History of Wolves(57)

The mechanic’s apartment was a basement walk-out in a once-grand Victorian. Students lived in the turrets. Bare poplar seedlings sprouted in all the gutters. “Hey there,” I’d say to Rom when he opened his rickety back door—still in his mechanic’s clothes, still in his greasy blue coveralls, his blue eyes watering at the cold I let in. I’d hold up a frozen pizza and a six-pack of Buds.

“Oh, man,” he’d say. “Oh, really, a Tombstone? You shouldn’t have.”

If he was unimpressed it didn’t stop him from drinking his three beers in the thirty minutes it took for the oven to heat up and cook the pizza. I kept him from my beers by whacking his hand every time he reached for one more. “Fair is fair,” I’d say, so one night Rom went into the bedroom and brought back a fifth of whiskey. As he swigged from his bottle, he whipped up his standard salad from bulgur, mint, and a cucumber. He made me drink a glass of milk as we waited for the pizza to cook. He made me eat a few bites of the salad and half an orange, before allowing me one little sip of his ratty booze.

“Fair is fair,” he mocked.

The pizza cheese burned the roofs of our mouths. When I went for another swig of whiskey, he pulled the bottle out of reach. “Eat your salad,” he commanded.

That first winter I was in the Cities, Rom was big on vitamins. He thought I ate like shit and had an unresolved past and should go to the dentist. He wanted us to eat at his table, so he set out plates and squares of paper towels folded in half. He’d started pressing for a pet, a Labrador retriever, because he thought a dog would lead to a more regular schedule, a shared apartment, more exercise. Weekend trips to the North Shore, a fucking campfire. I don’t know what. When I rolled my eyes at all that, he said, “If you’re not going anywhere, Girl Scout, just shut up. Okay? Just shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” I protested.

“You didn’t have to.”


Sometimes, after supper, we put on our mittens and hats and walked to the movie theater a few blocks down toward the capitol. We split the cost for two seats, two Cokes, and a bucket of popcorn. The movies Rom chose were always unrelentingly loud, full of cops shooting over the hoods of cars; still, I found it restful to sit there in the pulsing dark. The louder it was, the sooner I slept, my head against the seat back, my shoes sticking to the floor. I didn’t mind missing the car chases, the explosions. It was reassuring to feel that something important just went on happening while I slept, something with guns.

Afterward, Rom would test me to see when I’d fallen asleep. “That guy with the face that turned into a fish?” he’d say, when we were walking out. “Did you see that?”

And I’d say, though I usually hadn’t, “He was incredible.”


When I’d been in the Cities for about eight months, when the holidays rolled around, I showed up at Rom’s apartment on Christmas Eve carrying a little package I’d wrapped in red reindeer paper and a thin green bow. Rom opened it on his unmade bed, sitting cross-legged. His feet were bare, yellow nailed, but he was wearing stiff new jeans and a black button-up shirt, untucked. I watched as he broke the green ribbon with his teeth and lifted from the box a dog’s spikey collar and heavy leather lead. It took a moment for him to unwind the leash, and it’s weird how joy goes through a grown man’s face, so that for a second you can see him the way he was as a kid: all smooth faced and unguarded. Then that look was gone, and he was squinting at me as I wiggled out of my jeans, as I unhooked my bra and got completely naked. I took the leather collar and fastened it around my neck. For an instant he looked so disheartened, so disappointed—like I’d done the one thing that could truly hurt him—but then I sniffed his crotch and handed him the leash, so we had a good time.

“Bad girl,” he told me.

I pulled against the leash. I wouldn’t go where he said.

“Down,” he warned, a glint in his eyes. “Stay.”

His present for me was a Swiss Army knife. “Fool’s protection,” he explained, looking a little nervous, leaning in so I could hear the stud in his tongue click against his teeth. This was after we’d gotten dressed again and were sipping eggnog in his bed straight from the carton. He waited until I said, “Cool. Thank you,” before showing me all the things the knife could do. Peel an orange, scale a fish. I didn’t tell him I had the exact same knife in my purse, though more banged up. I didn’t tell him I already knew which metal slit to pull with my fingernail to get the wire stripper out, or the three-inch blade. It was like so many other things between us, that gift. It was exactly right and totally wrong for me.


That same winter, just after Christmas, I received a bright red envelope in the mail. Ann and I were sorting bills on a dark afternoon when she held up the envelope with a Santa stamp, a Florida return address. “Is this from your family?” she asked. I took it from her. Her pale, plucked eyebrows arched hopefully over the rims of her glasses. It bothered Ann—it broke her strict code of Canadian niceness—that I hadn’t any formal holiday plans, that I wouldn’t tell her even the littlest thing about where I’d come from.

I hesitated long enough to flip the envelope chestward before saying, “Yep.”

I stood and carried the envelope to our kitchenette. Inside was a holiday card with reindeer and HO HO HO’S in black cursive. When I opened the card, out winged a photograph of a whitehaired man with his arm slung around a dog. It was creepy in a way, but also not. It was just a guy in a lawn chair, a guy with his hound—a palm tree shadow floating over his head.