Meeting Miss 405 (2 page)

He bends down and touches my face, then kisses me. His breath smells of Roy Bus tea, which wasn't tea at all. You won't catch me drinking that red stuff.

“I want a butterfly kiss,” I tell him. Butterfly kisses are really for little kids. But Dad rests his face against mine and brushes my cheek with his eyelashes.

Then I do it to him.

When he has gone, I stare at the stars on my ceiling and wonder which ones Mom is looking at on the Sunshine Coast.

We took Mom over to Grandpa's on the ferry yesterday. Every night when we're visiting him, we sit down by the dock in gray splintery chairs with our hands resting on the flat armrests. As we count stars, I smell the smoke from Grandpa's cigarette and listen to the water
shush shushing
against the beach.

Last night before we came home, Dad and Grandpa talked baseball and stuff while it got dark and inky out on the water. I listened to Mom crying as we both stared up at the stars shining like glitter in the sky.

I sat with my hand touching Mom's. Suddenly one of her fingers crept onto mine, stroking them over and over and over while she cried.

Dad says her depression makes Mom cry all the time. It is an invisible disease that feels even worse than when my hamster died and I thought I would miss him forever. Depression is more than being sad, Dad says. And it is not catching and is not my fault.

But sometimes I wish she would just get over it. Then I feel really bad.

For now, my grandpa will take care of Mom while Dad and I take care of business at home. Grandpa says that she can sit in the chair on the beach and look at the water and the stars. He says he will give her three square meals a day, and she won't have to lift a finger.

He told us that every night after he has put Mom to bed, he will call to let us know how she's doing. So now I try and stay awake by counting the stars on my ceiling, waiting for the phone to ring.

Next morning I ask Dad what Grandpa said when he called.

“Nothing to report,” he says. “Remember you need to go straight along to Miss Stella's after school.” When he plunks a plate down on the table, the juice in my glass shivers.

“Do I have to?”

“You do. We talked about this, Tansy.”

Dad has cut my toast in rectangles. I like it in triangles. I poke my fork into the egg. It looks slimy.

“Just eat it. Please,” he says.

“Remember. No nuts in my lunch.”

Dad sighs and grabs the bag from the counter and takes out the granola bar. “Shall I give you an extra banana instead?”

“One is too many. I despise bananas. You should know that. You said you'd buy cookies.”

“I did. But we discovered they have peanuts. Remember?”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.”

If Mom were here she would tell me not to be lippy. And
she
would remember that I don't like bananas anymore.

Dad just sighs and scrubs his face with his hand. “Sorry, Tan. How about tonight we go to the grocery store and buy some more cookies or something? Look, I have to get going. I can drop you off.”

While Dad shoves the dirty dishes into the dishwasher without rinsing them, I cut my egg in teeny-tiny pieces and spread it around my plate. I eat one rectangle of toast and slip the other piece in my schoolbag.

It is Devin's fault I only have a bologna sandwich and a blotchy banana in my lunch.

It was very exciting when he was rushed to hospital after he had an allergic reaction. His face got fat and
his tongue swelled up, and he made funny noises right in the middle of silent reading.

Mr. Howarth saved his life by jabbing Devin with a special medical thing called an EpiPen that he keeps in his desk. But Devin still had to go to hospital for a checkup.

The next day there were signs all over school.
This is a Nut-Free Zone. Keep Your School Friends Safe
.

No nuts are allowed in the whole school now. Devin spoiled my favorite lunch.

Parveen and I sit on the hard edge of the sandbox while I tell her about having to go to Miss Stella's after school. Cats are the only ones that play here most days. They leave little turds behind, so no one else wants to go near it.

I tell Parveen that Dad and I are going to visit Mom soon on the Sunshine Coast. We will sleep under the glittery stars and rent a big sailboat and go out onto the ocean and then bring Mom home and everything will be okay again.

“Your grandpa should live with you like mine does,” she says. “Then someone would be there to take care of you
and
your mother.”

“Dad would not let him smoke at our place!”

Grandpa and apartments do not go together. He keeps his bagpipes on the back porch and plays them every night at sunset. Sometime he takes his little red boat out on the water and just sits in it for hours. Not even fishing. He chops wood for the woodpile every day. Even in summer when the woodstove is not lit.

Maybe Mom can help him. It must be hard to cry when you are chopping wood.

“Your dad could have asked my
bebe-ji
to watch you,” says Parveen when I tell her about being babysat by Miss Stella with the wrinkly legs and a balcony like a jungle.
Bebe-ji
is what she calls her grandma. Mine both died when I was tiny. And I only have one grandpa. We must have the smallest family in the world.

“My
bebe-ji
might not even notice if you came to my house every day after school,” says Parveen. “Some days there's me and my brothers and my cousins. Sometimes all seven of them.”

But I already have the key to my apartment building on a shoelace around my neck. And Miss Stella said if I was not at her door by 2:47 precisely, she would come looking for me on her bike.

“Thanks, Parveen. Maybe you can come home with me one day and meet her yourself.”

But I bet she won't be allowed to. Her job is to make the
rotis
for supper. Every night! Everyone in her house has a job to do.

Mine used to be taking care of my mom.

Now I am the one who has to be taken care of. By someone I don't even know.

I stand in front of the intercom and press the button that has our apartment number on it. It buzzes. I wait.

When no voice crackles back from the little mouthpiece, I feel sad.

I feel grown up using my own key to get into the building. But I feel sad again when I get upstairs and have to keep going past our apartment.

The little peephole in the middle of the door to 405 is way above my head. So after I knock, I lift up my arm and twiddle my fingers in front of it.

“Do come in,” says Miss Stella. I take just enough steps inside so she can close the door behind me. “You made good time. I've been busy, as you can see.”

She points at a coat rack that wasn't there last time. It has yellow and white butterflies all over it, like something a baby would have in its nursery. I am about to tell her that I will not put my stuff on
that
, when I almost hear Dad saying in my ear, “You cannot blame a person for trying.” Well, I can!

I hang my backpack by its little loop on one of the knobs. Then I sling my jacket across the top. I expect Miss Stella to tell me to hang it up properly. Or to do it herself. But she only says, “Shall we go through?”

When she puts a skinny hand on my shoulder, I duck under it and walk into the dining room ahead of her.

The stack of papers is still on the table. And the blue plate. But no avocado.

Now two small bottles labeled
India Ink
are standing next to a row of wooden sticks lined up on a black leather cloth.

I pick one stick up. It has a flat metal thing at one end of a long wooden handle. “That is a calligraphy pen. The shiny part—the nib—goes in the ink,” Miss Stella says. “You might like to try it.”

“What is it for?” I put the pen back exactly where I found it.

“Lettering.”

“I can do that on the computer.”

“I see.” Miss Stella rolls up the cloth, just the way Dad rolls me up like a mummy at night. “How about a snack?”

“What have you got?”

“The only way to find out is to come and have a look.” Maybe she is a little deaf, like Grandpa, and cannot hear my rudeness.

Her kitchen is long and thin like ours. The walls are a pretty blue, and a long straw mat covers the floor.

“I suggest you start down that end and work your way up this end to the fridge,” Miss Stella says. She waves her arm in a big line along the room.

“What?”

“Have a look. I have no idea what children eat. This side is just plates and stuff.” She pats the cabinet behind her. “We can come to that later. You root around in those cupboards—Lord knows what you might find there—while I tidy up in the other room.” She goes out and then turns right around again. “And check the freezer too. I believe there may be sherbet.”

Dad says not to be nosy. But she said I could.

I open all the cupboards I can reach and go through them one by one. They are so tidy! Our kitchen cupboards are full of packages with elastic bands holding them closed. Boxes dribbling cereal on the shelf. Everything mixed up. In Miss Stella's cupboards I find:

Three boxes of brown spaghetti
. Ugh.

One can of artichoke hearts
. I don't like the look of those.

A jar of forest berry jam
with a pink-and-white checkered lid. I like the jar but not the jam. I like grape jelly.

Two boxes of grown-up cereal
. The kind that the commercials say are good for you.

A box of brown sugar cubes
. I crunch one quick before Miss Stella comes back. It tastes just like regular brown sugar to me.

Sardines
. Dad says I must be the only kid in the world who likes sardines. I put one can on the counter.

Four cans of beans
. Three of the red kind Dad uses in chili. And one can of the white knobby ones that Mom uses when she makes it. Dad and I despise them, but we eat her chili anyway. To be polite.

Two kinds of crackers
. But no little ones for crumbling into soup.

A bag of wine gums
. I put them with the sardines. I like them almost as much as licorice.

A bag of Werther's
in their little gold wrappers. Grandpa cracks them when he eats them. When Dad reminds him that you should suck hard candy, Grandpa says as they are not his own teeth, why should he care?

A cloth bag of rice
. Ours comes in see-through plastic.

Shriveled apricots
. All wrinkly, just like Miss Stella's skin.

Raisins and almonds and sunflower seeds and cashews
. Devin better stay away from here!

Tea
. There's flowery chamomile. And mint. One box says
Rooibos
. It must be that red stuff that isn't really tea at all.

I am still working on the cupboards when Miss Stella sticks her head around the door. “Find anything you like?” She sees the sardines and wine gums on the counter. “That's a start. How about a big glass of milk and a banana to go with that?”

I shudder. No more bananas! “Do you have any peanut butter?”

Miss Stella opens the fridge. “Almond or pumpkin seed. No peanut, I'm afraid.”

I shrug.

She shrugs back. Then she rolls her eyes at me.

I try not to smile. But she smiles first, so I have to. Just to be polite.

I choose a plate with a gold line all the way around. I pick eight wine gums, four red and four green, to go with the silvery sardines.

Miss Stella pours me a glass of milk and puts crackers on my plate. “Can I watch tv?” I ask.

“I have one in a cupboard somewhere. But it's not connected, I'm afraid.”

No TV! She must be the worst sitter in all of Surrey and British Columbia and Canada and the world and the universe. I shove my plate away and look at it from low down with my chin near the table. I squint my eyes at it.

This is the dumbest snack I've ever had.

If Mom wasn't on the Sunshine Coast looking at the water and helping Grandpa fill his woodshed, she could be home watching tv with me. We would share a plate of peanut butter sandwiches with grape jelly creeping onto the crusts. Cut in triangles.

Mom always eats one quarter. I have the other three. (But I never get wine gums for snack!)

Miss Stella sits across the table from me. She unfurls the pen holder and starts wiping the shiny nib bits with a white cloth that has black smudges all over it. She cleans them one at a time. Very slowly. Then she puts each one back in its little slot before she does the next.

There are ten of them. Maybe twelve.

I reach out my hand and pull my plate back. I rearrange the candy all around the sardines in a circle. I munch a cracker.

Miss Stella cleans another pen.

“Where do you keep your computer?” I ask.