Every Time We Say Goodbye

D
awn should have known it was over the night the men showed up with the car. The jig was up, the goose was cooked, it was going to get worse before it got better. It was the beginning of the end, her grandparents would have said, only they would have seen it coming from Day One, if not sooner. This was not unusual: in Frank and Vera’s stories, things often ended before they began.

But Dawn was too busy on Day One to look for signs of the end. Her father and new mother were coming to take her and Jimmy to live with them, and a lot had to be done to make the beginning work out right. She was up and scrubbed and dressed before the darkness in the dining room began to melt. “For heaven’s sake!” Vera exclaimed when she came downstairs in her brown plaid housecoat. She checked the blue-faced clock above the sink. “They aren’t coming until lunch, you know.”

Vera had short grey hair, which she rolled in curlers and unrolled before going to church or the grocery store, and about five hundred aprons. Frank was tall and thin and wore glasses. He was very good at fixing things other people just threw out, like lamps with frayed cords and toasters that no longer toasted. Vera was good at explaining things. She could tell you the relations of everyone in Sault Ste. Marie, how so-and-so was the second cousin of such-and-such, who married the aunt of the girl you sat beside when you made your First Communion. “And that’s who they are to you,” she’d say.

“And I’ll tell you another thing,” Vera called over the running water in the kitchen. “They’ll probably be late, knowing your father.”

That was something else about Vera: she always wanted to tell you another thing.

Dawn adjusted her ponytails and sat up straight. Very soon, the beginning would begin and none of this would count, especially if she could convince Jimmy to help. But instead of sitting and waiting properly, Jimmy unpacked his cars from the cardboard box at the front door and played in his pyjamas under the table with the claw feet. His blond hair was sticking up all over his head. “You’re spoiling it,” Dawn hissed at him. He ignored her and whispered to Professor Pollo. Professor Pollo was a brown beanbag monkey smoking a big black pipe. Sitting on the bowl of the pipe was a tiny Professor Pollo, smoking an even tinier pipe. Jimmy claimed there was another, nearly invisible Professor inside the tiny pipe, but Dawn couldn’t see it. Jimmy also claimed the Professor could talk, which just showed what babies five-year-olds were. Now Jimmy held the monkey to his ear, listening. “Professor Pollo says, ‘Poop to you,’ ” he said solemnly.

“You won’t be ready when they get here,” Dawn persisted.
She was three years older and had to explain everything. “Don’t you get it?”

Frank said, “They won’t be here for a while yet, Tinker. Why don’t you see if there’s something on the television?” But there was only the morning news, all Nixon, Nixon, Nixon. Vera told Dawn to make herself useful and bring up six Mason jars from the basement; she was going to do down some beets.

Five minutes before noon, Dawn left the kitchen full of vinegar clouds and went to stand on the porch beside their brown suitcases. Then she walked to the driveway and looked up and down Sylvan Avenue. Vera said theirs used to be the only house on the street, when the road was a lane and it was all farmland out here. Now it was a subdivision of beige bungalows with sliding glass doors and patios, and theirs was the only house on the street that looked haunted: three storeys of dark brick with cobwebby attachments like trellises and eaves and storm windows. Even the yard looked spooky: gnarled apple trees on one side, tangled forest hiding the creek on the other. In a few minutes, though, Dawn thought happily, she and Jimmy would also live in a house with a patio.

At one o’clock, she sat down on the steps. Lunch was sometimes at twelve, sometimes at one. It varied with families.

At two, they had pancakes for lunch. Dawn said she wasn’t hungry, but Vera told her to stop moping and get to the table or she, Vera, would give her, Dawn, something to mope about. And it wouldn’t be pancakes.

At four, Jimmy fell asleep on the couch, Professor Pollo wedged under his arm, while Dawn watched
The Brady Bunch
.

At five, Dawn asked if she could phone them, knowing Vera would say no. Vera said no. She said they would get here when they got here, and god only knew where they were anyway, probably out in some barroom.

It didn’t matter, though, because the beginning wouldn’t start until they arrived. A beginning couldn’t be spoiled if it hadn’t begun.

They arrived at dusk, honking noisily all the way down the street and finishing up with
honkety-honk-honk-beep-beep
in the driveway. Dawn followed Vera out to the front porch. Dean had driven Geraldine’s blue Beetle right up to the flower bed. He leapt out, crushing a petunia or two, and ran around to the passenger door. Geraldine stepped out. She was wearing a grass green dress with a white sash, an Indian bead necklace and white high-heeled sandals. Her legs were darkly tanned, and her long brown hair rippled to her waist. In one hand, she had a pink carnation. Dean seized her other hand and zigzagged her around in a little dance. Then he bent her back so that her hair swept the ground and one brown leg kicked the sky. She shrieked with laughter. They both straightened up and waved. “Evening, Frank and Vera,” Dean called out.

Dean called his parents by their names instead of Mom and Dad. Dawn didn’t know anyone else who did this, but asking about it caused silences to prowl and lie in wait like invisible cats with flickering eyes, so it was best to just accept that what people called their parents varied in families.

Now Dean was scratching his head. “Say, didn’t I leave a couple of kids around here somewhere?”

They ran down the steps, yelling, “Dad! Dad!” He swung them around and tried to hand them to Geraldine, but she couldn’t hold them up, and they ended up in a laughing pile on the grass. Geraldine sprang up the steps, handing the carnation to Vera and giving Frank a kiss. Frank smiled and ducked his head. Vera took the carnation as if she were just holding it for someone else.

Dean had finished loading their things into the trunk.
“We’ll bring the kids for a visit soon. Say goodbye to your grandparents, kids.”

Jimmy’s “bye” turned into a wail, and Dawn would have pinched him if she’d been close enough. Vera stood stout and stern, but Frank’s voice stretched thin and tore at the end, and then he turned his head away and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his old plaid shirt. Something dreadful began to bubble up in Dawn, but then they were in the car, and Geraldine was humming “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” and by the time they reached their new house on the other side of town, the dreadful thing had drained away.

That was the real, true beginning.

Even three months later, puddles frozen and snow falling, it could still be considered the beginning. They were still settling in, which is why there was trouble over who didn’t pay the phone bill and who didn’t press the shirts and who was supposed to be home hours ago. The beginning was lasting a long time, but there were certain advantages. It was like playing an open hand to learn a new card game: mistakes didn’t count.

Some beginnings took longer than others. It varied.

Then the men came with the car. They came after dark, two stick men in jeans and leather jackets, bare-headed and -handed in spite of the snow, pushing a long white car up the driveway. They were friends of Dean’s, they said, and they were having a problem with their car. The problem was the starter wouldn’t start. They had a friend who could fix it, but he was in Wawa, and in the meantime they had borrowed another car, but they needed a place to keep this one until their friend came back, and Dean, their buddy Dean, they had known Dean since they were grass high to a knee hopper (one started laughing at this and couldn’t stop, even when the other kicked him), anyway, luckily Dean said they could use
his
garage for a few days.

Dawn stood behind Geraldine and watched the snow falling in the upside-down V of the porch light. It looked like the light was making snow. It was an illusion, though, just like when the sky caught fire but it was only the steel plant dumping slag. The men lurked at the bottom of the steps, just out of reach of the light. They shuffled in their pointy-toed shoes and mumbled into their jacket collars. Shifty, Vera would have called them if she had seen them.
Go on, get out of here
, Vera would have said to Shifty and his pal Shiftless. She would have put a stop to it, right then and there. She wouldn’t have cared what foolishness Dean had told them.
I don’t know you
, she’d have told them.
Who are you to me?