One Good Hustle (22 page)

Drew starts to sputter and then says, “Well, if I had that problem then it’d be up to me to give what little I had to a woman. How can I be around Shaye if he’s
gay?
”

“Because of sinning?”

He looks into my eyes for a second but doesn’t say anything more.

“I didn’t think you were so mean about sin.”

I stop walking and look down into the ditch, and then out into the field at the one scruffy black and white cow grazing in the middle. It’s a huge cow.
Huge
. It dawns on me that this must be the bull. I can see a slim wire fence now and realize that it separates him from a second cow. Another monster. I bet that second “she” is a he too.

Drew stops next to me. He jams his hands in his pockets and scrubs the gravel with his shoe.

“I don’t feel good,” I say.

Drew bounces his shoulders three or four times fast as if he’s trying hard to shrug off the whole gay thing. He looks away, searching for words.

“Guess I just can’t deal,” he finally says. He keeps his face turned to the field, sucks in a nervous breath. “Are your feet hurting?”

No. My head is hurting. My heart is hurting. My whole life is hurting. If Drew knew who the hell I was, what my dad does, what my whole family is really like, he wouldn’t be playing me Stevie Nicks songs, that’s for damn sure.

“I don’t know if I want to get on a horse today, to tell you the truth. I don’t—I don’t feel like making conversation with strangers right now.”

He turns to me. “Maggie’s not … Okay. We don’t have to.”

“I shouldn’t have come out here. I only wanted to say thank you about the socks.”

Drew nods.

“It’s just that …” I look at the bull in the field. He’s got no horns but I can see now that he’s a bull all right. He looks harmless, though. Like Ferdinand. Suddenly I’m sure that something terrible will happen to that bull one day and I want to cry. “I’m sorry,” I say. “That I’ve been such a shitty friend. You always do good-friend stuff. Like the socks last night. You’re not mean, you’re true—I mean real.”

“I don’t feel real. I feel like a total shit-heel.”

We stand there together and watch the bull for another minute or two until I speak again. “They put my mom in some kind of mental institution.”

Drew winces.

“Not like a
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
type of place. She could have gone home if she wanted to. Except she didn’t. She did things, crazy shit, to make herself seem like she needed to be there. She didn’t want to go home. I think she finally had to leave, though.”

Drew stares into the ditch and then looks back the way we came. An eighteen-wheeler roars down the main highway, blasts his horn. A car coming from the opposite direction seems to disappear in the cloud of sand and dirt kicked up by the truck. Poor car. Poor bull. Poor everybody.

When it’s quiet again, Drew says, “That night that your mom was at the police station, I meant what I said, you know. I wished I could have just driven you home with me and put you in my brother’s old bed. I wished I had a quiet place just for you.”

I shake my head. My eyes sting.

“Are you going to go back home with her or are you going to stay with Jill and her parents?”

“I thought my dad would come. I phoned him in Toronto and his girlfriend, Peggy, said he’s here. In Vancouver.”

Drew’s hand brushes mine. His pinky grabs my pinky for a few seconds and then he takes my whole hand. It feels naked to me, my hand in his like this. As if all of my clothes have disappeared and I’m standing in the middle of Broadway.

He glances over his shoulder. “Come on,” he whispers, and leads me across the road and up a grassy slope.

I can just see a big white house over the hill. It’s set way back but this must be part of the same property. We sit down in the shade of a few trees.

Drew takes my hand with both of his now and holds it to his chest. There’s a rush up and down me, as if cool air is zinging through my veins and into my brain. Part of me wants to pull my hand back, but if I do I might just float away, into the air like a helium balloon, fly into the sun and burst into shreds.

Then I burst anyway. “I mean, fucking Peggy—who the hell does she think she is? She was just some
booster
and now she acts like this. She used to be my mom’s friend.” Tears start down my face and no matter how hard I clench my jaws, I can’t stop them. “I think my dad doesn’t like me.”

“Of course he does. He’s your dad.”

“Lots of people don’t like their kids. His life has been way worse because of me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You don’t know me.” I pull my hand away after all. “You don’t know who I am. Or my dad. Or my mom. We’re not nice—” I shut my eyes and mouth.

“I do so know you, Sammie. Just because I don’t know every little—Who cares!”

“He’s got good reason not to want to talk to me.”

Drew fidgets with the grass in front of him, pulling out blades and twisting them together.

“Do you want to know or not?”

He nods.

If I tell this stuff to Drew now, I am the biggest traitor there ever was. But it’s my goddamn story too.

TWENTY-FOUR

THIS STUFF HAPPENED
ages ago, only a couple of months after the whole Mel debacle in Toronto. Drew doesn’t know all the players and I find myself circling around and stuttering. I have to break it down, as if I’m speaking Latin, explain what it means when I say that Peggy is a booster, my father is a rounder and Fat Freddy is a fence.

Drew sits quietly, watching me. He looks so innocent and clean-cut and I’m embarrassed to be the one to explain this stuff to him.

I try to keep it simple, keep it to the story of how I single-handedly brought down the whole family. I tell Drew a bit about how Sam would stay out all night playing cards and Marlene would get so pissed off with him that she’d storm out of the house and stay out all night herself, just to get even. Like the time we ended up at Mel’s place. But this particular time
when Marlene took off, she actually had a legit excuse. She was in the hospital.

“What was wrong with her?” he asks.

“Female problems,” I say. “Cysts on her womb.”

At least that’s how I remember it: Marlene explaining to me that she had this womb with lumps on it. Thing is, you recall an old story enough times, over enough years, and you start to wonder if you’re making up the details that aren’t there for you any more. Or were never there for you in the first place.

Whatever was wrong with her, Marlene had to be in the hospital for a few days. I was home alone one of those days, watching TV. I remember Bob Barker had just asked each contestant on
The Price Is Right
to guess the actual retail price of the lawn mower on stage. I remember because I guessed it exactly right—exactly!—and I wished someone had been there to witness my feat.

Just then, the front door opened and Sam and Fat Freddy banged into the front hall, hoisting a small sofa. They hustled it into the living room and set it down between me and
The Price Is Right
.

“Holy cow,” I said. The sofa looked fancy and expensive: wine and cream-coloured upholstery, gold thread around the piping. “Is it a coming-home present for Mommy?”

“It’s for you!” Sam lifted the cushions. The cushions were attached to the wood seat and the seat was actually the lid to a secret chamber. “Pretty cool hiding place, eh. Give her a try. See how you like it.”

Climbing inside the pine box, I could have exploded from the thrill. “This is mine? Only mine?”

“Of course it’s yours. You’re my girl, aren’tcha!”

That same day, Sam and Freddy took me over to Freddy’s place. I had never been to Freddy’s before and my eyes nearly fell out of my head when I got a gander at his basement. It was like a cramped luxury department store. I was scared to move, afraid I might break something. I saw most of Freddy’s inventory that afternoon, though, gold and crystal, fancy urns, Hummels and Royal Doulton figurines. Sam pushed all kinds of jewellery under my nose, chunky necklaces and fine bracelets, diamonds, jade and pearls. He detailed the difference between junk and gems and had me pay particular attention to one piece I would need to recall later.

He said he had a pal named John Reynolds. “John’s that fella I played cards with the other night,” he explained as though I’d been at the poker table with him. “How’d you like to help your old man play a trick on John? He’s going to laugh, boy. He’s going to get a real charge out of what you do.”

“Me?”

“You got so smart studying all that game show stuff. Who else could do it but you! See, look, you’ll climb right inside and then we’ll put the lid down so it looks just like regular furniture. Then me and Freddy, we’ll carry the sofa into his house, put you down in the fella’s living room and you’ll be hiding in there just like a secret present!”

I stared at him, excited.
Yes, yes, yes!
I wanted to help my old man. I wanted to be the one—the only one who could do it.

The next afternoon Sam and Freddy put on coveralls and loaded the sofa into the back of a cube truck. I rode inside the
box, lounging on a furniture blanket, anticipating my big moment. Marlene’s face flashed to mind, looking jealous. She always complained about being left home and here I was, going to work with Sam.

Sam needed
me
.

The brakes squealed as the truck stopped. I heard the back doors creak and open up. My belly did cartwheels when Sam lifted the lid and looked in at me.

“Should be just the fella’s maid there this afternoon, okay?” he said. “Listen carefully. Wait till she goes upstairs. You have to be
real quiet
. There’ll be the two statues in the den, remember the fat Buddha ones I showed you? Like them, except gold. They’re heavy, so you take ’em one at a time. The other important thing is in the last bedroom down the hall. The jewellery box on the dresser. You take the whole thing. You got it?”

I nodded, though his words swirled in my head.

The sofa’s lid came down and the pine box lurched as Freddy and Sam carried me toward the house.

The bell rang. Eventually the front door opened.

“We got a delivery here for Mr. Reynolds,” Freddy said.

“I’m sorry but Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds are not in this afternoon.” A woman’s voice. I figured she was the maid.

“Uh-oh.” This was Sam playing Farmer Lug. “Mr. Reynolds don’t get his prize now.”

Freddy interjected, “Ma’am, this is a gift from the Shriners for Mr. Reynolds’s outstanding community service. Shipped in special from Italy. Just got to have you sign here and she’s all yours.”

It was quiet a moment. Then the maid said, “Nobody
called.” She sighed. “All right. Where should I sign? … You can set it in that dining area.”

The sofa lurched again as they carried it inside.

“Gee,” Sam said. “This is the biggest house I ever saw!”

They set the sofa down. I was happy that the rocking stopped.

Sam started to hum, “
Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
.” That song was a signal. Sam picked it because of how much I loved Tony Orlando and Dawn. When I heard “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” he said that would mean that everything was copasetic.

The maid thanked the men. The men thanked the maid. I heard a heavy door slam.

In the dark of the box, I fidgeted with the musty furniture blanket; the smell of wood was sour all of a sudden. The pine began to shrink and squeeze around me. I manoeuvred my back around splinters.

“
Tie a yellow ribbon, hm hm hmm
,” the maid sang. I could hear her getting farther away, the creak of feet on stairs. I froze. My heart banged. I had not expected to be afraid.
This is my job
, I told myself.
Only I can do this job
. I wouldn’t be the one left home alone. Sam would think I was a genius.

A vacuum started somewhere in the distance.

I inched the lid up and peered into the room. Slipping out, I crouched on the hardwood. Sam wasn’t kidding. I had never been in a house so big, and with so many fancy things. Just like the home showcases on
The Price Is Right
. I caught sight of the two gold Buddhas.
The other important thing is in the last bedroom down the hall
.

I stared down the hall. Miles of shining hardwood floor.

Overhead, the ceiling creaked and my guts twisted. Looking back toward the Buddhas I noticed a ceramic lady in a red dress standing right between them. She was just like the Royal Doultons in Freddy’s basement.

I tiptoed to the hutch where she stood. The figurine’s honey hair was swept back and a white sash crossed her chest. I picked her up.

She looks just like Mommy, I thought.

I imagined giving her to my mother, presenting the lady like a prize when she came home from the hospital. The picture of my mother’s thrilled smile was just forming in my head when the figurine fell through my hands and shattered on the hardwood floor.

The vacuum cleaner stopped.

I glanced up at the ceiling, turned too quickly and knocked another figurine onto the hardwood.

“Hello?” the maid called.

I reached for one of the gold statues. It took both hands just to drag it to the edge of the hutch. I tried to lift it off but it was so heavy I couldn’t manage.

“Who’s there?” the maid called.

Rushing back to the sofa, I fought with the lid.

The stairs creaked.

I climbed into the box. I lowered the lid.

Seconds later the lid rose again. The maid stared in.

I tried to remember what I was supposed to say if someone caught me: something about a cat. “I found John Doulton’s cat … Mr. Royal’s cat?”

“I think you better come out of there,” the maid said. Her eyes were hard.

“My dad dropped me at the wrong house.” It was the only thing I could think of—because it was supposed to happen like this: Sam and Freddy would ring the doorbell again. “There’s been a mistake,” they’d say. “This sofa has to go to a
James
Reynolds in Forest Hill.” They would pick up the sofa and carry me away with all the fancy things I’d nabbed.