Tilt - Alan Cumyn [25]
“Why not? Why can’t I?” Lily howled.
“Stanley? Stanley, can you fix this?”
Stan took the remote. The veins in his head throbbed as he skipped through from show to show.
Lily hit him with the pillow.
“But I want to see it!” The blanket shifted and Stan pulled it back.
He stayed exactly where he was, waiting for the bubble of the evening to settle somewhere and die.
—
In the middle of the night, long after he’d gone to bed but failed to sleep, Stan sat on the front porch in the chilly air, his feet near freezing, bare on the wood. He fingered his father’s phone.
It glowed in chill darkness. He hit the buttons.
“Hello?” came a voice at last. “Lily? Is that you?”
“Hi, Ron.” Stan shocked himself addressing his father that way, and yet — why not?
“Oh,” Ron said.
Breathing on the other end. The street lamps, everything, so still.
“It was good to see you today, son,” Ron said. “I’m sorry to surprise you like that. I just saw the . . . ad, for the bus fares —”
“Does it get any better?” Stan blurted. Was that his question?
More breathing at the other end of the line. Stan thought he could hear noises in the background. At the bus station? Was it open this time of night?
What time was it?
“Does what get any better?” Ron asked.
“Getting an erection for some girl on TV,” Stan said. “Thinking about it all the time. Sitting at the table at breakfast over cereal and being hard as a poker in your pajamas over nothing. Nothing!”
Not a word. If anybody knew about this, it would be his father.
“What are you talking about, Stan?”
Off. Off with the phone.
—
Stan smelled smoke on his way up the stairs and back to bed. He remembered that he hadn’t replaced the battery in the smoke alarm from the burnt pancake episode, but this wasn’t house-fire smoke. It was coming from a cigarette.
From the back porch, in fact. The smell grew sharper as Stan crept back through the kitchen. In the years since his mother had quit he’d grown more sensitive, so that now the smoke from a single cigarette seemed to fill the whole house.
His mother was smoking again. She was on the back porch in the dark, her head resting against the screened window, the orange bead of the cigarette perched in mid-air. Her hair was loose and long and looked as though she’d been bunching it in her hands.
He watched her from the open doorway. She was letting the cold into the house, letting in the smoke. He’d grown up with it but Lily hadn’t. Somehow it seemed to him that Lily ought to be protected from the dangers.
He stood by the open door. It would be the easiest thing in the world to turn around, slip back up the stairs. He could make sure Lily’s door was shut against the cancer.
Janine’s mother had cancer. He’d be meeting her tomorrow night. Tonight, actually, since today had morphed into Saturday.
Stan stared at the orange bead, at his mother in shadows gazing into the backyard where the winter’s chill was already in the air even though that season was technically still a few months away. He could feel it on his face, in his feet.
Surely she knew he was there? She used to know every thought in his head, every hand snaking into the cookie jar. Every nightmare.
She was wrapped in her old brown robe, and her feet were tucked up beneath her.
Stan heard himself say, “I sank a shot against Karl Brolin today in the wind on a bent rim way too far to even try it.”
She didn’t startle or drop the lengthening ash on the cigarette. Stan wished she’d put it out. But she just turned her head and smiled a little bit.
It was the middle of the night. They might have been in a dream. But everything felt normal somehow.
“Who’s Karl Brolin?”
Stan went out and sat on the wicker loveseat opposite her and pulled a blanket around himself. It smelled of the damp, of outdoors. He told her about the whole improbable basketball game and she listened, in her way. Tossing a ball into a hoop was as unlikely an event for her as knitting this blanket would have been for him. (Was it even knitted? Crocheted?