On the first day of vacation, I woke up to the sound of my mom and sister moving around downstairs in the kitchen. I could smell bacon—a big deal in our house, where an exciting breakfast usually meant a choice between Cheerios and Rice Krispies.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Mom said as I walked into the kitchen. She smiled at me from across the kitchen island, where she seemed to be trying to cook something.
My sister, Alma, looked up briefly from her seat on the other side of the island, where she was flipping through Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide: 1992 Edition. She dragged that book with her everywhere.
“All the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, and he walks into mine,” she said.
Alma was thirteen and obsessed with classic films. She was always quoting stuff from movies nobody else had ever seen. Her room was plastered with pictures of old movie stars like Katharine Hepburn and Clark Gable. Even Orson Welles, chewing on a stogie, glowered down from over her bed.
“What’s with the fancy breakfast?” I asked Mom. “Is something up?”
She smiled. “I was just thinking that since it’s the first day of summer and all, I’d try to make a real breakfast for a change. Can’t a mother do something nice for her kids?”
I sniffed the air. “Did you burn the bacon?”
Alma looked up from her book and rolled her eyes at me. “What do you think?”
My mom had lots of great qualities, but her cooking wasn’t one of them.
“Bacon shmacon,” Mom said, as she pulled the offending pan off the stove and covered it with a plate. “We’ve still got lots of eggs. How do you want them?” She stared down at a carton of eggs as if it had just dropped out of a UFO.
“This is great, Mom,” I said, “but why don’t you let me take care of it?”
“‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,’” said Alma.
Mom happily dropped onto a stool on the other side of the counter as I turned to rummage in the fridge. I managed to find a wrinkly green pepper, half an onion in a ziplock bag, and a rubbery chunk of bright orange cheddar cheese. I passed Alma the cheese and a grater, and started chopping up the veggies, stopping for a moment to heat up some butter in a banged-up old frying pan.
“Your dad called while you were out last night,” Mom said.
“Oh, so that explains the good mood,” I said, tossing the veggies into the pan and turning up the heat a little bit. “Were you guys using baby talk again?”
“It was gross,” said Alma.
“Give me a break, you two,” said Mom, barely able to keep the goofy grin off her face.
Four years earlier, the bottling plant in town had closed, putting my dad—and half of Deep Cove—out of work. A lot of families had left town after that, but my parents had chosen to stay in Cape Breton. Now, to make ends meet, my dad worked out west in the Alberta oil fields. Usually he was away for months at a time.
“He was sorry he missed you last night,” she went on. “Next time he’ll try to call when we’re all here.”
“Oh yeah, for sure. That’ll be great.” I quickly whisked up some eggs and added them to the pan, giving them a good shake and then adding the cheese Alma had grated. I turned the heat to low, covered the pan and, while I was waiting for it to cook, put some bread into the toaster.
I felt guilty about it, but I didn’t really mind missing my dad’s call. He and I were about as different as two people could be. He loved sports of all kinds, especially hockey, and I didn’t have an athletic bone in my body. He loved hunting. I was afraid of guns. A tattered poster of Farrah Fawcett was pinned up over the tool bench in his garage. I kept Marky Mark’s Calvin Klein ads hidden in the back of my Royal Houses of Europe encyclopedia. When you got down to it, there wasn’t a hell of a lot for us to talk about.
Nothing, that is, except my future.
Dad may have given up on pushing me toward hunting and sports, but it had always been clear that he wasn’t going to go as easy on me when it came to my plans for life after high school. Whenever I did end up on the phone with him, he’d start giving me suggestions about university programs or jobs he wanted me to consider. So far, I knew he’d be happy if I became a doctor, lawyer, engineer, investment banker or rocket scientist. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t interested in any of those careers. Besides, as he never failed to point out, it wasn’t like I had any plans of my own.
I wished I did know what I wanted to do with my life—then I would have at least had something to talk to him about—but no such luck. It was easy to imagine living the high life in a big city like New York or London. It was a lot harder to figure out how I’d pay for any of it. I just couldn’t get excited about anything, which frustrated the hell out of my dad. Missing his call meant one less opportunity to disappoint him.
I pulled the cover off the pan and cut the eggs into three pieces.
“Voilà,” I said, throwing some toast on their plates and handing them across the counter.
“What is it?” asked Mom.
“It’s a frittata,” I said. “It’s kind of like an omelet.”
“‘As god is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again,’” said Alma, poking her fork dramatically into the air.
“I don’t know where you learned to cook, Danny,” my mom said, for probably the millionth time. “It sure wasn’t from me.”
It wasn’t like it was some big secret or anything. With my dad away, and my mom working crazy hours, I’d often ended up in charge of supper. You can only eat so many grilled cheese sandwiches, so I’d taught myself how to cook. I’d learned some things by reading my mom’s rarely used copy of The Joy of Cooking, but most of it I’d picked up from watching cooking shows on tv when no one else was around.
After breakfast, Kierce and Jay came to pick me up in Kierce’s mom’s van. My family lived in the sticks, outside of Deep Cove, and since I didn’t have my license, I had to rely on Kierce, my parents or my bike for transportation. It was a pain in the ass, and Kierce never let me hear the end of it, but I couldn’t build up the nerve to take the driver’s test.
We cruised into town and drove the strip for a while, wasting gas. If you believed my dad, Deep Cove had once been a boomtown, with a busy main drag full of shops and restaurants. Now it seemed like half of the businesses on Main Street were boarded up, and sometimes you had to wonder why there was a town here at all. In the summer we had the beach, but for the rest of the year, there wasn’t much to do other than drive back and forth across town.
Kierce grabbed a tape from the glove box and shoved it into the stereo. He jacked it up and started rhyming along.
This is for the G’z, and this is for the hustlaz.
This is for the hustlaz, now back to the G’z.
Jay and I groaned. “Can’t you give the rap shit a rest for five minutes?” asked Jay.
“You just don’t appreciate the sounds of the street,” said Kierce. “Probably because you guys have never lived in a city before.” Kierce’s dad was an RCMP officer, so his family had moved around a lot, which he claimed made him more worldly than us.
“Oh, right,” said Jay, “the urban jungle of Saskatoon, where you picked up your inna-city flava.”
“Rule Ninety-nine,” said Kierce. “Don’t hate the playa, hate the game. Hey, what say we go grab some BS?”
“Now you’re talking!” said Jay.
I shrugged. “Whatever, there’s nothing else going on.”
BS was the Burger Shack, a greasy spoon that the guys both loved. Personally, I thought the place was kind of gross. The decor hadn’t changed since the seventies: the bright-orange walls were stained with decades worth of grease, and uncomfortable red metal chairs sat under rickety tables with chipped yellow laminate tops.
Worst of all was the food. Thin gray hamburger patties with rubbery fake cheese melted onto them, soggy fries, deep-fried zucchini sticks served with little packets of ranch dressing. Kierce and Jay couldn’t get enough of the stuff, but every time we ate there, it made me want to try things I’d only read about or seen on tv: souvlaki with feta cheese and fresh tomatoes rolled up in pita bread, or hot crusty baguettes with Brie and thick slices of Italian ham. In Deep Cove, if you wanted to go out for dinner, the only choice was between the Burger Shack and a pizza place, which wasn’t much better. At least the pizza place used real cheese.
The one good thing about the Burger Shack was its location, on the side of a hill between town and the beach. Whenever I looked out of its big grimy windows at the gently curving stretch of coastline, the tree-covered mountains that flanked it, and the moody sky moving endlessly over the sea, I could almost understand why my parents had chosen to stay in Deep Cove.
As Kierce pulled into the Burger Shack parking lot, we were surprised to find that it was empty. The blinds were drawn, and the place looked deserted. Jay pointed to a piece of loose-leaf stapled to the front door, and Kierce drove up close so we could read it. BURGER SHACK IS CLOSED FOR BUSINESS. In smaller letters underneath it read, Re-opening soon under new management.
“What the hell?” asked Jay.
“This totally sucks,” said Kierce.
I didn’t say anything. I’d get by just fine without greasy Burger Shack onion rings.