by Melanie Mah
“Wow!” my dad says, a piece of dough in hand. “What he eating?”
“A seal,” I say. “It weighs four hundred pounds.”
“Waa.” He’s mesmerized.
I pinch the top of a bun till it’s closed. One time on tv I saw a shark with a four-foot wide mouth — a filter feeder, the biggest fish in the ocean, they said. Its mouth was fleshy inside, reminded me of my dad when he takes his dentures out at night and you can finally see how old he is.
When the store closes, my mom comes up to help with the buns. She’s short of breath, excited, bragging about how busy it was today as she joins us at the table. I ask what they want to do tomorrow.
“No-thing!” my dad says, sing-song incredulous.
“I thought you might wanna go to Edmonton.”
“What I leave for?” Loud and proud agoraphobic.
“Why’d you used to leave?” I say. “Get a good supper, bring Mom to the mall, get some Chinese groceries.”
On the other side of him my mom shakes her head wildly, waving and mouthing something at me. My dad doesn’t notice even though it’s like she’s trying to signal an airplane. “Naw,” he says. “You go out there, get char siu bow from factory! What’s good for?” It’s the final word on the subject.
In the past I would’ve pushed for it, talked to him about seafood and Peking duck, talked to her about the preppy stores and the place with the little cottages at the mall. It’s not like I wanted to go — I just wanted to remind them of how their lives used to be, how they still could be. But things are different. A stack of cheques in the cash register, a nature documentary when you’re expecting a talk show. This is what constitutes happiness for them now.
12
*
I USED TO love when my parents left town without us. My parents not being around was not a new thing. They were always like that, too busy at the store or, occasionally, away from home. Stef wanted for someone to be there for us, so when they went to see a salesman or visit relatives and we stayed home, she would make Hamburger Helper and Betty Crocker cake, stuff my dad never made. Stef in an apron, long hands ripping apart a head of lettuce, me asking if I could help. She made my lunches, too — every day she did that — and she was there for me when I was mad or sad. I used to sit on her back in our room, braid her hair and write poems for her. I hope you never go deaf. I took her for granted. I wish I’d said thanks, or taken care of her some Sunday.
Stef loved animals, always wanted a pet, but we never had one. Too dirty, our parents said, and it was fine by me. You love them like family and they inevitably die on you, so why bother? Gene said Stef saw the family as her little hobby farm, this collection of animals who couldn’t live without her, but I knew all along that she took care of us because she loved us, because of some idea she had about what family was and what siblings do for each other — points she drove home in the days after Reggie died.
Rodeo was a bad time for tragedy. Busy. My mom kept breaking down when people asked about Reg, so one of us was always near the counter just in case. My dad was the same as always, making meals and fixing shoes in the back. He never mentioned Reggie once. We couldn’t imagine our parents discussing terms with the casket and tombstone suppliers. They’re just not that kind of people. But we were all still kids, way too young for that kind of responsibility. We didn’t know how to book a funeral home, didn’t know that we needed a picture for the service, little pamphlets with details of his life and death, an obituary.
Eventually, Stef took a stand. She should have been mad, but instead she quietly got all the necessary catalogues. It was settled. Daytimes we spent rushing to our mom’s aid, getting sizes, shaping hats, cashing people out, trying not to look too sad. Nights we girls spent in our room going through the catalogues.
“What do you think of this one?” Stef asked Trina and me. She was lying on her stomach in bed, holding a pen, one foot dangling in the air. The catalogue was open to a page that could’ve been any other, and the one she’d circled wasn’t anything special, but there’s not a whole lot you can do with a casket. Different handles, different colours of wood. Twenty to a page. It was like we were picking the new fall shoes.
“I like this one,” Trina said, her finger on one called Matt Pecan. Matt Pecan like a nut with a name.
“Not bad,” Stef said. “But it’s more than a thousand dollars.”
I picked one called Oxford Tweed. It was full of character, covered in cloth. Stef said it seemed inappropriate. I wondered who it was appropriate for.
In the end, we went with a cherry casket and a mottled grey stone. We also decided on Edmonton. It wasn’t Ann Arbor, but at least it was out of town. None of us wanted to live in Spring Hills after high school or stay here longer than we absolutely needed to, not even Reggie. Stef was looking at the Conservation Sciences program at u of a, and we all saw ourselves living in Edmonton, too. We went to the library, huddled around a phonebook, and chose the cemetery by the west end museum. There were dinosaurs there, a bug room and scientific exhibits. Stef thought Reggie would have liked it.
The flowers started coming around then. We were as surprised as ugly girls being asked to dance when the first arrangement came. Back then — Trina and I were thirteen and twelve — flowers meant romance and popularity. With every arrangement we got, we felt jolts of confusion — sadness, excitement, and duty intermingled. The guys from Current Electric pooled together money for carnations, and one of them, Ed Burns, walked them up in his coveralls. For some reason all of us kids were at the counter. He didn’t know which of us he should talk to, so he addressed the wallets and bandanas under the glass. “Would you accept these?” he asked them, slack-jawed, cap off his greasy, grey head and in his hand like this were an old movie and we were the love interest. The carnations were red and white and stuck in green foam. Trina took them, and we all went to the back together to put them on the same work bench we had placed the ones Stef got from Josh McMurtry and all the other guys who liked her.
By the end of that first day, we’d received more than half a dozen arrangements. By the third day, there were at least twenty more. We ran out of space for them, started putting them on the floor. Most of them ended up upstairs, in the office and in our rooms, on the sideboard, coffee table, and ancestor shrine. I’d never seen so many different kinds of flowers all at once. My dad kept knocking them over. He poured a coffee and a vase would tip — whoa — same thing when he hemmed jeans or plugged in the rice or tried sewing a tarp. He made us clean up after him.
On the fourth day, with flowers on the coffee table blocking his view of the tv and signals from the remote, he blew a fit. He shoved some onto the ground, sent lilies, tulips, roses flying. He interrupted dinner to make us throw them all out. We tried to reason with him, but that only made things worse. I’d never seen him so mad.
I was mad, too, so mad I went to my room, but the sounds of everyone working and talking in the hall drew me back out. He’d calmed down by then, fast as usual. I didn’t have the heart to help throw the flowers out, so instead, while Carol Burnett floated around in a big white bell of a dress on tv, trying to seduce a man in a southern accent, I cleaned, scooped up water, broken stems, and glass. Meanwhile, the jungle of flowers retreated. We cleared the living room, kitchen, and dining room, but left as many as we could in our rooms.
One at a time, Stef, Trina, and everyone else came upstairs to take another bouquet away. It seemed weird, not being a part of that. Stef said it wasn’t that bad. She said it’d be worth it for me to come down and just hang out if I wanted to, so I went. I’m not sure what I thought I’d see. Maybe flowers spilling out of the trash, or an assembly line: my dad by the dumpster, everyone else offloading their bouquet for him to chuck in. Instead I saw flowers everywhere, arranged neatly on the landing outside the back door, on the concrete ledge where the dumpster was, on the little dirt pile below. There were even some on the crabgrass hill across the alley. My dad and Gene were placing vases. My mom
was positioning individual flowers. Trina was adding water.
It was a pretty nice scene, but as soon as I saw it I imagined a stranger coming that night to wreck it. Broken flowers, vases, leaves, a huge mess for us to clean up. Stef said there was nothing we could do short of camping out on the concrete pad. The next morning Gene and I saw that even though some flowers had been taken and one of the vases had tipped over, leaving a drying wet mark down the alley, for the most part things were fine. Gene took the tipped vase inside, filled it in the workshop sink, then brought it back out and set it where it was. “There,” he said, after arranging the flowers.
On Saturday, the day before the service, Mr. Gustafson, the funeral director, called. He wanted to pick up the flowers we’d received so that each attendee could throw one onto the casket at the graveyard. But vases had been steadily disappearing from the alley — all that were left were some bundles of carnations, sick and wilted in the heat, despite our tending to them in the evenings. A crowd was expected and Mr. Gustafson needed more.
The main events of the Caroline Rodeo — barrel racing, pony chariots, and chuckwagons — were always held on the third Saturday in June, and the store was extra busy that day. Lines were forming at the till and our mom could barely keep up with all the sales. But we had our priorities in place. When Mr. Gustafson showed up in his van, we climbed the stairs single file and came back down with the offerings for Reggie. We’d kept them in our rooms. We gave him every last arrangement, even favourites we’d hoped to keep, till the house was empty, till there was no sign of Reggie being gone at all.
We took up most of the front row at the service. No one else sat with us, which was right. In attendance were teachers, some classmates, their parents, people from the town, good customers. I only had one dress that fit — the same one I’d worn nine days before at Reggie’s graduation.
Mr. Gustafson stood at the podium and talked about youth and potential, about how much sadder it was when a person died young. The speech dragged. Reggie didn’t know Mr. Gustaf-son at all. Neither did we. I slouched down with my elbows on my thighs and my chin in my hand. My mom nudged me, wanted me to straighten up, but I didn’t. I turned to my dad. His eyes looked slimy. He swept his meaty fingers across them. Crying is like laughter or coughing: contagious. Before I knew it, our whole family was at it — all of us but Gene, though he still looked pretty sorry as he passed a pack of tissue down the row. Somewhere else in the room, someone was sobbing. Peggy.
The casket sat on a raised platform at the front of the room. I couldn’t see Reg from where I was, but I’d seen him a few days before in a different part of the funeral home, this small, dark, yellow room. I remembered the shock of seeing him, his face caked with powdery makeup. I remembered prying his hand open, how it settled back in place around mine, like we were holding hands. When it warmed up, I put my arms around him. He felt hard and more muscular than he’d ever been in life. Stef said he smelled like the frog she dissected that year in Bio.
When the eulogy was over, we stood, and immediately a long line of people snaked behind us. There wasn’t time to look at him the way we wanted to. I started counting when it was my turn, stared into his face like I never had while he was alive — I felt really bad about that, I missed my chance to know him — and when I got to thirty, I walked away. My mom came up next. She opened her mouth to cry, and threads of spit stretched between her lips. She collapsed and Stef was there to catch her.
Being in this family made you strong. When it was quiet in the store, we flexed our biceps for each other, bulges like balled up socks. We hauled boxes at the post office, went down stairs with teetering stacks of jeans on our shoulders, opened crates with our bare hands. Every summer, we threw ourselves under a dusty, old air conditioner, lifted it into the living room window. It’s how we could pile into the car and head for Edmonton, treat guests to a banquet lunch, then watch the casket sink into the ground.
I saw Stef and Peggy talking by Reg’s grave. My parents still didn’t know about Reggie’s girlfriend and probably never would. She wore a pillbox hat and veil, a fitted knee-length skirt, and showed a sliver of chest. Trina and I had our arms around each other, Gene was dabbing at his eyes. We ate dinner at Panda Garden. Some guests from the funeral came, too. They tried to share in our grief, but they weren’t Reggie’s friends or ours, and eventually it was just us again, a new family made from old parts.
I remember the drive home on that pretty little road we’d convinced our dad to take in memory of Reg — how I imagined a dirt-covered Reggie on the doorstep smelling like chemicals after my dad wondered aloud, “What if he not dead?” — and I also remember deer, they came suddenly, first one then another, then boom in the air legs up. Someone screamed. The car shook, then slowed to a stop. Was I okay? I felt jittery. A couple of seconds passed and we didn’t say anything. Then Stef asked if we were all okay. I had my seatbelt on. My mom and dad did, too. I turned around. Stef and Trina seemed fine. Gene, too. All those times he refused to wear a seat belt. We were fucking lucky.
The deer was limp and brown. My dad got out and pulled it to the ditch by its hind legs. He came back in and tried to start the car. It wheezed, wouldn’t start. He tried again.
“You’re flooding the engine,” Stef said.
He tried another four or five times, then yelled and hit the steering wheel.
“Ba, stop. It’s not working.” Stef said it without emotion. Or maybe out of sympathy. The deer lying in the ditch like it was sleeping.
My dad and Gene got out of the car, still in their suits. They tried the hood awhile, another tantrum from my dad when it wouldn’t open. Finally, it came and they fiddled with the engine, but they didn’t know a thing about cars. An hour went by. Still nothing had happened with the car, and it was getting dark, and no one had driven by. It was a bad idea going on that road. We didn’t know then how little traffic there’d be. My dad got up and walked to the ditch. His feet were near the deer and I was afraid he was gonna fall in. “Hey Stef,” he called, “why not I go?”
Stef had gone out to the field, we thought to take a piss, and after a while I’d forgotten she was there. “Where?” she said.
He said he thought there was a house a few miles back.
“When did you last eat?”
“Well, suppertime.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“Yah, I know, but otherwise we just sit here do nothing. No use.”
My mom’s lips moved like she wanted to say something, but she never did, and my dad kept offering to go to that house, as if it were a new idea. Knowing him, I guessed he was forecasting to a time when there wouldn’t be food when he was hungry. Still, Stef shut him down when he offered, and other times, too, when he didn’t.
“You better not be going, Ba!” Stef yelled from the field from time to time. Stef wouldn’t let any of us go — the reason was, she’d recently seen on the news about a guy whose head got lopped off while he was walking on the side of the road at night. It seemed reasonable enough. Still, we were antsy. “What’s your rush?” she said, when Gene tried sneaking off. It was like she had sonar. “It’s a nice night. Plus, this has never happened before, us sleeping outside.” She said it like it was some epic thing.
“You do it all the time,” Trina said.
“Yeah, but we’ve never done it together. It’d be fun if you didn’t stress. Forage some food, eat off the land …”
“What if we went through the fields instead?” Gene said.
“Are you crazy?” Stef said. “You can’t see a thing out here. There could be bear traps or electric fences. You could trip. May as well wait till morning.”
I agreed. I thought it might be fun to stay the night, and hard times were part of the experience.
Stef told us about the flashlights in the trunk. “Shine one around,” she said. “Someone will see it and get us.” We did what she said — I went first — and it was awkward. I stood with the dead deer a couple of feet away.
Everyone yelled out the car doors, telling me how to do it like I was a little kid who didn’t know anything. But I knew what to do. I started screaming for help, so loud they closed the doors. Then I was alone.
I thought of Reggie. I wondered where he was — his mind or soul, I mean — and if he’d had a good life. The night was both opening and closing around me, my arms were getting tired. Highway 117 was a quiet way to go. Too quiet. I kept half-expecting, half-fearing headlights approaching on the horizon or someone else with a flashlight. Sometimes I thought I saw these things, but it never panned out. It was always some illusion instead, a car at the junction too far away to see us. I imagined us killed by wolves, murderers, monsters, wondered if Reggie had a ghost, and if so, would it want to talk. I thought I should be tough — I was in Grade Seven then, junior high — and told myself I wasn’t scared, but there was no denying I was.
When everyone but Stef had had a go with the flashlight, people were saying it was my turn again, and my dad was grumbling about food. He had this idea to cut up the deer, but he didn’t have a knife. “I’ll bet Stef has one,” I said, and went to find her. It didn’t take long. She had a flashlight, too. “Stef!” I yelled when I was close enough.
“Shh!” she said.
“Dad wants a knife to cut the deer open.” She was crouching on the ground. I got a little closer. “What are you doing?”
Stef started to walk again. She had something that looked like grass in her hand. I followed her for a little while till she bent down and started ripping things out of the ground.
“What are you doing?”