Tilt - Alan Cumyn [55]
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Stan asked.
“My mom showed me.”
“Really? She’s pretty smart, I bet.”
Tiny, tiny folds. Feldon kept his eyes just inches away. Like a scientist looking through a microscope.
A bunny, maybe, with pointy ears? Feldon compressed it with his finger and it hopped.
“Amazing!”
Feldon set the paper bunny on the counter angled toward the door, as if it might scamper off any moment. He found a coupon in a pile of papers and began to fold that.
“You must miss her?” Stan said to Feldon.
“Who?” the boy asked.
“Your mother!”
Fold after fold.
“She can do butterflies,” Feldon said solemnly. “And Uncle Liam can do dragons!”
“Who’s Uncle Liam?”
“He comes to help Mommy sleep. But he has to leave really early. Sometimes he makes bacon.”
“He helps her sleep?” Stan said.
“When Daddy isn’t home.”
The doorbell then. Stan felt a surge — Janine! —
but summoned all his powers to ignore it.
“What do you mean? How often does your dad go away?” Your dad.
“Only sometimes,” Feldon said. “This time he brought me, too. Maybe Mommy won’t be home.”
The bell again. Stan saw Janine through the blurry front door window.
Janine Igwash in his house.
“Why won’t your mom be home?”
Feldon started folding something else from the pile of papers. “Because she went to Me-too Bay.”
“Where?”
Stan got up to let Janine in. There was an awkward moment at the door when really all he wanted to do was kiss her deeper and deeper for about half an hour until they both melted from the heat of it. Instead he stood too far back with his hands in his pockets, shuffling his feet.
“Hey,” she said.
She was crackingly beautiful.
Somehow Stan remembered himself.
“Me-too Bay?” he said to Feldon. “What?”
“That’s where she went,” Feldon said.
—
Montego Bay. That’s what Feldon was trying to say. It took a while for Stan and Janine to get the information out of him. First he had to tell them all about the new bathing suits that kept arriving in the mail and how his mother would stand in front of the mirror and turn this way and that but she couldn’t decide on pink or black. And every suit made her look fat, she said. And Uncle Liam would tell her she wasn’t fat and she would say she was and he would bring home pie for everyone.
Janine helped Feldon arrange the folded creations, some of which looked like animals and some were just shapes. Janine sat with her legs crossed and her body inches away from Stan.
“Is Uncle Liam her brother or — ?” Stan pressed.
“He’s her sleeping friend,” Feldon said.
All the folded creations were facing in the same direction, like cows in a field.
“He snorts pretty loud,” Feldon said.
Janine’s collar cut across the little lizard. It was an effort to keep himself from reaching out to touch it.
“And he makes funny noises in the bathroom.”
Stan laughed too loud. The air in the room was nearly boiling just because Janine was sitting there.
“And now your mother and Uncle Liam have gone to Montego Bay?” Stan pressed.
“Sometimes we went to the go-carts,” Feldon said.
“He let you drive a go-cart?”
“Brmmm! Brmmm!” Feldon said. He turned his hands as if he was steering.
“But what was your dad doing while all this happened?”
“Brmmm! Brmmm!”
Feldon was as bad as Lily. Stan put his hand on Janine’s shoulder, and she melted into the movement.
“Where’s your dad’s bedroom?” Stan said finally to Feldon, who squinted as if this was the most ridiculous question. “I mean, do your mom and dad . . . Do they sleep together, or does he have his own place?”
Feldon squealed, it was so funny. “Daddy doesn’t sleep! He works!”
—
How some people arranged their lives — good luck trying to figure it all out, Stan thought.
But maybe . . . maybe his father had good reasons to leave after all. It was hard to grasp what the situation might be. Stan wasn’t in his father’s shoes.
But he wouldn’t have abandoned his son, that was for sure.
Stan and Janine took Feldon to the park and played on the swings with other preschoolers. Janine asked Feldon if he went to kindergarten and he acted as if he