Every Happy Family (23 page)

Holly giggles, expertly extracts the cork and exits to the dining room.

Was that wrong, to give an alcoholic a bottle of wine and an opener?

Quinn is leaning over the sideboard studying his grade nine science project when Holly swings into the room. “Hey.”

“Did you make whatever that is?” she asks.

“Seismograph. Grade nine science fair. It worked too.” He's startled to see the opened wine in her hand and can't not watch as the bottle is placed on the table.

She slips her hands onto his shoulders, gently kneads the muscles as she looks over his shoulder. “What's a seismograph again?”

“Measures earthquake activity.”

“Right. How does it work?”

Jill arrives steering Nancy towards a seat, and his train of thought derails. Holly massages a little harder, asks her question again.

“This delicate arm,” he says in a quiet voice, pointing and tapping,”suspended over this rotating paper, moves with any of the earth's movements.”

“Cool. Owen would love it.”

“Do you think?” says Quinn, not sure Owen wouldn't break it.

“Sit here, Mom, okay?” says Jill. “And just stay put. Dinner is about to be served.”

“It's about time,” mutters Nancy and places her purse in the centre of her plate.

“Mom, your purse,” Jill says. “Not on the table.”

Quinn catches Jill's eye but she seems to look right through him. Is he invisible to her now?

Nancy waves at Holly as if she's a waitress. “I'd like some coffee please,” she says. “Black.”

“Coming right up,” says Holly with a laugh. She kisses Quinn's neck and goes out, just as Beau comes in with a platter of sizzling kabobs. The air fills with citrus and pepper.

“Ohhh,” groans Jill. “I forgot to make the rice. Beau, bring that meat into the kitchen.” She pulls him by the sleeve back through the swinging door and Quinn is left alone with Nancy.

“Hi Grammy,” he says and can't stop himself from grabbing the bottle of wine by its neck and topping up his half-empty glass of pomegranate juice. Before he has a chance to put the bottle back down, Annie's bringing in a basket covered with a dishcloth.

“Sure, Grammy,” says Quinn, too loudly, and pours wine into her wine glass.

Nancy narrows her eyes at him. “I ordered coffee.”

“And Holly's getting you some of that too.” He puts down the bottle and turns back to the sideboard and his seismograph, his face flushing with shame. Is his auntie looking at him? He waits for her to say something. Wants her to say something he can deny.

When Annie disappears back though the door, Quinn holds the glass under his nose, his heart racing with the excitement of a horse at the gate about to be thrown open, his thoughts obliterated, words standing no chance.

“I have a son,” says Nancy, amiably. “He teaches baseball in China.”

He'd forgotten she was here and smiles at her, but now she's looking out the window. He holds his glass to his mouth, tips it to wet his lips when she asks with an earnest smile, “Do you have children?”

He stops. This time she's looking right at him, expecting an answer. “I, well, Holly, my girlfriend, has a son.”

“What's the boy's name?” asks Grammy, leaning towards him, all ears, her smile real.

“Owen.”

“Owen.”

And he thinks of picking up Owen tomorrow night from Holly's mom's place. How once they get home, Owen will pretend to be asleep so that Quinn will be forced to carry him from the car and up into his bed. The boy's resolute arms will wrap Quinn's neck, his head burrowed under Quinn's chin and he'll smell clean in the way dirt smells clean. Quinn will smell a child's hair, as all parents have, for millennia, the smell of bringing your child home to your cave. Imagine if your home was a hole in the side of a mountain. A building shaped by tectonic plates to keep us safe.

Quinn sets his glass on the table beside his place card. He'll have it there, just in case. Then pictures Holly seeing it, knowing it, the silent burst of fear in her eyes before that shared moment of complicity. And then her hapless willingness to follow him into sweet, dim oblivion. A warm double suicide. Which leaves Owen where? They'd talked about this. Maybe some of the first honest words of his life were some of the words he'd spoken to Holly.

“Excuse me, Grammy,” he says and picks up his glass again. Forcing his attention on each foot as it contacts the floor, he makes his way to the front door and, after one last inhale, dumps the mixture outside in the hedge. Feels like he's pouring his own blood out and thinks he might faint.

Jill pulls from the fridge the chopped mango and scallion intended for the rice and dumps them over Beau's platter of meat. “Garnish. Voila,” she says and spins on her heel to take the bowl to the sink.

“I was wondering what those were for,” says Annie.

“Actually, they were for the rice, which I forgot to make.” Jill throws up her hands.

“And these pine nuts?” asks Annie.

“Also for the nonexistent rice.” She picks up the bowl and stands there, unable to think.

“How about in the salad?” Annie points.

“Why not?” Jill dumps them unceremoniously in the salad Pema's about to take out. Then Jill grabs Pema's arm. What else has she forgotten? She should put on some more music but that's not it.

“Pema dressed it,” says Annie. “Les's recipe.”

“That's what I was groping for.” Jill shapes her hand like a gun, rolls her eyes up to heaven and shoots herself in the head.

Jill sure seems more relaxed than when I left, thinks Pema taking the salad to the dining room.Could she possibly live in this house again and go to school? Would Jill even want her here?

Quinn and Beau are standing together in front of the sideboard. Brain and Brawn, she thinks, smiling. God, Beau pisses her off, yet still she can't help adoring the selfish imp. Whatever goes on in Quinn's head is still a mystery, and she suspects it always will be. Holly, who doesn't seem to have a secretive bone in her body, is probably good for him. Out on the patio, she was telling Pema, a virtual stranger, about the time she got so drunk she passed out in the bathtub and came to underwater. And the naked way she talks, unblinking, looking straight at you, arms loose by her sides, makes you want to wrap a blanket around her. And yourself. Some people live more life than others do.

If she came back here to stay, would she keep living life?

Pema sets the salad on the table and sees the place cards. “I made these,” she says in surprise.

“But do you remember this brilliant moveable staircase?” Beau steps back to reveal their Hogwarts diorama.

“Of course I remember.” She comes and stands shoulder to shoulder with him and feels him stiffen. Really she can't blame him for wanting to keep his distance considering how she used to boss him when they were young in order to get what she wanted. She was a bit of a puppet master and could get him to do anything for her. Was trying to show him in her letters that she'd changed, but he probably saw them as more of the same.

“I think these paper fastener things, that made the stairs swivel, were my idea,” she says.

“What?” says Beau. “I thought of those.”

“Did not.” She elbows him in the ribs and he grabs her, wrestles her back against his chest, his breath a little off and too close to her ear. “Let me go,” she laughs.

“Excuse me?” says Quinn. “The brass clips were my idea.”

“Oh yeah,” they say together and Beau lets her go.

Jill swings in for a last-minute check of the table and is about to go and wake Les, tell him it's dinnertime, when he's suddenly standing in the doorway steadied on Holly's arm. Holly manoeuvres him and his tubing with seeming ease into the seat at the head of the table and adjusts the chair's pillow for his back. The tubing, Jill knows, isn't long enough to reach from the oxygen tank in the bedroom all the way to the dining room. Which means Holly must have gone in and moved that unwieldy tank into the hall.

“Hired,” mumbles Jill and sits down heavily in her chair at the other end of the table. “And thank you,” she says to her marvel of a chair. “So nice to sit down. Chair is such a perfect sound, don't you think?” she says to no one in particular. “That thanks you feel when you sit in one. Chair.”

“Did you say something, Mom?” asks Quinn, and she dismisses the question with a flip of her hand.

“Is it someone's birthday?” says Nancy as the rest of the family hunt for their designated seats.

“It's someone's Living Wake day,” says Jill. “Liv-ing Wake. Blunt assertive phenomes. Life Celebration. Nicer. A gentle downhill rhythm.” She raises her hand and dives it downward towards the open bottle of wine. Fills her glass first then holds the bottle over Pema's.

“Sure. Thanks,” says Pema, taking her customary seat beside Beau and across from Quinn. Jill fills Pema's glass nearly to the brim.

“Oops,” says Jill and Pema wonders if her adoptive mother has actually changed or is just sauced.

“You made these place cards for my ninth birthday,” says Beau.

“Your tenth,” says Pema.

Beau reads his acrostic poem aloud, “Best Boy, Eats a lot, Awesome, Ugly not.”

“It was your birthday,” says Pema. “I had to lie.”

“Please pass the shish kabob,” says Nancy.

“Artistic,” reads Annie, blinking in the light, having slipped her sunglasses to the top of her bald head. “Neat, as in cool, Never lies, Ingenious, Energetic. You're too kind,”

“Yours is true,” says Pema.

A group of tiny, sleek black birds appear to jet over Annie's plate and disappear into the kitchen. “Whoopee,” she says and lowers the glasses back into place.

“Quinn, this is such a cute Father's Day card you made,” says Holly. “With all the pockets?”

“There's a message in each pocket,” says Quinn. “Or there used to be.”

She fishes in a pocket, brings out a tiny paper package and begins to unfold it.

“That's insane how much you folded that paper,” says Beau as the process goes on and on.

As the plate of shish kabob is passed to Nancy, she takes one in two hands and begins to eat it like it's corn on the cob.

“Mom,” whispers Jill. “Wait, please.”

Nancy intentionally ignores her and Jill decides she must be awfully hungry and lets it go.

“I love my dad because he makes the best French toast,” Holly reads.

“The others don't get any more profound,” says Quinn. Holly's eyes widen and she whispers to him that she forgot to call Owen as she'd promised.

“That card was my favourite,” Les says and Holly passes it to him before excusing herself. He is beyond caring if he is allowed to say such a thing, with other cards, and other kids, gathered so close.

“You did make the best French toast,” says Pema.

He winks at her. He always hated winkers but talking is now difficult. “Vanilla, pinch of nutmeg, cream not milk.” Maybe tomorrow he'll have the energy to make some. The batter at least.

Beau points at the empty place. “Where's Uncle Kenneth?”

“Your uncle,” says Jill and sips her wine, “had the urge to go for a scenic drive and should be back soon.”

Les watches his family pass dishes, read place cards and birthday coupons in a fuzzy overlap of conversation. These faces, as familiar to him as his own, at this table, in these seats, with the evening sun throwing its airy pink light against the walls, feels oddly like permanence. And, at the same time, as temporary as a breeze. Interesting that it can be both.

Beau holds the wine bottle over Quinn's glass. “Wine?”

“Beau,” scolds Pema.

“Just kidding,” says Beau, though his instinct, as always, is that Quinn needs toughening up. “Thought I'd go to the gym tomorrow. You want to come?”

Quinn can't tell if he's still kidding, gives him a quizzical look and doesn't respond.

“Pass the pita or whatever it's called,” says Jill, pointing to the basket of bread.

“Naan bread,” says Pema, surprised to be correcting this mother's English.

When Holly returns and everyone has food on their plate, Les clears his throat. “I'd like to say grace.”

“What?” Beau and Pema say in unison, look at each other and smirk.

“You never once said grace in our entire lives,” says Quinn.

“Getting closer to grace every day. Hedging my bets.”

“God is great, God is neat, Good God let's eat,” says Nancy as bits of meat spray between mouth and plate.

Jill sputters with laughter and Nancy beams proudly at her.

“Someone once said,” continues Les, “that love only exists when it is given.”