The Governor of the Northern Province (12 page)

“Which brings me back to my point. I don't care what it means in his country. In this one, in your country, Jennifer, which is Everyday Canada, YOU DON'T WEAR PINK TO A MAN'S FUNERAL. Now get upstairs and change and leave me to my cold supper.”

II.

She didn't move, not just yet, because she was still measuring up her father as Riding Everyman. If this was in fact how the median voter responded to her wearing full pink to the late Alderman Gallagher's service, it wasn't in the best interests of the campaign. Jennifer was leaning this way when another intervention, more decisive, took place. Her mother dropped over to the kitchen table like a clipped duck and snatched her father's plate away to reheat it. Flutter-limping back to the counter, Barb offered a sober second to her husband's throaty filibuster. “Yes, go upstairs and change into something more becoming, Jennifer. Something black and proper. Your dad's right—” Barb almost concluded “this time,” but with Gus in such a state, he might have caught it.

After Jennifer had gone upstairs, her father took a long breath and turned to address his wife. Barb was enduring a purgatorial wait for the microwave to ding its appointed conclusion, which would get Gus quiet and eating. Because otherwise, he was fired up and hungry to boot and so he kept at it.

“Barb, you think I'm just trying to save face, but there's more to it than my stopping the girl from wearing a prom dress to pay respect to a man's passing. This Bokarie, I don't like her carrying on with him, even if, as I pray to God you pray to God, there's no heart in it or physicals to speak of. And sure I'm disappointed that I don't think that young man took to her at dinner last night and I don't know why she came in and went straight up to her room after they went for that walk, except maybe he didn't ask her for a second date, but I wasn't exactly hoping for an engagement notice in today's paper, just a little, well, interest on her part in anything other than politics and drownings and Africans. But anyway, Barb, take this … this pledge for what it's worth—”

Here Gus Thickson's voice cracked and he hurt, just a little, his nose tingling and crinkly and his eyes narrowing, levee-hard against the unexpected spillage. Because, leaving aside worries about his name and questions as to why it wasn't a boy born to them, Jennifer was his only child, the flesh of his, and so forth.

“Take it, Barb, this pledge, for what it's worth. Remember, I am the man who took your daughter by the leg when she was a little girl, do you recall that? How I took her and cut that leech off and did it so gentle-like she didn't even scream or cry or hurt. Just stared. Anyhow, I'm trying to do the best I can by Jennifer, Barb, and right now, if that means cutting away another black bloodsucker, well, this time—”

PING!

Desperate, Barb had twisted the microwave's timer to a premature conclusion, hoping fate would smile on her and the food would be hot enough. Though still upset and looking to take some action, Gus settled down at the noise. Fork in hand, he was ready for his daily comfort. His mashed and meat.

He made a few more noises about getting the number for Immigration, but she agreed him back to his crammed mouthfuls by repeating his rightness, that yes, Jennifer's attempt to wear pink to the Gallagher funeral service later that night was simply out of the question. But she also put Gus at ease, and did away with any vigilante plans on the near horizon, by telling him that he had little to worry about, romance-wise, with Jennifer and Bokarie. When Gus asked for evidence, Barb invoked wifely privilege and maternal prerogative.

“A woman just knows these things, Gus, and that's all there is to it. Do you want me to try to explain, really?”

Though she really had little idea of Jennifer's intentions towards Bokarie in the romantic sense, or what she thought of that business herself, Barb was at least able to get Gus away from it. No need to worry about heart stuff, not just yet, not yet, she thought. Let's see where politics and this African take her.

He let it alone, this question of Jennifer and the African, and he perceived suddenly how his wife protected him from that skull-softening world of women's ways. Still waiting for Jennifer to come back down, Gus decided to take a minute with his wife. He went to the sink and nuzzled with her while the last dinner plate was scraped up and scrubbed, his sciatica-ripped hips buffing hers through their dark-toned, heavy-fabric funeral outfits. But it only takes so long to do a dish and put it away and scoop up the sink salad and wipe down the counter. And after all that loving, Jennifer still wasn't ready, and now she was ignoring hollers and threats to present herself so they could get going because parking was going to be torture. Pacing the living room, Gus got all fired up again. Her offer of apple crumble and milk evaded, Barb had to redirect her husband's fire and distract him from whatever was taking Jennifer so long up there. If he didn't want the Summer Kumquat for the living room, she ventured, that colour being her choice and what did she know anyway, what did he think of bringing in one of these interior consultant types you hear about these days? She knew a woman down the street that had a friend whose son was known to be creative and had even done courses for that kind of frill and frippery in Toronto. Maybe they could even see about a discount?

She took heavy artillery, as expected, and it was mission accomplished. A husband's executive powers were invoked and fifty more years of wood-panelled living was declared, which she accepted because it meant Gus forgot his half-forged promise to stop his little girl from tumbling into a big-lipped black hole. Looking ahead to future fronts, Barb was willing to accept this collateral damage. She could do that much for her daughter. Because even if it was never credited, even if Barb Thickson was universally assumed to be capable of little more than carpet-bombing cupboards with fresh contact paper every other spring and calibrating cream of mushroom shots for winter Crock-Pots, she had sense enough to know what kinds of publicity would and would not help her daughter at the polls.

III.

Black-skirted and mauve-bloused in compromise with her father's edict, Jennifer was stalled, unexpectedly. Sitting in her bedroom, she was still thinking. About him, no less. Not Bokarie. He had his marching orders and matériel for the evening's event. But about the other one, from dinner the night before, the one who had courted her by spinning the sugar line that he had a magnet in his pants and bet she had a steel magnolia under her dress. It was around then that she brought up an intervention.

But before that, and before he pulled out the monogrammed flask and before he encouraged her up the barn ladder with a thrusting, feely smack of the palm, she knew that this man her parents had invited over was intended to be an impediment against her future plans. And she'd been tempted.

Initially, Jennifer had been made wary by the sudden and opaque increase in place settings for the meal her parents were giving the Thursday evening after the Hollerwatty wedding. She thought the dinner was for her new friend, Bokarie, but then that night Barb asked Jennifer to set six for dinner, not four, and to take from Grandma's collection no less, and also to be sure to skip plates with chips in them or too many fork scrapes. At these Christmas and Easter instructions, Jennifer had felt a little vault to the heart. At evidence that her parents were intent upon impressing the guest of honour. Little did she know.

Bile came quickly when she realized what really stood behind her parents' unexpected suggestion, the previous week, that she invite
that new friend of yours, Boo Cary, over for a little supper
.

The date was set for one of those rare evenings in the Ottawa Valley between the fever hot of late August and the blouse cling of later September. The end-of-summer wedding itself, in its aftermath, was being recalled and studied around town less for the noblesse oblige of its
open friggin' bar
—hard liquor, too, not just wine and beer—than for what was understood to be the most striking image of the affair. In subsequent representations and re-creations, particularly by those young men who had never had their dance with the lady of the hour, her having gone sleepy and stomach-achy a few songs after “Butterfly Kisses,” the bride's four-minute twisty twirl with the town African was the big news. It had looked about as dangerous as a sapling twig dangling a campfire marshmallow, as classy as electric tape patching up a torn milk jug.

But Jennifer's parents knew nothing of this chatter. They had made the dinner invitation in near direct response to her informing them that she was going with Bokarie to the wedding. And because of how freely this offer had come, Jennifer had been warmed by the idea. By her parents wanting to meet the new friend she'd told them about, even if she was feeling edgy at the prospect of these constellations of her life colliding over sweet corn and cider.

In thinking about Bokarie coming to her home, Jennifer was, in truth, as nervous as a fourteen-year-old girl who'd invited over a new friend with better hair and makeup. Upon his meeting her parents, she worried, Bokarie might refuse to help with her campaign, having seen evidence suggesting that her mouth was writing him cheques that her bloodlines couldn't cash.

But she went through with it anyway, giving in to the desire for her parents to see Bokarie and understand what she had grabbed on to, to sense what he could bring her and understand where they could go together. Because then, maybe, she had hoped, Gus and Barb might start to believe a little in the rise of Jennifer Thickson themselves.

She had miscalculated. Profoundly. After asking her mother a second time why six, Jennifer realized that Bokarie was barely on their radar, and then she really understood:
Oh nobody special just a young man also new in town that your dad sort of knows who might share your interests. There's no harm in finding out so we've invited him to have a little supper with us too and when we told him about your friend from Africa the young man said he had someone in mind so there you are Jennifer your dad thought it up
. All along her parents were readying something of a bloodless coup by trying to get her hitched up before she could get her shot at Ottawa.

And worse, she had almost taken them up on it. She could admit this much now, while her father was downstairs yelling at her mother about the eternal virtues of wood panelling.

Soon enough they would drive off to the service, at which point the campaign for the federal seat of Nipissing–Renfrew–Pembroke would effectively open with a eulogy, delivered by her main opponent and one-time mentor Faye Gallagher. The start of six weeks of grieving and vote grubbing in the black widow catbird seat. But before Jennifer left and the battle she'd wanted was fully joined, it was best to make sure, one last time, that she didn't want him instead and what life he had proposed, what he had brought up for her.

IV.

Rick Hopewell taught grade seven and eight gym. He had been Gus's choice. Thickson was getting on, and getting worried about the fate of his farm and daughter. Hopewell came his way on recommendation from the local gas station owner, who understood from cash register chit-chat that the young man was new in town but, unlike some people we know, had politely blended into the background. It was easy enough; he was indistinguishable from a standard national mould—reasonably well-kept goatee, hairline just starting to horseshoe, reflexively anti-American, kidney fat spilling over his cell-phone hip clip. On further inquiry, Gus learned that the young man happened to be freshly single after a long cohabitation elsewhere had failed to take. From Gus's vantage, Rick seemed to have interests that matched his daughter's well enough. Contact sports weren't all that different from government, he figured, and when the gas station man snorted at this observation, Gus decided to use it as a conversation opener at dinner. Through the necessary channels, it was learned that Rick had shrugged some interest at meeting a young lady who had a really great personality and no brothers to speak of on a seasonably productive family farm. Eventually, speaking directly with Gus at a planned run-in at the gas station, Rick even offered to bring along a friend he knew of who might match up pretty well to Jennifer's little buddy, given the specs provided. Gus was looking to do some parallel matchmaking in hopes of simultaneously neutralizing manifold threats. When this possibility was established, he had Barb ask Jennifer to invite Bokarie to break bread with the family.

The soiree itself was slightly below average for the latitude and tax bracket. A stifled-cough, lame-question affair, during which Jennifer played the part of coy catch, if unwittingly. She had bluntly refused to participate, pushing food around her plate in cramped quiet and thus forcing her parents to speak on her behalf whenever Rick asked a friendly question. She had barricaded herself against the suitor's overtures, against her father's touting her like a good used car, this inviting a buyer home to kick the tires and take it for a test drive. She was also embarrassed for Bokarie and more violently anxious that he was going to walk away from the campaign. He was marooned on the far corner of the table beside his dinner partner—a brisket-tongued, enthusiastic educational assistant from Rick's school named Trinh, a Vietnamese Canadian who smiled and nodded and said, “Oh yeah huh really? Well I think that's great and courajust!” to every comment that came her way, including queries about seconds and requests to pass the gravy boat.

When dinner was finally, finally over, and the last of the meringue had been shaved up between the men, Gus sensed things weren't going that well and so he went to straight economics. After the dishes were cleared, he asked Jennifer to help the guests walk off the casserole—after all, Rick had eaten three servings!—by giving them a tour of the barn and the family acres. While this was a time and place self-evidently beyond dowries, Gus Thickson could, at the very least, give the suitor a sense of possibilities.