by Eva Crocker
Outside Needs I stopped and took out my wallet. No quarters. But I had a blue five-dollar bill. Inside the store was warm and bright; there was reggae playing. I took a bruised banana from a wicker basket by the checkout. The cashier had an Iron Maiden T-shirt on with a name tag pinned to it. Mary-Anne. She was baby-faced but the week before I’d seen her calmly lead an old drunk man out of the store by the elbow. The man was yelling, “He’s a cunt, he fucked me, fucked me over,” and the cashier was saying, “C’mon now, you know you can’t be yelling in here.”
“Just that?” she asked when I laid the banana on the counter. The countertop was see-through and in the compartment beneath the glass lotto tickets were fanned out in a colourful display. On one ticket a happy couple in white wool sweaters waved from the lawn of an enormous new house.
“Can I get some quarters in the change?” I asked.
My mother’s landline is the only phone number I know by heart. I put a quarter in the phone and listened to it drop into the guts of the machine. I pictured the coin landing on a pile of quarters, all dropped down there by desperate people.
My grandmother used to take me to the fountain in the middle of the Village Mall to toss a penny in. The fountain smelled of chlorine, spurts of water on a timer shot up at the ceiling, making the air around the fountain misty. I would climb up on the ledge and look down into the pool with a penny in my fist. Yellow lights shone up through the undulating surface: the tiled bottom was always almost completely covered in change. Some coins winked under the fluorescent lights; others had gone a dull, oxidized green. I wanted to stick my hands in and swish them around. I wasn’t allowed, even though it was only about a foot of water. No one was allowed to disturb the tossed coins. I would wind up my arm and fling my penny at the middle of the fountain. It would splish through the surface, then tumble in slow motion towards the bottom. The smell of copper would stay on my sweaty palm, wish residue.
I pressed the buttons on the phone. It rang three times. A young woman left the store with a six-pack, straight blond hair sticking out of either side of her hood. She smiled at me and I nodded, ashamed of what it meant to be on a pay phone, then ashamed of being ashamed. The space between rings stretched out and I worried it was going to voicemail but then the line engaged.
* * *
“What if it’s in the news?” my mom asked.
“I don’t think —” I started.
“It could be,” she said. “Just keep that in mind, be prepared. They’ll show the house and say the address.”
“Do they say the address? Really? They’re allowed?”
“They say the area at least.”
“I haven’t seen anyone out there. Like CBC or VOCM.”
“They might not come today. They’ll come when it’s a slow news day. Do you need me to come get you?”
I thought how nice it would be to sit in the warm car and be coddled, but my mom had a bad back. It was an old injury from being rear-ended in the mall parking lot two years ago. A week ago she’d bent to pick something off the floor, a sheet of paper that had shot out of the printer and glided across the floor of her cramped in-house office, and the old pain had reared up. My dad had to carry her out of the basement with her arms around his neck. For the past week she’d been lying on the couch, her feet propped on the armrest. Every few hours my dad microwaved a Magic Bag and she slowly wedged it under her hips.
“I’m going to the restaurant to see Viv now,” I told her.
“Come for dinner, your father will pick you up,” she said.
“I’m fine, I just wanted you to know I don’t have my phone.”
“You can help cook. Your father will come by at five. Don’t keep him waiting, have your coat on.”
When I hung up I peeled the banana. It was stiff and mealy with a couple of sickeningly soft spots where it’d been banged around. I walked down the street holding the empty skin by the stalk, the leathery strips of peel dancing in the air and slapping against each other. Halfway down Pilot’s Hill I dropped the skin in a slush puddle between the tire of a parked car and the curb.
* * *
At the restaurant I stepped around a family gathered around the wobbly “Please Wait To Be Seated” sign. Viv was walking through the restaurant with three oval dinner plates, one in each hand and another balanced on her forearm. There were a couple of empty deuces by the bathroom door. I edged back behind the family, letting them know I understood they were ahead of me. I watched Viv unload at a table of middle-aged men, confidently laying each plate in front of the person who’d ordered it.
When I’d worked at the restaurant, I’d been terrified every time I had to carry more than two large plates at once. And I always had to ask, “The turkey sandwich? And you had the club?” as I put the meals down. Viv had gotten me the job and every time I made a mistake, I felt like I was letting her down.
Once, I’d dropped a stack of cleared plates in the dining room. Nothing broke, but there was a loud crash, gravy splattered the floor, cutlery bounced under people’s tables. Everyone in the restaurant froze and some asshole called out, “You’re no ballerina, are ya?” I had to crouch to pick it all up with the whole room staring at me. Another waitress had rushed off to get a mop for the gravy.
A new server, maybe the girl they’d hired to replace me, led the family to a booth in the front and waved me towards the two-seater in the back. Table twelve. Viv was in the kitchen and didn’t know I was there yet.
“I’ll be right back to wipe this down for you,” the new server said. She had a tattoo on her neck of a disembodied hand holding a bouquet of wildflowers.
“It’s fine, I’m here to see Viv, can you tell her I’m here? I’m just going to have a coffee.”
“Vivian just started her break,” the girl said.
“Can you tell her I’m here?”
“When she gets back from her break.” The girl shifted her body so I could take in the busy dining room she’d been left to tend alone.
When she walked away I reached in my pocket for my phone. I thought for a second I’d lost it, then I remembered the cops still had it. The table was covered in spongy pancake crumbs and drips of maple syrup.
They’d done renovations since I worked there. They’d installed a propane fireplace and put in two new windows so they could advertise a harbour view. In the summer they put a wipeable sandwich board out front with “Harbour View” on one side and lunch specials on the other. Spelled out in swoopy letters with neon marker.
It was hard to judge how long I’d been sitting there because I didn’t have my phone to check the time. The new server came back with a slim mug of coffee and a tiny stainless-steel jug of milk. She pulled a cloth out of her apron and swept the crumbs on my table to the floor.
“Thank you.”
“She’ll be out in a minute.”
Just as she said it Viv emerged from the basement steps and came around the counter. Her orange hair glowed in the end-of-day light streaming through the new windows. Her golden eyelashes were lit up. She was wearing a long-sleeved black spandex dress that showed off her big breasts and wide hips. She swept through the middle of the restaurant with a pot of coffee, smiling and refilling people’s mugs as she went. I felt proud that she was my friend, that when she got to my table she would have a genuine smile for me, that she would shit-talk all these customers who thought she liked them to me later. There were two sharp rings of a bell and the other server took off towards the kitchen. When Viv got to my table I inhaled the smell of cigarettes on her.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“They still have my phone.” I bent my head to suck up some of the coffee and make room for milk. Tears were welling up in my eyes again. “Holly is acting like this thing with the cops is my fault.”
“I can’t really talk now. I’m sorry.”
“When are you off?” I dribbled milk
into my mug.
“I’m closing.”
An older lady eating a club sandwich raised two fingers at Viv from across the room.
“Can you come over after?”
“Probably, I’ll text you.”
“I don’t have a phone,” I reminded her.
“Fuck.”
“Ketchup?” the woman called.
“Come by,” I said as Viv walked away.
I finished my coffee and lifted my coat off the back of my chair. It was early afternoon but it would be dark soon, the days were so short this time of year. I could see a car on the other side of the harbour, winding its way up Southside Road. Bright lights on the dock made rippling, cone-shaped reflections on the water. I arrived at the counter at the same time as Viv finished her coffee run.
“Just the coffee?” She set the empty pot on the counter.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I pulled out my wallet and started flipping through receipts and movie tickets, looking for my bank card. It reminded me of shuffling through all these bits of paper and plastic the day before, when the cop had asked for my ID in my bedroom. My fingers had been stiff with panic then.
“Seriously, don’t worry about it,” Viv said.
“I want to pay — I don’t have cash, though.”
The coffee had made my saliva taste metallic and I was still shaky from the hangover and not sleeping. I took everything out of my wallet and tried sorting it in my hands, laying things on the counter.
“It’s fine.” Viv slid the coffee pot back into a machine beside the cash and flicked the illuminated switch. “Oh my god, put that away.”
“I broke Holly’s glasses.” I stuffed everything back into the leather pouch.
“On purpose?” Viv asked. “Oh, Stacey. That was stupid. Really fucking stupid. Glasses are expensive.”
The bell in the kitchen dinged twice.
“When are you off?” I asked.
“Around eleven, I have to get that.”
“Okay, will you come by?”
“Yeah, I’ll come by on my way home.”
“I can meet you here.”
The bell dinged again, three times. The other server was coming back down the centre aisle.
“No, just wait for me. If it’s dead I might get off early.” Viv pushed the swinging kitchen doors open. The other server rounded the counter. She pulled the half-filled coffee pot out of its slot and replaced it with an empty one. I walked out the steamed-up door into the empty street.
I took a left and walked up to the Battery to kill time; I didn’t want to go back to the house. I’d left without my gloves and scarf, the wind was cold on my throat and hands. As I passed the tower of condos alongside the restaurant I remembered a regular who lived there. An elderly man who came in most nights and ordered the Liver and Onions Platter. He always had gluey mashed potatoes instead of fries for his side. He would try to keep me at his table as long as possible, starting with questions about the menu and easing into questions about my life. I could feel the loneliness emanating from him. When it was slow I humoured him; I told him that the cod cakes came frozen in sacks of fifty, that Viv and I lived together, that I didn’t have a boyfriend. He said his son had moved to the mainland, his granddaughter was three and he’d never met her. Sometimes the old man would stuff a twenty-dollar bill into the front of my apron and say, “That’s just for you.” His fingers would go deep into that front pocket. I kept the money, I didn’t put it in the tip jar to be split with the other servers and kitchen staff at the end of the week.
Then he stopped showing up. When I realized it’d been two weeks since I last saw him I asked Viv, “You know the old man who orders the liver? He hasn’t been in.”
“I know,” she said.
“Do you think he died?”
She nodded. “Or maybe he got put in a home.”
“It’s so weird how people can just disappear out of your life,” I said.
On my way up to the Battery I looked into the lit-up windows of the condo building. I wondered if his son had come home from the mainland to clean out his apartment.
* * *
When I got back to the house Holly’s boots were gone from the porch. Her glasses weren’t on the bathroom floor. I flicked the light off and shut the door so the cats wouldn’t rip apart the garbage. Her guitar wasn’t leaning against the sofa anymore. I went into the kitchen to check the time on the oven: it was just before five, Dad would be by for me soon. I ran upstairs; Holly’s door was open. The blankets and sheets were still on the floor where the cops had left them. She had closed Natalie Swanson’s heavy curtains.
There was jewellery spread over the top of her dresser. There were chokers and enamel pins, a brooch with dried flowers caught in resin. There was the choker I’d seen her wear at shows and parties, white leather with two long tails that hung into her cleavage.
The bottom drawer was hauled almost all the way out of the dresser and emptied. I peeked into the closet and saw all her fancy, big-city dresses were still hung up in there. The suitcases she’d moved in with were slouched against each other beneath the dresses. The biggest suitcase was open; there were a few pieces of clothing and a U-lock in the bottom.
I heard a horn outside and lifted the curtain. My parents’ car was idling beside the dumpster. From Holly’s room you could see into the windows of the apartments on the top floor of the church. Most people had their blinds drawn but I could see a woman standing with her back to the window, shifting a frying pan back and forth over a bright red burner. In another room a young man sat in a recliner bent over a clunky grey laptop. I patted my coat pockets, feeling for my phone, wallet, keys. Then remembered about my phone again. I left Holly’s room slowly, making sure not to disrupt anything.
My father pressed the horn as I was coming down over the stairs. I stomped into my sneakers and left the house with the backs of my shoes flattened under my heels. In the car, heat was pumping out of the dashboard.
“Thank you for coming to get me.”
“Your mother said there was an incident with the police.”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” I reached down to fix my shoes.
“You don’t have any boots?”
I looked up at Holly’s dark window, making sure I’d put the curtain back the way she’d had it. I felt tears burning in my eyes. In the side mirror, I noticed that Fatima’s boyfriend’s station wagon was behind us. He was patiently waiting to pull into the spot in front of her house.
“We have to go, we’re blocking the way.”
Dad pulled out. I saw the older kid climbing out of the back seat in her snowsuit as we rounded the corner by the nurses’ union.
Both my parents are retired schoolteachers who make money tutoring in an office in their basement. The walls of the office are lined with shelves of textbooks and binders filled with three-hole punched worksheets and sample tests. A row of spider plants is arranged on the sill of a window set high in the wall. There is a long desk my father built for the room with drawers full of calculators and geometry sets and mechanical pencils.
My parents are beloved. At Christmas, cards from their students are staggered on the mantel and the tree is crowded with decorations picked out by the kids’ parents. Two kitchen cupboards are filled with mugs covered in apples and A+ symbols, mugs designed to be gifted to teachers.
Whenever I arrive at my parents’ house unannounced I check the front porch for sneakers or jackets to see if there’s a tutoring session happening. Even without seeing the sneakers or a coat, I can usually sense if there’s a session in progress. When my parents are working with someone a feeling of quiet concentration permeates the house.
It’s not uncommon for a kid to emerge from the basement — a math book against their chest, a knapsack slung over one shoulder — with a face t
hat has recently been crying. It’s frustrating not being able to do math. Some students get angry.
Once, a boy in grade seven hit my dad in the face with a hardcover textbook. The corner dug into his face below his glasses and immediately left a pinprick bruise that spread throughout the week. His mother apologized profusely in the front porch. After she left there was a long debate about whether they should let the boy come back. My mom didn’t want him in the house.
In the end he was allowed back, and the following Tuesday my father tutored him with the bruise on his face. They sat side by side at the desk my father had built, working on long division. The boy had to look up from the lined paper and see the bruise he’d made on my father’s cheek.
There were also nights when kids finished a session feeling triumphant, like they had conquered something. Or sessions where they showed up with a test they’d done well on, eager to show one of my parents the smiley their teacher had drawn next to their grade.
Tonight there were no students. In the car my dad explained how that morning my mom thought she would be well enough to sit in the basement and tutor by 3:30, but she had to cancel all her appointments at the last minute. She couldn’t get up off the couch because of her back pain. When we arrived she was reading an Agatha Christie novel, a library book with a yellowed sheet of cracked plastic protecting the dust jacket.
“Your aunt Jackie dropped this off for me with the muscle relaxants earlier,” she said, putting the book down on her legs. “I’m going stir-crazy just lying here.”
She tried to push herself up on the couch cushions and winced. For the first time, I recognized that my mother was getting older and more fragile.
“Did they help?”