Del looks at Roger and pops a forkful of steak into his mouth. Fluids splash his chin and he sucks them over his lower lip. Roger isn’t looking back. Roger is staring at the table and spinning the base of an empty beer bottle in tight, jerky circles. His skin is blotchy and his breathing is loud.
“Del,” he finally says. “You are a fucking imbecile, do you understand that? Do you? Do you fucking understand it? You are a goddamn fucking imbecile and I hate your fucking guts.”
Del stiffens and looks to Cassie for protection. But she’s focused on her plate. She’s trying to cut a corner off her steak, and she refuses to be distracted. Del slurps his wine and the meat inches down his throat like a punch in slow motion. His mouth is moving in grotesque little circles, and he can smell his own breath. But somehow, there’s nothing to say.
“Do you know why?” Roger demands, his voice rising. “Do you know why? I will tell you. Listen carefully. The reason is because our children were the victims of a botched kidnapping in one of those aid-sucking basket-case countries you’re always defending. Now they are dead. Brutally murdered as they tried to escape. I have to accept that. There’s nothing I can do about that. Not from way over here in this mostly civilized nation. But then you come to my home and you tell me — and you tell my wife — that you’ve chosen to honour them by starting a program that may well encourage more sappy, bleeding heart young people to put themselves in the same danger. And let me guess. Let me guess, Del! You’ll be encouraging the students to travel, right? Because it’s not . . . it’s not . . . what? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. ‘It’s not all bullet belts and kidnappings.’ See, Del? See! See what a fucking imbecile you are? Do you see?”
He pushes away from the table and his chair sails off his body like hurricane debris across some devastated coastline. Shrinking into his meal, Del wonders if Roger will strike him, but he stomps off to the kitchen instead.
“It’s okay to be upset,” Del says to no one because no one will look at him. “It’s a touchy topic. But listen. Uh. I just realized that I . . . I just realized that I forgot my phone in the truck. And I should go and check on it, right? Just in case. I’ll be right back. In case I missed a call.”
He floats down the hallway to the front entrance. His shoes are heavy and awkward and he can’t quite get them on his feet. He bumps his head against the wall and notices, for the first time, a framed photo of Willy and Roger. The father is in a formal RCMP uniform, his arm around his son. Both are smiling.
In the truck, Del examines his eyes in one of the makeup mirrors. They’re bloodshot from the booze. A teardrop dangles from the tip of his nose. He reaches into the glove compartment and finds one of the pinners he rolled just in case things went off the rails like this. Intuitively, he knows Roger’s stance on drugs, even soft ones like weed. But this is an emergency, so he lights up, draws hard, and holds the smoke in his lungs. Poor Roger. It’s not his fault.
Nancy
In the kitchen, Roger ransacks the cupboards. He swears under his breath, shoves dishes aside, slams one door and throws open another. Nancy floats across the floor like a spirit. Her dress falls all the way to her feet. It’s her favourite article of clothing because she can wear it quietly. That’s what she wants most from her clothes, to wear them quietly. But sometimes she’s too quiet, and she knows this, so she’s wary of resting her hand on Roger’s shoulder. She could startle him. His heart could seize. It happens to people every day. So instead she shakes the pills lightly, the sound like a baby rattle, and Roger wheels around, eyes immediately landing on the bottle.
“I just didn’t want them to see, honey,” she says. “You know. In case they came into the kitchen looking for a glass or something. But they’re right here, okay? And you should take only two, okay? Because you’ve been drinking.”
Nancy pops the little white lid off the bottle and shakes two oblong tranquilizers into her furrowed palm. Roger snatches them from her hand. He opens the fridge and pries another beer out of the cardboard case on the bottom shelf. He downs the pills, Adam’s apple like a pitched baseball.
“I need a minute.” He turns to stare out the window into the backyard. “Need a minute to calm down, okay?”
She fits the lid back on the bottle and drifts toward the dining room. “Of course you do, dear.”
Cassie is alone at the table. Her steak has been cut into dozens of ragged pieces, a tactic Nancy recognizes from when William was a boy. If he didn’t like something they cooked, he would just chop it up and move it around. He thought he was fooling them, and sometimes she let him get away with it. After dinner, she would throw the meat over the fence for the neighbour’s dog. That way Roger would be fooled as well.
Nancy eases herself into her chair, careful that the pill bottle doesn’t rattle in her pocket. “Did you enjoy your meal, Cassie? I’m very sorry we forgot about your specific tastes. We’ll have to make a point of remembering next time. We’ll have to write them down.”
“It was excellent, Nancy,” Cassie says. “It really was.” Nancy doesn’t understand this preoccupation with food, because who worries so much about steak? And she doesn’t understand this observance of the bohemian, the red highlights in her hair, or the black nail polish. Nancy likes her hair pulled straight back into a modest ponytail. She used to paint her nails red, but only at Christmas; now, she finds it oddly sexual and therefore inappropriate.
These small differences aside, Nancy firmly believes that Keisha would’ve had a better chance in life if she’d grown up closer to her mother. It’s not that Cassie shouldn’t be out in the world earning a living. Nancy supports that. She did it herself. She worked twenty-five years as a substitute teacher at the elementary school. She was the only sub with her own mailbox in the faculty room. And Cassie was obviously very good at her job, too, because you don’t mortgage a mansion in Whistler with empty pockets and bad ideas. No, the problem is that men don’t know how to raise children. Not properly. It’s like Keisha grew up trying to be friends with her dad, and her dad unconsciously encouraged bad behaviour.
But even that only explains so much. If there’s one thing Nancy learned as a substitute teacher, it’s that kids have minds of their own. They really do. Huge portions of their lives are lived away from either parent. Kids are walking to school. They’re in playgrounds and public washrooms. So much of what shapes them is unknown to their parents. Too much. And really, the Willis-Mayburrys had far less influence in Keisha’s life than she and Roger had had in William’s.
But that’s Vancouver for you, isn’t it? You turn on the TV news and see gangsters blowing each other away at the strip mall. You open the newspapers and young people are stabbing needles into their arms to get high on drugs. Someone jumps off a bridge. Someone else goes skydiving and crashes into a cliff. That’s Vancouver for you, but it isn’t 100 Mile House, where parents can raise their children and children can raise themselves.
Cassie is fidgeting with the plastic cutlery, tapping the fork and knife together like drumsticks. She keeps jerking her head down the hall toward the front door, and Nancy assumes she’s waiting for Del to come back inside from his phone call.
From the kitchen, Nancy hears the sound of running water and clattering cupboards. Roger is cleaning. Last year, after the Willis-Mayburrys backed out of the driveway, he washed all the walls in the trailer with a sponge. It took the whole night, and in a few places he scrubbed the paint away.
“It’s not his fault, you know,” Nancy says. She presses her palms into the seat of her chair and sits on the back of her hands. But then she realizes how girlish this looks, so she places her hands on the table in front of her. “I’m sorry if it seems that way.”
Cassie stops tapping. “Whose fault?”
Nancy shrugs. “Roger’s. It’s not his fault.” She’s staring at the table. “Or Del’s.”
Cassie starts tapping again. “But it’s someone’s fault, i
sn’t it? Isn’t everything someone’s fault? That’s what Roger seems to be saying, right? That my husband got our daughter killed? Got your son killed? That my husband wants other young people to travel abroad and be killed? I’m sorry, Nancy, I really am, but isn’t that precisely what Roger is telling us?”
“Roger is angry,” says Nancy, with a quick glance toward the kitchen to make sure he isn’t coming. “He doesn’t mean the things he says. He misses William and he’s angry at the men who killed him. That’s all. Nothing to do with the two of you.”
Cassie frowns and shakes her head. “We’re angry, too, Nancy. So what?”
The bowl of Caesar salad sits untouched in the middle of the table, two wooden salad spoons rising from the saucy lettuce Nancy chopped herself. She made the dressing too, with lots of cream and vinegar, a few dozen cloves of garlic, and a shower of salt and pepper. When the mix came out runny, she added a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise. She got the idea when Roger brought home the steaks, huge flanks of red meat running with their own blood and soaking through the packaging of Styrofoam trays and plastic wrap. Salad, she thought right away. I need to make Cassie a salad.
“Here.” Nancy reaches for the bowl, her wrists emerging from her dress sleeves. “Have some salad, honey.” There are no side plates. There’s Cassie’s plate, filled with uneaten steak. And Del’s has barely been touched. Nancy is still working on her meal, and anyway she wants to try the salad herself. That leaves Roger’s plate, which has been wiped clean of meat and blood, the two pieces of shriveled asparagus forgotten on the side. It’ll have to do. Gripping the salad spoons like bush knives, Nancy cranes a heap of Caesar on Roger’s plate and serves it to Cassie, who offers a thin smile in return.
“Go ahead,” Nancy says with a proud nod. “I made it myself.”
Cassie struggles with her plastic fork, managing finally to prong one of the leaves, and Nancy can’t help but wonder: Is it maybe a little too limp, this leaf, maybe a little too dressed? She watches Cassie lever it into her mouth and chew slowly.
With a tiny tremble in her hand, Nancy tries to scoop up a soggy crouton. Oh no, she thinks. This salad is a mess. But she hides her dismay. “So what was Keisha like when she was young? We always hear about how outgoing city kids are, especially in the Lower Mainland. Was she ever, you know, a handful?”
She expects to hear a story of headlong adolescence, maybe some marijuana in the underwear drawer, maybe a knock on the front door and the RCMP officer looking stern but forgiving beneath his patrolman’s cap. Maybe even a story about the family car “borrowed” one night and driven wildly down the mountains: a flat tire, a bout of drinking, a dented bumper, and thank God no one was hurt, at least not this time.
Keisha was very polite when William brought her over. She’d picked them flowers and ended every sentence with please or thank you. But there was rebellion in her heart. Nancy could tell. Just one look and Nancy could tell. She imagined a lifetime of newspaper headlines streaming around the girl like ashes from a forest fire. A sad thing to happen to an essentially good kid. But that was Vancouver for you.
Cassie chases a crouton around a pool of dressing. She says her daughter was an angel. She says her daughter was the most creative person she’s ever met. She wasn’t mad when Del approved the piercings and the tattoos, even though Keisha was still a minor. She didn’t think she’d like it, not on the girl’s forearm, but it turned out beautifully. A glacier-capped mountain in a wreath of clouds. Cassie took a picture and used it as a background on her phone.
“I mean, it was just classic Keisha,” she says, giving up on her salad and pouring another glass of wine instead.
She starts talking about their first restaurant, the one in Whistler Village. She starts talking about Keisha working there as a hostess all through high school, and already Nancy can tell this won’t be a handful story. No. Instead, it’ll be a little angel story. A little angel story told by a bereaved mother wracked with guilt.
“I fired an employee for stealing,” Cassie continues. “I knew he was having a hard time. But I draw the line at stealing. He could’ve asked for the money, you know? I would’ve lent it to him. I’m not a stingy person. I would’ve helped him. But stealing? You can’t ever trust a person like that again. So I fired him. A couple weeks later, he called the restaurant looking for Keisha, but she wasn’t working. She’d gone skydiving with a group of friends. ‘Just tell her I said thanks,’ this guy says. ‘Tell her I’m glad the police didn’t have to get involved.’ And then he hangs up. No explanation. Turns out, Keisha gave him the money he needed. Wouldn’t tell us why, either. Just said he needed it and it was her money to give. She was like that. She was very generous. And when we later uncovered further evidence of the kid’s theft, she convinced us not to call the police. To just leave it alone. She had a very big heart.”
Nancy reaches across the small space between them and gives Cassie’s hand a squeeze. Nancy’s fingers are old and peeling, white flecks in her cuticles and puffy blue veins coursing toward her knuckles. Cassie’s are still smooth. Like a model’s.
“It’s not your fault that she was reckless,” Nancy says. “Take it from me. I was a mother for longer than you were, and I learned quick that you can’t blame yourself for the decisions your children make. You just can’t. Because they aren’t your decisions. They really aren’t.”
Of course, that’s easy for Nancy to say. William had never been reckless. When he approached Roger to borrow $12,000 so he could buy into the printer cartridge franchise, he’d come with a dossier of business projections and a proposed repayment schedule. They sat down at this very table and he treated his father like the CEO of a bank. He wore a tie. His hair smelled like the barber shop. Roger asked a hundred questions and William answered them all. It was a difficult decision, but Roger cashed in their stocks, remortgaged the trailer, and transferred a huge bulk of their savings into William’s chequing account. They would get the money back. And anyway they had Roger’s pension, and Roger had attained an enviable ranking within the force.
Things came up over the next few years. Hurdles. The money was never repaid, but William couldn’t be blamed for that. It’s tough to run a small business. It’s extremely risky. But it’s not an issue of recklessness, and everyone knows that. After he died, they got a phone call from his business partner, and the man bought them out for $7,000. Roger filled the pickup truck with plywood and power tools, rolls of carpet and bundles of two-by-fours. For the next eight months, Nancy lost him behind a wall of swirling sawdust and ill-fitting safety glasses, but the trailer looks great now.
“Reckless?” Cassie pulls her hand away. “What do you mean, reckless?”
“Well,” Nancy says, and she can’t help it — she grips the chair again and sits on her hands. “For one thing all those tattoos. You see? And the skydiving. Maybe ‘reckless’ is the wrong word. Maybe I should say ‘brave.’ Keisha was the kind of person who might try to escape from a van in the desert, you see? Rather than waiting for the army? Like they do in Central America. I looked it up. It works that way with kidnappers in the Colombian drug war. It’s just that Keisha was brave. But that’s not your fault, Cassie! And it’s not Del’s fault either. I just want you to know that Roger knows that too. We both know that, okay? We really do.”
Nancy’s out of breath by the time she finishes. She inhales loudly, as if she were startled. Her hands are tingling beneath her thighs. She shifts on her chair to free them, one by one, and returns to her cutlery, beginning a new campaign to consume the salad she made just for Cassie. She is afraid to look at her. There’s a tremendous tension building around that corner of the table, much like before one of Roger’s outbursts. Nancy feels it in her bladder.
But the salad is a hit, she’s pleased to note. She put the perfect dose of garlic in the dressing, and that has to count for something. Maybe she’ll ask Cassie about it later. You never know. It could even end
up a staple at one of her restaurants.
“Ladies?”
Roger’s voice sounds airy and distant, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a drain pipe. But he’s right there, standing at the far entrance to the dining room, water dripping from the end of his tie, who knows for how long. Nancy still can’t find the courage to look at Cassie, so she studies her husband instead.
The tranquilizers and alcohol have mashed his face like potatoes. His cheeks are pale and his mouth is open, a thin cord of saliva hanging from his upper lip. His eyes are glassy behind his spectacles. He’s holding a bag of garbage, the white one from the kitchen now dripping on the dining room floor, a steady string of dark and bloody droplets. Houseflies buzz ovals around his hand.
“All done,” he slurs with a boyish giggle. “Nice and clean.”
Cassie
The front door hangs ajar like an open window in prison. Cassie can feel the moist, late summer’s evening wafting in through the crack. She bends down to wrestle with her pumps, the Maceys looming over her as she sinks her foot into the thinly padded heel.
“Hope the hotel’s good enough,” Roger says, his thickened voice sliding toward her like a slug down a plant stem. “They have flat screens in there now. Pay-per-view.”
No doubt Del has ensconced himself in the hybrid, smoked up all the weed he smuggled from the coast, and now awaits her as a bullied child does his mother in the safety of the principal’s office. He’ll be sitting there with bleary, pot-lover’s eyes, his seatbelt already fastened, an edition of BBC’s Focus on Africa open in his lap while he waits for her to assuage his feelings over Roger’s maniacal rebuke of the bursary proposal. Or, considering how much wine he guzzled before hitting the dope, Del could be drooling through the middle stages of a mild coma.
A Plea for Constant Motion Page 5