The Sweetest One

by Melanie Mah

  I’m mulling over the letter, how I feel about it, when the phone rings. Do I pick it up?

  “Jack’s Western Wear,” I say.

  “Treeee-naaaa!” someone yells on the other end.

  What will I do tomorrow? Can I home-school?

  Gene spent two years in his room because he was sick, because he was sad and scared, because people can’t keep their fucking mouths shut. If Trina were here, she’d understand. Fuck ’em, she’d say. But that gives me no relief, and anyway, she’s the source of my problems.

  17

  *

  GENE HAD A real connection with Stef. It was a special one. Throughout his life, he had this tough-guy front — he’d never hug you or say anything nice, and he made fun of you if he saw you being nice to someone else — but he was softer with her, even though she did things he’d call out in anyone else. Like watching soaps. Her favourite was Days of Our Lives, so he watched it while she was at work. He’d take notes, then go downstairs when it was done to tell her what had happened that episode.

  We used to jibe him for it, but Stef loved knowing that stuff. It seemed worth it somehow. “Oh, my god! I wish I could’ve been there!” she’d say, pricing jeans or dressing a mannequin, while Gene told her that Hope recognized Bo despite her amnesia or that Patch got caught in a boat explosion planned by Lawrence Alamain.

  Gene had a dark side, but somehow Stef got through. They used to stand on opposite ends of the store, tap dancing certain beats, back and forth like call and response, and I remember a few occasions when he came from out of nowhere and jumped on her back, expecting a piggyback ride. He had to have been, like, seventy pounds heavier than her, but she loved it. We took a photo of it happening one time. It’s probably one of my all-time favourite pictures, they both just look so happy, but it’s lost now, gone to wherever my mom puts the pictures of her kids who are no longer with her. Stef taught Gene how to use the cash register, she taught him how to drive, and before he went out she used to say to him, “Don’t do drugs,” “Don’t crash the car,” and “Wear a condom.” He took it.

  Another thing Stef did was defend Gene from my dad. About a week before she died, Gene crashed the car, and that same day, we had to keep our dad busy while she snuck off to get the dents pulled.

  Gene pretty much gave up on life after Stef died. We tried to step in, but you try replacing someone’s favourite person. It can’t be done. Gene turned up his music, took up smoking, and it all went downhill from there.

  One day my mom got a call from school saying he had stopped doing the work. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut that night at dinner — Gene still came out to eat sometimes — and my dad figured it out and flipped. For the next few weeks, he got mad every time he saw Gene, and sometimes even when he didn’t. He’d be in the middle of some unrelated task like cutting onions and he’d put down the knife or whatever, walk down the hall, and yell a new thing at Gene’s closed door as if he’d just remembered he was mad. We all caught shit in those weeks. My dad yelled at Trina, saying her outfit made her look like a beggar, and he yelled at me for not helping with meals, even if I had already helped plenty.

  My mom nagged and nagged and my dad yelled and yelled, and we never saw Gene at dinner again. Thing about my parents? They’ve never quite understood certain basic things about parenting. One? You attract more flies with honey. Two? Some kids are rebellious and don’t want to be controlled. Three? Parents are not the kings and queens of their homes, they are not cobblers with faulty machines that miraculously work when they hit them, or shopkeepers that might succeed if only they worked and ran hard enough. Life doesn’t work like that. It’s something we kids came by the hard way. My parents? Probably never learned.

  Still, they were worried sick. We all were. We started leaving plates on the shelf outside Gene’s room. In the morning, sometimes the food was gone. We never knew if he was home — his door was always closed — so it took a bit of work to figure out if he was there.

  Trina and I came up with the idea that she should get his assignments from school, same as how Stef used to for his episodes. She went to the office to figure out who his teachers were, then went to talk to them. One by one, they all said the same thing: he hadn’t been to class for weeks.

  Sometime later, after all of this was over, Trina found out what he’d been doing. She went into his room and looked through his drawers, saw his pictures of disfigured humanoid shapes and drowning robots. It sounds cheesy but that was his style, he was good at it. She also found notebooks filled with a lot of dark shit. Some of it we couldn’t read, and sometimes he used words wrong. Whose fault was it that he felt so bad and didn’t have anyone to turn to? It might have been his. Maybe it was my parents’. God, I hope it wasn’t ours.

  JOSH MCMURTRY COULD have been tried for manslaughter, but it was a flimsy case. His friends would’ve stood up for him in court, and there were no other witnesses and no evidence she was thrown in. The Crown would not press charges, so I tried to get my family to. No one bit, and I don’t blame them, we were all so sad and tired. But I was angry, too, got to picturing all the ways he could die: forest fire, flash flood, cancer, snake bite. One time he came into the store and Trina, my mom, and I hid in the back despite there being customers. He came back a few weeks later and we did the same thing. My mom got a kick out of it, as much as you can get a kick out of something like that.

  I thought we were all on the same page about Josh, but at some point, a few weeks after he came by the second time, Trina and Kirk went down to Red Mart. Fifteen and they were already dating. Josh wasn’t there but his mom was, and gave Trina a hug when she learned who she was. She said he was at home, and he’d wanna talk, so they walked over to McMurtry’s place in the new subdivision and rang the door. No one answered. They rang a few more times and looked in the windows, then gave up and went to cut across the back, a shortcut to the river, past the house, past plants staked into the ground, branches heavy with tomatoes. Kirk wanted some, but Trina didn’t feel right stealing.

  “Come on,” Kirk said. “You’ve never had a tomato till you’ve had a garden one.”

  They heard coughing then, a smoker’s cough, and a raspy voice saying, “Hey.” They looked up and saw someone on the back porch. It was Josh. He was wearing pyjamas, and even from where they were, they could see his complexion was pasty. He invited them to sit, so they did, Trina on the porch swing, Kirk on a reclining wooden chair.

  “Nice day,” Trina said.

  Josh nodded. He was staring at the end of the deck.

  Kirk said, “So you’ve got tomatoes.”

  “Yeah,” Josh replied.

  “They’re pretty awesome.”

  “Yeah.” Josh nodded and went quiet again.

  Eventually Trina said, “My sister Chrysler wants you in jail.”

  Josh said he could see my point.

  Trina said, “Did you know that for the last few months we’ve been getting letters for Stef from the university? Letters saying, ‘Please enroll in courses and pay, or we’re cancelling your registration?’”

  “No, I didn’t know,” Josh said. “She was gonna go to u of a.”

  “Yeah. Reg is buried in Edmonton. You probably know. We had this plan we’d all live there together. But she applied everywhere. Berkeley, Santa Monica, Seattle, New Mexico …”

  It went on like that, Trina making digs at Josh, Josh taking it, obviously hurting. For a while, she didn’t care — he deserved it — but eventually she softened up, started telling stories about Stef. He drank them in. Josh must have had his own stories about Stef, but he didn’t share them, just asked questions when Trina stopped talking. The sun went down, and they kept at it. When Josh’s mom came home and offered dinner, Trina knew it’d mean something if they stayed, so they did.

  Trina didn’t tell me all of what they said that day, but it must have been something good, because when Trina came home, she said she’d made her peace. It took a few months more, but I made mine, too. T
here’s no explaining it. I was mad every day, then one day found I was less mad. Josh is an okay guy. He cared about her, like, a lot. He didn’t mean for it to happen. And you can’t hate someone forever. Or maybe you can. Gene’s door stayed closed, his music always turned on from the afternoon till the middle of the night. I knocked on his door a lot those first few months. So did Trina and my mom. But he almost never answered.

  ONE NIGHT IN October, more than a year after Stef got thrown in the river, I woke to something on my bed, a little mouse on my shoulder. I twitched. It was Trina, saying she’d just seen Gene in the kitchen. He was thin, his clothes baggy, and she could smell him from ten feet away. What can I do? I thought, but I went with her because I wanted to know how he was.

  Gene was making a sandwich.

  Trina’s voice was low and even. “Gene. Hey.”

  Long fluorescent lights in the kitchen, same as in the store. Roast beef, white bread, processed cheese, Miracle Whip. An empty glass by his plate. His dull eyes, hand on the butterknife. He said, “Hey,” but didn’t look up.

  I felt like an ass standing there. Trina did most of the talking. “What’s up?” she said.

  “Not much.”

  “It was busy at the store today,” she said. It was. Midnight Madness is a sale we have the Friday before Halloween. Every year, on just that night, the store opens till eleven and we all dress up in costumes. Trina picked meat off the leftovers plate. “You should’ve seen the way we dressed Mom.”

  “Yeah. She was a punk rocker,” I said. Our mom didn’t normally dress up for Halloween, but somehow that year we’d convinced her. “She wore my Union Jack shirt, one of Triny’s leather jackets, and cherry Docs. I swear, she never looked so cool.”

  “Yeah, and Dad was a cowboy,” Trina said. He went every year as a cowboy. He held court. People would come by and remark on his costume and he would smile that photogenic smile.

  Gene smiled a bit, too, held his sandwich in both hands and took a bite. Didn’t even cut it first.

  We all stood around for a while till Trina said, “Gene, what’re you doing to yourself?”

  He opened the fridge and filled his glass with milk. “Sorry,” he said, then picked up the food and walked away.

  “Gene,” she said, but he didn’t turn around.

  TRINA AND I started hearing rumours about him at school.

  Mike Brown said, “Your brother’s a fuckin’ weirdo.”

  I said, “Yeah? What else is new?”

  He said, “He’s on the prowl. I saw him talkin’ to some cougar outside the Bottom last night.”

  Gene was good-looking till around the last year of his life. He was cute as a kid and it shows in all the photos my parents took — way, way more than they took of any of the rest of us. Girls liked him, too. He used to have trouble juggling them. Still, he’d been pretty chaste for most of his life. Who knows why — older siblings, upbringing, plain decency? The funny thing about Gene is that the time in his life when he was at his ugliest was also when he was having the most sex.

  Mike Brown was right. Gene did find older women outside bars. He also found teenaged girls in the school parking lot, at the Dairy Burger, outside their houses when they went to take out the trash. We didn’t know how he was able to attract girls in his state, but we had our theories. “Some older women just like a younger guy,” Trina said. The ones closer to his own age, I thought, he was able to get based on his past glory. If there was a lesson to be learned in that twelve-step program he worked out for Reggie, it was that confidence and charm were more important in seduction than looks. Plus, people tend to look better in low-light situations, which is maybe part of the reason why he always went out at night.

  He started sneaking girls home. One time in the middle of the night, after half an hour of moaning and screaming coming from his side of the wall, I went out to the hall. What was going on? Was he killing her? What would our parents think? I stood at the door for a while, gathering the courage to knock, but I didn’t have to. The screaming stopped. The door eventually opened partway, warm air rushed out from his room, and my school friend Maddy Hawkes scrambled out, naked except for Gene’s towel, her skin pink and flushed.

  “Your brother’s a maniac,” she said, stepping past on her way to the bathroom.

  “You could’ve fooled me,” I said, and went back to my room.

  18

  *

  FIRST THING I wanna say, you never wanted to go to the Yukon. I did. Not you. Do you remember? I said, It’s not that far, but there’s lots of animals there you can’t see here. I said, I wonder where the trees stop. You yawned, remember? Wondered how we could possibly ever be related when I’m always asking questions like that, even though we have the same fucking chin. Do you remember? Now you and Billy are hatching plans together. You wanna do it right. You’re going to Anchorage. Fuck you, Trina. You and your girlfriend can both go fuck yourselves.

  Oh, and thanks for waiting half a year to write. I’m sorry it took so long, you said. It was no big deal, actually, I only spent every waking moment of the first five months wondering whether or not you were dead and how you died and where you were and why the fuck you just up and left without a single fucking word.

  Stop telling me you miss me. Stop saying you think about me every day when you obviously fucking don’t. All that we’ve been through, the both of us, and two years of trying to keep you home, then you shack up with the first head case you see walk into a diner? You find this girl and talk to her and let her make you feel less lonely? Earth to Trina: I’m lonely. Here. I’m lonely. God, you better not be telling her anything about me.

  Also? What the fuck kind of name is Billy for a girl?

  EVERY LUNCH HOUR for a week, Mike Brown has done a comedy routine at my expense. Trina’s name has become the non-sequitur answer to all the questions at school. Tuesday, in Chem, Mr. Birch asked how many water molecules would be produced in a reaction where two molecules of sulfuric acid were combined with three of ammonia, and Derek Mason put up his hand and said, “Trina?” People laughed. Mr. Birch shrugged and said with a tone of forbearance, “No. Would anyone else like to try? Chrysler, what about you?”

  It’d be funny if it weren’t me. If Trina were here and not the source of so much of what’s wrong with my life, I’d tell her all about it. She’d laugh. But she’s not here and I don’t want to tell her shit, don’t want to remember or speculate on anything about her. But it’s not like I have a choice in that. Thoughts come, memories, whether or not I want them to, and I’m confused about how I feel. I want to think about her. I don’t want to think about her.

  The first few days after I thought I saw her, no one talked to me but Kay and Luke. But they don’t know what it was like to be with her, or how it was when my whole family was together. Neither of them has lost anyone. I’m lonely, but sometimes talking to the wrong people makes you feel even lonelier, so.

  My parents aren’t any better. After all these years, I’m gonna, what, talk to them about feelings? Reveal to my dad what all went down at school over Trina? Would I show him the letters? He doesn’t talk about anyone after they’ve gone, it’s not like he’d want me to bring them up. No wonder Trina was his favourite. He wants ignorance, she fosters it.

  Friday after school, I’m at cash, making change for Mrs. Emery’s shoelaces — she wants quarters for bingo — and when I look up, Conrad’s there.

  “Hi,” he says. “Is it all right if I come in?”

  Yes, it’s fine. Come talk to me. No, please go away. But we have a connection, don’t we? What does the heart want? To hide or to be recognized? You can’t have both at once.

  “I’ll come outside,” I say. I get my jacket and tell my mom, who’s at the back, that I’m leaving. It’s cold outside, wispy clouds. There’s a little girl in a snowsuit riding a bike yelling bye.

  “So how are things?” he says.

  I look at him, shrug.

  “That good?”

  I look down
at the old sidewalk. It’s worn down. Grooves where the cracks are, filled with snow. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, school is shit, people are assholes. If this doesn’t all blow over, it’ll be months of this before I graduate. But like, I’m not going to university anyway, so why should I feel the need to finish high school?”

  “I guess to keep your options open?”

  “How about you? What’s happening? What brings you here?”

  “Ah, same old. Basketball games. Doing the helicopter with little kids. I put my back out once doing that. Did I tell you? I’m, like, eighteen and my body’s already falling apart.”

  “Just, you know, pump some iron. You got a weak back? Back extensions could be your best friend.”

  “Thanks for the tip.” He’s laughing. Am I funny?

  “Where’s your bee costume?”

  “Left it with Dean Willis. He’s had a tough time, too — got rejected by some universities this week.”

  “You’re a good man,” I say.

  Hands in his pockets. More than half a foot taller than me, but he talks and acts like he’s on your level. “Got plans right now?” I say.