The Journey Prize Stories 25 (11 page)

“Being a teacher is so hard,” says Paul.

Josephine pecks at her food and looks at the line of hanging clothes as if, at any moment, they will fly away. Christian doesn’t want the day to end because when he sleeps, he always dreams his mother is missing. No one can protect her except for him.

When all the food and beer are gone, Thuong says something in Vietnamese and Christian gets up to clear the table. Thuong nudges Paul to get off his seat so he can put it away.

“Now, since you’re my guest, you should let me cut your hair,” says Thuong.

“No, that’s okay,” says Paul. He feels drowsy when he stands up.

“I insist,” Thuong says. Then in Vietnamese he says: “I need the practice. That’s my price if you want to take my family.”

“You’re being crazy,” says Josephine.

“Am I?” says Thuong.

“What are you all saying?” says Paul.

“Now that he is on my property, he can’t just leave,” says Thuong.

Josephine throws her hands up the air and pulls out the reclining chair herself. “Have it your way,” she says.

“What’s going on?” says Paul. Josephine turns to him.

“The sooner you do this, the sooner we can move on,” she says in French. “Trust me.” Paul thinks about his dead father and realizes that Josephine is the only one left in this world he does trust.

“I don’t understand you,” says Thuong.

“You don’t have to,” says Josephine.

Paul sits on the chair under the apple tree. Meanwhile Thuong barks something at Christian, who goes to fetch a white towel and scissors. The mirror is already hung against the tree. The sprayer is at the ready on the lamp stand. The old lady is by the window, telling Thuong to leave the tall man alone. Thuong says something that makes her disappear from the windowsill.

Thuong gets Paul to remove his sports coat, uses a piece of a Glad garbage bag as a cutting cape, and starts snipping away. “Why is kindergarten your profession?” says Thuong.

“I didn’t choose it,” says Paul. “I’m waiting to teach older children.”

Thuong puts a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “A man becoming something is just as good as a man who already is something.” Paul nods, though he doesn’t really get it. Or maybe at some level he does get it, because all of sudden, he feels a little bit better about things.

Something about how Thuong turns the steel scissors into a butterfly, fluttering in the back, around the ears, an inch off the top, soothes Paul. When Thuong is done, he gives Paul a hand mirror, walks around Paul with the larger portrait mirror to show off his handiwork.

“It’s perfect,” says Paul. “Maybe you are on to something.”

“I’m not done,” says Thuong. He tilts the chair back so that Paul is facing the apple blossoms above. “You need a shave.”

“I don’t know,” says Paul, but Thuong has, from somewhere, pulled out a brush and jar of shaving cream. Josephine is nowhere in sight.

“Relax,” says Thuong. “I’m going to give you a real man’s shave.” Thuong applies the cream to Paul’s beard. His son comes out with a paddle strop and a towel which Thuong’s mother had steamed in a pot. The steaming towel that Thuong wraps around Paul’s face is like a narcotic, and Paul almost falls asleep. When the towel is removed and Paul sees the straight razor in Thuong’s hand, dripping sunlight, he does not panic. Maybe it’s because his father used one, and taught Paul how to use it as well. Paul just closes his eyes, feels the razor brush against his cheeks, down to his Adam’s apple, and gives himself to fate.

When Thuong is done he calls Josephine out, to show her his true talent, as much as to show Paul’s face, unmasked, so that there is nothing for anyone to hide.

The day that Casey moved in across the hall from Lucas was the same day he decided to get rid of the bike. He was wheeling it out of his apartment when he ran into Pearl, his neighbour, who was on her way back from the store and carrying a bunch of plastic grocery bags. She looked messy, distracted. “I have the reusable ones,” she said, smiling apologetically, “but I always forget them.”

“Me too,” said Lucas.

Lucas helped her with her door, and she told him her daughter and grandchildren were coming down from Kingston to stay with her. “Just for a few days,” she said, although Lucas could tell by the way she looked past his head that she thought it was going to be much longer than that.

Lucas didn’t know how to deal with messy and distracted people. “Maybe one of your grandchildren would like the bike,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else. Also because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with the bike.

“Maybe.” Pearl set the bags on the floor just inside the apartment. She patted her hair. “Oh, my. We’re a pair, aren’t we dear? I seem to be gaining people just as you are losing them.”

“The balance of nature, I guess,” Lucas said. He leaned the bike against the wall in the hallway, thinking that Pearl might just be getting warmed up. She was like that sometimes.

But she only patted her hair again. Then she said, “I’ve got to start baking,” and absently closed the door in Lucas’s face.

Lucas took the bike outside. There was a parking lot in back with an old, rusted out bike rack pushed up against the side of the building; Lucas thought maybe if he locked it up there someone would eventually come along and steal it. It wasn’t like he could ever ride it himself, even if he took the basket off the handlebars. It wasn’t a practical bike for a man. And then there was the whole Laure thing. Laure with her soft, dark hair curling around her green bike helmet, smile like a little kid’s, all teeth and gums. It really wasn’t a practical bike for a man.

After he had looped the flimsy lock through the front wheel to one of the rusting spikes of the bike rack, he leaned against the wall and pulled out a Belmont Mild. He rarely smoked anymore, since Laure left, but he had ten minutes to kill before his shift and thought the occasion called for it. He was just finishing when the red Civic pulled into the parking lot, one headlight busted out, plastic storage tubs from Canadian Tire bungeed to the roof rack. The driver was a woman in her forties, a bottle blonde with an expensive looking tan, looking almost too classy for the car. In the passenger seat there was a younger girl, obviously a daughter: same blonde hair as her mother, only natural. She opened the door. She was wearing an oversized Canucks jersey belted at her waist like a dress, a
pair of Heelys, and a plastic tiara on her head. She smiled and waved at Lucas, but her mother swatted her hand down.

“God, Casey, you’d think you just fell off the turnip wagon,” she said. She grabbed Casey’s hand and dragged her toward the door of the building. Casey turned around and stared at Lucas until the door closed behind them.

Lucas had never even owned a blender before he moved to the little apartment above World Famous Comics. He had never owned a television or a set of tea towels printed with pictures of various herbs. Stuff had just somehow come to him over the years, left behind by various roommates: a vase carved with the image of Mayahuel, the Aztec goddess of fertility; pens from Canadian Blood Services; a shower curtain with a map of the world on it. Lucas had always just assumed that these things belonged to somebody else until one day he woke up and realized there was no one else there but him.

Laure had been the last one to leave. Dave and his girlfriend, Julie, had moved out maybe three months earlier, and Lucas and Laure had never bothered to get anyone to take over their room. Before that, there must have been at least a dozen roommates. Lucas couldn’t be bothered to keep track. Pearl used to call them orphans.

“Where’d your latest orphans take off to?” she’d ask every time one of the roommates moved out.

“Adopted,” Lucas would always answer.

Aside from being his neighbour, Pearl was also his landlady and technically his boss, although according to the other employees at World Famous she hadn’t been down to the store since her husband died. That was ten years ago. “Nate is in
every single one of those silly comic books,” she told Lucas once. “And I just can’t stand to see him reduced to that.” Lucas wondered if the things his roommates left behind contained pieces of them. He pulled a Canadian Blood Services pen out of his pocket and stared at it, trying to see Kurt or Angela or Dave or whomever else it had belonged to. But it was pretty much still just a pen.

And his apartment was still
his
apartment, no matter who else lived there. His name was on the lease and had been for the past five years, since he’d been a graduate student in the English department at York. Lucas had never thought about moving. The rent was good, the noise from the intersection below didn’t bother him, and his job was right downstairs.

Laure used to complain about this all the time. “Your world is supposed to get bigger as you grow up, Lucas. Not smaller,” she’d say. But Lucas liked things to be contained. The grocery store, the library, the bar, a decent souvlaki: they were all within a block of World Famous, and this was as far into Toronto as Lucas was willing to go.

Lucas came on his shift just as Mel was leaving. There was never more than one person working at World Famous at one time, except on Saturday afternoons or right before Christmas. Mel was sitting behind the counter writing in a Hilroy scribbler like the ones that Lucas used to use in elementary school. Lucas thought she was some kind of writer, although she didn’t ever talk about it. But Kyle, the kid who worked the weekends, had found some of her poetry online. Kyle liked to tell people he could find anything online. The poetry was all about crows and was on a website for a magazine that only published poetry
by lesbians. Mel had never told Lucas that she was a lesbian, but she did have very short hair. Kyle and Lucas had had a good laugh over those poems, and sometimes Lucas felt as though Mel somehow knew about it.

“Slow morning?” he asked, dropping his bag behind the counter.

Mel nodded. “A couple of online orders came in about an hour ago,” she said without looking up from the scribbler. “I haven’t done anything with them.”

“Okay,” said Lucas. They usually left the online orders for Kyle anyway. Lucas liked to think of it as a punishment for always bragging about his computer skills. Mel left without saying anything more to Lucas. Lucas sat on the stool behind the counter, which was still warm from Mel sitting on it. He put his elbows up and cupped his head in his hands. This was how he usually spent the first half hour or so of his shift, but today his head felt heavier. He would never admit it to anyone, but he hadn’t really been sleeping well since Laure left. He felt his eyes begin to close.

He woke to something tickling his face. Opened his eyes to Casey drawing on him with a tube of bright pink lipstick. He reached up and grabbed something off the top of his head. The plastic tiara.

“Aww, you looked so pretty,” Casey said.

Lucas put the tiara down on the counter. He turned around and checked himself in the Silver Surfer mirror hanging on the back wall. Whiskers. Casey had made him into a cat. “Please tell me this comes off,” he said.

Casey reached down and pulled a tissue out of one of her Heelys. “God,” she said, pushing it across the counter. “You’d
think someone who worked in a comic book store would be a little more fun.”

“You obviously haven’t been in a lot of comic book stores,” Lucas said, wiping at his nose. The lipstick left a faint pink stain on his skin.

Casey put the tiara on her head. “Dude, I’ve
never
been in a comic book store,” she said. “My sister says that comic books are for losers.”

Lucas sat back on the stool. “Well, I am a pretty big loser,” he said.

“Me too,” said Casey. “I mean, that’s what my sister says.”

“Uh huh,” said Lucas. He wondered how long he would have to ignore Casey before she went away. He pretended to be occupied with something on the computer. When he finally looked up, Casey was still looking at him. “What?” he asked.

“What’s your name?” Casey asked.

Lucas pressed some buttons with what he hoped looked like urgency. “Lucas,” he said.

“My name’s Casey,” she said.

“I know,” said Lucas. “I saw you outside with your mom.”

“She’s not my mom,” Casey said, with noticeable venom. Lucas looked at her, surprised. Casey sighed. “Okay. She
is
my mom. But I like to pretend she’s not. That’s what Dylan told me to do, if she ever makes me mad.” She paused. Lucas didn’t say anything. “Dylan’s my sister, you know.”

“Cool,” said Lucas.

“Don’t you want to know where she is?”

“No.”

“She died.” Casey paused dramatically. “In a helicopter crash.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “She was on her way
to the South Pole to catch a penguin. There was this penguin, see, it was blue. And the scientists, they wanted to figure out why it was blue, but they couldn’t catch it cause the blue penguin kept outsmarting them. But Dylan, she had this ability. With animals. She made them feel safe. So they sent her to the North Pole in a helicopter, but the guy driving the helicopter had just had a fight with his wife, and he drank a whole bunch of alcohol until he was drunk and then the plane crashed.” Casey rested her head on the edge of the counter and looked at him. “And now the scientists will never know why the penguin was blue.”

“Maybe he was cold,” Lucas said.

Casey pouted. “Aren’t you going to tell me you’re sad for me ’cause my sister’s dead?”

“I would,” Lucas said, “if I thought she really was dead.”

“Whatever,” said Casey. “She went to live with my dad. In
Saskatoon
.” She straightened up and wandered over to the nearest shelf and ran her fingers along the book spines. “So she might as well be dead.” She pulled out a book. It was a graphic novel called
Red Angels
and Lucas knew it was anything but appropriate for a kid Casey’s age. But he didn’t say anything. She flipped it over, reading the back. Then she looked up. “I live upstairs, you know.”

“So do I,” Lucas said.

“Well, that makes us neighbours. And that means you have to be nice to me.” She sat on the floor in front of the counter then opened the book and started to read. Lucas turned back to the computer and opened
Solitaire
.