“Yes. How did you know?”
“Oh, he told me about you.” He peers over my shoulder. “This is the first time I’ve been here. To Ontario, I mean. It’s quite charming, really. Lots of trees. And fields. Fruit stands, too.” He frowns. “I haven’t seen a moose, though.”
“Freddy mentioned me?”
“That’s right. He talked about his life in Balsden on occasion.”
What did he say about me? I want to ask. What did I mean to him? I feel like a jilted teenager all over again.
“When did you arrive?”
“Monday.”
“From Florida?”
“Miami. I own a restaurant there. Have you ever been?”
“To the restaurant?”
“No, to Miami.”
“I don’t think so.”
He crosses his arms. “You don’t remember if you’ve been to Miami?”
“No, I’ve never been to Miami.” My head is spinning. I need to sit down.
“It’s a wonderful city.”
“I don’t know—This isn’t—”
He takes a step towards me. “You don’t have a heart condition, do you? I had a feeling this wouldn’t go well.”
“What wouldn’t go well?”
“Coming here.” He pushes his glasses up again. “To Fred’s hometown. What a mess she made of things.”
“Who?”
He looks at me with an expression somewhere between annoyance and pity. “Do you want to grab a coffee, Joyce? You’re looking a little pale.”
He retreats into the motel room. I turn around to face the parking lot, pressing my hand against my forehead. What on earth is happening?
He comes out wearing a pair of black sunglasses that swallow half his head. We make our way across the parking lot towards the café.
“On the drive up here, I saw a goose,” he says. “A Canada goose. Fred told me they shit something horrible. They migrate between the north and the south, don’t they? Like seniors.”
We find a table in a corner.
“Doesn’t it seem like the worst restaurants are always the closest?”
He sighs and flips open the menu. My eyes scan the café for familiar faces. I’m embarrassed to be sitting with him. The last thing I need is to be seen with a strange-looking homosexual.
Fred was my partner
. That’s what he said. It can only mean one thing. Freddy was a homosexual.
Was
. That means Fred isn’t alive. I notice a couple at another table look over with a sly smile. What are they thinking? I want to get away from this man, but I can’t. I need to know what’s going on. I need the truth.
Gingham girl does a double take when she comes to our table. She must think I’m crazy. This time I order a blueberry muffin and an orange juice.
“Are the sausages pork or beef?” Walter asks.
“Pork,” she says. “I think. I can check with the cook.”
“No, don’t bother.” His hands fly through the air. I’ve never seen so many rings on a man before. There’s a ruby the size of a postage stamp on his pinkie finger. He glances over at me. “Why am I even asking about sausages? It’s like shopping when you have no money.” He turns his attention back to the waitress. “Is it possible to get an omelette made with egg whites?”
The waitress scratches her head with the tip of her pencil. “I suppose?”
He removes his glasses and massages the bridge of his nose. “My dear, make it a bran muffin and a coffee.”
He leans across the table after she walks away. “Is it just me or are people getting stupider? I blame it on television.”
I clear my throat and lay my hands flat on the table. “Just so I’m clear, Mr. Clarke. Freddy isn’t alive, correct?”
“No. He died two months ago of cancer.”
“Two
months
ago … You mean to say he didn’t jump from the deck of a cruise ship?”
“Oh, god. She could have at least made him disappear by doing something heroic. Rescuing someone from a fire, or taking a bullet for a nun. Even a car accident.” He picks up the salt shaker and squints at it. “I never understood why they put rice in the salt. There must be a reason.”
“It absorbs the moisture,” I say. “Who’s the ‘she’ you’re talking about?”
“Mrs. Pender, of course.”
The waitress comes back with our order. I stare dumbly at the muffin she places in front of me.
“Fred never forgave her for those lies.” He splits his muffin and spreads a thin layer of butter across each half. “Not that you’d ever forgive your mother for killing you off. But a
suicide.”
He shakes his head. “Even in death, she stripped him of any dignity. Fred would never have killed himself. He’d been through some hard times, mind you. But give me a break.”
He takes a bite of his muffin. Crumbs land on his geometrical shapes.
“She’s a psychopath. I really believe that. How else could you explain it? Not that
my
mother ever accepted me. But she never threw me off a ship.”
I’m acutely aware of everything around me, as though I’ve suddenly developed superhero powers. I hear Walter’s teeth clicking together as he chews. The sugar landing at the bottom of his coffee cup. The rustling of his nose hair as he exhales.
“I suppose you can tell we’ve never gotten along. Mrs. Pender and I, that is. I tried to find a way to relate to her, especially during those early years. I complimented her hair. Asked how she maintained her figure. Blah, blah, blah. You know—what women like to hear. But she wouldn’t have it. I was the evildoer, you see. I had corrupted her son.”
He swallows and I hear a glob of muffin glide down his throat. I feel nauseous.
“Not that Fred hadn’t been corrupted long before me.” He winks. “I often wonder if she has a heart at all. Sometimes I try to picture it. But all I can ever see is a small grey fossil tucked behind her rib cage. It doesn’t beat so much as rattle. I can’t believe she’s lived this long. God must be avoiding her.” He stops and looks down at his muffin. “This tastes like a barnyard.”
“Mine tastes fine,” I say, before realizing I haven’t even taken a bite. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”
I take my purse and hurry to the bathroom. I lock myself into a stall, pull out my teeth and vomit into the toilet bowl. This isn’t happening. It’s not possible. But there’s the swirl of my vomit in the water. And a man I didn’t know ten minutes ago is sitting out there, saying things that can’t possibly be true. I flush the toilet and sit down on the seat. Freddy was alive all those years. And to have this Walter person, this complete stranger, sit across from me and speak about his life without an ounce of discretion, without any regard for … talking so matter-of-factly about his relationship—if you can even call it that—with another man. I’m certain people at other tables overheard him. They’ll assume things about me. I’ll have to endure their whispers. The horizontal slide of their eyes. The pointed fingers. I can’t go back out there and face all of that. I’ll wait in here until the café closes. Until they’ve all gone home. The back of my throat burns. My teeth stare back at me in my hand, a lipless smile.
After three days away, my son called home.
“Where are you?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m not telling.”
“You come home. Immediately.”
“Not yet.”
“Why did you go, John? Did something happen?”
“I need some time on my own.”
“Where are you? Tell me that at least.”
“No. Not now.”
“I’ve been so worried. Do you have any idea what you’ve put your father and me through?”
“This isn’t about you.”
Two nights later, Charlie and I were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner when we heard the front door open. My fork paused mid-air. I looked at Charlie. He looked at me. And then our prodigal son was standing in the doorway.
“I’m back,” he said to the kitchen curtains. Then he walked down the hall to his room and shut the door. Charlie and I ate the rest of our meal in silence. I think we were afraid that if one of us spoke, the mirage we’d just witnessed would disappear into the air.
Later, after Charlie had gone to work, I made up a plate of food and went to John’s room. He was sitting on his bed, his arms wrapped around his shins, his chin resting on his knees.
“I thought you might be hungry,” I said and placed the food on his desk. I sat down on the edge of the bed. “I won’t ask you where you went or who you saw. I don’t want to know.”
He looked at me, his eyes wide with disbelief.
“I don’t
need
to know,” I said. “No one needs to know.”
“But I want to tell you. I have to tell someone.”
I couldn’t allow that. Not after all these years of trying to set him right. “No you don’t. You don’t have to tell anyone anything.”
“If you only knew half the things that go on in my mind. Nothing ever seems right with me. Everything is so wrong.”
“Saying something out loud makes it real. And what you’re going through isn’t real, John. It’s an illusion.”
“If I don’t say it, I’ll go crazy.” He was sobbing by this point, and it took every ounce of strength not to reach out and take him into my arms. I needed to be strong.
“John—”
“I met him on the band trip. I wrote to him when I got back and he said he’d meet me in Ottawa.”
“Please keep quiet.”
“We met up at the bus station and we drove to a hotel.”
“You don’t mean this. This never happened.” I closed my eyes. Inside me, a sound began to build. A hum.
“I felt sick afterwards and threw up in the bathroom. He took me back to the bus station. He didn’t even say goodbye.”
“You have no idea—” The hum was building in its pitch. I’d worked so hard. I’d given everything to fix this.
Everything
.
“I couldn’t come back home. I wandered around the city for days. I was so tired and afraid. Why didn’t he stay with me? He was nice in Winnipeg. What did I do wrong?”
This was not happening. I was not hearing my son say these words.
“I got lost, Mom.”
Mom
. My eyes sprung open and I grabbed his wrist. “You’re home now. You’re safe. Tomorrow morning, you’ll get up and go to school and soon, it will be like Ottawa never happened. We will never talk about this again. Do you understand?”
He shook his head. “But it
did
happen.”
“That doesn’t make it true, John.”
“It
is
true. How can you say it isn’t? I’m different. I know that. I’m like a jigsaw puzzle where none of the pieces fit together. There are parts of me I hate, but there are parts of me I like. I don’t know how to sort it all out.” He looked at me then, so young in that moment. Younger than I ever thought I’d see him again.
“It’s not natural, John. It’s not the way things go. You need to take control. You have to change.”
He looked away. Then asked in a voice so quiet I barely heard the words, “But what if I don’t want to change?”
I rose from the bed. “Stop being selfish! It’s not always about what
you
want. Think of your father. What if he found out about you? His only son. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
He started weeping again. A low, mournful note. I thought of his baritone. I’d found his Achilles heel. I told myself I’d won this round and brushed the dirt from my hands.
“Eat your dinner,” I said and left the room.
I wipe my mouth with a square of toilet paper and step out of the stall. I need to get out of here. I can’t go back to the table and sit with that man while he talks about omelettes and salt shakers and his perversion. I set my purse on the ledge of the sink and examine my face in the mirror. Lipstick. I need lipstick. I root through my purse.
I’d stood on Mrs. Pender’s front porch after I learned about Freddy’s death. I’d made date squares. She’d looked at me with such incomprehension. Such loss. How could she take those squares from me? How could Freddy allow me to believe he was dead?
I find my lipstick and run it across my lips, but my hand won’t stop shaking and I have to keep wiping the colour away with my square of toilet paper. This is some kind of joke. A trick. I look around the bathroom, convinced I’ll see a camera lodged in the paper towel dispenser or a television host peeping out from under a stall. I’ve been duped. They think it’s so easy to fool a woman like me.
I finish applying my lipstick and walk out of the restroom. I don’t stop. I walk right past Walter. I walk until I’m out the door and into the steely shine of the morning sun.
——
My son died twice. I used to believe the first time he died was in the schoolyard that day, as he lay in the centre of that ring of boys, muddied and bloodied in his green coat. But that was me taking the easy way out. It was simpler, less horrific if I could point the finger at anyone else except myself.
But time won’t let you get away with much. Not for long. And eventually, that finger began to shift like the arrow of a weather vane and I found myself staring at the black, pointed head of the truth I’d been avoiding for most of my grown life.
The real moment of that first death, the true one, took place in a bedroom with a crying boy and a mother walking out.
The click of the door shutting behind me could’ve been the shot of a handgun for all it mattered. My son had asked for help. And I cut him down. I believed I was doing the right thing at the time. I thought I knew best, the way all mothers think they know best, especially when it comes to their children. But they don’t. Mothers know only what’s best for them.
What would he have said to me if I’d let him? That he’d fallen in love with a boy? How would I have responded? What
could
I have said? There was no place for that answer in the world. No room. Not then. Nothing but a silence so heavy you could feel its weight in your palm.
The parking lot at the Golden Sunset is half empty at this time of the day. A few residents sit on the wraparound porch, blankets over their laps in spite of the heat. I scan their faces, but Mrs. Pender isn’t one of them. She never goes outside. She may be having a mid-morning nap. No matter. I’ll shake her until she wakes up. I’ll tell her there’s a strange man in town. That he’s telling lies about Freddy. Then I’ll hand over the Mother’s Day card, take the library book, and never set foot in her room again.