Kathleen was way late picking me up at the airport, which kind of strained my relationship with the flight attendant.
Josette had really liked me on the plane. Why wouldn’t she? Braden, the other kid flying by himself, was such a pain. He kept on asking for more pop or a different Lego set or if he could trade in his half-eaten chicken meal for the lasagna.
Me? I was the perfect passenger. The quiet type who’d never ask for anything.3 Josette could just smile as she went by and get on with handing out her headphones.
When she got stuck waiting at the airport with me, though, I knew Josette wished I was someone else. Maybe not Braden, but at least someone who talked. Even one of those kids who never stopped talking. In fact, given a choice between Bess mouthing off in handcuffs and me, I bet she’d have taken Bess any day.
I can’t blame her. It would have made killing the time a whole lot easier.
In the twenty minutes we’d been sitting there on my luggage, Josette had found out I was in Grade Seven and from teeny, tiny Beach Meadows, Nova Scotia, and had a dead cat. She was running out of questions to ask. (The dead cat was kind of a conversation stopper anyway.)
She was going on again about how excited I must be to visit Toronto when I saw Kathleen come flying in the door. You couldn’t miss that new red hair of hers.
I grabbed my fleece and started stuffing my book into my knapsack. I was psyching myself up to give Kathleen a kiss—Mum said I absolutely had to—when I realized I had a little more time to prepare.
Kathleen was about ten meters away, heading right for me, when she suddenly stopped and swung around. She stood there with her back to me, waving an arm in the air like she was Bugs Bunny conducting an orchestra or something. She stomped her foot a couple of times too, then leaned against the glass wall, that arm still flailing away.
I couldn’t believe it.
Kathleen was on her cell phone!
Luckily, Josette didn’t notice. She just kept going on about all the wonderful things to do, restaurants to visit, places to shop—like I was some little hick kid 4 who’d never been to the big city before.5 I turned down the sound and disappeared into my head.
I started thinking about how different Kathleen and Mum are.
For starters, Mum would have been on time. No matter what. A raptor could have mauled her and left her for dead in the driveway and she’d still manage to drag her legless body to the airport five minutes early. In fact, by the time my bags arrived, she’d have written a note to the cleaning staff in her own blood apologizing for the mess she’d made. She’d also have come up with a home lesson plan on meat-eating dinosaurs. (“You can see by the wound how he was able to tear off my left leg with a single snap of his massive jaws. I wish you’d been there, Telly! It really was fascinating.”)
She sure wouldn’t keep anyone waiting to take a cell-phone call.
Even if she approved of cell phones. (Which of course she doesn’t. Mum’s generally against anything hightech. And that includes two-ply toilet paper and toasters that pop on their own.)
Mum and Kathleen look totally different too. Mum goes for that natural stuff. Her blond highlights look like the sun made them, and you can’t even tell when she’s wearing makeup. (Though it’s kind of obvious when she’s not.) Her clothes all come from catalogs in the States that show people chopping wood in their best pants or laughing when someone throws snow in their face. (Like any grown-up would do that.)
Kathleen, on the other hand, is kind of, I don’t know, pointy or something. She reminds me of one of those Brain-Buster problems they give you on the so-called Math “Fun” Day. “Can you make a person using just five rectangles, a square and two rhombuses?” There are no circles on Kathleen. There aren’t even any semicircles.
I know she looks good because people in magazines look like her. But I always thought she looked kind of scary too. Like the captain of the enemy spaceship in one of those sci-fi movies or something. They always have the perfect face and the really cool uniform. That’s how you know they’re evil.
Believe me, I’m not saying Kathleen’s evil. (Mum would kill me if she ever heard me call her baby sister evil.) But she’s certainly got the look down pat.
One last thing. Mum is Ms. Community Volunteer of the Year. If you’re a homeless person or an ex-convict or some little sea slug that everyone else in the universe would be delighted to hear is about to go extinct, my mother is there for you.
That’s really important to remember.
I know I made her sound kind of bad when I was talking about Bess, but Mum really tries hard. She really wants to believe that everybody (except the people who make artificial coloring and the guy building the condos practically right on the public beach) is basically good and trying to do what’s best. She wants to make the world a better place.
Kathleen, on the other hand, is a television producer.
She makes TV shows.
We don’t even have a TV.
That’s because my mother believes that television is “mulching the minds of our children.” I always figured she’d disown me if she knew how much TV I used to watch at Bethany MacMaster’s before Bethany realized that was the only reason I came over. (I know she’d divorce Dad if she found out he rented us a television whenever she went on a yoga weekend.)
Now she was sending me to stay with her pointy sister Kathleen to “help her out in the studio.” She was even making it sound like it was a good thing.
Right.
And having your leg chewed off by a giant lizard is a learning experience.
Dad at least was honest. He did that whole “It’ll be fun!” thing, but he also admitted that they didn’t have the time to be worried about me right now. (Okay, he didn’t say exactly that— but that’s what he meant.) They had to straighten Bess out.
I was getting to skip a month of school, go to the big city and work on a TV show.
I was trying not to cry when I saw Kathleen accidentally thwack an old man in the back of the head with that flailing arm of hers and send him sliding across the floor like a big plaid mackerel.
Suddenly, everything started going crazy. Josette rushed to help, but before she could the old man took down a lady eating an ice-cream cone and a pilot who knew a lot of bad words in both French and English. A security guy came running over like this was a national emergency or something. I guess he didn’t see the ice cream on the floor. He did this log-rolling-competition thing for a while and then took a major face plant. That’s when the next pileup started.
Kathleen, meanwhile, was trying to wrap up her phone call and help everyone to their feet and hand out her business cards to pay for any damage and act all innocent (“Why, Telly, when did your plane get in?”) and thank Josette for looking after me.
People were still slipping around on the butterscotch ripple when Kathleen grabbed my arm and a suitcase and headed out the door.
You’d think we’d have had a laugh about it then. Maybe we would have, but Kathleen had to take another call.
3 Parents go for that type too. I guess that’s why I always got asked to lots of birthday parties even though I didn’t have many friends. Bess, on the other hand, had lots of friends and not many invitations. The guy who drives the ambulance asked her to his daughter’s party when she was little, but that was different. He knew first aid. (Good thing too. Before Bess had busted open the pinata, she’d beaned three kids and the family’s weiner dog. And that was with a blindfold on. Just think what she would’ve done if she could have actually aimed.)
4 Okay, I guess she was right about that.
5 But I had been to Toronto before. Lots of times. Or once before anyway. Mum took me up as proof she wasn’t a hopeless parent when she went to that conference for the Canadian Chapter of Responsible Parents of Irresponsible Children.