nap, nappy, pun, puny, up, ha, pan, pay, hay
I HAD TO practically run to keep up with my mother as we headed back to our place, which wasn’t easy because my leg was still numb. Fortunately, we lived only three blocks from the school, so it didn’t take long to get to our house.
Well, our basement. We rent the basement suite in a house in Kitsilano, a neighborhood on the west side of Vancouver, right on the bus route to Mom’s work.
We moved here for my mom’s new job. She’s what’s called a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia. It means she teaches a bunch of courses on contract, but she’s not really an employee. It’s the same job she’s had in all the other places we’ve lived. Every time she hopes she’ll be hired full-time, and every time it doesn’t happen.
I like our new neighborhood. We’re on West 7th Ave., a two-minute walk to all the shops on Broadway and a twenty-minute walk to Jericho Beach, one of the most beautiful parks I’ve ever seen. We walked down there the day after we moved here, and it was the first time I’d ever set eyes on the Pacific Ocean, or any ocean, come to think of it.
The house we live in is owned by Mr and Mrs Economopoulos, a friendly Greek couple who live upstairs. They didn’t call our place a basement in the ad; they called it a ‘garden suite’. Mom kind of took them to task for that when we looked at the place, but they still rented it to us. Actually (and without meaning to brag), I think they rented it to us because of me. Mrs Economopoulos, who is plump and smells like fresh-baked bread and wears shapeless dresses with flesh-colored nylons that stop at the knee, pinched my cheeks a lot that day and kept saying I reminded her of her youngest son, Cosmo, when he was my age.
‘He was beautiful boy,’ she said. Then her eyes filled with tears and she pinched my cheeks again and she told my mom she could have the place if she wanted it and she would even knock fifty bucks off the rent.
I like their house. It’s white stucco and surrounded by a low, wrought-iron fence. The front yard has a bird-bath in the middle of a big flower garden, which Mrs E says will be full of roses in the spring. The backyard is even bigger, and a third of it is full of Mr E’s tomato plants, protected by a huge plastic tarp. They also have a big deck off the kitchen, where Mr E barbecues in all kinds of weather.
The door to our place is at the side of the house, and we have our own sidewalk to lead us there.
Our basement suite isn’t as big as our place was in Kelowna, or as sunny as our place in Regina, but, as Mom points out, rents were cheaper there so we could get more for our money. It’s got two bedrooms, a combination living-room/kitchen, and a big bathroom. Mom has covered the living room walls with her photographs. She used to be quite into photography when Dad was alive, and her pictures, mostly of trees and flowers and beaches, have made all of our apartments feel more like home.
All in all, it’s a fine place, and so far it’s only flooded once. When that happened, the Economopouloses were really nice about getting it cleaned up for us, and we even spent a couple of nights in their spare bedroom. This was fun because, on the first night, Mrs Economopoulos made us an enormous Greek dinner, with souvlaki and moussaka and even that cheese that you light on fire. And once Mom had made her swear on her statuette of the Virgin Mary that there were no peanuts in anything, I was allowed to stuff my face. Man, was it delicious, and no offense to my mother, but Mrs E is a way better cook. Mr and Mrs E told us a lot of stories about growing up in Greece and about the bakery they used to run, until they both retired last year. Mrs E translated for Mr E, who still doesn’t speak much English even though he’s lived here for over thirty years. It was really fun. As weird as it sounds, it almost felt more like home than home.
The only not-so-nice part in the evening was when the grown-ups were drinking coffee in the living room after supper. Mr E sat in his favorite chair, a big leather La-Z-Boy. Mrs E and I sat on the couch, which had a clear plastic cover on it and made fart sounds every time anyone moved. Mom was standing up and studying a wall full of framed photos of their kids. ‘You have three children?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Vivian, she’s the eldest, she’s twenty-eight, married to a doctor,’ Mrs E said, beaming with pride, then pointed at her feet. ‘Podiatrist. He makes a lot of money doing the feet. Nick, he’s the middle child, he’s twenty-six and working very hard selling cars. He’s a very good boy.’
‘BMW and Lexus,’ Mr E added.
There was silence for a moment, then Mom asked, ‘And your youngest?’
‘Cosmo,’ said Mrs E, and suddenly her eyes were filled with tears like they were on the day she pinched my cheeks, and Mr E started talking loudly in Greek.
‘I’m sorry,’ my mom said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘Is he dead?’ I asked, and Mom gave me the stink-eye, which didn’t seem fair because I knew that the question had been on the tip of her tongue.
‘No,’ said Mrs E. ‘He’s in prison.’
Then Mr E shouted at Mrs E in Greek and he stormed out of the room.
‘My husband, he’s mad, I tell you. He thinks you’ll think we’re bad people because of Cosmo.’
‘Goodness, of course not,’ my mom said, but in a phony kind of way.
‘Why’s he in jail?’ I asked.
From the look on my mom’s face, you’d think I’d just asked what color underwear Mrs E was wearing. Mrs E started to cry, and Mom gave me the stink-eye again and said, ‘Ambrose, that’s none of our business.’ But give me a break. I knew she was dying to know, too.
Anyway, everyone calmed down after a while and we all had seconds of dessert. Then we watched The Amazing Race, one of Mr E’s favorite shows. Mom had tried to get us to go to our room before it came on, but I just ate my dessert really, really slowly because I’d heard kids talk about this show but had never seen it (despite the fact that it had been on for years). It was great – I was on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. Even my mom, who won’t let us get cable because she says TV is a mindless waste of time, got sucked into the drama of it all. Mr E spent the whole time shouting at the contestants in Greek.
Afterward, we went to bed. They gave us Vivian’s old room, which had twin beds. A huge collection of Barbie dolls lined the shelves.
I asked my mom again, ‘Why do you think their son’s in jail?’
‘I have no idea.’
We lay in the dark for a few minutes, then I asked, ‘What if he’s a murderer and he escapes and comes home for some of his mom’s cooking? Which was amazing, by the way.’ I burped and got a taste of moussaka in my mouth, mingled with toothpaste, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds.
All I got in response was a gentle snore.
When we arrived home from the meeting at school, the Economopouloses were out on their porch.
‘Hi, Irene; hi, Ambrose.’
‘Hi, Mr and Mrs E,’ I said.
Mom just waved and kept walking to our door. Over the years I’d noticed that she didn’t get too friendly with our landlords. When we entered, she still didn’t say anything. She just opened a bottle of wine and started getting dinner ready, so I went to my room.
My room faces the garden, so through my high-up window I can see the grass, and if I stand on my bed, I can see Mr E’s tomato plants. I have glow-in-the-dark stars all over my ceiling, which I’m now starting to think might be kind of babyish, but I still like gazing up at them after I’ve turned off my light. Definitely babyish is my bedspread, which is covered in Buzz Lightyear images from Toy Story, but Mom says we can’t afford another one for a while. There’s a small white-painted desk in the corner, loaned to us by the Economopouloses. Two big mason jars sit on the desk. One is filled with bottle caps, which I collect. I’ve managed to find some really unique ones, maybe because I’m always looking at the ground when I walk. The other jar is filled over halfway with quarters. I’ve been saving quarters since I was little, and whenever the jar fills up, my mom and I put the money into a special bank account for my university education.
I don’t have a door, but Mom and I bought these cool multicolored plastic beads that hang from the frame and make a clickity sound every time I walk in or out.
I have a big poster of the moon above my bed and one of the human body on the opposite wall. My only other picture sits beside my bed in a frame. It’s one of my dad, taken by my mom only a few months before he died. He’s looking right at me, and his eyes are all crinkled and he has this huge grin on his face. Mom said she’d just told him a joke, but whenever I ask what the joke was, she says she can’t remember.
He was really handsome, my dad. He had thick brown hair and tanned skin and muscles, and he was so tall – six feet, three inches – a full foot taller than my mom. She told me once that he used to call her Squirt, but when I tried calling her that, she asked me not to.
Sometimes I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, trying to see if any part of me looks like him. But I just can’t imagine that my dad was ever short or scrawny or bowlegged, or that his hair had a cowlick at the front, or that his nose was too big for his face. Lookswise, I must have got some sort of recessive gene.
Anyway, I gave the picture of my dad a quick wave, which I always do when I enter my room. It may sound dorky, but I know deep down in my gut that he sees me waving and that he wishes he could be here to watch me grow up, play ball with me, and talk to me about girls and puberty and embarrassing erections (entices, esoteric, notices, cistern, corniest), of which I have now had at least a dozen. Thank God for textbooks that a guy can put in front of his pants if he needs to walk across a room. And I’m not even going to start about wet dreams.
But even if Dad can’t be here physically, I think he’s watching over us.
And I know he loves Mom. And I know he loves me.
After supper, I washed the dishes while Mom drank her third glass of wine and paid some bills. I could hear her talking to herself and swearing a little. Bills always make her do that.
She still hadn’t said anything about the meeting at school. When we were both done, she pulled out the Scrabble board, which was a good sign because she was sticking to our routine.
There’s not a lot I’m good at. I’m good at school, but not exceptional. I’m lousy at sports. My mom once scrimped and saved so I could take trombone lessons. I was so hopeless, we gave it up after three months.
But I’m good at Scrabble. In fact, my mom calls me a Scrabble genius because I beat her all the time. She finds this mostly amusing, but also a little irritating. ‘And to think I’m the one with the Ph.D. in English lit,’ she’ll say.
Tonight was no exception. I laid down the words ‘LEGUME’, ‘ZIP’ (on a triple word score), and ‘MEMENTO’, in front of an ‘S,’ which got me a bonus of fifty points for using all my letters. But my favorite part in the game was at the very beginning. I had to go first, and I had a terrible rack of letters: ‘HPYKIOT’. I stared at them for a long time, moving the tiles around, and just as my mom was starting to get restless and drum her fingertips on the table (which was really annoying and actually against our family rules), suddenly I saw it: ‘PITHY’. I laid it down on the double word star in the middle for twenty-six points.
Later, when we were putting away the board, Mom said, ‘What did you do with the book?’
‘What book?’
‘The book we bought for Troy’s birthday party. The Thief Lord.’
Oh. That book. ‘I left it at Planet Lazer.’
She nodded. ‘And what did you do there for three hours?’
‘I read the book in the bathroom. It was very good.’
She put the Scrabble game back on the shelf and poured the last of the wine into her glass.
‘I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t know why I lied. It’s just … starting at another new school, it’s not easy, and I thought if I made it seem like I was someone … someone, I don’t know—’
‘Someone else?’
I didn’t answer.
Mom picked up her wineglass. ‘I think I’ll go to bed and read,’ she said.
‘OK,’ I replied. But I knew this conversation wasn’t over.
And I was right.