My October (11 page)

A crash came from the kitchen. Silence followed, and then someone swore. Luc and Vien turned, but there was nothing to see. Their waitress was standing by the cash, cracking her chewing gum and staring out at them with unconcerned eyes.

Luc turned back to Vien. “Will charges be laid?” That was the question. The one over which he had agonized all weekend: his son in youth court; the media getting wind of the story and broadcasting every aspect of it but Hugo's name, thus respecting the letter of the law if not its spirit. All of Quebec would figure out who the celebrity father was. He had already warned Frédéric Axe. And Marie-Soleil. This could degenerate into a circus.

The waitress disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Luc and Vien to themselves in the vast dining room.

“Oh, I don't think that's much of an issue,” Vien said, raking his fingers through his grey hair.

“You don't?” Luc said sharply. “Why not? A crime was committed. He was caught red-handed.”

“You should watch more TV,” Vien said, gazing at Luc with his misaligned eyes. “You'd learn that not every crime gets prosecuted.”

Lennon's voice was still coming through the tinny jukebox speakers, explaining the eternal mystery of jokers doing just as they pleased.

Luc looked away in frustration.

The waitress had emerged from the kitchen. Whatever drama had occurred seemed to have sorted itself out. The guy who stood by the cash had also resumed his station. Behind him was an old-fashioned glass display case full of pie slices: lemon meringue, apple, and something green. Key lime, most probably. They weren't edible, Luc knew. As a boy, he had liked to get up close to the case and see the layers of dust on the painted plaster. Next to the pieces of pie sat five or six glass goblets filled with green Jell-O cubes. Fake as well. Glowing eerily and topped with grimy plaster cream, the delight of his youth.

Lennon stopped singing. The anthem of a generation was over. Luc turned back to Vien. “The detective said they might prosecute.”

“Might,” Vien repeated. “Possible, but not probable. I'm pretty sure this thing will stay internal.”

“But the police are already involved.”

“Bonnaire will disinvolve them.”

A couple of kids who had just come in put on a new song. American rap. Angry words spat out to a brainless rhythm.

“Trust me,” Vien said, leaning back against the red banquette. “There'll be no formal charge.”

Luc reached across the table and took hold of Vien's wrist. “Thank you,” he said, his voice cracking. Until that moment, he hadn't known how much he'd needed to hear those words. He withdrew his hand quickly. Wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt.

Vien watched him, surprised. “It's going to be okay, Luc. Really. I have a good feeling here.”

Luc suddenly regretted his histrionics. He regretted calling Vien today, regretted laying himself open to another man's pity.

“This is tales out of school,” Vien said, leaning in conspiratorially. “But we're
anciens
, right? We're entitled, to some degree. I obviously can't tell you all the details of my talks with Bonnaire. I don't want to play double agent, but the least I can do is reassure a friend.”

“Friend” was a bit of an exaggeration. But Vien was at least an ally, something Luc desperately needed right now.

“Bonnaire will do just about anything to avoid the press getting mixed up in this,” Vien said. He glanced around the room and dipped his tone confidentially. “Numbers are down at Saint-Jean this year. They've been falling for a couple of years, actually. People in Quebec aren't having kids anymore. Or at least not the kind of people who used to send their kids to schools like Saint-Jean-Baptiste. We're in the red, Luc. It's serious. The last thing Bonnaire needs right now is a scandal.”

The waitress picked that moment to arrive with their order: two bags of fries and two large, ice-filled glasses of Coca-Cola.

“You sure you don't want plates?” she asked, depositing the snacks on their placemats.

“No, no,” Vien assured her. He smiled sweetly. “We're on a trip down memory lane.” He took one of the ketchup packets that accompanied the fries, tore it open with his teeth, and squeezed its contents onto his potatoes.

“We used to come here a long time ago,” Luc said to the waitress.

“A very long time ago,” said Vien, taking a greasy fry between his long, pre-arthritic fingers and examining it. A filament of steam rose into the air. “Now
that
is a
patate frite
,” he said, and popped it into his mouth.

Luc and the orange-skinned waitress laughed.

“Are they as good as you remember?” she teased.

“Better,” said Vien.

Luc dug into his own paper bag. He hadn't tasted a Green Spot
frite
in decades. Vien was right. They were delicious.

The woman left and they ate in silence.

Luc finished first. “What do you think will happen?” he asked, folding his bag. The fries had improved his spirits.

“Well,” said Vien, still chewing, “there is sure to be a disciplinary hearing. This coming week, I would guess. I've sat on these things before, Luc. I can help you prepare.”

“Prepare?”

Vien was now digging fragments of potato from between his teeth with a toothpick. Luc averted his eyes.

“The parents have to attend,” explained Vien. “The student too, obviously. It's your chance to say your piece.”

The bell on the Green Spot door jangled and a big family
group entered the restaurant—grandparents, parents, and a clutch of children. You rarely saw families like this in Saint-Henri anymore. They looked like something out of the fifties or sixties. The waitress led them to a large table at the front of the dining room and went to get a high chair for the smallest child in the group, a little girl of two or three in a frilly party dress. Luc watched the mother settle everyone. They weren't speaking French. Over the traffic sounds coming in from Notre-Dame Street, his ear caught Slavic syllables. Of course. These people were too united to be from here.

“His chances can't be good,” Luc said wearily. He and Hannah would have to find another school for him, the kind of school where troublemakers and misfits got dumped.

“Chances?” said Vien.

“Of staying at Saint-Jean. After all this.”

Vien surprised him by smiling. “
All this
isn't terribly serious, Luc. Really. Not that I'm exonerating Hugo. But I've seen far worse. He didn't hurt anybody. There was no damage done. His motives don't make much sense to me, but it doesn't look like there was an intent to harm.”

A commotion made them turn. The little girl at the front table wanted to sit with her older siblings on the red banquette. She was twisting in her high chair, reaching out to them and whimpering. The mother tried to reason with her, standing up and hovering over her chair, but that only made things worse. The whimpers escalated into shrieks. Finally, the father stood up. He was a short man, solid, probably not yet out of his thirties. He scooped the little girl out of her seat in a single deft movement and carried her, writhing and shrieking, to the back of the room where Luc and Vien were sitting, veering just before
he reached their table and disappearing with the child into the men's room.

The shrieking stopped. Vien raised his eyebrows in mock alarm.

Luc ignored him. The man was a good father. When had discipline become cause for alarm? Still, there was something that made Luc listen for sounds from the men's room, something less certain and harder to name than his own tacit approval.

A moment later, the door to the washroom swung open and the man stepped out, leading the girl by the hand. She had stopped crying, although she looked pale and subdued. She held her father's hand and walked with dignity back to her family's table, where the man made her kiss her mother and apologize. Then she climbed uncomplainingly into the high chair.

Luc's approval was complete. He wished Hannah had seen this: the rebuttal of all her arguments. A deep resentment surged.

Across the table, Vien smiled cynically. “Small child, small problems. Give her a few years,” he said, and winked his bad eye.

Luc shrugged. The little girl was already laughing and talking with her siblings. “You never know. Some children work out fine.”

“They all have to go through adolescence. If they don't act out, it's probably grounds for worry.”

“Not all of them bring guns to school.”

“No,” said Vien. “No, they don't.”

“There have to be consequences.”

“There will be,” said Vien. “But I don't think expulsion will be one of them. Not this time. Think of it, Luc. If Bonnaire kicks Hugo out, how's it going to look? We can't risk that kind of publicity. Not right now, with our numbers so weak.”

He sighed and reached out to retrieve the menus again from between the sugar container and their darkened jukebox. He flipped it open but didn't look down.

“If you ask me, the worst is already over. He's been slapped with a suspension. And a disciplinary hearing. Bonnaire will deliver a sermon, make him feel two feet tall. But that will probably be the end of it. He'll get some sort of a punishment— lines to copy or something. A kid who spray-painted graffiti in the schoolyard last spring spent four weekends scrubbing off the damage. That sort of thing.”

He searched Luc's face for a moment, then turned to the dessert list. “Can I interest you, perchance, in a bowl of Green Spot Jell-O?” He grinned, but Luc shook his head. His stomach was already burning from all the sugar in the Coke.

Vien replaced the menu in its slot. “Have you talked to him yet?” he asked.

Luc shook his head.

“You should.”

Heat flared between Luc's ribs. He gave Vien a sharp look.

“He's not a bad kid,” Vien said. He looked suddenly old, a sad, asymmetrical man with uncombed hair. “He's fourteen, Luc. Remember fourteen?”

The heat in Luc's chest was pulsing now. Yes, he remembered fourteen. That was how old he'd been when his father shot himself. That was how old he'd been when he swore to himself he would never, ever fail at anything.

“Has he talked to you about anger? Bullying? Did he ever mention anybody bugging him at school?”

Luc rubbed his solar plexus with his knuckles. He saw where
Vien was going. The teachers would have talked about it. About his son, the boy with a gun and a chip on his shoulder.

“I'm trying to help,” said Vien.

Luc tried to look grateful. “I appreciate it,” he said, but he knew Vien saw right through him. They were back in their old dynamic. Vien meant well, but Luc had always found him irritating. Their years without contact hadn't changed this.

The placemats here were thin grey newsprint covered with the logos of local businesses in pale green ink: a pet store, a dry cleaner, a shop that sold fitness equipment. Luc took an edge of paper between his thumb and index finger and rolled it into a cylinder.

“What's behind the name change?”

Luc looked up.

“Why Stern, I mean?” asked Vien, unaware of how sensitive the issue was in the Lévesque household. “He even asked the school to put it on his transcripts.”

Luc tried to compose his face, tried not to think about his burning stomach. “It's his mother's name.”

“I thought she went by Lévesque,” said Vien, still oblivious.

“She does.”

Vien frowned.

“He admires his grandfather,” Luc said. “When Hugo was in the sixth grade, he did a project on him. You know the kind of thing they do. A mini-biography of someone close to him. Someone he looked up to. He picked Alfred Stern.”

Vien's mouth fell open. “
The
Alfred Stern? That's his grandfather?”

Luc sighed.

“Say it ain't so, Joe,” Vien said in English, shaking his head. He frowned again. “I thought your wife was from Toronto.”

“She grew up here,” said Luc. Hannah's history was the last thing he felt like discussing, but Vien wasn't about to let it go. “Her parents left during the Anglo exodus in the late seventies. Hannah and I were together by then, so she stayed.”

“You married Alfred Stern's daughter.”

“Yes. We've established that,” said Luc. “Fuck you, anyway.” He looked up to check that he hadn't offended. This was how they'd talked in high school, throwing punches like tough guys, even though they were both frightened little boys.

“He charged me, you know,” said Vien. “In 1970? All I'd done was attend a couple of rallies, and I got slapped with a criminal charge.” He paused. “You knew I was arrested?”

Luc had heard about it. The news had come to him second-hand. By the autumn of 1970, he and Vien had parted ways. Luc looked at him now, still proud of his little moment of defiance. If they hadn't parted ways, Luc would long ago have said something cruel.

Vien the rebel. Luc could picture him being mouthy with a cop. He had always been mouthy with figures of authority, even with old Monsieur Hervé, the pockmarked, half-deaf principal. Luc had been more obedient, though in the fall of 1970 he had taken risks too. Everyone had. If you were in Montreal and under thirty, how could you not take risks? Luc had attended the legendary rally at the Paul Sauvé Arena. He had shouted out “FLQ! FLQ! FLQ!” in the same delirium as everyone else. He had felt the rush of tribal belonging. When Pierre Vallières, Quebec's answer to Che, had stood up at that rally to speak, Luc had stood too, whistling and clapping until his hands hurt.

“Alfred Stern's daughter,” Vien said again.

“Let it go.”

Vien stroked his chin. “Family dinners must be fun.”

Luc picked up the edge of his placemat and started rolling again, his irritation rising. Vien had hit a nerve. He hadn't seen his father-in-law in seven years.