Here So Far Away(5)

But I was already sitting down, having gotten what I wanted from the Face.

She’d flinched.

“You have no filter,” Nat said as we watched Christina retreat to the ladies’ room.

Bill finished noisily vacuuming up the last of his float. “George has no . . . Dude, you’ve never had a period that I did not know about.”

“Not having a filter means you say everything,” Lisa said. “George will say anything.”

That’s what made them a little afraid of me, the Elevens, what made me the enforcer of our group. The girl version. I mean, I was wearing a delicately beaded yellow cardigan over my Tito Jackson T-shirt.

“Only to the Elevens,” I said.





Three


I dreamt all night about eating wet, sour sausages, and when I woke up, with a start, realized I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. I did remember to wear my running clothes to bed, the surest way to get my arse out the door on a Sunday morning, but the gloomy sky outside my bedroom window was begging me to burrow deeper into the covers.

“George? George!”

I leaned in the doorway of my parents’ room. The Sergeant was sitting up in bed wearing an old RCMP training depot T-shirt, his reading glasses, and a skirt of newspapers.

“You can’t get out of bed to yell at your beloved daughter?”

He glared as he swung his leg out from under the covers and thunked it on top of the papers. The skin sewn over the place where his foot used to be was chafed and purple, angry-looking. A double row of black stitches circled his leg, just below his calf.

“You can’t put a nice sock on your stump for your beloved daughter?”

“My cast fell off,” Dad said. “Now, if you’re all wrung out of concern, go over to the dresser and get that stack of bills and the checks and a pen. And my cigarettes.”

In my defense, had I said something more sympathetic, Dad would have batted it away. We were alike in that respect, two cats who only wanted to crawl under the bed and be left to suffer alone. He didn’t seem to be in pain, though who could tell? For weeks he’d walked on a foot that was dying before he would admit where the smell was coming from.

“How does a cast fall off?” I asked as I collected everything. “Were you dancing the shimmy?”

“The swelling went down all of a sudden. I was taking a whiz when I felt it slip. It was grab it or graffiti the wall. I protected the wall.”

“Had to be a hero.”

“Your mother’s fond of that wall.”

I placed his things on the bedside table and took in the leg situation. Though the skin was irritated, the stump itself had a surprisingly soft look. It was flattish across the bottom with rounded edges, like a Nerf baseball bat. “Dad,” I said casually, lest a cat claw shoot out from under the bed, “do you think it’s okay for it to be out in the open like that already?” He’d been home from the hospital for just over a week.

“We’re waiting for the doctor to call back and say whether the local ER can put on a new one or we have to drive into the city.” He pointed to the end of the bed. “Sit. We’re overdue for a discussion.”

For the past thirty-two hours I’d been nursing a false hope that for once Dad would let something slide, as though they’d removed his personality with his foot. “If this is about Friday night, I missed curfew by five minutes, max,” I said, perching on Mum’s side, which was tucked in already, her slippers neatly aligned with her bedside table.

“It was twelve twenty-seven and that was not Lisa’s car. You think things are going lax around here because I’m short an appendage?”

My eyes drifted back to the stump then to the crusted-over cut on Dad’s forehead. He’d fallen getting out of bed a couple of nights earlier, having forgotten the foot wasn’t there anymore. It was hard to fathom how you could fail to remember such a thing, even while groggy on meds, even for a second.

“Well?”

“Joshua Spring drove me home.”

“Ah, the Springs. I had to pull his mother over twice for driving under the influence.”

“Just because his mother—look, he drove me because Lisa has a one-o’clock curfew, like a normal person. He has a girlfriend.”

Sort of.

Mum appeared in the doorway, carrying a stack of linens. “His father had a wife, but that didn’t stop him from getting frisky with the dental hygienist,” she said. “Oh, Paul, I can pay those bills. You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’m sitting. Aren’t you supposed to be going somewhere with those sheets?”

Mum looked down at the linens in her arms. “I am.”

When she’d gone, Dad said, “I’m giving you Abe. As soon as I can talk your mother into taking the Honda.”

I almost rolled off the bed. Borrowing my parents’ cars required heavy negotiations unless I was driving to work, and Abe was Mum’s baby, a secondhand 1975 Lincoln Continental Town Car. It was a ridiculous vehicle—tan colored, size of a small apartment, impossible to park—but Mum was convinced it was safer than Dad’s little Honda, even though she was always clipping things with that wide-ass hood.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t know what to say?”