailboat, but it’s also a picture of a man and a boy who planted a garden—a garden that I’m going to save.