by G. S. Wiley
Paul blinked. Although his father had been a lifelong police officer, he’d always been soft-spoken. Paul had never heard him swear.
“Then he released me without charge. Seems stupid, I know, but that really made me think. I didn’t change overnight or anything, but a year later, I applied to university. So he really changed my life.”
“That’s good.” Paul wasn’t sure what else to say.
Regina wasn’t the most walkable of cities. To be fair, Up Up and Away, off Albert Street, wasn’t in the most walkable of neighborhoods. After half an hour, Paul and Dylan went back to wait in the van. Dylan told Paul what had happened to their classmates. Most still lived in the area, although a couple had gone to Calgary, and Connor Boyko, cousin of Kim’s husband, Jeff, had made it as far as Edmonton. Less exotically, Daisy McLaughlin had gone to Saskatoon, although she was back in Liddon now.
“We were engaged for a while,” Dylan said, a smile on his face.
“You and Daisy?”
Dylan nodded. “It took me some time to figure things out. I was always jealous of you that way.”
“Jealous?”
“Yeah. You always knew who you were. You seemed to, anyway.” Dylan looked over. “That night, when we graduated—”
“We should check back,” Paul interrupted, looking at the faded numerals on the dashboard clock. “With the balloons. She should be done by now.”
“Right. Of course.”
Dylan had been right about bringing the van. The balloon arch would have filled the Kia completely. As it was, Paul sat hunched over, balloons brushing the back of his head as they drove the straight, flat blacktop roads to Liddon.
The Legion building, with the restored RCAF Spitfire on a pedestal out front and the C in Royal Canadian Legion hanging at a ninety-degree angle, like a horseshoe, was the center of social life in Liddon. It had been for two generations. Potluck suppers, square dancing, bingo nights, movies. Even their high school graduation dance had been held in the hall. It had been decorated with purple streamers, Paul remembered, uselessly, and someone—possibly Daisy McLaughlin—drank too much vodka-spiked Kool-Aid punch and threw up on the pockmarked floor near the coat room. It hadn’t slowed her down.
Now, when they arrived, the hall was done out in gold and silver, a shimmering 100 hanging from the cracked old disco ball in the center of the room. Paul and Dylan maneuvered the balloon arch in through the narrow doorway, losing only a couple of balloons in the process. His sister was up a ladder, fixing twirling decorations to the walls.
“Oh, thank God for that.” She came down, her high heels balancing precariously on the rungs, and kissed Paul on the cheek. She looked the same as ever, mostly, although there were bags under her eyes and lines on her forehead he hadn’t seen before. “Can you just put it there, by the door?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Dylan pushed the archway to the indicated spot.
“This party has been a nightmare from the start. Did you know Nana wanted a string quartet to provide the music?”
“What?”
“Well, neither did I, until last night. She’s getting Charlie Rodgers on his electric keyboard. And you’ve heard about this ‘surprise,’ right?”
“You told me about it. She really has to make a huge announcement in front of everyone?”
“She wants the drama of it. You know what she’s like, Paul.”
He did, of course. He’d spent half his childhood being forced to write elaborate thank-you letters—in Ukrainian, sometimes, which was one torture piled atop another—for every Christmas present, birthday gift, or linty mint his grandmother pulled out of her pocket, lest she brand them “ungrateful” and spend a dramatic week or month refusing to visit. Personally, Paul had always quite liked the periods when they were in their grandmother’s bad books. Everything had been so much calmer when she wasn’t around.
“Where is she?”
“Mom’s bringing her down for one o’clock. You know she lives with Nana now, right?”
“Yes.” And better her than me had been Paul’s reaction to that.
A phone trilled somewhere in the room. “Shit,” Kim said. “That’ll be Jenny from the Liddon Lookout.” She headed off in search of the phone, while Dylan came over from where he’d neatly positioned the balloon arch.
“I’m going to go pick up my parents,” he said. “Do you need anything?”
Paul could think of many answers to that. “A glass of wine, probably,” he said. “Or maybe a bottle would be safer.”
Dylan smiled. “I’ll buy you a drink when I get back.”
“Isn’t it an open bar?” Paul hoped so. Even if, as family, he would be expected to chip in for the bill later.
“Then I’ll get you a couple,” Dylan promised. With a wave, he left, and Paul leaned against a table to wait.
Apart from a few abortive attempts at Skype and the occasional picture sent by Paul’s mother, Paul hadn’t seen his grandmother in twenty years. He wasn’t sure how he expected her to look, given that she was now a hundred years old, but she hadn’t really changed since she was eighty. She came into the legion hall leaning heavily on Paul’s mother, who smiled when she saw him. Nana just peered at him, as if he was someone she once knew. She wasn’t suffering from dementia, he was sure of that, which meant she was just being herself.
“Pavel?”
Paul sighed inwardly at the name, but he kept smiling. “Happy birthday, Nana. Congratulations.” He leaned forward to kiss her cheek. Her skin felt like paper, and it left a faint powdery sensation on his lips.
“Do you have a boyfriend yet?”
Paul looked at his mother. She shrugged at him. Her eyes were apologetic, but as always, she did nothing. “No, Nana.”
Nana harrumphed. “Is there something wrong with you?” She paused for an answer, as if that was a genuine question.
Paul gritted his teeth. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Man of your age should have a boyfriend unless there’s something wrong with you. That boy at the Gas and Go in Sandy Creek, we think he’s gay, don’t we, Natalia?” She glanced at Paul’s mother but gave her no chance to answer. “You should go down there, see if he’s single before someone else gets to him.”
“Thank you for the tip.”
Nana nodded, as if she had just done Paul a significant favor. “Come on, Natalia. Show me where I’m sitting. I’m a hundred years old. I don’t need to be standing around like a fool.” She surged forward, dragging Paul’s mother behind her.
Slowly guests began to trickle in. Paul knew many of them, at least vaguely, from his childhood. There was Big Gary Phillips who ran the corner shop, along with his son, Little Gary, who was now well over six feet tall and built like a sumo wrestler in a Saskatchewan Roughriders jersey. There was Darrel-with-one-L Wilson, who had been skip on the curling team when, at his father’s insistence, the adolescent Paul made an effort to play a team sport. It lasted all of three weeks. Paul wasn’t sure Darrel-with-one-L ever recovered. There was Sarah Vovk and her parents, an ancient couple who, like Nana, had come from the Ukraine as children, and there was Jenny Wilson from the Liddon Lookout, who’d been two years behind Paul at school and showed up with a DSLR camera with a lens more suited to a Hollywood paparazzo than a small-town reporter.
“It’s all online these days,” Jenny said, when Paul expressed surprise the paper was still going. “We get over a hundred hits a month!”
Paul was astonished, however, to see how many people he didn’t recognize. Liddon wasn’t a place to which people moved. Dylan himself had said they’d closed down the school due to a lack of enrollment, but there were at least a dozen people here that Paul was certain he’d never seen before. Two of them, a very old Aboriginal man in a denim jacket and a slightly younger Aboriginal woman in a black cocktail dress, looked around anxiously when they came through the balloon arch, as if they weren’t sure they were in the right place.
“Excuse me.” The woman approached Paul. “Is this
Olena Kostyshyn’s birthday party?”
“Yes.” Stifling a sigh, Paul put on his best gallery owner persona and extended a hand. “I’m Paul, Olena’s grandson. I don’t believe we’ve met.”
“Minnie,” the woman said. “My father is Olena’s son.”
Paul wasn’t aware he was going deaf. “I’m sorry, her….”
“She put him up for adoption when he was born,” Minnie said easily, in the tone of someone who had explained this many times before. “They’ve only just found each other again.”
In his life and career, Paul had faced many situations in which he had to conceal his emotions. Disappointment, anger, surprise, even inappropriate happiness. He’d stifled them all with, he liked to think, the utmost in discreet professionalism. This time was no different.
He smiled, shook the woman’s hand, and said, “Very nice to meet you.” He extended his hand to the man and did the same. Then, suavely and calmly, Paul said, “If you’d excuse me,” and he went to find his sister.
Kim was in the corner talking to another old man, this one standing behind an electric keyboard. “I don’t care what you play,” she said, “just get on with it….” Turning to Paul, she trailed off. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I may,” Paul said, “have some idea what Nana’s surprise is going to be.”
“What?”
He couldn’t tell her. It wasn’t his place to blurt out something so potentially life changing.
“Just get Mom away from her.” He hadn’t seen his mother a lot lately, but he loved her too much to let her find out she had a secret half brother in front of a room full of people, like they were on some small-town Saskatchewan version of Maury. “I need to talk to Nana.”
Kim winced. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“No.” But he had to fall on his sword, for the good of the family.
Paul stopped by the bar to get a glass of wine before heading into the lion’s den. “It’s local,” the ancient woman behind the bar told him, handing over the plastic wineglass with one gnarled hand, her nails painted an eye-popping shade of red.
“Local? As in, made in Canada?” Paul and Cleo did a yearly tour of the wine regions of southern Ontario, an annual excuse to get drunk and complain about men somewhere else than Toronto.
“Made in Saskatchewan,” the woman replied, easily, as if this made perfect sense. “Near here.”
Paul eyed the wine. Well, he thought, I survived the Saskatchewan sushi. Hesitantly, he sipped. It was good enough.
With that to fortify him, he went over to Nana’s table. The buffet was open, a table of potluck dishes displayed in various sizes and colors of Tupperware containers. On Nana’s plate sat two fat cabbage rolls, smothered in tomato sauce, half-a-dozen pierogies, and a thick heel of bread. Paul got heartburn just looking at it, although until he was eighteen, this had been regular, if not daily, fare in his house. Paul was the only person he knew who actually lost weight when he moved away from home.
Kim had done her job. Their mother was over at the buffet table, helping Kim’s children load up their plates with pierogies. Clutching his wineglass, Paul took the empty fold-down chair beside his grandmother.
“I told you, Pavel,” she said, without greeting. “The boy at the Gas and Go. He might be a little on the young side for you, but maybe he’s looking for a sugar daddy.”
Paul barely kept himself from spitting wine over the cabbage rolls. He swallowed instead, wiping his lips inelegantly with the back of his hand. “He’ll be disappointed with me, then.”
“You’re too modest.” She made it sound like a severe personal shortcoming, something akin to alcoholism or petty thievery. “Natalia tells me your museum is doing very well.”
“It’s a gallery, Nana.” And it had been better, but he wasn’t there to talk about that. “Who are those two, over there?” He looked pointedly at Minnie and her father, sitting alone at the end of a long trestle table.
“Who?” Nana blinked myopically. “Big Gary and Little Gary? You remember them, surely. I know it’s been a long time since you abandoned us, but—”
“Not them.” He glanced over to the buffet, where his mother was still spooning sauce onto Kim’s daughter’s plate. He wasn’t about to point, so he said, “The Aboriginal woman and her father.”
“Oh. The Indians.”
“Nana….”
“That’s my son, John.” She speared a pierogi with her fork and raised it to her mouth, her arm moving painfully slowly.
“Your son?”
She nodded.
Paul took another long drink while she chewed, what seemed like a hundred times, then swallowed, her crepey neck shimmying with the motion. “Are you sure?”
“You think I don’t know my own child, Paul?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s just….”
“We had a DNA test done. My granddaughter Minnie organized it for us. That’s John’s daughter, over there.” She looked at him. “I never loved your grandfather. He was useless, thick as two short planks, and about as handsome as a horse’s ass.”
Paul choked.
“My parents made me marry him. The man I really loved was an Indian. John Running Deer. Beautiful black hair, strong, gorgeous. You’d have liked him.” She hesitated, although whether she expected Paul to agree with her, he couldn’t say. She carried on anyway, before he said anything. “We had our baby, little John, but it wasn’t like now, when you can marry anyone you like. Man, woman, Indian, black, doesn’t matter. I wish it had been like that then. I’d have married my handsome Indian and never looked back.” The fact that this would have eliminated Paul, not to mention his mother, from existence didn’t seem to weigh on her in the least. “They took my baby away from me. It was criminal. Ripped him away from his loving mother and shoved him at some poor Indian woman who already had half-a-dozen kids of her own. But it doesn’t matter now.” She drew herself up, squaring her shoulders. “Now we’re back together.”
“Okay.” Paul drained his glass and wished it wasn’t quite so tiny. “But, I mean, Nana, are you sure it’s a good idea to just announce it like that? I mean, I think Mom ought to know, at least, before everyone hears about it.”
“You think your mother doesn’t know?” Nana’s narrow penciled-on eyebrows drew together. “You think I’m that sort of terrible mother that I wouldn’t tell her about this?”
“I—I don’t know, I….”
“Your mother has known since she was sixteen years old.” Nana’s voice was instantly hard. Just like that, Paul was transported back to his childhood, to this severe, humorless woman becoming furious with him over something as innocuous, to his childish mind, as not wiping his feet when he came into the house, or leaving a window open overnight. “She’s the one who helped me find him. Natalia! Natalia!” Despite the reediness, Nana’s voice split easily through the party din. Paul’s mother turned to look. “Natalia, tviy syn obrazhaye mene.”
“I think I’ll just go to the washroom.” Paul stood and walked away as quickly as he could, without looking like he was afraid of a one-hundred-year-old woman, and without giving the Ukrainian speakers in attendance any more cause to stare.
Dylan was in the bathroom, pumping pink soap onto his hands from a dispenser. He looked up when Paul came in, meeting his gaze in the mirror. “You all right?”
“Just family.”
He laughed. “Tell me about it. My mother spent the entire ride over here asking me when I’m going to find someone.”
“Apparently there’s a guy at the Gas and Go who’s available.”
“Matt?” Dylan shook his head. “He’s in an online relationship with a guy in California. He’s saving up money to move out there.”
“Ah. Well, don’t tell my grandmother that.” Paul didn’t really have to use the toilet. He went into the lone stall anyway. Dylan switched on the ancient hand dryer. When the sound of the clattering machine and the whooshing air stopped, Paul flushed, needlessly, and
emerged.
Dylan was still there, studying a poster on the wall advertising the “Fall Fish Fry and Potluck Supper.” “Hey,” he said, turning to face Paul. “You feel like coming by my uncle’s place after the party? It’s changed a lot,” he added quickly. “It’s not that hole in the woods anymore.”
Paul hesitated. Dylan had grown up, obviously. They both had. But they’d never been friends as teenagers, and Paul wasn’t looking to make friends in Saskatchewan. He was looking to get this party over with, go back home, and never set foot in the province again.
“I won’t kiss you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I wasn’t,” Paul replied, before he realized Dylan was smiling.
“Think about it.” Dylan left without saying anything else. Strangely, not to mention stupidly, Paul felt a little disappointed at that.
The rest of the party was an endless round of speeches, from people Paul recognized and those he didn’t. When Jenny Wilson asked Nana what her secret was for reaching advanced old age, Nana replied, “Not answering stupid questions.” The guests laughed, even Jenny, but Paul knew she was being perfectly serious.
The cake was rolled out, a monstrosity with white icing beneath a forest of burning candles. “They couldn’t just get numeral candles?” Paul asked Kim, who winced as the ball of flame passed beneath the smoke detector. It didn’t go off.
Instead, the two old women pushing the cake parked it in front of Nana, who said, “I want my children to help me blow them out. Natalia.” Paul’s mother was at her side, as always. “John.”
Minnie helped her father up to the table at the front of the room. His stomach clenching, Paul waited for the inevitable murmurs to begin, for the whispers and the muttering and the staring. None of that happened. Nana took Natalia’s hand in one of hers and John’s in the other, and together, they blew on the candles. It barely made a dint. They tried again, and again.
Paul turned to his sister. “Did you know John is her son?”