How did he end up here? How did he become that old man eating alone in a restaurant, staring, half focused, at the guttering candle on his table while he forks soggy lasagne into his mouth? That was one of Leigh’s worst things, seeing old men dining alone in restaurants. Or in the grocery store, alone, befuddled by the shelves of pickled onions and beets. She hated the sight of that. She once came home from the store and told Yannick about this old boy who had half a loaf of white bread, one tomato and a can of pineapple slices rolling around in a shopping cart. ‘You can’t even make a meal out of that,’ she said, her eyes shining. Yannick wonders if maybe she knew she was going to leave him long before she actually did it.
And here he is now, picking at his food, and maybe he looks familiar to people in this small town or maybe he doesn’t. Who can be sure after so many years?
He will stay for Una’s party tomorrow but after that he is gone.
The restaurant, the kind of restaurant that heats single portions of lasagne in boat-shaped dishes, is mostly empty tonight. There’s this young guy, though, looks somewhere in the region of forty, who keeps glancing at Yannick. He’s sitting at a table with a bunch of other guys. They’ve finished eating and are now sharing pitchers of beer. Guy has the soft, rounded shoulders of one who played hockey or football in high school. His hair and his eyebrows are dark and thick, and from underneath those impressive brows his curious eyes meet Yannick’s more than once. When Una first went missing, Yannick was very well known in this town. He’s accustomed to strangers knowing who he is, deciding whether or not they should approach and speak.
Yannick turns his attention to the dusty lamps on the walls, meant to look old-fashioned but, really, they just look old. He and Kathleen used to bring Una here when she was little because she liked the Shirley Temples they made. She liked chasing the maraschino cherry around the bottom of the glass with the long spoon that came with the drink.
Yannick pushes the tines of his fork into his food, which is rapidly congealing, and wonders again how in the hell he ended up back here.
Just like everyone else, he’s got himself one of those phones they call smart. Ask him, though, if he can get a hold of any of his kids—he cannot. He would very much like to hear the voice of at least one of them. Just one would do.
The guy with the eyebrows comes over.
‘Are you Mr Lemay?’ he asks.
‘I am,’ Yannick says, and asks this man to call him by his first name.
The guy smiles and his demeanour changes from brutish to boyish. ‘I thought so,’ he says. He offers his big hand and Yannick shakes it. ‘I’m Dave,’ he says. ‘My wife is Heather?’
He says his wife’s name in a way that suggests Yannick ought to know who this Heather is, which he does not.
‘She works for Kathleen,’ he continues, ‘on the flower farm. She helps with the party, stuff like that.’ Dave looks off to the side and rubs the stubble on his chin in a way that leads Yannick to believe that, perhaps, he does not like his wife spending so much time with Kathleen. ‘You here for the party?’ he asks.
The truth is, until Yannick saw the poster in the coffee shop yesterday, he didn’t know that Una’s party was happening this weekend. ‘Yep,’ he says. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘We go every year,’ Dave says.
There’s a wooden bowl on the table filled with thin slices of crusty white bread. ‘You want to sit down?’ Yannick asks. He gestures to the wooden bowl. ‘You want some of this bread?’
Dave smiles politely and declines. ‘Heather organizes a lot for the party,’ he says, ‘with the posters and all that. They’re making decorations tonight back at our place.’
Yannick nods.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ Dave says. He rests his hands on the back of the empty chair across from Yannick. ‘Last few years, the party has been…’ He stops speaking and shrugs.
‘I’m glad to be here,’ Yannick says. He pushes his plate away and tries to get the attention of the waiter.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then?’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Dave shakes Yannick’s hand and makes his way back to his friends. Halfway there he stops and turns, smiling. ‘I remember your motorcycle,’ he says.
‘You do, eh?’
‘You still ride?’
No, he does not still ride. He hasn’t ridden for some years. He tells Dave he sold that motorcycle and prefers his truck, and Dave turns back to his own table.
This is what happened with the motorcycling.
Devon, being the most like Yannick of his five children, was born to love motorcycles. Dev graduated high school a year later than he should have, having failed most of his classes in grade twelve. He went straight up to the logging camps, just like his grandfather, Yannick’s father. At nineteen, same age Yannick was when he himself saved enough to bring home his first Triumph, Devon bought what would be his first and last motorcycle, a Yamaha YBR. Midnight blue. A bit of an aggressive choice and not what Yannick would have gone for but, still, he was proud of his son.
One Sunday night, less than six months after Devon bought his bike, Yannick was reading the paper at his dining-room table when the phone rang. It was March, it was raining heavily, and on the phone Devon’s mother was calling from the foyer of St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Devon had been helicoptered there from where they’d scraped him off the 427 highway south of Barrie. Both legs broken in five places between them. Ribs fractured and subsequent pulmonary contusion. Lacerations to the liver. Broken hip, broken collarbone. Broken wrist on the left side. Yannick cannot remember his drive into the city, but he does remember being told that his boy Devon had been induced to a comatose state and was about to go into surgery to release the fluid that was building on his brain. Yannick remembers being told that Devon could die before the sun came up or he could live. And he remembers being told that if Devon did survive the night and the following days, the extent of the damage to his brain wouldn’t be known for weeks. He was told to have a word in his son’s ear before they rolled him away for surgery.
There are only two things worth saying into your son’s bloodied ear at a time like this: I am here, son, and, I love you.
Other than that, there is nothing.
Organ donor on wheels. That was what Yannick’s tante, his father’s sister, who was a nurse back in Québec where his father was born, that was what she said to Yannick when he started riding motorcycles. ‘That’s what we call you, totons, you idiots, in the emergency room,’ she said to him. ‘Young and healthy. Strong and stupid. Best pickings for the harvest.’
Yannick waited all that first night with Devon’s mother in a small room without windows. He bought her sesame snaps from the vending machine and she reciprocated with pretzels. They barely spoke but they were kind, and had not been kind to each other in a very long time. Sharing coffee-flavoured water in styrofoam cups and waiting to find out if the son they shared was going to live or die.
Devon did make it through the night, though, and in the morning, when the surgeon determined he was stable, Yannick did something he still doesn’t understand: he left the hospital. Stayed away for days. He didn’t go home to Leigh and Robin, Robin being about five years old at the time. Instead he slept on a buddy’s couch, like a mouse crouched in a hole. After a few days, Sunny, who now had a brand new baby of his own to look after, knocked on the door and convinced Yannick to come back to the hospital, because Devon was fine, because Yannick was not going to lose another kid.
There followed years of surgery and physiotherapy. Devon lost the hearing in one ear, and his short-term memory has never been the same. He is scarred and volatile and clinking with metal, and one of his knees doesn’t bend all the way. But he is here.
Both he and Yannick quit the motorcycling for good.