Few Kinds of Wrong (28 page)

“I have interviews scheduled for tomorrow,” I say.

“For the new mechanic?”

“Technician. They want to be called technicians now.”

Bryce snorts. “I'll take a mechanic over a technician any day.”

“So, will you join in the interviews? Help me pick out the mechanics from the technicians?”

“You sure?”

“Positive. You can pick up on some of the vibes I can't. Dad always said you could smell an asshole a mile away.”

Bryce smiles. “I didn't know he said that.”

“Yup.”

“But I can smell an asshole a mile away. And we've got to deal with one now. An unhappy customer is asking for the owner.”

I look out the window onto the garage. There's a man pacing back and forth by the front counter. In Ray's bay, Jamie and Ray are under the hood of a van.

“Let Jamie look after it.”

“But—”

“Jamie is owner too. He's part owner of dealing with assholes. Maybe we'll give him the title of asshole handler.”

“I'm not sure he can do it.”

“Let's let him try.”

“Yeah, okay.”

Bryce walks to Jamie, talks to him, points to me in the office. I wave. Jamie shrugs at me, scrubs his hands then goes to the customer. He shakes the man's hand. The customer, a new one I don't recognize, seems to shout, his arms waving around, his finger pointing at Jamie, then around the garage.

Dad had two ways to deal with upset customers. Which he used depended on the customer and the complaint that customer brought forward. He always listened, at least in the beginning, to any complaint. If it got heated right away, he tried to calm the customer down. If the customer seemed unreasonable or wouldn't listen, he'd offer a discount, a full refund, or if the customer was rude enough, tell that person to take his business elsewhere.

“Some customers aren't worth the money,” Dad said more than once. “And you need to figure out which ones right away.”

Or, if the customer seemed reasonable, if they spoke in a respectful manner, Dad would do anything to keep that person coming back. He'd double-check something himself, investigate and provide a full refund if necessary.

Jamie looks like a cat just placed in a bath. He's bouncing back and forth from foot to foot and looking in at me. Finally, he walks into the office.

“He's crazy.” Jamie pushes his hair back with his hand then puts his palm on the top of his head. “What am I supposed to do with him?”

Not my problem
pops into my head, but he looks so frustrated, and my mixed feelings about him pull me toward helping. “What's his beef?”

“He says his car smells like mechanic. Says someone really dirty must have worked on his car.”

“Who worked on it?”

“Bryce.”

The name, the sheer ridiculousness of the idea sets both me and Jamie off in peals of laughter. Tears soon run down my cheeks, feeling familiar yet foreign, the pain usually accompanying them replaced by amusement.

Bryce arrives in the office. “Jesus, are you trying to piss him off more? He thinks you're laughing at him.”

“We are,” I say through another laugh and start again.

Tears are running down Jamie's face too and he wipes them away, straightens up and tries to act serious, only to lose it again and start guffawing. He sits on the floor, half under the desk so the customer won't see him. Thinking it a good idea, I join him.

Bryce surprises me by sitting down too and asking us to let him in on the joke. Between giggles, Jamie and I tell him, but Bryce just stares at us like we're crazy. “Why is that funny?”

“You?”
Jamie and I start again and Bryce stands up.

“Guess I had to be there,” Bryce says. “I'll offer him a full cleaning?”

I nod, laughing too much to answer with a word. I wave my hand for him to go ahead. He leaves and it's another minute or two before Jamie and I start to have longer pauses between the laughter.

“It's so good to see you laugh,” Jamie says. “To laugh with you.” His face is mostly smile.

The comment makes my laughter stop. We're still sitting on the floor, leaning against opposite walls, the floor we made love on between us.

“What's different?” He looks right in my eyes before I can look away, before I can make them say something other than the truth. Denying that anything is different is futile.“ It's hard to explain.” I look down at my clean hands. Even the pores are free of grease. “Impossible really.”

“Will you ever be able to explain it?”

“I don't know. I'm processing stuff.”

“Can I help?”

“You always do. Somehow. Even when you don't do anything, you're the voice inside my head.”

He stares at me a long time. Outside this room air guns roar; someone is smacking a brake drum that sounds like gunshots. Fumes — carbon monoxide, Varasol, grease, oil, brake fluid, antifreeze — permeate the air. Nothing, though, distracts me from his eyes. We have a wordless conversation and he finally closes his eyes, turns his head away, perhaps having seen what he had to see.

“I better go see how Bryce got on with Mr. Clean.” He chuckles.

“Okay.” And even though he is no longer there, I stay on the floor and smile.

Later that afternoon, I'm a little disappointed that her car is in the driveway. My determination is too great to avoid the task at hand but I wouldn't mind a little forced procrastination. The Toyota Echo sitting in the paved drive takes away that hope.

I know she is watching
Days of Our Lives
, think that maybe I should have decided to come here later, after her show, when maybe she would be gone out somewhere shopping for groceries or walking along Rennie's Mill River. But she is here and part of me knew she would be, the part that wants this more than I don't want it.

I knock. She peeks out the corner of the living room window before coming to the door.

“What's wrong? Why didn't you use your key?” Momasks.

“Nothing's wrong.” I hand her the coffee I have brought for her. “Thought you might want a coffee.”

She takes the coffee, stares at me a moment then tells me to come in.

In the foyer she stops and turns around. “You've never brought me coffee in the middle of the day before. What's really going on? Did you and … Bryce have a fight?”

I shake my head and wonder why she paused before his name. “No. I just want to talk to you.” I walk past her and sit on the couch, motioning for her to sit too.

“Sunday,” I say, after she sits down.

“Yes?”

“Any plans?”

Her mouth drops a little and her eyes blink faster than usual. “Bagel Cafe sound good?” I ask.

A smile spreads across her face and into her hungry eyes. “That sounds wonderful.”

“Good. That's what I wanted to say.” I stand up. “I'll see you then.”

“Jennifer,” Mom says as she lays her hand on mine. “What did you really come here for?”

I weigh the options. No matter what, she knows I didn't come here to confirm our Sunday date. But I can still walk out of here without saying anything else. So easy to say nothing. To do nothing. To let things happen. I reach into my pocket and feel cardboard. Carl's card with Joan Craig's number on it. Carl's words come back to me:
How's doing
nothing been making you feel?

“It's just. Well, you know. You must know. I mean, I've been awful to you.” I look down and search the burgundy shag carpet for something to help me find the right words or even to tell me a way to say them.

Mom hesitates, lets go of my hand, her other hand on the coffee cup. She shifts around on the couch. Her mouth opens and closes twice with no sound until she decides on the simple word “oh.”

“I'm not good at this, Mom. I don't think I ever will be but I want to say I'm sorry. I said awful things and thought awful things. And the truth is—” My voice breaks. I clear my throat and try again, open my mouth but my words wobble in my throat.

“It's okay.” She reaches out again and I know she wants to make everything okay. But it's not.

“No, it's not okay. The truth is … that you don't know the truth. That when you left Dad, when you left us, I didn't know you called for me. Dad didn't tell me. He didn't ask if I wanted to speak to you and I didn't say no. He told me that you probably forgot to call, probably forgot about me.” A sob grabs my voice and it comes out as a gasp.

Mom's hand goes to her chest. “Oh my God.”

I watch her as the truth settles in.

“Oh my God. Jennifer. You must have—” It's her turn for her voice to break.

“When you came home, I didn't understand. Not until that night at the hospital when you told me.”

“Why didn't you say something then?”

“Because I wasn't sure I believed you at the time. I couldn't believe he'd do that. Not to me or to you.”

Mom closes her eyes. “I can.”

Her words stab me, confirming that I really don't know the man I've mourned, that I haven't really been mourning him at all. I've been grieving the loss of someone I don't even understand.

“He liked to control, ”Mom whispers. “He always did.”

“Not me. At least not when I was growing up.”

The pity on her face as she looks at me makes me want to run out of this house and to something warm in a bottle. But before me is something warm and kind and loving. I sit down.

I breathe deep, sucking in what feels like every bit of air in the house. Mom stares at me and our coffee is long gone before either of us speaks.

“I don't know what to say.” Mom's voice seems small. She looks away, looks down at her fingers, and I see now that she isn't wearing her wedding ring. She definitely had it on at Nan's funeral. I remember feeling it as she held my hand. I stare at her hand, can't take my eyes off the white line around her finger where her ring once was. It reminds me that mine still sits on my dresser, in the little dish I always put it in while I worked. Thinking of the ring still there makes me think about Dad's message on my answering machine and the whiskey in the office filing cabinet — the multitude of things holding me firmly in place, keeping me from budging, let alone moving.

There are words inside me waiting to be released. “Mom, I love you, you know?”

She pulls her head back and blinks, like I've just smacked her in the face. But the smile on her face shows me something different.

“I adore you,” she says. “I always have.”

“I know. But I don't know if you realize that I always loved you.” I don't say the awful truth that is in my mind. That I'm not sure I always knew it myself.

That night, I find myself outside BJ's TV studio, a shaking inside me becoming more
intense, a want becoming a need. I'm in my car and I wait until she comes out in the parking lot and beep my car horn.

She stops still, stares at the car a moment then walks over. “What's up?”

“Want to go for a drink?”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Want to go for a drink?”

Her mouth stretches out to a disapproving line. “Coffee?”

Without a word, I reach out my hand. She and I watch it tremble.

“Let's take my car,” she says and closes the door.

“I thought a restaurant, maybe,” I say, when I see that she's driving to her house.

“I don't want the hassle and I don't want to be noticed.” She glances at me. “Don't think you do either.”

“No.”

We drive to BJ's house in silence. Inside, she takes a bottle of rum from her cupboard and pours me a drink before we sit down. I gulp it down and pass the glass back for a refill. She complies.

“This is really not good,” BJ says.

I pull out Carl's card and turn it over to show her the name written on the back.

“Who's Joan Craig?”

“A counsellor. I got her number from Carl. Father March.”

“What do you want from me?” BJ says, an anger in her voice I didn't expect. I had imagined a pat on the back.

“What?”

“What do you want from me? Why are you here? You could have bought a drink for yourself. You didn't need me.”

“I do need you.” I shake my head. “Not for a drink.”

I watch the beautiful face that looked hard and cold a second ago morph into someone soft and kind.

She shakes her head. “I'm not going to watch you go down. I will watch you get help and I will hold your hand but I will not watch you go down.” She points at me and flashes a wry smile. “You are worth keeping and I won't let you go.”

“You won't have to.”

After I finish the drink and BJ fills my glass again, we move to the living room where I sit on a recliner chair and BJ sits, as she often does, on the floor.

“When are you seeing this Joan Craig?”

“I haven't made an appointment yet. But I'm going to call.”

She nods but the way she looks away tells me that she doesn't believe me. I want to make her trust that I'll call the counsellor but can't find a way to start to do this. I can't even find a way to make me know for sure that I will. I just know that in this moment I intend to.

“You don't open up to people. I find it hard to believe that you'll open up to a stranger.”

I nod and take a deep drink. “I want to tell you something about my dad. Something I'm trying to get my head around.”

As I start to tell her, I'm not sure if it's because I want to prove to her, and myself, that I can open up, or if I really want to share this burden.

On Sunday morning, I leave Jamie in my bed and go to the garage. There are no windows in the main area, so it's dark as I enter from the front customer area. I turn on a light but it wouldn't matter if I didn't. I could find my way around here blindfolded.