Mac closes the book. “Three, four days tops.”
He’s excited. All he does, practically since they got there, is talk about that trip when he’s not at work. He hasn’t replaced Delilah’s bed yet. And there is still just a curtain for privacy in their honey-bucket room. It’s mostly Barrens this and Barrens that, especially when Will comes over. Mac is always showing Delilah rocks, explaining how they take samples for the company and some for themselves and then send them off to the labs when they get back. Cross their fingers and hope for the best. He said finding a mine is like finding a needle in a haystack. A gold vein in a million acres of rock. But still. It happens.
It’s curious to Delilah why her mother doesn’t seem to want Mac to go on this trip. Annie’s irritation with Mac’s plans is nothing new, but her sullenness confuses Delilah.
“Why can’t I come?” she asks her dad, hoping to lighten the mood. She’s already asked twice and been turned down because he doesn’t want her to miss school.
“Still no,” he tells her.
“I want to see the Barrens too. It sounds pretty.”
“It is pretty,” he says. “It’s beyond pretty. Takes your breath away. But we’re going to be working and—”
“Just take her,” Annie says. “What’s the big deal?” She pours some water from a jug into her cup and rinses it roughly. “One of us should be getting some adventure.”
“Well, you can come too,” Mac says. “There’s room in the plane. We could all go. I can ask Muddy . . .”
“No,” Annie says. She walks over and takes Delilah’s face in her hands, cradles it. Delilah can smell Sunlight soap. Annie kisses her on the cheek. “Just take the little bird.”
She leaves the room. Her camera is on the table, lenses lined up as though they’re waiting for something important to happen. Annie’s restlessness waves like a small red flag in the back of Delilah’s mind.
DELILAH IS CHOPPING VEGETABLES with Will at Jethro and Mary Ellen’s. Jethro and Mac are outside by the lake looking at Jethro’s canoe. He made it himself, so Mac wanted to see it. He said he wanted to make his own one day, which was news to Delilah. Mary Ellen is showing Annie her small garden plots in front of the house, still withered and dead from the summer before. She had led Annie out of the house by the hand like a child.
Delilah likes it here. It’s a cozy three-room shack, filled with what her mom would call junk. Piles of fishing rods and tackle boxes by the door. Cardboard boxes stacked on either side of the sagging plaid couch for end tables. A collection of stuffed animals and old dolls spilling off a shelf above an old TV. A cotton sheet hung clumsily in the window for a curtain.
Delilah transfers the carrots she’s been chopping to a large green plastic bowl and picks up a plump cucumber. “Slices or chunks?” she asks Will, who is rooting around in the refrigerator.
“All goes to the same place. Don’t think it matters, kid.”
She turns back to her cutting board, considering. Slices, she decides. She cuts thin pieces and carefully layers them over the carrots. It’s a rainy, cool day, and the cabin is filled with a warm earthy smell coming from the oven. Will opens it to check on dinner. She glances over and sees a big roast with root vegetables simmering in rich gravy.
“What kind of meat is that?” she asks.
“Moose,” he says, testing the roast with a charred wooden spoon. He slides the rack back into the oven and closes the door. “How’s that salad coming along? Never knew you were a vegetable artist. You got an exhibit coming up?”
She smiles and keeps slicing. Moose. She doesn’t know if she can eat a moose. But she doesn’t want to be rude. Would it make her gag? The thought of it makes her gag. It smells so good, though . . .
Will rinses a bunch of radishes in the plastic basin sink and then plunks them in front of Delilah. “You can make those into flowers or something.”
“I’m not that good,” she says.
“Practice makes perfect.” He leans against the plywood counter and takes a swig of beer, looking out over the lake through the window across the room.
“Hey, Will?”
“Yeah?” He’s still watching something. Delilah turns and sees it’s Jethro and her dad talking by the shore.
“What kind of feathers are those?” She points to a bunch of feathers, at least twenty of them, held together with ribbon and hanging in the corner above the front door.
“Duck,” he says.
“Duck?” This seems strange to her. Duck feathers don’t seem special enough to hang by your door. Eagles, maybe. Hawks. “Why are they there?”
“Clem collected them.”
“Who’s Clem?” She has started on the radishes, thicker slices so they crunch when you bite them, and they are so small they require concentration.
“My kid. Clementine.”
The radish slips from Delilah’s finger.
“Oh.” Clementine. She’s never heard her name. She likes it. It’s old-fashioned and sweet. “She likes feathers?”
“Yeah.” He sits at the rickety card table Jethro and Mary Ellen use as a kitchen table with his beer and picks up his tobacco. “Clem, she went through this phase once when she was two. Thought she was a duck. ‘Put your shoes on,’ I’d say, and she’d say, ‘Quack.’ ‘Don’t run in the kitchen,’ Sarah’d say, and Clem’d quack as she ran by. Went on for a week. ‘Your fault,’ Sarah told me. ‘Always taking her to see the ducks.’” He laughs and then pauses to lick the rolling paper and seal his cigarette. His Zippo flashes as he lights his smoke. Delilah is watching him, radishes forgotten.
“Lots of ducks at Frame Lake that spring. She watched them for hours, sitting still and quiet when they came peeping up from the water. She knew to be quiet. Seemed strange to me. Only two and she knew to be quiet.” He looks at Delilah as though he wants her to agree, to understand how special it was that she knew this. “Clem watched the mom and dad ducks flap their wings and send up a spray when another group of ducks came by. ‘Clem,’ I told her. ‘That mom and dad is just like your mom and dad. Keeping their babies safe.’ Kid didn’t say a thing until she got home and Sarah says, ‘What do you want for lunch? Macaroni?’ And Clem looks up and says, ‘Quack.’” Will laughs, a deep belly laugh. Then he shakes his head. Takes a drag as he looks out toward the lake. “She had this runny nose and these giant black eyes always looking somewhere else. Looking at you and then behind you. Beside you. Wants to see it all at once. Trying to figure it all out. She collected those feathers. Made us keep every one. Gave a bunch to Mary Ellen.”
Delilah is suddenly sad for Will and this big-eyed little girl. She wants to meet her. “When will you see her again?”
He stubs out his cigarette. “That is the million-dollar question, kid,” he says, his tone harder. “Been two years. Sarah keeps saying she’ll send her up for a visit, but then the plan always changes.”
“Can’t you go there?”
He stands. Takes another long sip of beer. “It’s complicated. You about done with those vegetable flowers or what?”
She knows this means he’s done talking about it now. She picks up a new radish and tries slicing tiny petals into its bright skin.
DELILAH IS READING Carrie by the bright evening June sun coming through the living room window in the green shack. She is curled in the easy chair by the cold wood stove, Etta James on the battery-powered record player, and Annie is absently strumming Mac’s battered old guitar, her back propped on a pillow against the arm of the couch, her bare feet in Mac’s lap. Mac is giving her a foot massage, something she sometimes demands. “Be a love,” she says in a bad English accent as she presses her feet into their laps.
Annie worked the dinner shift at the Wildcat Café in her platform velour boots, so her feet hurt. She brought home whitefish dinners and strawberry rhubarb pie wrapped in foil for their dinner. She seems happier now that she’s working, and she takes as many shifts as possible.
“I know a good one,” Annie says.
/> “A good what?” Mac asks. Delilah turns the page. It’s the part at the farm with the pig and the bucket and the spurting blood. Her stomach, full of lemony fish and sweet pie, lurches.
“Thunder Bay,” Annie says, strumming gently on the guitar. She can’t play. Not any real songs, at least. Delilah has never seen her try to play a real song.
“What about it?” Mac asks.
“That night at the Chinese restaurant.”
Delilah senses tension and watches out of the corner of her eye as Mac releases Annie’s foot. It just sits there in his lap, pale and pretty, a thin silver chain looped daintily on her ankle. This is the most affectionate she has seen her parents since she and Annie arrived. She can’t think of the last time they were all there together. If her mom is home, Mac is usually working, and vice versa.
“Come on, Annie,” he says, like he’s trying to keep things light. Come on, Annie, let’s all get along.
“No, I’m just saying. You wanted an example, and that’s a good one. You said, ‘Give me some evidence that I make irresponsible decisions that affect the family.’” She’s mocking him, but her tone is mild. Delilah turns another page and pretends to read.
“It was not an irresponsible decision.” He sounds wounded. “It was a shitty situation, but I wasn’t trying to be irresponsible.”
Annie laughs, pulls her feet from his lap and sits up straight, setting the guitar against the arm of the couch. “Nobody tries to be irresponsible. It’s not something people set out to do when they wake up in the morning. Delilah, do you remember that night in the Chinese restaurant?”
“Annie, come on,” Mac says.
Delilah rolls her eyes behind her book. She doesn’t want to be involved. Annie won’t back down until she wins, and she always tries to drag Delilah in as a witness.
“No, I’m just wondering,” Annie says. “She was three, so she might remember. I’m not persecuting you here, Mac, I’m just trying to give you some evidence. That’s what you were asking for. Delilah? Do you remember?”
Delilah sets her book down, a flicker of anger twitching in her belly. She isn’t sure how to answer. Saying no might help her dad, which she would rather do, if she has to choose. Saying yes might too, if she actually remembered and could say it wasn’t bad, whatever it was. But she could easily be caught in the lie. “No,” she says.
Annie tucks her long legs under her, her white cotton skirt flowing to the grubby shag carpet on the floor. “No? Well, it wasn’t the end of the world. But I thought you might remember.”
Mac lights a smoke and leans back, looking weary.
“So we were living in Thunder Bay, and it was winter and you were three. Your dad had this truck. An old Ford truck from the forties. He loved that truck. Didn’t you love that truck?”
Mac doesn’t answer, taking a long drag and looking out at the slowly sinking sun. It’s around ten-thirty. Delilah wants to go to bed, but she feels cornered.
“He loved that truck. But it broke down all the time. Almost every time he went to start it, he had to go jiggle the battery cables and run back and forth until it started. We didn’t go out much, you and me, Delilah, because we didn’t know anyone there, and it was winter and it was viciously, unrelentingly cold. Your dad would go to work with this man, Gord, building a new Burger King or something downtown, and we didn’t go out much. But this one night we had to do laundry, and your dad had to go help Gord move. Because his wife kicked him out. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” Mac says. He’s resigned, Delilah can tell, because he knows she will tell the story whether he wants her to or not.
“So he says, ‘I’ll take you to the laundromat, and you can do the laundry while I help Gord.’ There was a Chinese restaurant beside the laundromat, and I thought it would be fun for you and me to go have some sweet-and-sour chicken balls while we waited. As a treat.”
A memory trickles into Delilah—a street light with snow falling around it, swirling down as she looked up, the flakes touching down delicately on her eyes as she blinked them away. A plate of sticky sweet chicken balls, her mother licking sauce from Delilah’s pinky finger like a cat, both of them giggling.
“So we do the laundry, we have our chicken balls, but your dad doesn’t come.”
“Annie. Things happen. Cars break down.”
“We wait with our big garbage bag of folded clothes in the restaurant, and the staff is getting antsy because they are supposed to close. It’s nine, and he was supposed to be there at seven-thirty. And we don’t have any money for a cab because we spent all our quarters at the laundromat. And there’s a blizzard outside. A snowstorm. We live three miles away.”
Delilah remembers being cold, remembers looking down at her pink snowsuit under that street light, watching the snow settle on it in tiny gentle drifts. She doesn’t know if this was before or after the chicken balls. She doesn’t even know if it was that night. She doesn’t remember being worried or scared or upset that her dad had forgotten them.
“There was nothing I could do,” Mac says. “It was ten years ago. I apologized. Profusely. I felt terrible.” He stabs his cigarette out in the ashtray on the steamer trunk they use as a coffee table. “You got home safely. Nobody died, Annie. This isn’t some story that proves I make terrible decisions designed to somehow hurt you and ruin your life. I love you. Everything I do is for you and Del—”
“Who said anything about ruining my life?” Annie says. “I’m capable of making sure my life isn’t ruined by you or anyone else. No, you asked for an example of irresponsible behaviour because you don’t seem to think that spending all your free time on some wild goose chase with Will looking for gold in the Barrens is irresponsible. Or the fishing boat you wanted to buy in Vancouver. Or the barge you wanted to build on the Great Lakes.”
Delilah has heard this list of wrongs her dad has committed before. That’s nothing new. But being stranded in Thunder Bay in a snowstorm . . . this is new. “Wait, what happened to us that night?” Delilah asks.
They both turn to her.
“What happened?” Annie says. “We borrowed tip money from the waitress and took a cab.”
Mac shakes his head. “I was frantic,” he says to Delilah. “I was going out of my mind. I could not get that goddamned truck to start, and I was going out of my mind. The cab took half an hour to get to me because of the storm, and by the time I got to the restaurant you were gone.”
“I told you to get it fixed. Four times,” Annie says.
“You were safe,” he says to Delilah. “You were okay.”
She nods, slowly, trying to understand. Trying to remember. Was she upset? Did she even know?
“I will always be safe and okay,” Annie says, her voice rising, the pleasantness gone.
He was talking to me, Delilah thinks.
“But you go from one thing to the next blindly, one town to the next, always with a different agenda, and it always fails. You don’t think about consequences.”
“Me?” he says, and Delilah inwardly rejoices that he is finally angry. “Was it my decision to leave Regina because the art scene was better in Winnipeg when I had a good paying union job? Was it my decision to leave Winnipeg for Toronto because they had a fucking vegetarian co-op housing project you wanted to live in?”
“Yes, because our quality of life is what matters to me,” Annie says. “How we live, not whatever shitty job you manage to get to pay the bills. I don’t want to live in some isolated apartment in a high-rise because you have a union job and can afford to go out and buy fancy new shoes for Delilah or take us to the Four Seasons for dinner. I had that life. I grew up with that life. I was given diamond earrings for my twelfth birthday when what I wanted, what I really needed, was some recognition. To be seen. Do you understand that? Do you get it? I don’t want that kind of life. Meaning well doesn’t make you a good person. Doing good things makes you a good person. It’s a lot harder to do good things.”
Doing good things? Delil
ah thinks. Being a good person? Is she for real? Marcel’s final words to Annie flood back into her mind. Witch . . . liar . . .
“What, so now I’m not a good person?” Mac sounds stunned, injured.
“I don’t want to be here,” Annie says, frustrated now. “This is not my home. I keep trying to tell you I don’t fit in here, and you keep telling me to give it time, but time isn’t going to change how I feel.”
What? Annie wants to leave? This is the first Delilah has heard of this, and her heart sinks like a cold stone. Unlike any other time she has been told they might be moving, this time she feels something close to panic.
“I’m not leaving,” she says, surprising herself, her book shaking in her hand. Annie and her father look over, startled. “I’m staying here.”
“Of course not, little bird,” her mother says. “We’re not leaving right now. But this was never a permanent move. That was never the plan. And I’m just trying to express myself, that’s all. I have a right to express myself.”
“Why can’t it be a permanent move?” Mac asks. “We could buy a house here. I know you don’t like it now, but you haven’t been here long. Give it a chance. I don’t understand why you give up on places so quickly.”
Delilah is frozen in place. She wants to leave the room, but she doesn’t want to miss anything.
“The fact that you don’t know that is the problem, Mac. The fact that you don’t know what makes a home.”
“But we keep trying to create them, and you keep wanting to leave them.”
Annie leans forward, her features tightening with gathering rage. “You left me alone in Vancouver with our child. I had to do everything. Make all the decisions, do all the work, and all while I was trying to go to school. Do you know how hard that is? How many sleepless nights I had from worry and exhaustion?”
Delilah almost laughs in disbelief. Alone? She finally gets up and walks out because if she has to listen to one more word, she will hurl her book across the room. She goes into her bedroom and pulls the blanket across her door frame, wishing she had a door so she could slam it.
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