After (15 page)

“You’re mean! You want to steal my Maman!”

I heard footsteps and then the creak of my door opening.

No polite knocking this time.

Maman marched in. “For God’s sake, what did you say to Luc?” She looked like Alice Cooper, her makeup smeared all over her face. “Why are you acting this way? Francis? Answer me!”

I didn’t understand why, I just knew that I was in a rage. Her mascara had made black football player smudges under her eyes.

“Why are you so mean, Francis?”

“I am not mean.
You
are!”

“Why can’t I have a little bit of happiness?”

“What about Luc and me?”

She clasped her hands to her head and repeated softly, “Why can’t I have a little bit of happiness?”

I felt that the air had been knocked out of me. “It’s only been a year, Maman. Only one year.”

“I’ve cried enough, I think.” Her voice had grown calm and cool and it enraged me.

“How dare you replace him like that, with freaking Green Hat?”

“His name is George! Stop calling him Green Hat!”

“You can’t replace Papa.”

“I don’t want to.” Her composure vanished and she collapsed on my bed, curled up on her side, and cried like a baby.

I don’t know how long we were frozen in place, but eventually she sat up. I handed her a Kleenex and she snuffled. “You know, I’m really angry with your father. He cut out and left me with no money and two kids to raise alone.”

“You’re not alone, Maman. I’m here with you.”

“I know, but it’s not the same thing, Francis. Someday, when you fall in love, you will understand what I’m talking about.”

Huh! Falling in love. I wasn’t about to do that again. I’d learned my lesson.

“Okay,” she sounded defeated. “I understand it’s only been a year. I will ask George to leave. But listen to me very carefully: I’m doing this because of
you.
It’s the first and last time in my entire life I’ll do this. Do you
hear
me? The first and last time. Now, I don’t think I want to talk to you for a while.” She closed the door and left me alone.

The day after the Leaving of Green Hat, Aunt Sophie appeared at the deli. It was around six on Monday evening. There were only two or three customers sitting at the back. Mr. Deli was in the basement fretting over the bagel oven. The Cranberries were playing on the radio. It was raining softly.

Aunt Sophie shook out her umbrella and sat on a stool at the counter so she could talk to me while I sliced potatoes. “Your mother told me everything,” she said. She looked like a big potato herself, in her wrinkled linen dress with her face drawn into unaccustomed lines. I concentrated on the cutting board.

“I’m disappointed in you. If I were you, I wouldn’t be proud of me,” she said.

The more I agreed with her inside, the madder I got. When you’re already beating yourself up for doing something stupid, you don’t need anyone else’s help. Aunt Sophie had always been in my corner. I didn’t want to feel ashamed in front of her.

“You aren’t me!” I was yelling without meaning to.

She leaned across the counter. “Look at me, Francis.”

I clenched my fist. “You’re dumber than this potato and I hate you.” I heaved the potato at the window. Luckily I hit the newspaper rack.

“You’re crazy, just like your father!” Aunt Sophie stood and shook her umbrella at me.

I guess at that minute I was. I started chucking all the potatoes I’d peeled at the door. She left. The three customers sat looking at me. Mr. Deli came huffing up the stairs.

“What are you doing? You can’t throw potatoes like that! You can’t do that!” Mr. Deli looked at me as if I had three heads. He unfolded a green garbage bag and started picking up the potatoes. “Violence begets more violence!”

“Oh, great. More words of wisdom.”

Mr. D. didn’t look angry so much as confused. And disappointed.

I had clearly cracked. Mr. Reptile Brain had taken over in my skull. I had managed to terrify Luc, wreck Maman’s plans, and alienate both Aunt Sophie and Mr. D. Good going, Francis! A triple-header. No, a quadruple-header. No wonder Papa couldn’t stand me.

I washed my face at the tiny sink in the men’s room and left the deli. It was raining so hard that I took off my T-shirt. I walked down St-Denis and turned on Mont-Royal.

I didn’t stop until I came to the big statue of an angel at the entrance to the cemetery. She looked as if she was giving me a high five. Everything was clear in my mind. I had to leave.

Aunt Sophie had loaded Luc and Sputnik into her car and taken them to a holiday camp in the Laurentians for a week. Maman and I had hardly exchanged a word since the End of the Affair. I had convinced myself that nobody would miss me if I left.

August 14, 1993. My own private D-Day. I was going to fly on my own wings, but, truth be told, I felt more like Tweety Bird than an eagle. After I bought my bus ticket I had two hundred and fifty dollars in potato-peeling money sorted neatly in my brand-new wallet. My knapsack was packed with a couple of bottles of Pepsi, my Walkman and tapes, some underwear, a couple of T-shirts, and a map of Toronto.

I took the métro to Berri-UQAM. From there, it was only a five-minute walk to the bus station, but I was drenched with sweat as I stood in line for a ticket. Part of my brain knew that what I was doing was not the brightest of moves, but it was overruled by the litany of reasons I had assembled to convince myself that I had to go: I wanted to leave all the pain, frustration, anger–wait a
second, where’s my synonym dictionary? Okay. Just found it–disappointment, fury, rage, resentment, and bitterness behind me. I also had plenty that I wanted to forget. For instance, there was making a fool of myself over George, and telling Jul that I liked her. But most of all, I wanted to forget that Papa hadn’t loved us enough to stick around. Those were the
push
reasons. The
pull
reason was Password: Black Jack.

T
he bus was nearly full. I sat down in an aisle seat next to an old woman in a pink pantsuit with soft white hair and glasses on a beaded cord. Before the bus pulled out of the station she told me that she was from Barrie, Ontario, and that she was on her way home from visiting her granddaughter. I wondered if she knew Jul, but I had a horror of speaking to strangers so I didn’t ask. I slept until the bus stopped at Kingston. There was a Tim Hortons there, and though I wasn’t hungry I bought a turkey sandwich. The old woman gave me an apple.

“Where are you going, dear?” she asked.

“Toronto.” Ever the snappy conversationalist, me.

“Do you have family there?”

“No.”

“Is this your first visit?”

“Yes.” Was she never going to stop asking me questions?

“Lord, Lord, you’ll enjoy yourself. You know the Exhibition is on. My, it’s fun, what with the roller coaster and the midway. There’s the Food Building. My, I used to love going to see Elsie the Cow carved out of butter, but now it’s all…”

“Excuse me.” I got up and lurched down the aisle to the minuscule washroom to get away from her. I came back to my seat, hoping that the Inquisition was over. It wasn’t.

“Are you from Montreal?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.” I was going to have to jump off this bus. I didn’t care if it was speeding down a highway. I chose the only other option. Lurch down the aisle to the washroom again, and when the smell got to be too much, lurch back to my seat.

“How old are you, dear?”

“I’m sixteen.”

“Oh, my dear! Sixteen! If only I could be sixteen once again with all the experience I have, dear! Life would be so cool!”

Cool?
I’d never heard an old lady use that word. Weird.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

What kind of person was this? The source of my profound knowledge of the citizens of Barrie was Jul, and she had led me to believe that they were normal. Not if this lady was an example. She was odd, strange, and if I hadn’t written the word
weird
three lines up, I would have used
it again here. What was strange about her was not the persistent questioning, but the fact that I somehow felt compelled to answer. I had never needed to be told “don’t talk to strangers.”
Shy
was my middle name. By some magical force, she had me spilling my guts.

“I used to, but it’s over now. She was
verboten
”

Verboten.
I had no idea what the word meant, but I liked the way it sounded so I used it whenever I wanted to make an impression.

“Oh…I’m sorry.” She sounded puzzled. “You know, I had my first boyfriend when I was sixteen. I ended up marrying him, and we were married for seventeen years. Then he died.” She smiled at the memory, as if she were skipping over the
died
part.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, my dear. He’s been gone a great many years, now. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Just my little brother.”

“I only had the one child, my daughter. She was nine when her father died. It was a long time ago.”

I held the foil-wrapped turkey sandwich out to her.