Every Happy Family (16 page)

As they toured the facility, Nancy acted as if it were her private home, muttering about the guests she couldn't seem to get to leave then giving him a nasty look as if wishing him gone too. And that was when sorrow gutted his chest. Why hadn't he made more of an effort to see her while she was still the person he knew and loved?

He took her for a walk in the adjacent park then stayed for an institutional dinner of ham steak, boxed potatoes and canned peas. When he mentioned going to see Jill and family, Nancy perked up and asked with a kind of pleading clarity if she could come along. Her sincerity was so heartfelt, however temporary, and his guilt so replete, there was no way he could leave her. And when he called Jill and she said in that self-righteous way of hers, “No, it's a bad idea,” he became all the more determined.

Now, as he and Nancy wait in a line of vehicles to exit the ferry, and he's lost his name and identity to someone named Harold, he's worried that Jill may have been right after all.

Kenneth punches his sister's address onto the rental car's computer screen.

“Fifteen eighty Thurston Court,” the mechanized yet sultry female voice reads back to him.

Beside him, Nancy turns to look in the back seat.

“It's the car's computer talking,” Kenneth explains and Nancy gives him a look like he's the one who's lost his mind.

He drives off the ferry into the narrow stream of traffic and sudden blinding sunlight.

“Like a herd of angry turtles,” singsongs Nancy in what Kenneth thinks of as her former-schoolteacher voice.

“Yep, we're off and running to see your daughter, Jill, and your grandchildren, Quinn, Beau and Pema. Jill's husband, Les, is very sick.” He drones out this information at regular intervals because Jill told him to.

“My husband's very sick,” says Nancy.

“And very dead,” he mumbles.

“Excuse me, Harold?” she says, her voice rising in alarm.

“Nothing, sorry.” And he is, then reminds himself that in another few seconds all will be forgotten.

“What time is the ferry?” asks Nancy.

“Two o'clock.” He looks at the car clock. It's three-forty.

“I haven't been on a ferry for a while.”

Only three minutes ago.

Nancy goes quiet, hands plucking at the top of her purse with a kind of restlessness that prompts him to activate the child lock on the doors and windows. She taps out the syllables of her next sentence on the window. “I re-mem-ber.”

“That we're going to your daughter Jill's house?”

“It's good to go back. Pin it down.” She mimes putting a pin in the lapel of her rain jacket. “Otherwise, it's like salt over your shoulder,” she says with a toss.

He doesn't ask. Has given up trying to make her make sense.

“Nice that we left the rain behind,” he says. It had been raining in Vancouver.

“What time's the ferry?”

“Two o'clock.”

“I haven't been on a ferry for a while.”

Nancy was frightened by the ferry crowds and they'd stayed in the car until the car deck emptied out. Then he took her and her cane up in the elevator to the quiet buffet room where she had six desserts, a bucket of coffee and, also at Jill's suggestion, they played rummy, a continuous game of recklessly changing rules. His fingers ache from shuffling. When the “return to your vehicles” announcement came, Nancy was in the washroom. After ten minutes and some urging by the buffet personnel to head down to the car deck, he went and found her locked in a stall. Had to crawl under the door, not an easy manoeuvre with his height. Her sweater and purse were hung on a hook, her shirt unbuttoned to the waist. She mumbled something about “tickets to get out of here.” It all would have been funny if it wasn't so sad.

“Minto?” Keeping his eyes on the road, he offers her the open roll. When she doesn't take it, he looks over and sees her staring at it as if he's offered her a rotten fish. “If you don't like Mintos just say so.” He slips the roll back into his pocket.

“I have a son,” says Nancy.

He sighs. “Yes, you do.”

“He teaches baseball in China.”

“English in Japan, though he does coach Little League.” He presses his head against the headrest and sighs. “I've been away a long time and I'm truly sorry about not coming more often. But I'm here now, Mom. It's me, Kenneth.” He glances over, hopeful.

“I'm tired of eating chicken.” She's looking out her window. “It's chicken this and chicken that, as if the sky's falling.”

Changing into the passing lane, he's eager to get to Jill. Things are a little too real for him these days and he needs a strong drink and his sister's advice. She has always told him what to do and hopefully will tell him what to do now. Back home he's fucked up big time, literally.

“Turn left in ten kilometres,” drones the computer.

Nancy turns to search the back.

“It's the computer talking,” he repeats for what it's worth.

She huffs and opens her purse and Kenneth glimpses what looks like the motherlode of paper clips. She shuts it again and clucks her tongue. “I've always liked the smell of a decent place.”

•••

Jill had risen early to ensure everything was done in time. She cleaned the final light fixture in the bathroom, did another dusting in the upstairs bedrooms and marked four test papers before Les woke and rang his bell for help to and from the bathroom.

After tossing the marinating potato wedges, she made Les his morning oatmeal then put together the Greek salad – keeping the tomatoes separate. She skewered the chunks of lamb, toasted pine nuts and diced mango and scallion for the rice, then froze her fingers struggling to embalm the mascarpone ice cream in thick slices of pound cake. “Form the cake into the shape of a hill or volcano,” Les had told her, “with enough surface on top to place the demitasse.” Her cake hill ended up lopsided, but the ice cream was beginning to melt so she wrapped it in wax paper and made room in the freezer. Figured that when the time came to make the meringue icing she could spread it on in a way that straightened up the hill.

She sliced celery, carrots and cucumber for the veggie plate, realized she was missing red pepper – Pema's favourite – and made a trip to the store. The moment she arrived back, Les was ringing his bell for lunch, last night's soup and a tuna sandwich. Having forgotten to eat breakfast, she grabbed a banana and poured herself a cup of tea, which ended up turning cold on the kitchen counter while she made her mother's pastry recipe for the miniquiches.

Now, as she fills the pastry cups, she reviews the order of the ceremony. “Welcome everyone home and give a short speech to set the tone. Invite each family member to light a candle on the mantelpiece, say their prepared words and finish by offering their gift to Les. Les opens gift. Invite next person. Dinner. After dinner, ask Quinn to run slide show to Annie's music. Serve coffee, end with the flaming cake which Les will ceremoniously light.”

She can't help wondering if Pema will even feel like hers any more. Oh, why the possessiveness? A child is not something you own. Les's bell rings. She's coming home, thinks Jill, heading to the bedroom, just be happy about that.

“I'd like my shaving things and toothbrush, please,” he tells her.

Because walking takes so much out of him, these are things he now does sitting up on the side of his bed, over a bowl of warm water on the card table Jill carts to and from his bedside as needed.

She leaves him to it, finishes filling the quiches – swiss and cream cheese, parboiled broccoli – which she puts aside to cook just before serving so that they'll be warm the way her mother likes them.

“The egg whites for the meringue have to sit at room temperature,” she intones, repeating Les's directive. She puts the required number of eggs in a bowl on the counter, then, to have at the ready, hunts down the old dented container of cream of tartar.

Her favourite chore, setting the table, she's saved for last. Cathy Benfey, the professional celebrant Jill hired, had encouraged her to incorporate familiar traditions. Therefore, like she's done every Christmas and Thanksgiving since starting a family, she uses her grandmother's damask tablecloth and napkins – dry cleaned for the occasion – the china and silver inherited from Les's parents, the crystal glasses that were a wedding gift from her parents and the brass candlesticks that Kenneth sent for their tenth anniversary but which arrived over a year late.

Cathy Benfey designed all occasions from baby welcomes to ash scatterings, menstrual beginnings to pet memorials. Living Wakes, though, were her specialty. Despite the grating sounds of the term ‘celebrant,” Jill had paid Cathy for an hour's advice. “Knowing that he or she has made a mark upon this earth,” said Cathy, eyes drooping with sincerity, “makes the thought of an imminent departure more acceptable.”

The woman tried to talk Jill into handing over the evening's reins – “So you can focus on your loved one and attend to your own grief” – but the last thing Les would want, and Jill too, was a stranger in their midst pretending to know what they were feeling. She did adopt Cathy's suggestion of semi-formal attire – Jill plans to wear her green satin cocktail dress because it's the one dress the kids never fail to compliment – and her suggestion to display things the kids had made for Les over the years. When sorting through the storage room, Jill dug up a dozen necktie-sporting Father's Day cards – an ongoing joke since Les didn't own a necktie – and the place cards with acrostic poems Pema had painstakingly made for somebody's birthday. She also found two well-preserved school projects that Les would have helped with and she thought the kids might get a kick out of seeing.

With Pema's place cards, she marks the immediate family in their customary seats with Les at one end and herself at the other. Nancy, she places to her right and next to Kenneth. Holly between Quinn and Les.

Curious all over again what Pema had written about her, Jill picks up her place card.

J uggles home and work

I nsists everyone speaks right

L oves words

L ong legs

She smiles and reads Les's.

L aughs a lot

E njoys cooking

S uperific dad

She rereads hers. Fair enough. She'd have been more fun if she hadn't had to work so much. If Les had stuck with a job and been more ambitious...some people find more reasons to laugh. Is anyone – Is anyone to blame for the way she is?

She displays the Father's Day cards around the table's centre, including the unredeemed remains of a coupon book Beau and Pema made for one of Les's birthdays.
Good for one Foot Massage. Good for getting you one Beer. Good for one Toe Paint.

How many times did she arrive home from work to find this table strewn with Monopoly or a card game and Les in front of the cooking channel, his hair festooned with clips and ribbons, his eyelids a horror show of blue. Jill never once got her toenails painted with scented markers, each nail a different colour, sometimes polka-dotted or striped, smelling of watermelon, licorice and lime. She never got a coupon book either. But then she never asked for one. She asked for notebooks, transplants for the garden, oven mitts. Once she asked that no one say “like” all day, to try really hard, and no one found this funny or endearing.

She adjusts Quinn's first-place science project – a homemade seismograph – on the dining-room sideboard. Hardly fair for Quinn to be the only one not drinking. She can abstain too, provide moral support. She looks at her watch. Time to shower and get dressed. Also on the sideboard, though battered in places, is the elaborate diorama Beau and Pema made of Hogwarts. Jill had helped edit the book report while Les had helped with the diorama – quidditch balls and secret chambers – the fun part. Something's ringing somewhere. It's Les's bell.

As she heads to the bedroom, she remembers something her father, the armchair philosopher and drunk, once said when she was angry at her then boyfriend for blowing off a date. “‘Tis good to be reminded that every relationship has its wows,” he said in that bloated professorial way of his she'd vowed never to have. “It's a law of our solar system demonstrated by its elliptical, not circular, orbit.” He'd swung his finger round and round in an elongated circle. “Its wow.”

Occasionally what came out of her father had the ring of intelligence, and she was feeling dejected enough then to accept a little fatherly wisdom until he added in a bullying tone: “There are no perfect circles.”

It was then that something inside her sixteen-year-old brain bit down and she became resolute to prove him wrong. To this day she's ever propelled by the notion that perfection is out there, around the next corner just out of sight but not out of reach, and if only she tries a little harder...

His dress pants are even baggier than he'd feared and they have to use one of Jill's belts to keep them up. The folds of his white shirt are hidden under a black V-neck sweater that Jill shrank in the dryer. On purpose, he thinks, despite her apologetic claim otherwise. The doorbell rings just as Jill is tying his shoes.