Tilt - Alan Cumyn [36]
Then Gillian coughed so hard her little body shook the car. When it was over she stretched back awkwardly for a moment to view Stan. She smiled when she saw their hands.
The car kept going. Janine squeezed tighter.
Maybe he really was Janine’s boyfriend?
“Your mother must be an amazing woman to raise the both of you on her own,” Gillian said.
Was his mother amazing? Maybe. But what Stan ended up explaining was that she could never figure out how to work the TV remote no matter how often he explained it.
“My mom has two degrees but when it comes to electronics —”
Gillian asked about the degrees, so Stan said what he could about sociology and the history of art.
“She’s a Vermeer freak,” he said, and he tried to remember the name of the painting — a copy, obviously — that hung in their living room near the fireplace that didn’t work.
“The Girl with the Pearl Earring?” Gillian said.
“Not that one. But it looks like that one. My mom could tell you all about it.”
Why couldn’t Stan tell them all about it? Maybe he didn’t pay enough attention to his mother. She was terrifically smart in her own way.
He could feel the pulse in Janine’s fingers.
“She used to drag us to galleries all the time. But my little sister is allergic to them. It’s like her skin starts to itch from the inside. She just can’t stay still. So my mom goes on her own, or else she drags Gary.” The wipers sloshed water back and forth without seeming to clear anything. Could Joe see out the windshield at all?
“Gary’s great,” Janine breathed then. “He let me win at silly basketball.” She had the sexiest voice when she was talking quietly.
Let this ride go on and on, Stan thought.
“Did you . . . go to university?” he asked Gillian.
She turned and smiled oddly. “I studied to be an anthropologist, but ended up working in the bank, and then I got sick.”
Joe reached across and covered her frail hand gently with his own.
It was a sticky part of the conversation. Stan wasn’t sure what he should say next. He felt like he could spill anything about his own family now, that a rusty door had been knocked open. His mother’s purple sweatsuit. Gary and Ron like bulls in the living room. Feldon dripping on the porch in the rain.
The wipers sloshed. Janine withdrew her hand. Was he gripping too hard?
“I met Joe at the bank,” Gillian said. “I was supervising him, actually. He married me to get ahead.”
“I married her to get ahead,” Joe chimed. It seemed to be a family joke.
“There was a rule at the time against office dating, so we had to sneak around,” Gillian said. “That’s the thing about those kinds of rules.”
“They encourage the opposite behavior,” Joe said.
“We were illicit lovers.” Gillian beamed at him now. These two middle-aged people — Joe with his bristly head, Gillian with her scarf and the hard lines on her neck, like the flesh was retreating from her bit by bit — looked like they had more love between them in just this car ride than Stan had ever seen between his own parents.
This was what Janine had grown up with.
He wanted to take her hand again, but suddenly felt shy.
—
The rec center was a squat brownish building in a part of town Stan didn’t recognize. Were they downtown? He couldn’t even guess.
As soon as they walked in, Gillian took charge.
“Put the pop table over there!” she said to two boys fiddling with fold-up legs. “Did you bring the banner?”
It was rolled up in a corner, and Gillian had Stan and Janine hang it on the far wall under the shaded windows.
Dance for Life, it said.
Families arrived in noisy clumps. The kids seemed to be of all ages, the girls wearing everything from pants to slinky dresses, the boys in probably whatever they’d had on earlier in the day. So Stan wasn’t out of place in Janine’s plaid shirt and jeans.
Some of the kids were . . . bald, or otherwise sickly looking.
Or they had a parent who was too thin or trembly and pale, lost in the eyes.
“It’s for cancer families,” Janine explained.