One Good Hustle (6 page)

So much dirt and misery and meanness, and here was Lionel Richie droning away about love two shows a night.

We were on the first flight out of Vegas.

It was ten-thirty in the morning by the time we got to Vancouver General. Under her sunglasses, Marlene’s face was one big mass of swollen purple bruises and black cuts. She phoned Fat Freddy from a pay phone while we waited in Emergency. She cried. She whispered bits and pieces of what had happened to her.

When a doctor finally saw us, she told him that she’d fallen down the stairs. It was her divorce, she said. The stress was giving her insomnia and the lack of sleep was making her clumsy.

They put five stitches in her eyebrow and taped her nose, gave her prescriptions for Percocet for pain and some Ativan
to calm her nerves. Freddy picked us up and drove us back to the apartment.

On the way home, he asked Marlene how much Ketamine she’d used. “A hundred milligrams,” she told him. “One millilitre dumped into his drink. You said—”

“Orally? Ah, honey, no.” He reached for her hand. “Hundred by injection, sure. Orally—that’d barely put a German shepherd to sleep.”

He murmured sympathy and kissed her hand as he drove. I stared at the back of his head.

For weeks, Marlene wouldn’t go out. She stared at the TV and popped painkillers and Ativan. She started sipping vodka and milk sometime around noon each day.

When the phone would ring, she barely looked at me. “Tell them I’m not home.” Unless it was Freddy. Suddenly Freddy was the only one who could really understand what had happened to her.

He came by the apartment to see her every couple of days. He brought her a Hummel figurine the first week: a little blonde girl bathing a baby. Marlene touched the smooth, pale arms on the little girl and tears rolled down her face.

Freddy smiled. “Cute, isn’t it? I thought you’d like it.”

“I’m a terrible mother,” Marlene sobbed. She cried full-on for a good ten minutes.

I went into my room and closed the door.

Whenever Freddy made a pest of himself after that, he came bearing designer blouses instead.

It was two weeks after Vegas that I came in from school and Freddy was there, joining her in a drink. This time he had brought her a box of European chocolates.

“Good thing you girls started collecting that welfare cheque a few years back,” he said. “That welfare’s a nice little safety net for a single gal.”

I could feel myself stiffen. “We don’t
need
welfare. It’s just available, that’s all.”

“Looks like you need it
now
, sweetheart,” Freddy said. “I think you definitely need it now.” He seemed to leer when he said it.

I wondered whether it was the government cheques or the vulnerability of Marlene’s half-broke face that turned him on.

FIVE

IN SOME SOCIAL
worker’s office, Ruby, Jill and I each sit in one of those moulded plastic chairs. Lou dropped us off. He had to get some gas, he said. He’d just wait in the parking lot for us. Who could blame him? What normal person would want to visit the Department of Child Welfare?

We’ve been here maybe ten minutes and we haven’t said a thing. All you can hear is the turning of pages. Ruby is reading a pamphlet on fetal alcohol syndrome and Jill is flipping through an issue of
People
she brought with her. I’m staring at the floor thinking, where the fuck is my dad anyway? Everyone wants to blame Marlene but, really, if you think about it, this whole thing is Sam’s fault. If he hadn’t screwed up, he wouldn’t have landed in jail and he and Marlene never would have split up. And if my parents hadn’t split up, we wouldn’t have been so broke and if we hadn’t been broke, Marlene never would have tried the
bullshit hustle that sent her off the rails in the first place. That’s the origin of the problem. That’s the forensic explanation.

The door opens and Jill and Ruby put their reading down. The social worker says hello and introduces herself. I don’t hear her name.

She sits down and sets a file on her desk. The tab says
Bell
. Our family file. It’s thicker than I would have thought. What the hell could they have in there? Marlene and I have probably been on their radar for six years now. That’s what happens when you go on welfare. Tabs.

I stare at that file while the social worker asks me what’s been going on at home. I guess I don’t answer the first time she asks, because she repeats it clearly. Everything is quiet for another few seconds. I feel like a stuffed animal. White cotton in my eyes and mouth, clogging my whole skull, spilling out of me. I can’t remember how to talk. If I could make words right now, I’d say,
Who are you again? And who am I?

I glance at Ruby and Jill.

“Go ahead, Sammie,” Ruby says. “Tell her what’s been happening at home.”

I’m floating in white, white clouds. Nothing but white, white noise.

Someone needs to bang me on the side of the head, the way you do with a TV that’s on the fritz.

“Samantha,” the social worker says, her tone stern. “Can you tell me what’s going on with your mother, Marlene?”

Marlene’s name is a rap in the mouth. Marlene. Marlene’s in big trouble. Me too.

“She wants to kill herself …” Should I say about the drinking? Ruby will tell anyway. Big mouth. “She’s drinking. She’s very … um … she’s sad right now. Depressed. For the last few months, she can’t even … I write out the cheques for the bills and the rent and—” I curl one hand into a writing position, then cradle it in my other hand to illustrate. “I hold her hand on the pen so she can sign.”

My fake Marlene signatures flash to mind and my head aches. They can see it all, the film of my sick thoughts projected on the wall behind me. I am the dirty floor. I am the filthy dishes. No one says
Poor Marlene
.

The social worker asks about my father. Samuel Bell, she says. Is that correct? Where is he?

“I don’t know.”

The day after I got to Jill’s place, I had called Sam again and given him the phone number. He said, “So, you got a place to stay. That’s good. Okey-doke. Real good. I can’t stay on the phone, cuz I’m drivin’ to Montreal this afternoon for a game. I’ll give you a buzz in the next couple days.”

I’m not telling this chick anything. He’ll call. Eventually.

The social worker makes a note.

Ruby begins to talk now about her and Lou, their former status as group home operators. The department is well acquainted with them, Ruby says, and their work with
disadvantaged youth
. They decided to close down their home five years ago, but under the circumstances they would like to take Sammie in.

Her. She. Sammie
. I’m like the stray dog in the room. The
mongrel. Someone should put me to sleep and be done with it.

Sammie’s mother is in desperate need of a wake-up call, Ruby says. Ruby suggests that the department appoint Ruby and Lou as temporary guardians and begin sending support cheques for Sammie to them. They could deduct the amount from Marlene’s welfare.

Is she fucking
serious?
How is Marlene supposed to live? She couldn’t run a decent hustle on a retarded priest these days.

“No.”

All eyes turn to me, the talking dog. “She’s barely making it as it is,” I whisper.

The social worker eyes me. She must see a thousand jerks like me every week. She must wash her hands all day.

“I’m inclined to leave Mrs. Bell’s support as it is. The red tape involved to adjust support—We can appoint you guardians for short-term placement. That sounds prudent. And we’ll just send an additional cheque for Samantha while she’s with you. For a maximum of three months, at which point we can re-evaluate the situation.”

Ruby’s mouth tightens. She makes a cranky growling noise. “Why should that woman receive financial support for a child she can’t take care of? Seems like rewarding bad behaviour, if you ask me.”

Jesus. What’s it to her?

“That’s not fair,” I mutter.

“It’s not fair at all,” Ruby says.

“I’ll take it under advisement.” The social worker’s lips blow out as she exhales. She gives a curt nod to Ruby and says,
“You can pick up the cheque here on Monday or we can mail it to you if you prefer.”

She hands me her card and tells me to contact her anytime if I should feel the need to talk. She wishes us good luck.

I could punch Ruby in her tubby little kisser right now.

SIX

SOMETIMES I WISH
Marlene did still hold a torch for Sam. She could probably get him back if she wanted to. We could all have each other back. But she doesn’t. That’s not to say she didn’t love him at one time. He loved her too—I know he did. The Lady Leni, my dad used to call her. He called her Leni when he loved her, short for Marlene. I was little then. We were all little, in my head.

“If you went bald, I’d shine your head every day,” my dad once said to her.

“That’s beautiful,” Marlene said. “
I’d die without you, Leni
,” she said, acting out what should have been his part. “
I’m yours till the end of time
.”

Sam grinned and went back to marking cards. This was early on, before he was a real card mechanic. Later, he could stack himself a nice cooler, slip the fixed deck back into a poker game
without anyone having a clue. A true mechanic doesn’t need to mark any cards. He can stack the deck just so and deal what he wants to who he wants and nobody’s the wiser.

Sam raised the tip of the marker from the flip side of the card, squinted at his craftsmanship. “I never left nobody in my life,” he said and set the card aside to dry.

My mother told me about this conversation some time ago. The way I figure it, she and Sam must have been nuts about each other at one point or why would she have worked so hard to piss him off?

We were living in Toronto when Marlene split on me the first time. She had buggered off on Sam before, but never me.

It was August. The air in Toronto was muggy and hot. We’d left Vancouver in June and Marlene wanted to go back. She often dropped her head to wave a hand or magazine at her sweaty neck. “It’s like living under a dog’s tongue,” she’d say. Then she’d get all soppy about the Pacific, the pure sweet breeze of it, how gorgeous the hydrangeas would be—fat blue heads, big as basketballs. Not like these anemic little nothings that grew in Toronto. Hydrangeas seemed to be the symbol of all that was bad in Toronto and good in Vancouver.

The real problem was that Sam didn’t take her out with him any more. Not that my mother and father had ever worked together all that much. Sam’s forte was card sharping and Marlene didn’t play cards. But Sam stopped bringing her along altogether when we moved east. He said it was because they didn’t have a free sitter for me the way we used to in Vancouver. Back on Willow Street, I liked to sleep over next door with
Abby Elliot and her big sister Joy, so my parents were all set. Once in a while, Sam would bring Mrs. Elliot a present—say a cashmere sweater or a Royal Doulton figurine. If Mrs. Elliot knew the stuff was hot, she never let on.

No Mrs. Elliot in Toronto, though. And Sam said we had to keep the nut down—he wasn’t going to work all night paying for a bloody babysitter.

Working all night was the other significant issue. The first time it happened in Toronto, Marlene was bug-eyed furious. He came home the next morning to a wife with sharp fists and a thousand teeth. My father wasn’t big on yelling. He closed the kitchen door as they argued. I crept into the dining room to listen.

“What do you think I was doin’ all night?” I could hear Sam’s playful chuckle. Out all night, but his shirt was still smooth. As if he’d ironed it just before driving home.

“They had no telephone?” It was the second time Marlene had asked this, and so she hollered to make sure he heard. “You couldn’t use a pay phone?”

“I didn’t have any slugs on me.”

“If you weren’t such a liar I’d say you were the cheapest prick I’ve ever known.”

“I had a game,” Sam told her again.

“Did Peggy happen to be at this game?”