Days That End in Y (3 page)

Mom laughs. “Deal.” She hugs the dress to her body one more time and says, “I just can’t part with this yet. Doug will have to suffer with a little less space in the closet.”

I still haven’t quite recovered from the image of my mother answering phones somewhere downtown. “But you like being a stylist, right?”

“Of course! I love the Hair Emporium almost as much as I love you.” Mom smiles wryly and adds, “Sometimes even more.”

“More than Doug?” I ask.

“Be nice.” The phone rings before I can get a lecture. On her way to answer it, Mom dumps a box on the bed beside me. “Here. Make yourself useful.”

Most of the box is old magazines and a few books —
romance novels with a few murder mysteries thrown in for variety. I am about to haul the whole thing to the Salvation Army pile, when I spot what looks like a yearbook. I dig around in the box, and sure enough, there are four yearbooks. All are bright red leather with “Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School” stamped in yellow on the front. Mom’s old yearbooks! I feel like I’ve found a winning lottery ticket.

“That was Doug,” Mom says, returning from her phone call. “He’s bringing Chinese for dinner—” Mom stops short when she sees the yearbook in my hands. “Oh my god, where did you find those?”

“In the box you gave me.”

Mom sits on the bed next to me, tucking her feet under her like a teenager.

“I haven’t seen these in ages! May I?”

I give her the yearbook, and she flips through the pages, shaking her head and murmuring under her breath. It’s almost like I’m not there; it’s just her and the yearbook strolling down memory lane. “This is wild. Look how young we were!”

“Wow,” I say, as she points out people I’ve never met before. I am itching to look at the books myself, but I act bored. I know my mother, and it is not wise to show too much interest or she’ll get suspicious.

“Are you going to throw these out?” I ask.

Mom looks horrified. “Of course not! Put them in the keep pile, and I’ll make room for them somewhere. I’m sure Doug will get a kick out of them. Denise, too.” Mom frowns. “On second thought, I think Denise got rid of her yearbooks a few years ago when she was reinventing herself. Something about ghosts of the past holding her back.” Mom
and I share a smile, which is nice. Smiles at the expense of Denise are rare. Mom is Denise’s number one defender and rarely acknowledges her crazy factor, which is significant.

Mom smiles wistfully at me and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, even though it doesn’t need to be smoothed. “Just think, in a few weeks you’ll be embarking on your own high school years.”

“Don’t remind me,” I mutter. I’m not the biggest fan of school, and a new school that’s three times as big as my old one, where I’ll be the lowest form of life, is even less appealing. Mom is quiet, and when I turn to see what’s up, there are tears in her eyes.

“Mom, what’s wrong?”

“You’re just so big. You used to be my baby, and now look at you!”

Mom-tears make me uncomfortable. I look away, pretending to be busy folding and refolding a blazer until the coast is clear. When Mom starts humming, I look up again. I don’t recognize the song; probably something from the “good old days.” I eye the yearbooks but continue to fold the clothes she tosses my way.

When the door opens and Doug yells, “Who’s hungry? I’ve got chow mein!” I let her run ahead. Then I fish the books out of the keep pile and smuggle them to my room where I can examine them later.

I tell myself that everything is fine; it’s not stealing if it’s from your own house and you intend to return something eventually. Right?

After stuffing ourselves full of Chinese food, Mom and Doug go outside to have a beer on the porch. I sneak off to my bedroom to find out about my mother’s past.

I have one big reason for wanting to be alone with the yearbooks: my dad. I’ve never even seen a picture of him. Over the years I’ve learned bits and pieces from Denise — like how all the girls loved his floppy hair, how charming he was and that he met my mother at a bush party. But I could still count all the things I knew about him on one hand. It’s never bothered me before — not much, anyway — but now that I have the chance to look him up, I can barely contain myself.

I skip the yearbooks from grades nine and ten and go straight to the year my parents met, grade eleven. I know Bill switched schools for her, moving from Bennington to Sir John A. so they could spend more time together. Imagine someone being so in love with you that he went to the trouble of switching schools!

Someone else’s yearbook is not as exciting as you might imagine: page after page of school photos arranged in rows, some “wacky” club photos, a few news articles from the local paper and a list of notable world events that happened that year. You don’t realize how old your parents are until you discover that things you learned about in history class happened when they were in high school.

Everyone has one of three haircuts, and none of them are
flattering: flat-ironed paper thin locks, shags gone wrong and big bangs. I scan the page of students with last names that start with D–F, and there she is, the Dairy Queen. Even with an overly layered haircut it’s hard to find fault with Annette Delaney. With her heart-shaped face, dimples and eyes that sparkle, even in black and white, she has a face that looks made to smile. All the other girls on the page look like regular teenagers, but Annie Delaney looks like a teenager from a movie.

Obviously someone else felt the same way, because there is an arrow pointing to the picture with the words
Eat your heart out, Jeff K!
scrawled in the margin. The same person (I can tell by the pen, which is green, and the handwriting, which is loopy) has commented on people throughout the book, mostly boys (
My future husband; Mama’s boy; Hubba, hubba
).

Denise.

Her picture is near the end of the section, and I have to stop myself from laughing out loud. Everyone else has polite little smiles, but Denise looks like she just told a bad joke — she’s smiling big as a Muppet, with all her teeth showing. I can’t get over how young she looks. Everything is a little too big on her face, as if she hasn’t quite grown into it yet. And her hair looks like it’s been assisted by both a curling and crimping iron. I’m not even sure what you would call that style other than maybe “the cloud.”

The person with the green pen also drew a box around the picture and added little rays, like the ones children draw around suns. There’s a comment beside it:
The coolest person I have ever met!

Yep. The person with the green pen was definitely a teenage Denise.

There is knock at the door. I slam the yearbook shut and
slip it under my pillow.

“Come in.”

The door opens and Doug is there, holding Suzy’s leash.

“Are you ready? It’s go time!”

Ever since the engagement, Doug has asked me to “tag along” when he walks his dog, Suzy. I’m not much of a dog person, and I’m definitely not a Suzy person. I have never quite forgiven her for running away from me last spring, even though it did lead to one of the more interesting moments of my life: kissing Michael. I still blush just thinking about it.

Doug never uses the word “bonding,” but it’s clear that these walks are for us to get to know each other. Now that he is moving in permanently, it seems like a good idea. If I didn’t go, I’m sure my mother would find a horrible task for me to do, like fishing hairballs from the drain pipe in the Hair Emporium. Even half an hour with Doug and his hairball of a dog is better than that.

Luckily Doug is a talker, so there are never any awkward moments.

“So, C-Bot, you haven’t said a word about me moving in.”

As part of our bonding process, Doug is constantly coming up with new nicknames for me. Some are better than others.

I can feel him looking at me, waiting for a response. Even though they’ve been engaged for more than a week, Doug hasn’t asked me how I feel about it yet. I knew it was only a matter of time before the questions came. Doug can’t help himself when it comes to talking things out.

I keep my eyes on the dog, who is basically skipping along the sidewalk, her nose to the cement, sniffing out
who knows what. Unlike the other dogs we pass, she seems incapable of walking in a straight line, preferring to zigzag around, depending on what interesting smells she can find.

“I think it’s good,” I say to him, still looking at Suzy.

“You can be honest with me. I know it’s a big change.”

“I know. We’ve never had a pet before,” I say.

Doug laughs. He thinks I’m being funny. “It’s nothing. You’ll love it.”

Just then Suzy spots a single fallen leaf, drops to her haunches and starts barking at it. I’m not so sure I
will
love living with such a dumb dog.

Doug goes on, “Suzy will be a change, that’s for sure, but I was talking about me moving in. How do you feel about that?”

I wonder if this is how it’s going to be now: Doug asking me questions about my feelings while we walk his dog. I feel like we’re on a family sitcom, and this is the part where the father and daughter have a heart-to-heart. Only Doug is not my father, and I hate heart-to-hearts.

If this is going to be our new thing, then it is an unfortunate side effect of his moving in. I don’t like to talk things out; I do enough of that with Mattie. I don’t need another amateur psychiatrist in my life.

Nor do I need a dog, come to think of it.

“I’m okay with it. I’m still sort of … processing the information.”

Processing the information?
Now I sound like Mattie.

Inside, I’m cringing, but Doug is nodding.

“Totally. I get that. It’s going to take some time. That’s why we thought I’d move in in stages,” he explains, sounding suspiciously like my mother. It hits me that they probably discussed how they would approach me, mapping out all
my possible reactions and deciding how they’d respond.

This is something they will do, now. They will have secret conversations to discuss things like allowance and curfew and whether or not I am being too mouthy. They will be Team Parent and I will be all alone. There is no one on my side. Except for maybe the dog.

Suzy bounces up, snapping her jaws at a moth. Even the moth, the laziest and dopiest of insects, gets away. This doesn’t seem to bother Suzy. She still runs over to Doug, elated, as if she had caught it. Doug leans down and roughs up her doggy bangs, jabbering away to her in baby talk.

Who am I kidding? That dog is not on my team. It’s just me against Team Parent and their sweet-natured, if a little slow, mascot Suzy.

Because Mattie is leaving for camp soon, we are trying to spend as much time together as possible. She even comes over just to hang out while I cover the phone for the Hair Emporium. Mattie loves it, especially when I let her answer the phone and make appointments. She’s so good at it: very professional and friendly.

Today I got roped into packing the last of the boxes that are headed to the Salvation Army. With Mattie around, I barely have to do any of the actual work. She’s happy to organize, and I do my best to add my two cents from the bed, flipping through the yearbooks.

“Clarissa, you aren’t being very helpful.”

“Sorry, you’re just doing such a good job.”

Mattie tosses an old tuque at my head. “Yeah, right. What are you doing? Are those yearbooks?”

“Yeah, they’re my mom’s.”

Mattie squeals, abandons her organizing and steps through piles of winter clothes to sit on the bed next to me. “Let’s go through them!”

I’m happy to pore over them again. We go through the yearbooks one by one, laughing at the hairstyles and wondering over all the mysterious notes.

“Your mom was so pretty,” Mattie says. “My mom had these horrible glasses in high school. You could barely see her face!”

“Do you want to see my dad?”

Mattie draws her breath in sharply. “Are you serious?
They went to high school together?”

“Yep.”

“Show me.”

I find the grade eleven yearbook and flip to the prom picture. “That’s him.”

Mattie takes the book from me, sets it on her lap and stares at it for a few moments before declaring, “He’s handsome. Don’t you think so? I would date him.”

I take the yearbook back, snapping it shut. “Ew, don’t be gross!”

I should have known Mattie would take what could have been a nice moment and make it all about boys.

“I’m not — I’m giving him a compliment! Do you ever wonder about him?”

“Not really. A few times, maybe. But lately I’ve been thinking about him more.”

“And you’ve never spoken to him?”

“Never.”

Mattie shakes her head. “I can’t believe it. It’s like something out of a movie. Have you ever looked him up online?”

“No.”

“Really? Why not?”

I’m embarrassed to admit that even though I’ve considered it in the past, I always chickened out. “It didn’t seem like such a big deal before.”

Mattie’s eyes wander over to the computer. “Want to look him up now?”

Now that the seed has been planted, I do want to look him up. “Okay, but let me close the door first.”

Mattie frowns. “Why?”

“Just in case my mom comes up and wants to know what
we’re doing.”

“Why would she care? He’s your dad. It’s not illegal to Google your own father,” Mattie says.

“I know, but she’d probably overreact. She’d think it was this big deal.” I roll my eyes, as if to say “mothers, what can you do?” even though my heartbeat is speeding up and my skin is itching, which is what happens to me when I’m excited or anxious. This is, in fact, a huge deal. I’ve never done anything other than ask Denise a few questions about Bill before. I’m in completely new territory here.

Mattie sits at my computer, and I sit on the bed behind her. It feels safer to let her do the typing, as if I’m just an innocent bystander and have nothing to do with it.

“What’s his name?”

“Bill Davies. I don’t know his middle name.”

“Do you think he goes by Bill or William?”