I chewed on my bacon.
“What’s your band’s name?” Charly asked.
“The Pedestrians. We play at McSorley’s about once a week, on a night when I’m not behind the bar. Usually Thursdays. Hey, I know.” Bree turned to Charly and waved the spatula at her. “You should sing with us sometime.”
Charly’s eyes grew to golf ball size. “Really?” she whispered.
“Of course!”
I pictured Charly on stage in an acid-washed jean miniskirt with pink hair, a giant pregnant belly hanging out under a halter top. Classy.
Bree poured coffee into two mugs and brought them over to us. “So you didn’t call your grandma last night.”
She wasn’t looking at me, but it felt like she was. “Yeah,” I said. “I was just so tired, I totally forgot. And I don’t think Charly is supposed to drink coffee. What with . . . you know.”
“Oh. My bad.” She pulled the mug away from Charly, who glared at me. I didn’t actually know if it was bad for the baby, but I really didn’t need her any peppier.
“She called this morning at five to make sure you guys were alive. She must’ve forgot about the two-hour time difference.”
“Yeah,” I said. Probably not. “Sorry.”
“I told her you guys would call her when you got up.” Bree took the phone off the counter and held it out to Charly.
“Nope,” Charly said, hands up, staring at the phone like it was a gun. “That’s Amelia’s job.”
“Why is that my job?”
“Because Grandma doesn’t want to talk to me.”
It was hard to disagree with that.
“Well, just as long as one of you calls her,” Bree said, sweetly but not that sweetly.
“After breakfast,” I said.
She put the phone beside my mug. It felt like a threat.
“So Ezra stopped by McSorley’s after he dropped you guys off last night,” she said. “That boy is such a sweetheart.”
Sweetheart? He’d seemed more like a big, domesticated primate.
“He said you guys might need some winter gear, and that you could stop by and dig through the lost and found at Lake Louise if you want. That stuff can be really expensive, and you only need it for one season.”
“Nice,” Charly said.
I wasn’t going to argue. I didn’t know exactly what really expensive meant, but I did know that money was tight at home. Grandma’s lecture about interest rates and responsible spending had been completely unnecessary. Did she really think I was going to run out and buy a two-thousand-dollar pair of moccasins with her credit card? Charly maybe, me no. The thought of blowing a ton of money on ugly snow gear made me cringe.
I’d just assumed that we could get by on the bare minimum. But the shock of last night, of how the cold had felt like a thousand teeth taking a thousand bites out of my skin—that changed things.
“His older brother, Quinn, and I used to, you know . . . ” Bree swirled the bottle of syrup around high up in the air, drizzling a squiggly crosshatch pattern onto her own pancakes. It was all very bartender-ly. Charly looked completely mesmerized, like she’d never realized syrup could be so beautiful.
“But that was forever ago,” Bree said.
I waited, hoping talk about boyfriends past would lead to talk of boyfriends present, specifically, who Richard was, and whether or not he was going to show up and walk around like he owned the place. But Bree transitioned to clothes instead.
“I’m guessing you’ll need more than you can scrape together from the lost and found, though.”
“We did bring clothes,” I said, hearing the defensive edge to my voice after it was too late.
“Oh, of course! I didn’t mean you didn’t have clothes. I just thought I could help you get a few things you might not already have. Like some good boots, and a few pairs of long johns. I found these silk ones at Mountain Equipment Co-op last winter that have seriously changed my life.”
I nibbled on a piece of bacon, wishing it wasn’t so chewy. She wanted to help us get a few things? “Help” was a little ambiguous. Was she talking about buying us stuff, or was she talking about dragging us to the store and maxing out Grandma’s credit card?
“Sounds good to me,” Charly said, mopping up the syrup with her last bite of pancake. “We nearly froze to death last night.”
“It’ll be my little welcome gift to you guys.” Bree smiled and the lip ring gleamed. “What do you say?” she asked, putting a hand on my arm.
I say you’re trying too hard. “Sure. Thanks.”
She squealed and Charly squealed and I almost squealed for solidarity.
“How about you guys get ready and then we head into Calgary to shop? That way you’ll be all set for starting school on Monday. We can stop by the Alberta Healthcare Office to get your ID numbers so we can make an appointment for Charly. Are you guys going to need school supplies too?”
“Charly’s not going to school,” I said. “She’s got her stuff for the online classes she’s doing, and I brought school supplies.”
“Well . . . ” Bree’s voice trailed off. When she picked up again, her voice was bright and shiny like cheap fabric. “Actually, I thought maybe we should talk about that.”
I turned to face her, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Charly. “I mean, I know your grandma wants you to do the correspondence class thing, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It just seems like you’re going to miss out on the whole semester.”
Charly stared at Bree, eyes wide and innocent.
“So I enrolled you both.”
“What?” I sputtered.
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” she said, ignoring me. “I just thought I’d give you the option. They don’t make pregnant girls stay at home here.”
“They don’t make pregnant girls stay at home in Florida either,” I said. “She’s choosing to do online classes for one semester.”
Finally, Bree turned to me. “I just want to make sure that’s what Charly is choosing to do.”
So I was the bad guy.
I put my fork down, so gently it only made the softest clink. She wasn’t getting the satisfaction of seeing me mad. I looked at the floor and waited for Charly to jump in and defend me. She owed me that. She knew I hadn’t bullied her into staying home.
“I guess,” Charly started slowly, “well, I guess I assumed I’d do what Grandma told me to do. But now I don’t know. Maybe I do want to go.”
Traitor.
“Can I think about it?” she asked.
“Of course,” Bree said. “It’s a big decision. You should think about it. I just thought you might get lonely, being cooped up in the apartment alone. It would be pretty isolating, you know, not knowing anybody.”
“Aren’t you here during the day?” Charly asked. “I mean, you work at night, right?”
“Yeah, but I have class during the day,” she said. “I’m in nursing school.”
“Oh,” Charly said. “That sucks.”
Bree laughed. “You sound like Richard. Oh, you guys have to meet Richard still. He’s my, you know . . . ” She twirled her fork in the air, like that was the universal sign for sugar daddy. “He wants me to drop out and come hang out in Calgary with him during the week. I keep telling him no way. The classes are hard, but I love it, and it took me forever just to get in. I totally screwed around in high school and then I dropped out, so I had to get my GED first and then my nursing prereqs to get into the program. Anyway, so just think about the school thing.”
“She’s not dropping out,” I said. “It’s one semester.”
“But do you want to?” Bree asked Charly, her voice dramatically somber.
Charly stared at her plate, opened her mouth, and waited. “I want . . . ”
Want? Who cared what Charly wanted? Nobody was getting what they wanted anymore—not her and not me.
I still had half a pancake and several pieces of undercooked bacon to go, but
I wasn’t hungry anymore. “Sorry. I can’t finish this.”
“That’s okay,” Bree said, all sweetness again.
Charly pulled my plate toward her and started transferring the bacon onto hers.
“Shopping, then?” Bree chirped.
Shopping, then.
• • •
I showered and dressed first, then forced myself to call Grandma while Charly and Bree took turns in the bathroom.
She was mad, but curious enough to calm herself down and interrogate me.
“So what’s it like?”
“Colder than you could even imagine. So cold I want to die.”
“I’m not talking about the weather, Amelia. What’s your aunt like?”
“I don’t know. We’ve only talked for a couple of minutes so far.” That was both true and false. We had only talked for a couple of minutes, but I was pretty sure I knew what she was like: She was a bartender with at least one tattoo and several piercings, she sang in a band and had screwed around in high school and lived in an apartment owned by a boyfriend who wanted her to quit nursing school. Oh, and she was trying way too hard. “Charly loves her.”
“That doesn’t tell me much. What’s her apartment like?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said truthfully, looking around me. “All modern and fancy with real art on the walls. But our room is really small and we have to share a bed.”
That calmed Grandma right down. Real art translated into a stable, conservative atmosphere. She made me promise to read my Bible and to make sure Charly got plenty of rest before saying she had to go. There were bridge ladies waiting.
“Wait, wait,” I said, before she hung up. “What about Dad?”
“Clueless. Thank the Lord.”
My rib cage felt hollow, my entire body empty. How had he not seen through it? Not that it was his fault, since I’d lied my little heart out. We all had. But still, he should’ve connected the logical dots. Dad figuring things out would have been the worst and best case scenario—the end of the world for Charly, and deliverance for me.
“Good. Okay. Bye.”
“What’s the matter, Amelia?”
“Nothing.” I’d made myself invisible. I couldn’t hate him for not seeing me.
“I’ll call on Monday to see how school went, then.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath and considered whether to tell her about Bree’s campaign to get Charly to go to school with me. But what was the point? Charly just had to think it through for a minute and then she’d remember that she’d hated school since fifth grade. A semester at home was the only thing about being pregnant that didn’t totally suck for her. “Bye, Grandma.”
Grandma hung up.
“Does she seem like Mom?” Charly whispered.
I glanced toward the closed bathroom, then shook my head at Charly. “Why would you even ask that? You know I don’t remember Mom.”
“Yeah, but I thought maybe meeting Bree would remind you of something, you know? Jog your memory.”
“I was two.”
Charly didn’t respond, just turned away.
• • •
“Mind if I smoke?” Bree asked as we left the apartment.
“No, go ahead,” Charly said.
Great. I wondered how long it would take for my pink lungs to turn tar black from secondhand smoke.
“Thanks. Richard would freak if I smoked in the apartment. He kind of thinks I quit last year. I did quit last year, I just still occasionally need a cigarette. Like a few times a day.”
Charly nodded sympathetically.
I cleared my throat. “Sorry, but I’m pretty sure secondhand smoke is bad for the baby.”
“Oh.” Bree looked at the cigarette in her hand like this was the first time she’d been told it was toxic.
“It’s okay,” Charly said. “Just stand downwind.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. No biggie.”
Bree looked to Charly, then at the cigarette, then to me. “No, it’s okay. I’ll have one later. You know, I should probably just quit for real. Yeah, I’ll quit for real.”
Denial to quasi-resolve in seconds. Impressive.
I turned away from both of them and started down the stairwell to the sidewalk, gripping the ice-cold railing on both sides. The steps were steep and a beautiful thought bubbled up from my subconscious: Grandma would let me come home if I broke my leg. Maybe. But maybe not. A broken back definitely, but that was a little extreme.
Behind me, Charly started whistling the theme song from Moulin Rouge. Bree joined in with the harmony. I sped up.
Banff Avenue was different by day. The air was so blindingly bright it stung my eyes. I stepped out onto the sidewalk and turned a slow circle. The street was wide. So were the sidewalks, and glimmering snowbanks edged them both. Everything was white-crusted, like gingerbread house icing had been piped over every surface and into every crack.
“It’s warmer,” Charly said, and I realized she was right. I was cold, not in pain.
Charly reached down to dig her fingers into the snow.
“It’ll chinook for the next couple of days,” Bree said. “Enjoy it while it lasts. I’m parked just around the corner.” She pointed up the street and started walking.
“It’s like the North Pole,” Charly whispered behind me. “Minus Santa and the elves and the toys.”
And the joy.
The sky, for all its brightness, was too small. Huge mountains surrounded us, jagged walls of rock and ice, clawing at the sky. I’d never seen a real mountain before. It was disorienting, being enclosed by them, like being trapped inside that print Señora Lopez had hanging on her wall, the Salvador Dali maze, with stairs twisting and changing directions, floors becoming ceilings, doors opening up into nothingness.
“Amelia, touch it,” Charly begged.
Snow. It was everywhere. Packed hard beneath me, piled in mini-mountains along both sides of the street, hanging on store awnings, blanketing cars. In movies it floated around like heavy pollen, or like manna fluttering down from heaven for Moses. But the snow wasn’t falling.
I reached down and trailed my fingers over the bank to my right. “It feels like ice.”
“That is ice,” Bree said. She scooped up a handful of powder, then held it out to me. “I give you snow.”
I put out my hand and she dropped the snow into my palm. It was cold. And surprisingly wet. “Thanks.”
“Banff is your typical ski town,” Bree said. “Gift shop, restaurant, gift shop, restaurant, ski shop, restaurant. Or at least Banff Ave is that way. Off the side streets you get more residential.”
I glanced up the street of tourists shops, not yet open for business, except for what looked like a coffee shop. “Where’s school?”
“About a kilometer that way.” She pointed behind her.
A kilometer. I was pretty sure that was less than a mile, so probably walking distance, which was good since we had no car.
Bree let out a sigh. “Warm weather! I’ve been outside for two minutes and I can still feel my face.”
I shivered and pulled my hood up. It was still colder than Florida on our coldest day.
We turned the corner and I looked up at the church to the left. It was tall and white with a steep black roof and sharp angles. Anglican, according to the sign. Nothing like the sprawling brown brick of First Southern Methodist. Tomorrow Dad would be up at the pulpit and everybody else would be in their usual pews. Savannah’s family. Will’s family. Grandma would be sitting alone, but I couldn’t feel sorry for her. Nobody forced her to exile me to Siberia.
Dad always made a point of smiling at our row a couple of times per sermon. Maybe he’d do it tomorrow, out of habit. Or maybe just so everyone could see that he was thinking of his family. As usual.
“Ready to shop?” Bree called from up ahead. She was scraping frost off the windows of a sporty-looking silver Audi. Charly had already climbed into shotgun.
I stopped. My hand hurt
. I opened my fist and let the slush and ice drip through my fingers.
“Hurry up and get in already!” Charly yelled.
I obeyed.
Chapter 11
Shopping was a success, but only if success is defined by number of purchases made. If the definition has anything to do with enjoyment, or self-esteem, or bonding, shopping was a complete failure.
Bree had insisted on buying us two pairs of boots each.
Back at the apartment with boot boxes spread all over the floor, Charly was modeling a different boot on each foot.
“I think we should return a pair each,” I said.
“What?” Bree said. “You got some good deals. You’re just not used to the exchange rate.”
“But we don’t need two pairs.”
“You need at least two pairs. See, these ones you’ll want for when you’re going to actually be in the snow,” she said flipping the lid off the first pair I’d bought, some trendy-but-utilitarian fur-lined boots with pom-pom tassels.
“Oh yeah,” Charly said, “I love those ones on you.”
“Me too,” Bree continued, picking up the wedge-heel knee-highs. “And these ones won’t be quite as warm, but you can wear them with a skirt or pants, to school or wherever. And plus, they’re really sexy.”
They were. I’d never have picked them out on my own. “But it’s too much money. I mean, aren’t you saving up for school? Isn’t that why you’re bartending?”
I knew as I heard it come out of my mouth that I was crossing the boundary into none-of-my-business land, but Bree just laughed.
“First of all, this is Richard’s credit card, and he doesn’t care if I go out and blow five hundred dollars. It makes him feel like a man to buy me stuff to keep me happy. He’s weird like that. He’d pay for nursing school too if I let him.”
My mind spun like a fan, receipts blowing in every direction. Richard had funded our spree? Now we had to return the boots. It was bad enough when I’d thought it was Bree’s money. “These are going back,” I said, closing the lid on the wedge heels.
“No, they’re not. You’ll offend Richard.”
“He wants to pay for nursing school and you won’t let him?” Charly had stopped prancing around in the boots and was standing sideways, hands on hips, facing Bree. Still no baby bump. “Why not?”
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