After (4 page)

After the cemetery, we went to a restaurant somewhere in Old Montreal for the reception. It could have been a five-star restaurant or a chip wagon for all I cared. There was a lot of food, and Aunt Sophie was in her element, balancing a plate of pork pie, potato salad, and party sandwiches as she stood guard beside Maman. Everyone wanted to tell my mother and me that my father was too
young to die, in case we hadn’t realized it. Then they helped themselves to food from the buffet, and talked and laughed as if we weren’t there. My godfather, Uncle Ted, sat down next to me with a beer in his hand. He isn’t my favorite uncle. In fact, I don’t much like any of my uncles. They’re all about as warm as the St. Lawrence in January when the ice blocks the Seaway. Ted is impossible to talk to, as if he counts out the number of words he is allowed to say in a day, and if he says more than that, he’ll be punished by some vengeful god.

“Well, Francis, now you are the man of the house, eh? You have to take care of your mother and your little brother. You have lots of responsibilities, you know.”

Wow! Three complete sentences in a row. That’s the most he’s ever said to me.

“Your father was a good man,” he continued. “Time will help you to forget about this.”

“I guess.” That’s all I could think of to say. Did I inherit word-hoarding from Uncle Ted?

He patted my arm and hoisted himself to his feet. “Good luck, eh!”

Good luck. For what? Did I just buy a lottery ticket? What am I supposed to say? Thank you? Bless you? I wanted to knock over the table with its plates full of crust-less party sandwiches and
tourtiere
and potato salad. I hate potato salad. It’s gross. I found Luc sitting by himself at a table, an untouched plate of food in front of him.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I want to go home now.”

“Me too.” He crawled into my lap and fell asleep.

I could see my grandpa–my father’s father–heading toward us. By the time he got from point A to point B with his walker, I could have played three games of Mario Bros, at the slowest speed. I didn’t want to talk to him. I had had enough comfort from Uncle Ted.

“Francis. Your father is dead now.”

Yes. I know. I freaking know!
I thought that maybe I could pretend to faint, or pretend that I couldn’t understand him. Looking back, I realize that he’d buried his son that day and could have used a big dose of comfort himself, but I had no sympathy for him. I was too shattered to comprehend anyone else’s pain.

“Sorry, Grandpa. Luc has to go home to bed.”

Grandpa looked at me, I think. He has a lazy eye, so I wasn’t sure. That day his lazy eye enraged me.

Finally, Aunt Sophie drove us home. I put my father’s wedding ring and his watch close to his picture on my desk. Luc slept with me in my bed. He curled up tight against me as if he were afraid I would vanish.

I walked through the last days of school on automatic pilot.

It felt wrong to be with my friends. Houston, Caroline, Eric, Melanie. They all kept offering me reassuring smiles, but the smiles simply puzzled me. What’s the point of smiling at anyone? Who wants to smile? It felt wrong to smile.

We’d been friends from the time we were kids and played on the swings at the park. We could spend all day together and then go home and spend hours on the phone. We knew all the tricks in Mario Bros.; we knew exactly what each one of us would order when we hung out at Deli Delight, home of the finest bagels you’d ever want to eat. We all knew that Houston had a crush on Caroline. He loves dancing–you should see him moon-walk, picking up static from the shag rug in the living room, all for Caroline’s benefit. The problem is that Caroline didn’t care about him at all as a boyfriend. She had a long-standing crush on Eric who is serious and quiet and favors black turtlenecks. Eric the Brooding Poet acts like he’s oblivious. All of this had been a big deal that fascinated me. Now all the drama and intrigue and giggling scraped my nerves raw. And these were my best buddies.

I gave up going to rugby practice. My father used to love rugby.

Of course, the biggest changes were at home. After the funeral, we stopped talking about Papa. Our sorrow tunneled underground, secret and private. Luc stopped waking me up at dawn to play with him and his stupid Lego blocks.

My father’s slippers waited where he had left them, side by side under the beat-up brown couch facing the TV, as if he were coming back to pull them on again. His denim jacket was still slung over the back of the rocking chair where he sat after dinner. It had muddy paw prints
on it from where Sputnik had jumped up for a pat. I offered to wash it, but Maman was furious.

“That jacket is not dirty. It doesn’t need to go in the washing machine,” she said firmly. “It smells like him. Pine.”

“But it’s been there for a month.”

“I said it doesn’t need to be washed.
Point final
”

Luc was a newborn and Maman wanted some quiet, so Papa and I walked up to the top of Mont-Royal. It’s a small mountain in the middle of Montréal. It was crowded. People love the mountain during fall, especially people with dogs. They go there to breathe when they’re fed up with traffic jams and stuff like that. That day, my dad taught me how to recognize
petit thé des bois.
It’s a kind of grass you can eat when you’re hungry and lost. I ran ahead and when I retraced my steps, looking for him, he jumped out from behind a tree, yelling
Boo!
I hated it when he did that, but he loved to surprise me.

Right after Papa died I went back up to the top of Mont-Royal and sat under the same tree, waiting for him to jump out and yell
Boo!
I sat under that tree until it grew dark, but nothing happened, maybe because I was fifteen and when you’re fifteen you’re too old for scary games.

It’s funny, the things you miss. In those first few weeks I fretted, because Papa had promised to show me a trick for holding my poker hand and he was going to give me a tip on bluffing. He took all his secrets with him.

Montréal features January Sundays so cold that the only thing you want to do is stay home with a bowl of soup and a piece of warm apple pie. The Seaway was frozen over and Papa was on shore leave with time on his hands. After lunch he made an announcement. “You are seven years old, son,” he said solemnly. “The time has come for you to learn how to play poker.”

Maman was at the sink washing the dishes with lime dish detergent. I have always loved that smell–I don’t know what it reminds me of, but who cares. Whenever I smell limes I think of the time before Luc was born when the house was snug and the roof was sound and outside the frosty windows the garage and the garden were neat and well-kept.

Papa cleared off the chipped table and made a pile of pennies in the middle. He cracked open a fresh deck of cards.

“Ben, why are you using new cards with the boy? Those are for company.” Maman didn’t sound angry, but it was true. During weekdays, when my father was at home and my parents played cards, they used an old
grimy deck. For special guests, they brought out slippery fresh cards.

“Because today I’m teaching the boy to play poker. Fish is for babies. It’s time to show him how men play.”

I was thrilled. I thought that once we played a hand, I would get up from the table a foot taller and I’d know all my multiplication tables by heart. It didn’t happen, of course. In fact, I’ve never learned the multiplication tables–that’s why I rank the calculator at the top of the list of the world’s greatest inventions. I watched Papa make the cards waterfall through his hands in an orderly ribbon. I wanted to be able to make them obey like he did, but my fingers were too short and awkward.

Sometimes Maman played with us, but she wasn’t very good at it: she wasn’t observant enough. When people play poker, it’s important to observe them, especially their eyes, when they are dealt their new cards. Papa said that learning how to play poker is like getting an education in a human being. You have to learn about his strengths, his weaknesses, his nervous tics, and his moods. I guess I didn’t play enough poker with my father to realize that he had hidden cards up his sleeves. I didn’t know that he could cheat.

At first, we only played for pennies. But after a few weeks, when I learned how to hold my cards close enough so that no one could see them, Papa taught me how to play “real” cards like straight poker and blackjack. He let me use the pennies in my little china piggybank. He often
won, but even when I lost, my penny pig never grew lighter. Papa always replaced my coins. One day when I was twelve, I couldn’t find my pig. It wasn’t on my shelf or my desk. When I asked my mother where it was, she said: “It’s been magically changed into groceries.” She didn’t laugh.

I never asked about my little pig again. She didn’t have to tell me that Papa had no work. Life had begun to change.

T
he long, hot summer finally ended. Luc wore new shoes to kindergarten, and we took his picture standing proudly at the front door. I didn’t want to take the shine off his day, but I dreaded going back to school. All I wanted to do was hole up in my bedroom and play guitar. I needed to be lonely.

The first shock of the day was that Mr. Enrique had left the school. We didn’t know why, but apparently, his blind cat, Rococo, had died. We got a new Spanish teacher.

When the First-Day-of-Class commotion was over, Mr. Lunes rapped on his desk.

“What is a preposition?”

I had no idea and hoped that he wasn’t calling on me. He was.

“Young man. What is your name?”

«
Me llamo Francis Gregory.
»

«
¡Muy bien! ¿Y qué es el nombre de tu padre?
»

I could feel everybody looking at me. There was an embarrassed shuffling of feet.

«
Mi padre se llama Ben.
»

«
¡Muy bien! ¿Que hace tu padre en la vida?
»

What did my father do? The class sat in frozen fascination as if they were watching a trainwreck.

«
Por favor, ¿qué hace tu padre en la vida?
»

I wanted to grab Mr. Lunes by the throat and break his neck, but I didn’t. When I was little and I didn’t like a Christmas gift, I would throw it at the wall. I’d learned not to do that anymore, because when you’re fifteen you’re kind of a part of adult society, and you have mastered the art of pretending to love nauseating Chia Pets or gray woollen socks or a book on saints. That lesson stood me in good stead for staying in my seat and answering Mr. Lunes’ questions. As opposed to committing murder.