Every Happy Family (2 page)

Any more? She imagines her young, fine-boned mother flirting across the table over Mrs. Early's roast chicken and Hawaiian salad, Dad too drunk to notice. “So when's he coming?”

“He's spending tonight in the hospital, for good measure, and will be dropped off here tomorrow.”

“Dropped off by?”

“Taxicab. His children are spread out across the globe. One lives in Kalamazoo, one in Timbuktu.”

Jill laughs. “That was funny, Mom.” Nancy isn't laughing. “Where do they really live?”

“I'm going to put him in your room downstairs, if you don't mind terribly.”

“My room's upstairs.”

“I mean upstairs.”

Kenneth's former bedroom, testament to his baseball glories, was downstairs. Most of it is in boxes in Jill's garage.

“I have trouble envisioning an older man sleeping in my room,” she says, picturing the white-painted furniture and eyelet sheets, Nancy's sentimental arrangement of dolls and favourite books. “But go ahead, it's
your
house.” She emphasizes the
your
because she knows what's coming.

“It's your house too.”

Kenneth hasn't been home since their father's funeral. Calls Nancy on her birthday and at Christmas. “Men,” the department secretary said after Jill vented about her brother's lack of help. “They get looked after. Women do the looking.” Her cheerful resignation pissed Jill off. Will Pema stick around when she needs looking after? The letter came in a brown, wrinkled envelope, the address painstakingly printed and the ink smudged on one side. An exotic mess of stamps fills one corner. She feels the base of her neck tighten. It's not like Pema even remembers her birth mother.

“I'm glad you'll have company, Mom, but please, don't wear yourself out.”

“I sure miss Lucy. It must have been terrible for her.”

“Look, I need to go but I'll call you next Sunday.” Jill's sorry but she can't hear again how her mother's best friend collapsed in the bathroom, no one finding her until the following evening.

“Okay, Jillian dear. Goodbye till then.”

“But do call, Mom, if you need to,” Jill adds, though she knows Nancy never would, for fear of
interrupting
. “I'll call you next week.”

“I'm pleased about John Early coming,” Nancy says as if to herself.

Jill hangs up. Something else to worry about. Didn't even get a chance to bring up the letter. She hears the creak of a door upstairs and thinks she should make Pema and Beau do their own dishes for a change. Then imagines the excuses, the procrastination over whose turn it is, their need to eat breakfast first, which'll mean more dirty dishes. She pulls on her rubber gloves.

•••

Sunday morning and heavy rain blurs the backyard. Jill didn't sleep well last night and arranges the pillows on the couch in the family room in order to lie down before calling her mom. Her hand hits something hard wedged between the seat cushions and she draws up an empty mickey of vodka. For a moment, she's sixteen, on a bottle hunt, out to prove her mother's ignorance. She'd found three: one in his workshop, one in the hall closet, one in the trunk of the car.

Quinn had Lauren over last night, and when she and Les came home from the movie, she thought he was unusually talkative and looked a little...stupid. All teens experiment with booze, she tells herself; it's the sneaking around she can't, won't, tolerate. She gets up and places the bottle on the mantel where he'll see it. So they can talk about it.

“Vodka,” she says into the quiet. “Vodka.” Two hard double consonants followed by the open, feminine
ah
, like a cough of frozen air. The name sounds like a toast to Slavic health. “Wodka!” She'd like to know who bought it for him. Remind him he's an example to his brother and sister. And that, while his brain's still developing, it's just not smart to drink too much.

She stands at the picture window in the family room, dials her mother's number. The line rings twice before Nancy picks up.

“Mom, hi.”

“Jillian, dear. Hello.”

“How's your week been? You taking your pills?” Besides her thyroid issue and an arthritic hip, Nancy is borderline diabetic.

“I fill up my days-of-the-week container each Sunday after your call.”

What happens if I don't call? “So how's it going with John?” she asks, though she wants to skip right to the letter and get Nancy's advice on how to respond. She pushes up the volume on the phone.

“Jillian, it couldn't be more pleasant having him around. He was up and moving after two days. But then he's still nice and trim. Your father had that stomach of his. I never understood how
something made of fat
could be
hard as a clenched fist
.”

“I know.”

“He built a little cage for my planters, out of chicken wire and black plastic bags.” Four flower boxes on benches are the extent of her mother's gardening now.

“Like you saw on that show,” Jill says, feeling sheepish because last spring Nancy asked if Les might be able to devise such a thing, and she'd forgotten to mention it to him.

“We planted kale seeds in one planter. He has this wonderful recipe for winter kale apple soup.”

“But you used to make that.”

“Oh? It was John's recipe. His wife's.”

“It was good soup.”

“Extremely good, yes. Very good soup. And nutritious.”

“So, if John's building things, it sounds like he's recovered then?”

“But his house has stairs and he uses a cane. Though he says, and I agree, that moving to a walker is a slippery slope to a scooter.”

Jill heard that very remark on
The Daily Show
the other night. The scoundrel is stealing Stewart's jokes.

“This morning my throat's sore from singing.”

“Singing?” Jill looks at the phone in her hand.

“John plays the piano. Gershwin, Rogers and Hammerstein, all the old show tunes.”

Her mother had a quiet but pretty singing voice from what Jill can remember. She gets a small thrill thinking of her singing. “Sounds like a regular party over there.”

“We did have a little wine with our dinner.”

“Mom, since when do you drink wine?” She's surprised by her scolding tone. Her mother usually celebrates with an extra cup or two of coffee.

“Never too late to start.”

“John's a drinker then?” she has to ask.

“No. No. Just one glass. Helps the aches and pains.”

Jill waits for the usual questions about the kids, but they don't come. “Mom, I need to talk about some –”

“We began the day with a game of rummy. We've been playing all week, a penny a point.”

“You and Dad used to do that.”

“Yes. And then we took a hobble up and down the block. I enjoy going to visit Dixie, that cat I told you about, in the Bergman's old house?”

“The white cat?”

“Dixie. Long hair. A handsome thing but he's been in for a shave. His skin under all that white fur is a lovely pink. Looks like a pink and white poodle. I had such a laugh. John too.”

“Where's John now?”

“He's where... out on the patio, putting a clever handle on those cages to make them easy to lift.”

“A regular handyman.”

“So how are things there?” Nancy asks, sounding almost smug.

“We're all fighting some stomach bug.” It's been a wretched week. Rainy and cold, everyone off their food, her classes flat, Quinn almost getting himself fired after singeing off his eyebrows – too much rum on a flaming goat cheese appetizer. He looks like a startled baby.

“Drink ginger tea,” says Nancy.

“Yes, we will. But I wanted to talk to you about Pema who, by the way, has decided to go with Katie and family to their place in the interior this summer.”

“That sounds good.”

“Her first time away. Nearly six weeks. I was going to get her a summer tutor – she still struggles with basic math concepts – but I think the independence will be good for her. Beau'll miss her. Like twins, those two. Anyway, I got this crazy letter in the mail.”

“You've had lots of rain,” says Nancy.

“We have.” Why is she changing the subject?

“We had a thunderstorm,” Nancy adds, quietly.

“You hate thunderstorms.”

“This one she didn't hate.”

Jill laughs.

“John took her by the hand and made her sit with him on the deck.”

“Mom, you're speaking in third person.”

“He told her that lightning opens the sky to give us a glimpse of heaven.”

“He held your hand?” says Jill.

“He did.”

“He sounds too good to be true.”

“He is a good man, Jilli.”

Jill stops. That's the line she used whenever Jill was angry at her failure of a father and feeling, somehow, that her mother was to blame.

“And I need to go, it's tea time.”

Nancy has never been the one to terminate their Sunday call. “At eight in the morning?”

Nancy doesn't respond.

“Okay, Mom.”

“Bye, Jillian.” Nancy hangs up with a noisy clatter and Jill can't help feeling jealous. Who is this guy stealing her mother's attention?

She hears Beau's lead-footed trek from bedroom to bathroom and recalls the word he came up with at last night's dinner when she brought up Grammy's new housemate: “Geriaction.”

•••

Jill sits at the kitchen table with her coffee and computer determined, after she calls her mom, to buckle down and work on her paper. Movement in the yard makes her look up to see the ducks pecking at the grass, as if drinking the previous night's rain. This morning feels like peace, she thinks, after last night's loud, giddy sleepover. Four grade nine girls, glitter in their teased-up hair, trying to master the choreography off some misogynist rap video. Clumsy and innocent on the one hand, on the other, their sexy moves to words like ‘bitch slap' were disturbing. At one point Pema dragged Beau in to watch. It's like feminism never happened. She gave them a quick lecture on the power of language, which effectively shut it down, though that wasn't her objective. Awareness was her objective.

She calls her mother's number.

“Hello?”

“Mom, hi. How are you?”

“Oh, it's you Jillian.”

And she was expecting? “What's new?”

“Well, lots, if you must know.”

What, is she prying now?

“But first, how are you and everyone there?”

“That stomach flu's gone.”

“Ginger tea.”

“Yes. That helped,” she lies.

“And?”

“Your contrary grandson, Beau, is playing rugby despite the doctor's orders and won't listen to me. Has a lot of pride, that kid.”

“A lot of pride.”

“Oh and Pema” – she lowers her voice – “had her period.”

“Had what?”

“Her period. Finally.” The oldest in her group of friends because she refused to start school without Beau, Pema was, nevertheless, the last to have her period. “I think she's happy. Played it cool though. I tried to research Tibetan traditions around first menstruation but came up empty and took her out for high tea at the Empress, invited Auntie Annie along.” Annie was invited because Jill finds herself uneasy when alone with Pema, their conversation a little forced. “So it was just us girls. We even got dressed up. That was Annie's idea. The tea is something Pema always wanted to do and, though it's overpriced, I wanted things to be celebratory. Undermine any notions of it being a curse.” Afterwards, Jill had considered telling Pema about the letter, had even brought it with her in the car, but then decided it would be mixing messages. “We had a good time.”

“That's nice, dear,” says Nancy flatly, and Jill wonders if she's offended her. Nancy had been morose when Jill hit puberty. It was just a matter of time, she'd said, and then she gave instructions on how to hide all evidence from her father and brother.

“So was John able to open those pictures I emailed?”

“Pictures?”

“Of Quinn and his girlfriend? New Year's grad.”

“Yes, yes. Very nice. Quinn looks very handsome and also his girl.”

“Lauren.”

“Lauren.”

“I've always liked that name. It has a tough elegance. You liked his pink tie?”

“I liked his pink tie.”

“A little gangster-looking against the black shirt, but that's what's in. Speaking of Quinn, I don't think I told you how he almost got fired.”

“Do you remember Lyle Jarvis?” says Nancy. “He lived in the powder-blue house beside Cates Park. He had a daughter, you know her, Meredith or Marilyn, she went to your school in Deep –”

“Yes,” Jill says just to stop her. It's her turn to be offended.

“Well, his wife died and he didn't want the upkeep of a house and garden and he moved into an associated living complex.”

“Assisted living.”

“That's right. It's up on the hill beside Parkland.”

“Parkgate.”

“Where he had his meals taken care of. They also provided a hot tub and jazzuci that he appreciated for his back.”

“It's Jacuzzi, Mom,” says Jill, laughing. “Have you had your morning coffee?”

“So I've suggested he move in here.”

“Come again?”

“Lyle. I've suggested he move in here.”

“Move in?”

“It's been such a pleasure having John, so I thought why not.”

“What, is John still there?”

“John's still here.”

“I thought you said it was temporary.”

“Lyle lost half his pension in the economic downgrade. Just poof, gone.”

“Downturn. You said it was a tempor –”

“He can no longer afford all that pampering.”