“You said you had to entertain the friend’s kid. You didn’t say that her name was Patrick.”
She went from pink to red in about one second flat.
“I thought you’d get all upset if you knew I was hanging around with another guy all night,” she said.
She had that right. The worst part, though, was that she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me.
“Mike, I need my parents to relax a little,” she said. “I don’t need them to be watching me every second. You can’t call me at home anymore, okay?”
“Bet it’s not a problem if Patrick wants to call you,” I said.
She answered by not answering. I didn’t explode. I didn’t yell at her. I didn’t say anything. I just turned and walked over to where Vin and Sal were waiting. And, oh yeah, on the way there I plowed my foot so hard into the passenger door of a car, probably a teacher’s car, that the car alarm started to bleat. That’s when I ran. Vin and Sal caught up with me half a block later.
Billy wasn’t home when I got there, but a miracle had happened. The fridge had food in it. Actual non-beer food. There was a package of hot dogs, with an eight-pack of fresh buns in a plastic bag on the counter. There was a loaf of bread, a container of coleslaw, a carton of eggs, an unopened package of bacon, a jug of milk, a couple of oranges, and a store-made apple pie. A note, in Billy’s writing, was stuck to the fridge door. “Mike: Check the freezer,” it said. I did. Squat in the middle sat a container of ice cream. Not the cheap stuff, either, but one of those premium ice creams. I couldn’t help smiling. What Billy didn’t know about nutrition would fill a cookbook. But he tried. Well, sometimes he tried.
I fried some bacon and then a couple of eggs. I set the eggs on a slice of toast, topped them with bacon, and pressed on a second slice. I put it on a plate with a generous serving of coleslaw and carried it and a big glass of cold milk into the living room, where I flipped on the TV and sank into Billy’s recliner.
I had just eaten the last bite of my sandwich and washed it down with the last of the milk when someone knocked on the front door. Probably it was one of those gas salespeople or maybe one of those door-to-door religious types. But there was also a fraction of a chance it was Jen coming to apologize, which is what got me halfway to my feet. Before I got up all the way, I heard the door open. Good thing this wasn’t a bank. I had forgotten to lock up. I hadn’t even shut the inside door.
Someone called, “Hello?”
I set my plate and glass on the floor and poked my head out into the hall. When I saw who was standing in the doorway, I groaned.
“Well, well, Mr. McGill,” Riel said.
“What are you doing here?” I said. What I was thinking was, Are teachers even allowed to do this? Are they allowed to just show up at your house? Wasn’t there some kind of law?
Riel stepped into the hall and let the screen door clatter shut behind him, as if he’d been invited in, which he hadn’t been.
“I looked for you all day, Mr. McGill,” he said. He had a kind of lopsided way of smiling, but there was something behind it—and something in his eyes—that made me think he wasn’t smiling at all, at least, not all the way. “You want to know why?”
I shrugged. I wished he’d go away. I couldn’t believe he was even here, standing in my front hall, looking at me and looking all around at the same time.
“Apparently,” Riel said, “it’s not standard operating procedure at Eastdale Collegiate to send students home in the middle of the day to retrieve forgotten assignments. Ms. Rather and Mr. Gianneris—you know them, right?” Sure, I knew them. Ms. Rather was the principal. “They have this idea that if you send students—well, certain students—off school property during school hours and trust them to return, that you’re pretty much giving them a day off. Apparently they frown on that.”
“They give you a detention, too?” I said.
Riel grinned, like it was a fine joke. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, something like that. They slapped my wrist, that’s for sure.” He looked straight at me. He never blinked, and his eyes never skipped away, not even for a split second. It was like he was staring right into me, or like he was trying to, and it made me want to look somewhere else, except that if I did, I was pretty sure Riel would read something into it, nervousness or cowardice, and there was no way I was going to let him do that.
“You have that paper ready?” Riel said.
Hey, wait a minute! Teachers couldn’t just show up at your house after school hours and demand homework you owed them, could they?
“I, uh…”
“You what, Mr. McGill?”
Then there were more footsteps on the porch, and Billy shouldered his way through the door. Dan and Lew were with him. So was Carla, Billy’s current girlfriend, and some other girl I didn’t know.
“Hey, Mikey, what’s going on?” Billy said. He checked the expression on my face before turning to look at Riel. “Who are you and what are you doing in my house?” he said, puffing himself up so that he could feel taller than Riel, even if he couldn’t actually be taller. Billy was average height and tried to make himself taller by wearing boots with thick heels. Even then, Riel had a big advantage on him.
“I’m one of your nephew’s teachers,” Riel said.
Hold on! How did Riel know that Billy was my uncle? Most people assumed he was my big brother.
“Yeah?” Billy said. “And?” He was looking closely at Riel now and frowning. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that he knew Riel from somewhere, but was having trouble placing exactly where.
“Mike cut school on Friday,” Riel said. “Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t,” Billy said, his tone as somber as Riel’s. But he turned and winked at me.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Wyatt,” Riel said. He also knew that Billy and I had different last names, only by now I wasn’t surprised. I had it figured out. He must have gone into the school records. He must have read whatever was in my file. “But it’s your job to make sure that Mike attends school regularly, isn’t it?”
Billy had never liked it when my mom pointed out his responsibilities. He didn’t appreciate it any better when some teacher did the same thing. He took a step toward Riel. I think he was trying to appear menacing—or something.
“Look, Mr.—” He waited for Riel to fill in the blank.
“Riel. John Riel.”
You could almost track the progress of the name as it entered Billy’s ears—no particular expression on his face at first—then traveled along his nervous system into his brain. Bingo! The name got processed, and a signal went to Billy’s eyes and the muscles around them, and to his mouth. He didn’t look mad anymore. He didn’t look like he was a hair’s breadth from introducing the history teacher to the front door. Instead, he looked surprised. He leaned in to have a closer look at Riel. Then, slowly, he started to nod. Surprise gave way to amusement.
“Yeah,” Billy said. “Now I’ve got it. Well, we’ve got things pretty much under control here, Mr. Riel, so thanks for your concern. Now, if you don’t mind, I just put in a hard day at work, and I haven’t had my supper yet.” He nodded toward the door.
Riel didn’t move. Instead he turned to me.
“What would your mother think,” he said, “if she knew you were blowing off assignments and cutting classes?” He didn’t wait for an answer, which was good, because I wasn’t planning to give him one. “I want that essay on my desk first thing tomorrow morning, you got that?” Riel said. “If it’s not there, I’ll give you a detention—and I’ll do it at my convenience, not yours.”
Before I could say anything—and I wasn’t even sure I was going to say anything—Billy ducked around Riel and opened the screen door.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s it. You’re out of here.”
Riel held my eyes a heartbeat longer. Before he let go he said, “I’ll be expecting that paper.” Then he turned and moved past Billy, not elbowing him out of the way exactly, but taking up so much s
pace that Billy had to flatten himself against the wall to stay clear. Dan and Lew didn’t move back as fast. In fact, for a few seconds, it looked like they were going to start something. They were a couple of big kids, just like Billy. Thought they were so cool. Thought they were so tough. Sometimes I just had to laugh.
Riel stopped. He didn’t say a word, but he must have given them that steely teacher look of his because Dan and Lew backed up until they were outside on the porch. Riel loped through the door and didn’t look back as he made his way down the steps and to the street. Billy watched him go. He chuckled when Dan and Lew came back inside.
“Thanks for backing me up, guys,” he said.
Dan shrugged.
“They’re not making teachers like they used to,” he said. “That guy looks like he could really do a number on you.”
Lew nodded.
Billy turned to me, shaking his head in admiration.
“Jeez, what kind of trouble did you get into at school that they’re sending teachers home to check up on you?” he said.
“He knows you,” I said, “and you know him. How come?”
“He’s a cop,” Billy said. Then, “Was a cop.” He laughed. “Jeez, the guy’s teaching school now? What, phys. ed?”
“History,” I said. “What kind of cop?”
“We still got some ice cream?”
I nodded and followed Billy into the kitchen. Dan and Lew and the girls went into the living room.
“What kind of cop?” I asked again.
“Detective,” Billy said. “Homicide.” He opened the freezer, grabbed the ice cream container, and carried it to the counter. “Heard he retired, though.”
“Hey, Bill! Get your butt and some beer in here, will you?” It was Dan. He was always ordering people around. Always with a smile, though, so you actually wanted to do what he told you to do.
“Yeah, yeah, give me a minute with the kid,” Billy called back. He scooped some beers out of the fridge. “Jeez, the guy’s teaching school now!” He laughed as he flipped the lid off the ice cream and started eating it right out of the container.
“How come you know him?”
“You really don’t recognize him, huh?” Billy said.
“Me? Why I would recognize him?”
Billy pulled another spoon out of the drawer and handed it to me. “Riel looked into things after Nancy died,” he said.
I dug my spoon into the ice cream, even though I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t want to think about cops and my mom and the hit-and-run driver who had killed her and left her lying in the street, dying, then dead. And, no, I didn’t recognize Riel. Didn’t, or didn’t want to.
Billy ate most of the ice cream, then grabbed some beers and carried them into the living room. Someone cranked up the stereo, ear splittingly loud. The party had begun.
I carried my backpack out onto the porch. Okay, so I could write my history paper or not write it. Besides history, I had some math homework, and my math teacher—I’d had her last year, too—assigned extra pages anytime you didn’t hand in your homework on time. I also had a science lab to write up. I stared out at the tired-looking houses opposite ours. It was funny how streets were. Walk one block over and you’d see houses that were all painted up or had siding or brickwork that was well looked after. Turn the corner and the houses facing the park were bigger and had newer, more expensive cars in their driveways. But my little street? It was a down-and-out street where the paint was peeling, the porches sagged, and the grass looked crabby all summer. I told myself that I didn’t care.
Riel wanted a five-hundred-word paper on the importance of immigration to the development of Canada. “All the information you need is in chapter two,” he had said. “But don’t even think about copying so much as one sentence directly. I spent my summer reading that book, people. I know every word in it.”
Five hundred words. That was two full pages. I opened my textbook and tried to make myself concentrate. But all I could think was, Riel had been a cop. Riel had investigated Mom’s death. He knew who I was because he had met me after Mom died. Maybe he had come to the house. He must have, if he recognized me. But I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember much about the days following Mom’s death, except going to the funeral parlor with Billy. I remembered looking into the coffin, even though Billy hadn’t wanted me to.
“You’re going to give yourself nightmares, Mikey,” Billy said. But I looked anyway, and so did Billy. He laid a hand against Mom’s cold cheek. I didn’t touch her. I just looked at her. It wasn’t creepy at all. She didn’t look 100 percent like Mom, but she looked enough like her that I had started to cry, silently at first, trying to be a man like Billy had said, until I realized that even though she looked like she was sleeping, she wasn’t really. She was never going to open her eyes. She was never going to look at me again or kiss me or make fried chicken for me. Then, just like that, my shoulders started to shake and I started to sob—great, wracking noises that came from somewhere deep, deep inside and that made me shake and shudder all over.
I remembered a few things from after the funeral. I remembered how quiet it was in the house without Mom humming and rattling pans and running the vacuum cleaner. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was dust. I remembered how the whole smell of the house changed—no more fragrance of Mom’s hand cream and face cream and cologne. No aroma of roast chicken or meatloaf cooking in the oven. No fresh pie smells or fresh cookie smells. I remembered how cluttered it seemed, too, without Mom picking things up and putting them back in the cupboards or closets or drawers where they belonged. I remembered Billy and Kathy going through all Mom’s stuff, putting her clothes in green garbage bags, piling them into Billy’s car and taking them to Goodwill. I remember Billy sorting through her dresser where she kept her special things—our birth certificates, her insurance papers, a picture of my dad, the little bit of jewelry that she owned. I remembered people coming and going. Kathy spent a lot of time at the house, until one night when Billy yelled at her—again—because she had showed up late when she had promised to babysit and made Billy late for some appointment he had. There’d been a big blowout that day and Kathy had never come back. I remembered visits from Mom’s friends. Almost all of them brought food. I remembered some of them sitting in the kitchen with Billy, drinking coffee and talking in low voices, and I remember that Billy was always in a bad mood when they left.
“What do you think?” he said to me after one visit. “Do you want me to farm you out to some decent family, or do you want to stay with me?”
I was stunned that Billy had even asked. I had started to cry again, thinking that Billy didn’t want me, and Billy had teased me, saying if I kept on acting like a girl, he was going to send me to live somewhere else for sure. Then, I’m not sure why, he suddenly stopped kidding and he hugged me real tight—not a pal hug, like guys do sometimes, but a clinging-to-me hug.
“Hey, Mikey, I was just kidding. We’re like brothers, right? I’d never send you away. Never.”
Maybe there had been cops in the house, too. Maybe one or two or more of the nights when Billy had been sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee and talking low, maybe he had been talking to a cop. But if he had, he never said anything about it to me, and they never found the guy who had run Mom down and left her in the middle of the street.
I stared at my textbook.
“What would your mother think if she knew you were blowing off assignments and cutting classes?” Riel had asked.
She wouldn’t be happy, that was for sure. She wouldn’t be happy about the way anything was going in my life—not the grades I was making, not the comments that accompanied those grades on my report card. Needs to make more effort. Needs to complete assignments. Needs to pay attention.
Yeah, but so what? She wasn’t here, and I didn’t care about school. It was stupid. History was history, who cared about it? What was I going to do with algebra and geometry? What did chemistry matter to my life? And what was the d
eal with French, anyway? It wasn’t like I was ever going to live in Quebec or in some French-speaking country. So what was the point?
Still, I didn’t need any more grief. Not this early in the year. And, okay, so maybe I wasn’t going to be a brain surgeon, but even I knew that you pretty much needed a high school diploma these days. I had heard that even the auto plants were demanding it. For some jobs, they wanted you to have more education. So maybe high school was like vegetables. “You don’t have to like broccoli, Michael,” Mom used to say, “but you do have to eat it.” You had to eat it because it was good for you. You had to get through high school so that you didn’t end up a shelf stocker down at Mr. Scorza’s grocery store for the rest of your life.
So, fine, I read the stupid chapter in the textbook, and I wrote the stupid five hundred words, counting them carefully, throwing in a few therefores and a handful of for this reasons to get the right word count. I was folding the paper into my history textbook and reaching for my math assignment when I heard someone whistle. It was a distinctive whistle, like a bird chirping—a Vin whistle.
I spotted Vin and Sal down on the sidewalk. I ditched my math book and joined them.
“We figured you needed cheering up,” Vin said. “Come on.”
I glanced back at the porch. I thought about my math teacher and all the extra work she would load on me if I showed up without my assignment done. Then I heard the vintage Rush sounds that were blasting from the house. Roll the bones. Take a chance.
“Hang on a sec,” I said. I ran up to the house and shouted at Billy that I was going out for a while. I don’t know whether he heard me or not. Either way, he probably wouldn’t have cared.
We headed down to the park first. There were quite a few kids there—big kids, kids from our school and kids from the Catholic school right next to the park. Some guys were shooting hoops in the dark. A bunch of girls hung out on the sidelines, watching, listening to music from a boom box, a couple of them were sort of dancing. There was another bunch of kids over on the play-ground—girls swinging on the swings, shrieking their way down the kiddie slides, a guy and a girl on a seesaw, him mostly keeping her up in the air.
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