Tilt - Alan Cumyn [15]
“What was?”
“His beard.”
“Dad has a beard?”
Lily twirled her wet spoon on the table.
“Was he waiting for you at school?”
She was a baby when their father left. What was he trying to do now? Steal her away?
“Should I tell Mommy?”
“No! Let’s just keep this —”
“Because I already told her and she didn’t believe me anyway. Just like you don’t believe me about Rick the dead cat.”
“I took the phone, Lily. If Dad’s going to call anybody now, it’ll be me.”
—
Stan wasn’t going to go to the dance. Not with his father in town. This was high alert, code red! He had the phone in his pocket and it felt radioactive.
No way his mother would react well to his father being back. Why was he back? If he wasn’t going to send money — he was years behind with the money —
no way Mom would let him see Stan and Lily.
Why didn’t he send money? Because he’d left all of them: Stan, Lily, Mom. He’d just poured gasoline on that part of his life and set it all ablaze.
Why was he phoning Lily?
Stan felt like he was standing by his locker in the middle of the storm, a storm of high-school kids whirling off in their own directions, and he was the lone calm center.
“What do you have now?” Janine Igwash said to him suddenly from only a few inches away. He didn’t particularly like having to look up at her. She was in a black stretchy top that went well with the red shock of her hair and hid nothing of her form. The tattoo on the crest of her milky shoulder peeked out at him. A little lizard shaped like an S, but with legs.
“What?” He really had to work on his conversation skills.
“What class do you have now?” she said slowly and clearly, pronouncing the words through soft-looking lips.
He was not going to go to the dance with her because she was not interested in him and it was horrible to feel so stuck to the edge of his locker door by someone who wasn’t even trying. She did it effortlessly by standing there.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“You don’t know what class you have?”
The little green and red lizard rippled slightly when she breathed.
She smiled and then hooked her finger into his belt loop and tugged slightly. He fell forward, almost directly into her, into where she had been. Already she was moving off.
Heading down the hall to whatever classroom was supposed to contain her.
—
At lunchtime Stan stood outside in the cold gray air and stared at the phone. Now would be a good time for his father to call, if he was going to call. It would be a good time to have thoughts in order in case the call came, so Stan leaned back against the wall and considered.
“Dad!” he said to the cold wind. No one else was out in this wind. It was a promise-of-winter wind, a warning of cold times to come. “Why the hell are you in town?”
The phone remained mute.
Stan’s father was a difficult man to figure. That much was clear, and Stan had had five years to think hard about it. His father was tall and lean and a good hockey player. Stan remembered, too, the burn of snuggling close to his cheek. He smelled . . . of aftershave or something.
He smelled like a regular father. But how was Stan to know? He’d only had the one.
Stan’s father burst over things. Like Lily did, Stan thought now, except he was a lot bigger than Lily and more dangerous. Stan had a memory of spilled coffee in the kitchen — of how his father’s voice cut even deeper than broken china on a bare foot.
He made you feel like everything was fine or it was all your fault. But didn’t every family scream? It was all usual, right up to the moment his father left with a much younger woman and a baby on the way. Stan had never even seen a picture of them. They were phantoms, ghosts. But afterwards his father became something entirely different — a liar and a cheat and a man Stan’s mother couldn’t talk about anymore without the wallpaper curling from the tears and swearing.
Why was he back?
Maybe the real-estate thing he’d been pursuing — he’d quit law after running away with Kelly-Ann — had come through and now he could finally cough up the years of child support he owed.
Maybe it was