RACHEL

They walked home together from Booth Memorial, Rachel and Vicky, happy that they could finally leave off jackets and sweatshirts, let the sun pour down on their shoulders and their arms, bare in short-sleeved blouses. Vicky had a blouse with a ruffle down the front, that whole Princess Diana thing all the girls were into this year. Rachel knew she couldn’t pull that off, though she did try her best with feathering her hair. With her dark hair and pale skin she’d really rock the headbanger look, but she felt weird around the metalheads, didn’t like the music and didn’t know any of them well enough to start dressing like they did. Plus, it’s not like Nan would actually let her out of the house wearing a leather jacket, a spiked collar, and black eyeliner.

The usual route home was over Merrymeeting Road, where they walked with a whole crowd of people past Mary Brown’s until their classmates stopped at the bus stop. Rachel and Vicky continued on, turning down before they got to Chalker’s. This whole strip of Merrymeeting Road, from Mary Brown’s to Chalker’s, smelled of chip fat. If they had pocket money, sometimes the girls would go over and get chips at lunchtime, joining the crowd from Booth and Bishops and a handful of the weird kids from the Seventh-day Adventist school, all converging on their lunch breaks and jostling for places at the counter. After school, a bunch of kids dropped into Coady’s store for Cokes and bars and ice cream, but Vicky and Rachel went on past, because they could get stuff for free when they got to Rachel’s place.

There were still lots of kids on the street after the girls passed the bus stop, but none of them were friends with Rachel and Vicky, and some were actively unfriendly. A crowd of guys, Shagger Cadwell and Reggie Walsh and that crowd, hung out on the corner by Chalker’s. If both the girls were together they would call out stuff like, “Hey, blondie! You and your friend wanna come over and check out what I got in my pocket? Hey! Hey you! Can I get two for the price of one?” If Rachel was by herself they’d yell something like, “Hey loser!” or “Who smacked you in the face, ya weirdo?” She couldn’t decide which was worse but it was interesting, she thought, that they called different things depending who was there. It wasn’t like the things they yelled at Vicky were compliments. Guys like that, maybe it was better if they did think you were a loser and a weirdo.

Today the girls were together and one boy shouted, “You make me cream in my jeans!” Vicky said to Rachel, “Ignore them.” It wasn’t like she needed to, because Rachel had never said anything back, not once. But Vicky often did stuff like that, gave Rachel sort of basic life advice that didn’t need to be said.

Rachel was well aware her life would be much worse if Vicky hadn’t become her friend in Grade Five. Vicky had stayed loyal even after it became obvious that Rachel was a bad choice as a friend, and that dragging her around would prevent Vicky from getting access to any really popular groups. Kind of like how a dog with one of those big cone collars on couldn’t get through a hole in the fence. Rachel was Vicky’s big cone collar. She kept thinking the magic spell would end sometime, that Vicky would wake up and look around and think, I’m blonde and pretty and more or less normal. I don’t have to be friends with this loser. But it hadn’t happened yet.

At the corner of Rankin and Calver they stopped into the store. Some days, Rachel had to work; if she didn’t they just dropped in and picked up snacks. Vicky’s Aunt Carolann was in there today, talking to Audrey. “I don’t know what to be sayin’ to her, she’s off the head with worry over him,” she was saying as the door opened. When she saw the girls, she shut that conversation off and said, “Look at the two of you! My Lord, Rachel, it’s been some long time since I seen you, you’re grown right up. Same as our Vicky here, what a pair of lovely young girls.” She looked at Audrey. “Next thing you know they’ll be going around with fellows, what? How time flies, hey?”

“I hope Rachel got more sense than that,” Nanny Audrey said.

Vicky went over to the cooler and got a Coke for herself and a Pineapple Crush for Rachel, while Rachel got two bags of chips—salt and vinegar for Vicky, ketchup for herself. They leaned on the glass-topped counter to open their drinks and chip bags. Nanny Audrey asked if Rachel had any homework. She never checked to see if any of it got done, but she felt like she had to ask, especially if anyone was in the store.

“She’s the spit of Henry though, isn’t she?” Carolann said, sizing up Rachel.

“She got his eyes and mouth,” Audrey agreed.

“Who do you think she takes after? Poor Stella? She got no Nolan in her that I can see.”

“No, no, none of the Nolans. She got the Holloway nose, though—Henry never had it, he was like his father that way, but Rachel got it,” Audrey said. She was quick to dismiss any suggestion that Rachel took after her mother in any way, and everyone skirted the topic of Poor Stella. Rachel met a couple of the Nolan kids—they went to Catholic school of course, but they were around the neighbourhood, and it was weird to think they were her cousins, that she had this whole other set of grandparents and aunts and uncles she didn’t even know. Like anyone needed more relatives; the Holloways were more than enough. Audrey alone was more than enough, most days.

Rachel rolled her eyes at Vicky, and Vicky grinned in a way that took the sting out of the older women sizing up Rachel’s face and body like cuts of beef. “Mom says I looks like her grandmother born again,” Vicky offered, and both the older women nodded.

“Oh yeah, I can see that, old Mrs. Hynes, with her fair colouring—she was some looker in her day,” Aunt Carolann said. “Long before our time, of course, but you could see it even when she was an older woman—good bones, you know. You got good bones, Vicky, you’re one of the lucky ones. Hair goes grey, you gets wrinkles, you puts on a bit of weight—but good bones lasts forever.”

“Get some Lune Moons to take over to my place,” Vicky said, and Rachel reached for the Vachon box. They were really called Half Moons, each one a cakey semicircle the size of her palm with a sweet cream filling sandwiched in the middle. When one of the girls was little—Rachel couldn’t remember anymore if it was herself or Vicky—she misread the bilingual box label and they had been calling them Lune Moons ever since.

The door pinged and Vern Cadwell, Shagger’s little brother, poked his head inside. Audrey broke off midsentence. “You get out of here you little tartar! I told you last week I don’t want to see your face in here no more! That’s it, get out, and tell that crowd out on the step they can’t come in either, not one of them!” As Vern made his hasty exit, she said to Carolann, “I caught him with two bars in his pocket last week—it don’t seem like no time since I was chasing his father out of the store for the same thing.”

“Them Cadwells,” said Carolann, shaking her head. “Of course they’re not all bad,” she added quickly. Most people in the neighbourhood knew Audrey had some kind of an understanding with Richard Cadwell. What did you call it, anyway, when people were that old? Rachel wondered. Surely not dating. Nanny Audrey and Richard Cadwell were not exactly dating, but all the same, people made a point of mentioning that the Cadwells weren’t all bad when they were talking to Audrey.

Rachel and Vicky took advantage of the Cadwell interruption to leave the store. If Rachel didn’t have to work, Vicky’s house was where they liked to hang out; it would always be warmer and more welcoming than her own home, Rachel thought.

In fact, this was not true. After today, the store and the rooms above it would seem like a haven compared to Vicky’s house. Rachel did not tell the story of this day to anyone for a very long time, and then only to one person. By the time she told it she wondered which of the details she had made up, or stitched together from other afternoons. They had walked from the school, to the shop, to Vicky’s house so many times. The routine was well-worn and smooth as a beach rock, and little things like Vicky’s Aunt Carolann being in the shop might have happened on any one of a dozen days. Rachel remembered the conversation Carolann and Audrey had been having before the girls came in and other conversations like it, the little hints of something wrong that teenagers would never have noticed. Later, maybe, she pieced them into the narrative of that afternoon.

From the end of the street they could see the car, a beaten-down Olds 88, in the driveway. “Dad’s home,” said Vicky.

Growing up, Rachel used to think Vicky had the perfect family. Now that they were older, she couldn’t decide whether Vicky’s family was falling apart a little bit or whether she was just better able to see the cracks in the perfect surface. Barry and Karen had moved out, so it was just Vicky at home now, although Karen moved back in whenever she had a fight with her boyfriend. Vicky’s dad got laid off a couple of years ago and while he kept getting new jobs they never seemed to last for long. Vicky’s mom got a job at Woolco in the Mall; she worked odd hours and wasn’t always home to cook, and meals at Vicky’s house were now almost as unpredictable as meals at Rachel’s. But Rachel figured life at Vicky’s house was still a lot better than living over a store with a cranky old nan, a dead mother, and a father who had disappeared up in Toronto.

“Hey Dad,” Vicky called out as she opened the screen door. She kicked off her shoes. “He’s probably out in the shed,” she said, dropping her bookbag next to the shoes. The girls trailed through the house, threw their pop bottles in the garbage, headed upstairs. Vicky had to go to the bathroom, so Rachel went straight to Vicky’s room and had just laid her stuff down on the bed when she heard Vicky scream.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday, Nan took Rachel to the funeral home “where they’re waking poor Dan Taylor,” she told Aunt Treese, who came in to cover the shop.

“That’s right,” Treese said, “Rachel’s right good friends with the little one, Karen, is it?”

“Vicky,” Rachel said. She hadn’t seen Vicky since the afternoon it happened. She had stayed with her, Vicky screaming and incoherent, till Rachel finally thought to go get Mrs. Kelly from next door, who called the police. When the house was full of neighbours and police and family, she had said to Vicky, “Do you want me to stay?” and Vicky had shaken her head, looking at Rachel like she wasn’t even seeing her.

“Anyway, we got to pay our respects,” Nan said to Treese. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“I might want to stay,” Rachel said. “With Vicky. She might need me.”

“If she needs you that bad, one of her crowd can give you a run home. Come on now.”

“Shouldn’t I have something black on?”

“Go ’way, that’s foolishness. It’s old-fashioned, nobody expects youngsters to be wearin’ black to funerals nowadays. And this is not a funeral, it’s only the wake.”

Rachel had heard the word “wake” because Nan and Nanny Ellen had been going out to them as long as she could remember. When she was really small, five or six, she had asked what a wake was and Nan told her it was where you went to see dead people. Rachel worried about this for a long time, especially after she got up late one night and couldn’t get back to sleep and her father let her watch Night of the Living Dead on the late late show with him.

Eventually she got old enough to figure out that her grandmother and great-grandmother were not going to Barrett’s or Carnell’s (or, occasionally, Caul’s for Catholic neighbours) to watch reanimated corpses stagger around and moan. It was Vicky’s mother, when Rachel’s Aunt Susan died, who explained a wake was something that happened at a funeral home for a few days before the actual funeral, when the dead person was laid out in the coffin for people to look at and “pay their respects,” and you could bring flowers and comfort the bereaved. “It’s in funeral homes now, but people used to have the wake at their house,” Mrs. Taylor had added.

“In their house? People had a coffin with a dead body in it lying in the house?” Vicky had echoed.

“Oh yes, seems strange now, don’t it? But at the time nobody thought it was odd at all. I remember when my grandmother died, the wake was in the living room and they lifted me up to the coffin to make me kiss her on the cheek, and I didn’t want to. It was cold as a stone. Thank God nobody makes children do that anymore.”

Mrs. Taylor had seemed so sensible, so calm and all- knowing then, sitting down at the table to explain things to children instead of dropping cryptic comments here and there, leaving a child to piece things together, which had been Nan’s way of teaching Rachel about the world. Now Mrs. Taylor was what Nan called “a basket case,” sitting in a chair at the funeral home surrounded by her sisters and sisters-in-law, red-faced and bawling. Vicky’s sister Karen was on the couch crying into her boyfriend’s shoulder. Lesser relatives, various aunts, and cousins circled around the room shaking hands and talking to people. Despite what she’d feared, Rachel noticed with relief that there was no dead body to look at, only the long, shiny wooden box covered in flowers. She had seen Mr. Taylor’s dead body swaying from the rope in the bathroom, his face unrecognizable. She had no desire to see it again.

“Closed casket,” Nan said. “Makes sense, under the circumstances. Carolann, my love, how are you holding up? Some shocking thing, isn’t it?” She sailed toward Carolann, and Rachel went to look for Vicky.

“She’s outside,” a cousin said, and Rachel stepped out into the cool air of the parking lot. There was a little patch of grass at the far end, and Rachel saw three or four people there, leaning on the hood of someone’s car. She heard Vicky’s voice, a sharp harsh note of laughter. She had imagined she was coming here because Vicky needed her, because she couldn’t go through this awful thing without her best friend. For the first time in years of friendship, Rachel felt she had something to offer Vicky, and she had come here tonight ready to give it.

Instead, Vicky was out here in the parking lot with, Rachel now saw, her brother Barry and his girlfriend Angela, and Angela’s younger brother who was in their class but who Rachel had never spoken to. All four of them talking and laughing like it was a party instead of a funeral, Vicky’s blonde head bent next to theirs as they all looked down at something in their hands, making a little circle that looked so complete that Rachel stopped walking halfway across the parking lot.

But Vicky had seen her already, and waved her over, though she didn’t raise her voice to call. When she got in close Rachel saw that Barry was rolling a smoke, like Aunt Treese’s roll- your-owns, except the smell was different, and then she realized he was rolling a joint. Hard to believe she hadn’t watched anyone do this before, but Rachel had lived a careful life so far. Nan, who chain-smoked like a factory chimney, says she would beat the living daylights out of Rachel if she caught her smoking or drinking, never mind doing the weed, as Nan called it. Vicky didn’t smoke—not anything at all, as far as Rachel knew up till this moment—and the girls’ experiments with beer had been few and cautious. Both their fathers drank too much; maybe that’s why they were careful.

Now the joint was getting passed around, and Vicky took it like she knew what she was doing, but when she hesitated Barry showed her how. What a great big brother, teaching his sister how to smoke a draw outside their father’s wake, Rachel thought. Vicky coughed and sputtered, then passed it on to Rachel. Rachel took it and felt like something was broken, like the window of the shop when Nan had finished laying stuff out in it and writing the specials up on the glass. Making it look nice, but somebody came along with a baseball bat and shattered the window.

All those years going to Vicky’s house, borrowing Vicky’s perfect family, fitting herself into the edges of it. Her own family came pre-broken. Rachel, too, coughed when she inhaled, and didn’t feel anything but sick, but she smiled. There was something right about it. This was who she was after all, not a part of Vicky’s family but her own Holloway thing, daughter of Henry and Stella, both doomed and damned. Granddaughter of Audrey, who would kill her if she got in the car reeking of the weed.