Bow Grip (18 page)

“Too bad. I just made way too much pasta. I can’t seem to scale the recipe down when the kids aren’t here. You should come in. James hasn’t called yet, but I’m expecting the phone to ring any minute. Can I pour you a glass of wine? A beer?”

“Sure.”

“One of each?” Cecilia raised an eyebrow at me.

“Whatever you’re having is fine, thanks.”

She poured me a glass of red and passed it to me, then went to stir a pot on the stove. Smelled like fresh basil. The light on her back porch was on, shining through her fogged-up kitchen windows. I sat down at the kitchen table, which was made from a thick crosscut of pine, once varnished but now worn and scuffed. There were crayon marks on the wall between the tabletop and the window that looked
out over the backyard. A battered white Toyota Corolla in the carport, alongside two street-hockey nets. A tangle of bicycles.

“Your kids are away?”

“From Friday night until I pick them up after school on Monday. They go to Seth’s dad’s place in Canmore. You just missed meeting them last night.”

“How old are they?”

“Seth just turned twelve. Isaac will be ten in January. There they both are, on the fridge.”

The fridge was a cluster of tempera paintings, pipe cleaners glued in the shape of a heart to red construction paper, and lots of photographs. Cecelia and two cotton-haired boys lined up like a row of peas in a canoe, grinning. A third kid perched in the bow, a little girl with a snarl of copper curls, holding up a dandelion, triumphant-like.

“Which one is Seth?”

“The one in the red and blue shirt.”

“So Isaac is the little guy on the left?”

“That’s Aiden, my ex-husband’s other son. Seth’s half brother. Isaac is the one with the curls. Holding the flower. That picture is from a couple years ago. He made me cut his hair off when he started grade one.”

“Real cute kids.”

The phone rang. Cecelia searched through the newspapers on the counter for the cordless. Caught it on the third ring.

“Hello? Hi, James. Let me take you into the other room for a minute, okay? You won’t believe who’s here.” She pulled the phone away from her ear. “Joseph, hang tight while I talk family stuff with my brother for a minute, okay? Help yourself to some more wine if you want.”

Cecelia padded down the hall, taking the phone into the front room.

I stared at my thumbs, waiting. The motor on the fridge kicked in with a buzz, drowning out the murmurs from down the hall.

Cecilia was gone long enough that I started feeling weird, sitting alone at the table of a stranger. I wondered what James was going to say about me. Finally she came back and sat down across from me.

“James wants to know if you would mind towing the car into Calgary. He wants to give it to me, since my car is on its last legs. I would pay you for your time and gas.”

“No need for that. I’m going to be coming back to Calgary anyways, end of next week.”

“You got yourself a sweetheart in town?”

“No, cello teacher.”

“Right. Elaine’s cello.”

“Who was Elaine again?”

“James’s wife. She loved that cello. Back in their Buddhist days she used to say it was the only material possession she couldn’t forsake.”

“Do you think Elaine might want it back?” I asked, my voice tight. I didn’t really want to hear the answer to my own question.

Cecelia looked at me. “James never talked to you about her?”

“We weren’t that close. Just met over the car, like I said.”

“Elaine was killed in a car accident, what, seven years ago now, this Christmas. So was Eliza, their daughter.”

“Oh no, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“How could you know? James isn’t known for talking about himself. Like I said, I barely even know where he is most of the time.”

“You said before he had two kids, though?”

Cecelia nodded. “A son. He was in a car with James right behind Elaine and Eliza when a semi hit Elaine’s little Volkswagen. Isaac was only three when it happened. I’m not sure how much he remembers.”

“Isaac was there, too?”

“Isaac is James’s son. My nephew. Didn’t I mention that?”

“I must have missed it.”

“I took Isaac right after the accident. James just couldn’t … cope. He was supposed to come and get him when he got his shit back together, but I guess that hasn’t quite happened yet. I’ve stopped holding my breath. Seth and Isaac are inseparable, like brothers. And Isaac needs me. I don’t think being raised by a single father who’s a hermit living in a rusty old bus is the ideal situation for him. He’s a very special boy. James has never been able to relate to Isaac, even since before the accident. He’s the spitting image of his mother.”

“That’s very nice of you, raising your brother’s kid for him. He’s lucky he has you. They both are.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s how it’s supposed to be. Isaac has lots of people who love him. Maybe that’s God’s way of making it up to him, for taking his mother
and sister. It’s not like any of us planned for things to turn out like this, but sometimes life gets in the way of all your plans.”

I couldn’t tell you everything we got to talking about after that, and I can’t place the exact moment when the talking turned into something else altogether. By that time we were in the living room, listening to Tom Waits records and finishing that bottle of wine. Cecelia cracked the front window open and we stood in a swirl of draft, swapping drags off one cigarette and trying to blow all the smoke outside. She kept saying she didn’t want a whole one all to herself, she’d just have a puff off mine, if that was okay by me. Left a bit of vanilla lip balm on the filter. That was okay by me, too.

T
he next morning, I lay there in my motel bed for hours, shirtless and tangled up in the sheets, a permanent smile on my face, like a crack in the concrete. Rolled over on my side to scribble in my journal, the Beatles harmonizing through the tinny little speaker on the alarm clock radio.

I decided my stitches could finally handle a shower. I leaned one arm against the cool tiles of the stall and let the almost scalding water needle down between my shoulder blades until my skin was glowing and humming.

We were laughing about something, I can’t remember the details. She was one of those people who leaks tears from the corners of their eyes when they really crack up about something, and she kept wiping them away with the back of her thumbs. She was sitting next to me on the couch, to my right, and then without much ceremony and in mid-sentence she swung her right leg over her left one
and across both of mine, planting herself in my lap, her face inches from mine. Her hands were warm and rough on my chest, under my shirt, pulling on the long end of my belt.

I flipped through the stack of snapshots I saved in my head of what happened after that, and what I remember next was my body going stiff all on its own, with no conscious help from me. She had me in her mouth, and she had reached with her other hand and slipped a spit-slicked finger into my ass. I froze, my hand tangled in the maze of her unbraided hair. She stopped, flashed her eyes at me. Left her finger right where it was.

“What’s wrong, Joseph? Does that make you uncomfortable?”

“I’m not really sure. I don’t know, exactly.”

“Don’t tell me you’re forty years old and you haven’t found your own prostate?”

“I’ve seen it on camera, at the doctor’s. It’s pinker than you might think.”

Cecelia laughed. “Should I take it out?” She wiggled her finger, it called out come hither from its perch inside of me. “You don’t like how that feels?”

“Did I say that?”

“So maybe you should shut up and relax.”

I dried off, reminding myself to bring a towel from home when I came back here. Shaved in front of a steamy three-sided mirror, for the first time catching the deep purple hickey Cecelia Carson had deposited at some point in the hollow above my collarbone. I pressed it with my forefinger, watched it fill up with blood again. The muscles under my hips were stiff from remembering everything. I never would have made a move, as much as it had been in the back of my mind ever since the first time I saw her. I would have
sat there tight all night with my hands folded in my lap, if it had been left up to me.

She hadn’t asked me to stay, or even showed me her bedroom. We had laid there for awhile in a tangle on the rug in front of her couch, whispering and passing back and forth the red end of my last cigarette, just letting the smoke hang there in the dark above us. It was late, maybe one o’clock, and too cold now to open the window on our naked backs and legs.

Cecelia still had her fingers buried in my hair. “You should probably go. I have three nice ladies coming over at nine for our stitch and bitch. It’s my week to be hostess.”

I slipped out her front door and down the steps, my new shirt untucked and half-buttoned. I stopped at the 7-Eleven on my way back to the Capri, bought some smokes. Threw in a little magnetic checker game for Raylene.

I sat for a bit on the bench outside, my mind pulling wheelies and my lips still burning with her on them. I was going to have to wrap my head around quitting smoking again soon. I was really getting to love it again.

A thin rectangle of yellow light appeared in Hector’s doorway, and a wide-shouldered man with black black hair slid through it into the dark and clicked the door shut behind him. The motion light on the stucco wall above our stretch of sidewalk popped on as he passed under it, hard lines lighting up his face as he crossed the lot, his cowboy boots sounding hollow in the still. He unlocked the door of a midnight blue Trans Am and I heard the dull damp thump of a subwoofer as his ignition kicked over. Guns N’ Roses. Whoever this guy was, the solenoid on his starter was definitely about to pack it in.

By the time I finished my smoke and fished out my door
key on its plastic diamond, Hector had switched off the light in his room.

Fuck me, I thought. How come nobody ever tells me anything?

Hector kept spinning a jam packet on its tin foil top on the table between us. One side of his suede collar was turned in, hugging the thin skin of his neck. The remnants of our breakfasts were stacked together and pushed to one side.

“I saw the first guy leaving your room a couple of nights ago. I was outside smoking, just so you don’t think I’ve been snooping around in your business. I’m not like that.”

The jam packet stopped under the square nail of his forefinger. He didn’t say anything.

“And the guy last night, too. So I just want you to know that I’m not the kind of guy who makes a judgment about that kind of thing. I know we just met a couple of days ago, but I’ve already come to really value our friendship.”

“Likewise, Joseph.”

“So I want you to feel like you can be honest with me. I don’t care about that stuff.”

“What stuff would you be referring to?” Hector motioned for the waitress, stalling my answer as she whisked away our plates and refilled his cup.

“I don’t care if you’re gay.”

“I don’t use that word. I was married to a woman whom I adored for many years.”

“Well, bisexual, then. You’ll have to excuse me, Hector, I’m just a mechanic. Whatever you want to call yourself, that’s okay by me too.”

“I’ve never called myself much of anything. I’ve never felt the need to.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know I was okay with it, whatever you want to call it or not.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Joseph. I want you to know that, I really do. I also must be honest, though, and tell you that it is really of no consequence to me if you are okay with how I choose to spend my private time or not. I taught myself not to care what other people think of how I live, many years ago now. I had to. We all have to, eventually. But thank you, all the same. Shall I ask for the bill?”

Hector insisted on paying for breakfast, acting insulted when I tried to stuff a rumpled ten-dollar bill into his coat pocket. He left the waitress a huge tip, and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

Outside, the wind whipped across the chipseal, and a tiny tornado spun dust and garbage past the gas pumps and whirled itself through the parking lot, dying with a ripple in the tall grass that grew in the ditch beside the highway. The air smelled heavy and kind of metallic, like it might snow.

Hector flipped the collar of his coat up and lit a smoke, leaning into me, using my body to block the wind. We sprinted across the highway in between two big rigs, squinting
our eyes against the wake of exhaust and cold air that swirled behind them as they passed by.