The Ambassador of What

by Adrian Michael Kelly

  In the quivering side mirror I saw some townies spilling from the hotel. It was now the kind of place with pissy draught and strung-out peelers, but I remembered the Sunday smorgasbords. My father in his Black Watch blazer. The mystery of cocktails. Dim light glinting in polished brass and silverware. At the end of the line, where the man in white presided with carving knife and prong over a shank of bleeding meat, my mother always asked for the heel. On her napkin and on the rim of her glass, on the ends of her Dunhill Lights, the rosy imprint of her lips. These days, she was living with her fourth husband (an invalid ex-army captain) out in a Calgary trailer park.

  The townies now were ambling past. One of them waved and shouted a greeting at my father. He did not return it. Revved the van hard. Found first. Released the clutch. With tugboat slowness we heaved into traffic.

  II

  My father watched the road like a foe. Just past the bridge crossing Trent River, a silvery Honda Prelude pulled out to pass, and as it glided by us the clean-cut driver sounded his horn.

  “Know him?” I said.

  “Played hockey with you.”

  “Didn’t recognize.”

  “Doherty. Sean.”

  I remembered loud dressing rooms and the strawlike smell of a farm kid. Floppy red bangs and squeaky Lange skates. Feigning interest, I said, “What’s he up to now?”

  “Full time on the ambulance.”

  “Your partner?”

  “Was. I’m back down to part-time.”

  I looked out the window. Watched the ditch.

  “See these places?” my father said, pointing here and there at red-brick green-shingled farm houses. “Bein bought up. People from Toronto. ‘Summer homes,’ they call them. Palaces, more like.”

  I nodded.

  “Should see the insides. Gut the lot. Full renos.”

  I nodded.

  “Anyway. I can go into one of those places, and,” he jabbed his finger at an invisible accuser, “it’s twenty bucks an hour, boyo.”

  “Good,” I said, and that was all. Here was our turn. My father whacked the blinker. Far ahead, the taillights of the Prelude disappeared around a bend.

  On the bus, I had refused the reeking piss-splashed toilet, and now, as we veered right at the fork in the road, my bowels wrung. Around us, forest thickened and evergreens swayed in squall. Again, my innards twisted as the van jounced down my father’s rutted lane. Flagstones leading to his bone-white hut wobbled underfoot, so I walked instead on the sodden oak and maple leaves carpeting the lawn. In the back door window there hung a white wooden goose with a smiling yellow bill and beady black eye. Beneath its feet, a pale blue banner read WELCOME in grandmotherly white writing. It clacked against the glass as my father stepped forward and shoved the door open.

  The kitchen carpet—mustard with a busy black pattern—had always been grimy, but now it had the look of old scraps put down in a playhouse. Over in the sink, unwashed dishes heaped. A kerosene heater with a half pot of water on top stood in the doorway to my father’s bedroom, and an opaque plastic tub with a spigot squatted on the kitchen counter.

  Two strides took me to the room he called mine. There, I dropped the knapsack. Flicked the light switch. Four or five times I flicked it, then I slouched in the doorway, one hand on the jamb.

  “Come and I’ll show you,” my father said.

  I followed him past the useless fridge—cases of empties stacked up its side—and into the living room. On the fold-out table amidst more unopened mail stood this midgety tree, the kind that comes with the lights attached. My father was pointing. A yellow extension cord. It came in at the side door and through the orange-brown shag it ran to the standing lamp and bulky Zenith at the far end of the room.

  “Where,” I said, “does it come from?”

  “Old missus next door.”

  “She doesn’t mind?”

  “Doesn’t know. Sit yourself down, now, I’ll get the heat on.”

  I said only, “Toilet.”

  He said, “One or two?”

  I looked at him.

  From the washroom he returned with a dark brown bucket. I stood at the front door and watched him lope down to the river. How would we eat? The hospital maybe. He dunked the bucket. Some woman’s apartment. Her relatives and us. He lifted the bucket in one hand, and, in the other, six glistening tins of Molson Export.

  Reaching into the breastpocket of my blazer, I fingered the return bus ticket redeemable in—I checked my watch—less than sixteen hours. Then I held the door open for my father and accepted the sloshing bucket.

  “Remember?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, and he followed me through to the kitchen, where he whistled and opened drawers and cupboards while I was in the washroom. Some of the water I saved for my hands. A brand-new bar of Pears transparent soap lay to the left of the taps, and the hand towel, too, was fresh. On the shelf below the dusty mirror, my father’s comb and brush and razor, his bottle of British Sterling, had been placed with military precision. I ran a hand through my hair and appraised my beard a moment—it could still surprise me—then retrieved my blazer and my overcoat from the shower curtain rod. The blazer I put back on, the overcoat I tossed on the bed in the room where I would be sleeping. Leaning against the wall was a fake wooden frame I had failed to notice earlier. In the dim light, I looked closer. A copy of my M.A. I was trying to recall my father having one made when—“Son?”—he called to me from the living room.

  “Here, Dad.”

  “What you up to?”

  “Be right there.”

  In the living room my father was kneeling before the heater (the half pot of water still on top) and filling it from a blue plastic keg with a hose-and-bulb like a blood pressure cuff. “Sit yourself down,” he said. “I’ll just get this lit.”

  Beer effervesced in two tall glasses (the PetroCan Olympic ones) standing on the coffee table. Between them on a cutting board was a knife and a brick of crumbly white cheddar. I sat on the brown plaid sofa and watched as my father cranked the knob on the heater. A soft pop and its central cylinder began to glow orange-red. My father rubbed his rough hands hard and pushed his palms toward the grate. “Feel that, now, will you.” Then he sat in the matching chair opposite and nodded at the cheese. “Lovely, that. Six years old.” I nodded. Glass held high, he said, “To your health.”

  Sipping, I watched him over the rim. He gulped and then smacked his lips, but his hand was steady, and he set his glass down.

  “So. What’s new in Kingston?”

  “Plodding on.”

  “Up to Montreal?”

  “Not in two years.”

  “Habs are falling apart.”

  “Pretty busy at school.”

  “What have they got you readin?”

  “All of it seems to start with ‘post.’”

  “What in fuck does that mean?”

  “Not sure I know.”

  “Used to like it.”

  “School?”

  “Readin.”

  “Still do, sometimes.”

  We had some cheese—he closed his eyes and savoured it—and then washed it down and returned to talk of hockey. The Montreal Forum would be closing come March, and my father embellished the forgotten glories of Béliveau and the Gumper.

  Steam was now rising from the pot on the heater. I nodded at it. My father ran a hand up and down his stubble and said, “Needin a shave.”

  “We going out?”

  He grinned a little.

  “Who is she?”

  “Nothin like that.”

  “Where then?”

  “You wait and see.”

  I took off my blazer and moved farther down the couch. The room was becoming almost too warm, but the beer was good, and he stopped at two.

  III

  Wafting
over the kerosene now was the sharp, piney scent of my father’s British Sterling. Fresh-faced, he strode into the living room and said, “Right, then, kid. Time we were off.” An overcoat hung over his left arm, and he was wearing his Black Watch blazer. In the light of the standing lamp, its Brasso’d buttons glinted, and his buffed brogues shone.

  “Looking pretty sharp, Dad.”

  Feigning baronial airs, he tugged at his lapels and said, “Do crank off that heat, old fish. No point in burning down the place.” Before the mini-inferno I knelt and cranked its knob all the way to the left. My father switched off the standing lamp, and I followed his silhouette through the dark of the kitchen. In the bedroom I groped for my coat, and then outside we took slow steps until our eyes adjusted to the night. The sky had cleared and the wind had abated—low in the west was a young crescent moon—but the temperature was dropping. In the van, I watched the pluming of our breath and obliged my father’s palpable need to not tell me where we were going by asking him where we were going. He said, “Patience, lad,” and sat taller in his seat.

  We were climbing Airport Hill by now, and the struggling van dropped to forty as my father shifted from fourth to third. Then as we peaked and began to descend, he geared back up and stomped on the gas. The van quaked like a spacecraft commencing re-entry, and clutching the overhead handle I half expected quarter panels and fenders to tear free and go whirling out in the night. My father was laughing, and then he braked—braked hard—and flicked on the blinker. Ahead on the right was an old gas bar and diner. “She overheating?” I said, but my father didn’t answer and swung into the lot. There was one other car but the diner and gas bar both were unlit.

  My father cut the engine. I looked again at the darkened ramshackle diner, and then I looked at my father unbuckling his seat belt.

  “Dad.”

  “What you waitin on?”

  “It’s closed.”

  He began whistling and got out of the van. Slowly, I followed. Here was the place where my father and I had come umpteen times for toasted westerns and a dozen worms on our way to the lake, but in the big and silent dark it did not seem to me a place that anyone should enter.

  Running diagonally across the old screen door was a wooden bar that read Coca-Cola, and my father rapped on it. Without waiting, he opened the screen and the door behind and leaned in and called, “Hello the place!” Motioning to me, he stepped inside. Like a nervous thief, I followed. Down at the end of the coffee bar, light escaped a curtain drawn across the doorway that led to the kitchen. There used to be double doors there, and I remembered their whop and thud as waitresses answered the bing of a bell or came out plate-laden. Now, as my father called once more, a hand drew back the curtain and out stepped a woman in a white ruffled shirt and black bow tie. A big grin spread across her plump face, and my father stepped forward. “There she is. How are you, love?”

  “Just fine, thanks. That your son?”

  My father nodded.

  The woman walked to me—her eyes big and dancing—and took my hand in both of hers. “So nice to meet you.”

  I looked at my father and then back at her and said “Pleasure” too stiffly.

  Not a bit did it faze her. “Come on back,” she said, turning and walking toward the lighted doorway. My father gestured after her, and I followed the woman past the empty booths, each with their jukes. At the lighted doorway, she stood to the side.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I missed your name.”

  “Darlene, honey. But you call me Dee.”

  “All right, Dee.”

  “Now go on in,” she said, winking at my father.

  I took two uncertain steps and heard the breath escape me as though I’d just been gut-punched.

  Bigger bare tables had been pushed against the walls, but beneath the chandelier’s dazzle, there was a small one set for two. Its white and lilac linens matched the walls and trim of the room.

  I spun on my heels.

  In the doorway, Dee and my father were standing face to face, their elbows cupped lightly in one another’s palms. Dee still was grinning, but her face had flushed, and her eyes were wet. “No more fretting, now,” my father said, rubbing her upper arm. “It looks magic, love. It does.”

  Dee stepped back from him and snuffled and took a tissue from her pocket. “I just knew that I’d do this.”

  My father, meanwhile, had turned to me and was gesturing at the room. “What,” he said grandly, “do you think of this?”

  Think? There in the doorway to a darkened country diner stood a strange woman dabbing her eyes, and surrounding me was a pastel otherworld.

  “We’re eating here?” I said.

  My beaming father nodded.

  I looked at Dee. “Wasn’t this the kitchen?”

  “Used to be,” she nodded. “We built a new one just through there.”

  I followed her pointing finger. In the room’s far corner, there was a swinging door. A face appeared in its porthole window, and then the door swung inward: a lanky man in white.

  “Hey hey,” my father said.

  “’Ello, my friend!”

  He was fiftyish and bald, but wore a heavy blond-grey beard. He shook my father’s hand, and then they embraced (I had never seen my father hug another man) before regarding one another like relatives in airports. The man’s right eye was droopy, but his left was wide and glinting and focusing on me as he said, “Your boy?” The accent was French, but there was something else. An impediment. An epiglottal thickness.

  My father was nodding—proudly, he was nodding—and, excitedly, he said, “Son, this is Gabby.”

  The man pumped my hand and said, “Welcome, welcome! We ’ear so much about you.” Now he was clasping my shoulder as well. “Your father,” he said looking down. When he looked at me again, his good eye was wet. Letting go of my hand he said, “I am sorry.” Then he stepped back and flung his arms wide and smack went his heel on the floor. “So, what you think of my little bistro?”

  All the lilac seemed to me sickly, but I said, “Looks great.”

  “Your father, he do a good job.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay! Enough my talking. I see you later.” He looked at Dee. “They have the cocktails?”

  “Give them a chance to sit down, why don’t you.”

  “But of course, sit!” he said, thrusting his hands at the table. “We get you some drinks, and I make you a meal you’re never gonna forget!”

  On his way by, the man slapped my shoulder. Dee took our coats and drew back both chairs from the table. Sitting, I noticed a small menu card with calligraphic writing all in French. I had studied French. I had bandied terms like l’autre and il n’y a pas de hors-texte, but I could not understand or pronounce even in my head most of the words on the menu.

  “Now,” said Dee, “a cocktail to start, maybe Champagne?”

  Quickly, I said, “Just water will do.”

  “Sparkling?” she said. “Or do you like still?”

  “The kind,” I said, “that comes from a tap.” My father’s eyes were on me. I was able to meet them, and I felt both relieved and righteous when he told Dee that he’d wait for the wine.

  “I’ll bring you a list,” she said, clasping my shoulder on her way by.

  The swinging door behind me had not completed its motion when my father said, “Hey,” and toed me just beneath the knee.

  “What.”

  “They’re doin this for us.”

  Rubbing my knee I said, “The local charity cases.”

  His teeth bared, and I watched the fist begin to ball then relax as behind me the door swung inward. A moment later, Dee appeared. On her tray stood two slim glasses garnished with lemon twists and a gleaming blue bottle of spring water. In her right hand she carried a wine list. This she handed to my father, but he nodded at me as t
hough deferring to connoisseurship. As Dee filled the water glasses, I glanced over a panoply of mostly French wine. Some of the bottles topped a hundred bucks. Good. If my father had painted this place for our supper, then we would drink rich. But when Dee asked me, “See anything you like?” I could only look at her, plebian heat in my face. “Why don’t I serve you by the glass?” she said, explaining that a white would go better with our salads, while the main required a red. She ran through some suggestions, and her voice was so bell-like, her manner so authentic—so unlike some five-star snob—that my shame and my petulance melted.

  “How long have you had this place?”

  She grimaced a little, as though hiding a pain in her hip, and looked at my father. “What is it, now, handsome, almost a year?”

  My father nodded.

  I said, “Unique combination, diner and fine dining.”

  “Trying it out for now,” she said. “Gabby wants to tart the whole place up.”

  My father said, “No more flippin burgers.”

  “I don’t mind so much,” said Dee. “Whatever pays the bills.”

  Off she went—giving my shoulder another squeeze—and into the silence between my father and me I said, “Sorry. She seems nice.”

  “Tip to toe,” my father said and took a sip of his water.

  “How long have you known them?”

  “Since they bought the place. In for a coffee on my way to work. Know how it is. Get to talkin.”

  I nodded at the menu. “This Gabby’s a chef?”

  “Yeah,” said my father, “trained in Europe.”

  I lowered my voice. “Was it a stroke?”

  “Eh?”

  “Gabby,” I said, pointing to my eye.

  For a moment my father closed both of his, and after opening them again he looked over my shoulder and said, “Not now.” Dee had come in.

  From a small decanter she poured white wine into our glasses, and then she placed two salads before us. After saying the name in French, she listed the ingredients in English. Amidst the varied greens (one of them looked thistly), there was fennel and shavings of cheese and little orange wedges or maybe pink grapefruit. I don’t remember gourmet meals. I remember barbecues. I remember perch fillets. There were Cornish hens that night, I do remember that. Inside them was a mash of herbs and veg and bits of zingy sausage. On every course, as Dee presented it, and then again as she cleared our plates, my father and I lavished praise. We told her how we could taste the spices, and how the wine went well with them, but when she was out of the room, we masticated mouthfuls and handled our silverware as though encircled by sniggering snobs. What did we know of tannins and thyme? We knew liver. We knew leeks.