One Good Hustle (15 page)

No response from Sam.

In the accessories department of Eaton’s, I picked four pairs of the priciest socks on the rack and then stomped into the
lingerie department. Sam had it coming after that teacher crap. I made a show of holding up lacy black “panties” and he loitered in the aisle, with his back turned, hands jammed in his pockets.

After we left the mall, he took me home.

It’s always awkward saying goodbye to Sam. He wouldn’t come in, just sat there in the car, idling in front of our building. I gathered up the store bags and said thank you, told him I was sorry for getting cranky earlier.

He said he’d give me a call before he left town and gave me a stiff pat on the arm. “You just keep doin’ good in school.”

I nodded and got out of the car, and felt suddenly lonely. As if my father had just dropped me off at the side of the highway.

He waved. I did the same, turned and headed for the door.

I came into the apartment with masses of crunchy store bags. My Bonnie Tyler record was playing on the stereo.

“Sammie?” Marlene’s voice was thin and startled. She came out of her cave of a bedroom with big black pupils, staring like a lemur.

Still in her nightie, a pair of my argyle knee socks bagged around her ankles. Two years ago, Marlene wouldn’t have been caught dead in that getup. Then, somehow it got to be normal.

“
It’s a heartache
,” Bonnie Tyler kept rasping. “
Nothing but a heartache
.”

Marlene stared at the shopping bags and turned back to her room.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

No answer. I asked her again.

“I was scared he wouldn’t bring you home, okay! You’ve been gone for hours.”

“Where the hell was he going to take me?”

“Away. With him.”

“Mom, I’m almost sixteen. A little large for kidnapping, don’t you think?”

A strangled sort of snort came out of her. She slumped down on the edge of her bed.

“Can I turn this record off?” I said. “It’s depressing.”

“It’s
your
record.”

I shrugged, hauled my bags into her room and sat down beside her on the bed. “You wanna see what I got?”

Marlene watched as I pulled out each item. She fingered tops and T-shirts. She held the pantsuit jacket up to herself and looked in the mirror. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face.

The next afternoon, I came home from school wearing my new bomber jacket and jeans. I was feeling stylish and expensive—the way Sam must feel every day. The apartment seemed dark and bleak, though, after I’d been out in the sunlight.

Marlene leaned in my door and watched me toss books on the bed. “You wear those goddamn jeans so tight—why didn’t he buy you a coat that covers your ass?” Her s’s were sloppy.

I kicked off my new running shoes.

She chewed her cheek a second. “He just left.”

“Dad? What was he doing here?”

“What do you think?” She blinked at the floor. “Compensation. Wasn’t here five minutes before he started in.” Marlene
put on Sam’s voice. “Come on, Momma.” She mimed with her hands as though corralling livestock. “Pushing me into the bedroom. Come, on, Momma, come on … Nice guy, eh.”

“What are you saying?”

She stood in my doorway and I sat on the bed and we stayed that way, staring, until her voice broke a little.

“I had to. He bought you all those clothes.” She pushed her hair out of her eyes and then steadied herself on the door frame as she moved back into the hall. “Never mind. You’re too young.”

A minute later, the new top tore as I yanked it off. I swore and threw it on the floor. Marlene came back and asked what I was doing. She didn’t look like she cared much.

I wanted to smash Sam’s head into the sidewalk. “He
pushed
you? That’s, like,
rape
.”

“It wasn’t rape. If he was with me, then he wasn’t with
her
, was he.” My mother’s expression moved from slack to something like her old smugness for a second and then she went back to her room and closed the door.

Her
meant Peggy, Sam’s girlfriend. But I wonder now if it meant me too. Me and my bags of new clothes.

The kitchen sink is finally empty of dishes and I’m standing here with my hands in the dirty water, letting it drain, watching it swirl in circles and circles.

What’s wrong with me? I’m just like them and I’m nothing like them.

When I was a kid, Marlene used to laugh at how easy it was to read my thoughts. “You ain’t no poker-face, honey.”

I used to picture an iron poker, the kind people use in a fireplace. I took it as a compliment.

I get it now, though. They can read me and I can’t read them. I see what they want me to see. Although Marlene’s no poker-face these days either. The only sharpy in this family now is Sam.

When you mark cards, you mark the flip side, the side the other players—the suckers—see, but only the hustler knows how to spot the marking. A good hustler can steer the game so that the cards go right where he wants them, but I’m no hustler. I’m a gold-plated sucker.

FIFTEEN

LOU IS DRIVING
me in his huge black pickup to the road test centre. Three of us are in the cab, with Jill in the middle. The windows are open but she’s still managing to stink up the joint with her perfume. Her hair seems particularly huge this afternoon.

Every morning after her shower, Jill sits at the kitchen table by the window and stares into one of those double-sided vanity mirrors. She sponges on foundation, and then powders herself from neckline to hairline before she brushes her cheeks with Winter Rose blusher. Next comes the Smoky Indigo eyeliner followed by two coats of Blackest Black mascara. Then she goes to work on her lips, making them shiny and purple. Once her face is on, she takes the towel off her wet head and plugs in her supersonic dryer. Holding it like a .44 Magnum, she blows sections of her hair over a round brush for about half an hour to give it “big curls and extra lift.”

“I don’t know how you can go through that blow-drying crap every single morning,” I said once. “I just wash and go.”

“That’s because you’re happy to go out looking like Cousin Itt,” Jill said. “I have
style
.”

Beside me now, her bangs spray over her forehead like a fountain. She’s really jazzed about this whole driver’s licence thing, cracking jokes and grinning her head off.

“You know how the test works, right?” she asks me. “It’s a point system. So, if you run over a kid, it’s ten points, old people are only five—”

“Jill,” Lou warns her. “Give us some peace. Try and be supportive.”

“I am supportive! I’m the cross-your-heart bra of friends. I lift, I separate …”

“Pipe down,” Lou says as if he’s completely exhausted.

I watch his giant hands on the wheel, steering his shiny monster though traffic. I can see why he prefers a vehicle like this: it probably feels normal to him to be seven feet higher than everyone else on the road.

Lou takes us down Willingdon Avenue and I try not to stare in the direction of Oak Shore Mental Health. But I feel a stab in my guts when I imagine her in there, sitting on the edge of her bed. Jill and Lou know she’s in there too. If they’re thinking about it, neither one lets on.

When we pull into the parking lot of the test centre, Jill gives me a big squeeze and a peck on the cheek and says, “Good luck, baby.”

I wonder if she’s left one of her purple lipstick prints on my face. She’s as bad as my mother that way.

“You’re going to do just fine,” Lou assures me. “Jill told me you drove like an old pro the other night.” His voice is especially low and quiet when he gives a compliment.

My face heats up.

“Pick you up at three-thirty,” he says.

Jill grins and waves with both hands. “Make us proud, baby,” she calls out the window.

The Young Drivers of Canada people have arranged for a test car to be here. I look around the lot and spot their logo on a white compact before I head inside.

The test centre has that cheap government-y feel and reminds me of the Social Services office, which makes me want to run. I force myself to walk tall and straight and I sit that way too when I fill out the form they give me. When I hand it back to the woman behind the counter, a wiry man with a craggy face peers over her shoulder at my form, and then looks up.

“You’re my two-thirty,” he says. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot.” He sounds like he gargles Drano and sand every night before bed.

Once we’re both buckled into the test car, he sets the clipboard with my scoresheet in his lap and tells me that first we will do a pre-trip check. He gives me a minute to familiarize myself with the vehicle and then asks me to show him the left indicator, the right indicator, the high beams and the handbrake. There’s a kind of bored fatigue to the way he talks, as if assessing me is just one more in his long list of ass pains. He tells me to demonstrate my hand signals and all I want to do is flip him the bird, but I do the right thing.

Eventually he has me drive out onto Willingdon Avenue, change lanes and change back. I turn on the indicator and carefully check my mirrors and my blind spot both times. Just like in driver’s ed. So far, so good.

He gets me to take the ramp onto Highway One, do some more lane changes and get off at the next exit. We drive up the steep hill on Boundary Road, the street that marks the division between Vancouver and Burnaby, and I imagine myself making a right turn and heading west, driving until I hit the beach, sand flying up from the back wheels.

Just before we reach Kingsway he gets me to hang a right onto a side street, then asks me to parallel park behind a blue Cadillac that is so clean and new, the glare off it is blinding. It’s the flashiest car on the block. Why couldn’t he pick an old beater for me to park behind?

Nerves are zipping through my guts and my face feels sunburned.

In order to parallel park I should pull up alongside the Cadillac and then back up slowly, turning the wheel toward the curb, but my brain keeps saying no, that I’ll hit the perfect baby blue shininess of it and then some pissed-off rich bastard will come out of nowhere and beat the crap out of me. Actually, this car looks like the one Sam used to drive except Sam’s was a two-tone.

As I ease into reverse, Sam’s car keeps flashing through my head—royal and baby blue—and I can’t help but steer away from the Caddy, pushing my car’s back end back into the road.

“Oops. Sorry, that’s not what I meant to do.”

The assessor guy scribbles. “Try again,” he says with his cranky toad delivery.

I put the car in reverse—and do the same thing all over again.

“Sorry. I’m just nervous.”

He exhales through his nose and scribbles again. Did he just deduct points on
both
of my attempts?

He reaches over and pushes the car into park. “Think about what you’re doing,” he says. “Try again.”

I flip my signal on, and reverse, telling the scared voice in my head to shut the fuck up. Sam is not here. And if he is, and I rip into his car, it serves him right.

I ease my foot off the brake, give it a little gas, and the car slips back alongside the curb just the way it’s supposed to. The Cadillac’s silver back bumper is directly in front of me now. It’s perfect. I did it!

Why can’t it be Sam’s car in front of me? Why doesn’t Sam come out of that white clapboard house over there and say,
Holy shit! That’s my kid!

The test guy doesn’t remark. He doesn’t scribble any more either, though.

“Pull up to the end of the block where there are no parked cars and make a three-point turn.”

His voice really reminds me of Froggy from
The Little Rascals
show. Calm down, I think, he’s just Froggy all grown up. Harmless.

I signal, carefully pull out, and head down the road, wondering why I’m such a jerk. Three tries, that took me. I
know
how to parallel park for fuck sakes. I know it. Froggy knows it. Sam would know it too if he took a friggin’ look.

At the end of the block, I make a three-point turn. No mistakes.

Froggy has me drive us back out onto the main road and then up to Kingsway. You’d think I’d be nervous being on a busy street like Kingsway, but it’s a relief after the parallel parking. All I have to do is stay in my own lane. Just watch the bumper in front of me like the driver’s ed guy used to say: “Look in the direction you want to go and the car will follow.”

We roll along, and for a minute or two I feel just the way Lou said, like an old pro. Even Froggy can see that I know what I’m doing now. It was only nerves back there.

He tells me to make a left turn at the next light and I sail into the intersection just as the light turns amber, and then effortlessly steer the car onto Willingdon Avenue again.

I am in the zone now. I am
acing
it.

“Why did you make that turn back there?”

I squeeze the steering wheel. “You said—”

“You should have
anticipated
that light would turn red. Should’ve stopped.” He scribbles on his clipboard.