Days That End in Y (9 page)

“I know. They got married soon after high school. They’re divorced now.”

“What about Tara B. or Krista Cummings?” Tina asks.

“No one’s really seen or heard from Krista since she went off to university, and Tara moved to Toronto a few years ago. Last I heard she was working in TV doing publicity or something.”

“Good for her.”

“Do you ever hear from Matt?” Mom asks.

Tina groans a little, embarrassed, then looks at me and explains, “Matt Van de Graff was my first boyfriend. I can’t believe you’re bringing him up, Annie!” She swats my mother playfully and continues, “I thought we were going to get married for sure.”

“I always thought he was a sweetheart, even if he did try too hard. You were a cute couple.”

“He
was
a sweetheart and probably still is.”

“He’s working for his father now. He’ll take over Van de Graff Farms, if his father ever retires. He married Janet Simmons. They have three kids.”

“Good for him. Matt is a great guy. Remember how he hero-worshipped Bill?”

Mom nods. “I remember. It’s too bad. How come nice guys always look up to jerks?”

“Because girls like a bad boy,” Tina says. “Then we grow up and kick ourselves for ever thinking like that. But Doug sounds like one of the good ones.”

“He is,” Mom says.

“How’s Denise?” Tina asks. “We’ve been trying to get together, but our schedules never match up. God, I miss that laugh.”

I have to restrain myself from choking. Denise’s laugh, as distinctive as it is, is not something one should pine over.

Once the conversation veers into a discussion about Denise and makeup products, I sense that my fact-finding mission has come to an end. I look at my list: Stookey, TJ, Tyler Kellerman, Alison, Krista, Tara B. and, perhaps most promising of all, Matt Van de Graff. Surely some of these people are still in touch with Bill. And at least one of them, Matt Van de Graff, still lives in town. Now all I need is a plan.

I have a one-track mind. Bill is all I can think about. Even though “Mission: BKJR 199” went bust, and I still haven’t decided what to do with my list of names, I’m not ready to give up. I need to gather more information, which is why I volunteer to pick up the punch bowl and plastic champagne glasses from Denise’s apartment.

Mom gives me a quick squeeze before I go. “Thank you for being so helpful. This party is really coming together, thanks to you.”

I roll my eyes. “Party? Don’t you mean wedding?”

“You know what I mean. I’m really impressed with how calmly you’re taking all of this. I know it’s a lot to digest. You would tell me if you needed to talk, right?”

Truth be told, the wedding is only the second most important thing on my mind these days. Maybe I should be thinking more about Doug becoming a part of our lives forever, but finding Bill feels more urgent. Who knows how long he’s in town for? The window of opportunity is small, and it feels like it’s shrinking every second I’m not out there doing something about it. He could have left already.

The thought makes the back of my throat tickle, like I’m about to cough — or worse, cry.

“I’d tell you,” I say, and in my head I add silently,
just not about what I’m really doing
.

“What did I ever do to deserve such a great kid?”

I smile weakly and am out the door before the guilt makes me confess. If only she knew I was about to secretly pump her best friend, she of the famously loose lips, for information on my long-lost father.

I’ve only been to Denise’s apartment a handful of times. Her building is one of four by the river. All of the apartments on the north side of the building overlook the water. It’s a nice view — just ask the people who used to have it. When the apartment buildings went up, they were wedged between the backyards on Dawson Street and the strip of woods that backed up to the river. The people who lived in the houses complained, but they couldn’t do anything about it.

It was in the paper a lot. Denise used to read the stories aloud to Mom and me in the Hair Emporium. “Boo hoo,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Poor little rich people have to share their view with us regular people. Cry me a river.”

You have to buzz to get in, and then take the elevator up. Denise lives on the fourth floor. I’m so full of anxious energy, I could probably run up all four flights and keep on going to the tenth floor, but time is ticking, and I don’t want to waste a second.

“Welcome, welcome!”

Denise’s house is a mess. No matter where you look, it appears as though she were interrupted in the middle of something and forgot to go back and finish. The table is full of breakfast bowls with cereal bits dried to the bottom and dinner dishes with crusts of hardened spaghetti sauce. A coat, two pairs of shoes and a blouse lie on the back of the couch, as if she changed clothes on her way out the door. Romance novels lie open — pages down, spines cracked, making little tents — on the couch, the kitchen counter
and the floor in the bathroom.

I am something of a neat freak and the whole messy place sets my teeth on edge.

“Don’t mind the mess. When you live on your own, no one sees it, so what’s the point?”

“Personal hygiene?”

“Oh, you’re such a funny girl. Want a root beer?”

“Yes, please.” Denise disappears into the fridge, which is just as jam-packed as the rest of her apartment. When I catch sight of a watermelon balancing on an egg container, I have to avert my eyes. I can’t help counting the disasters waiting to happen.

“How’s the wedding planning going?” she asks.

“Fine, although Mom still refuses to acknowledge that it’s a wedding. She keeps calling it ‘the party.’”

Denise shakes her head. “Has she changed her mind about music at least?”

“No! I suggested a whole bunch of nice, non-wedding songs, and she still thinks it would be too formal.”

We don’t agree on much, but music at my mom’s wedding (or non-wedding) is one thing Denise and I are both pushing for.

“Well, we can keep at her, but if Annie doesn’t want to do it, she won’t.” Denise gives me a very pointed look. “Must be a family trait.”

I ignore the last bit and take the root beer she offers me.

“Do you think she’ll change her name?” I ask.

“I doubt it,” Denise says.

“Annie Armstrong sounds too much like a country singer. Delaney is a good last name,” I say carefully, looking for a way to ask what I really want to know. “I like being Clarissa Delaney. I’m glad she never went with Davies. Clarissa
Davies sounds like a high school secretary.”

“With press-on nails,” Denise snorts. “But Davies was never in the cards for you, kiddo.”

“Why not?”

Denise narrows her eyes at me. “Why do I feel like this is a trap?”

I play innocent. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, why are you bringing up your father’s last name?”

I look down at my drink and fiddle with the pop tab. “Mom and I found her old yearbooks. It just made me think.”

“Don’t you have enough to think about right now? Why bother wasting your time and energy worrying about him?”

“Was I always going to be Clarissa Louise Delaney? Did she even think of Davies?”

“You’re her child; why shouldn’t you take her name?”

“And my grandparents, I mean, on his side, they were okay with it?” I can’t bring myself to use his name, Bill. I’m afraid that if I do, something in my voice will give the truth away. She’ll guess that I’ve seen him and have been out looking for him.

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” Denise asks, trying to change the subject.

“Not exactly.”

“Yes, I do believe we had this exact conversation at your house, sitting at the kitchen table, not so long ago.”

“Well, now I have more questions.”

“Lord, give me strength.” Denise downs her root beer in one long gulp and rubs her forehead.

I decide to come clean. Well, partially clean. “I saw a picture of my dad.”

“Who?”

Honestly. Between Denise and Benji, you would think that I popped out of the world completely fatherless: a miracle of immaculate conception.

“What do you mean, who? Bill Davies, obviously.”

“Why would you go looking for him?” Denise says with a sigh.

My heart stops. How does she know? Then I realize she means looking for him in the yearbook, not looking for him in town. I have to swallow hard to keep my voice casual.

“I wasn’t looking for him; he was just there, in the yearbook.”

“I don’t believe that for a second, but okay, if you say so.”

“In the yearbook he seemed … fun.”

“Oh, he was fun all right,” Denise says, but she doesn’t elaborate.

“There was this picture, I think it was from prom. They were both all dressed up, but he was joking around for the camera, in sunglasses.”

Denise nods. “I remember that picture,” she says.

“How come he never came back here? Doesn’t he have family?”

“His parents were divorced and he lived with his dad. As far as I know, Mr. Davies moved away years ago. He had an older brother, but I don’t know what happened to him. I doubt he has much of a reason to come back.”

Except for me, I think. Aren’t I enough of a reason?

“In the yearbook it seemed like they were really in love.”

“They were young and beautiful, of course they were in love. It doesn’t mean it was going to last. You can’t believe everything you see in a yearbook. Those things are meant to make high school look perfect, when lots of the time it
was far from it.”

“Do you have yours?”

“No, I got rid of them ages ago.”

“How come?”

“They made me sad.”

“They’re just some cheesy old books; how can they make you sad?”

“This might be hard for you to believe, knowing me as I am now: great skin, great hair, all put together—”

Bite your tongue, Clarissa, I think. This is not the time for a snarky comment, even if there are a hundred things to say.

Denise continues, “But when I was in high school, I was a bit of a dork.”

I think of her school pictures, the big smile and big hair, but I stay silent.

“Thank goodness for your mother; otherwise, no one would have looked twice at me. But I always thought, just wait, I’m going to move to L.A. and make everyone jealous.”

Denise gets up and starts to pace, like she did in those first few weeks after she gave up smoking. At her side, her fingers drum against her thigh: yet another one of her smoking withdrawal signs.

“Back then, I used to think I would be a makeup artist on movie sets — the kind of person who could charge a thousand bucks for a few hours on Oscar night, glamming up celebrities. And what do I do now? The same thing I’ve done for almost fifteen years: I sell makeup in hick towns to people who think blue eye shadow is still the height of fashion.”

“But you have a job, and this apartment …” I’m about to add “and your health,” but it feels like something a guidance
counsellor would say.

“My job is a joke, and I don’t own this dump; I rent it,” Denise says savagely. She stops pacing and makes a beeline for a cupboard, fumbles around and pulls a package of cigarettes out from behind the coffee mugs. Uh-oh, this isn’t good. Denise stopped smoking more than a year ago when my mother was in treatment. Now she only smokes when she’s stressed out. I just wanted some answers; I didn’t mean to drive her to smoking again.

“Don’t tell your mother,” she says, indicating the cigarette.

“I won’t, as long as you don’t tell her about this conversation.”

Denise blows a stream of blue-grey smoke out both nostrils. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Look, I don’t want you to think I’m some sad, old single lady. I’ve got plenty of good years in me yet, and I’m going to make some changes. Oprah always says you have to be the change, not just wait for it.” Denise exhales, closing her eyes. “But you can see how I wouldn’t want a bunch of old yearbooks around, mocking me. Making me feel like the same old geek I was back then.”

I don’t know what to say. I’m uncomfortable giving advice to my own friends, let alone adults. I drink my root beer and wait for the mood to change. How did this mission get so completely off track?

“Just a second — don’t go anywhere.”

Denise disappears, leaving me on the couch, sipping my root beer and trying not to touch the piles of clothes on either side of me. Who knows how long they’ve been there or whether or not they’ve been recently laundered? She returns with an album, baby pink and laminated, with
enormous pastel circles and squiggles on the front. It is the ugliest photo album I have ever seen.

“This is all I have left from high school. Sort of like my own yearbook, except I got to choose all the pictures.”

Denise lets me flip through the pages, which are stiff and covered in slightly greasy laminate. Most of them are shots of Denise and an impossibly young-looking version of my mother, modelling hairstyles and playing for the camera.

“Your mom used to let me practise on her,” Denise says. “When I got really good, I did her makeup for all the beauty pageants.”

Some of the photos are group shots, taken in the hallways of the school or around someone’s truck at a party in the country. I ask Denise for everyone’s names, as if it makes a difference, knowing who the people are.

“Who’s that?”

“That was … Lord, I don’t remember his name. It’ll come to me.”

“It wasn’t that long ago.”

“I know. I just haven’t thought about him in ages.”

“But you look like you’re such good friends in this picture. Or at least he and Mom do.”

“Well, sure! At the moment we probably felt like the best of friends. But people change, life moves on and then, the next thing you know, your friend’s kid is accusing you of being a bad person because you can’t remember the name of some guy you went to a party with once.”

I ignore that last part and press on. “I bet Mom would remember. Look at her — it’s like they’re best friends!”

Denise shakes her head. “She might have really liked him, but I doubt it. Your mom knew how to work it. She was a big flirt; she made everyone think she loved them.
Part and parcel of being a Dairy Queen, you know.”