Summer of My Amazing Luck

fifteen

Mercy had a girl. The father turned out to be the same father her other daughter had. We were all a little taken aback by that: in Half-a-Life it’s sort of assumed that siblings have different fathers. Mercy could control just about everything around her and keep everything in order, in nice, straight, clean lines. Except for her feelings about this guy. The Father. Most of the time she could keep him out of her mind and out of her apartment, but not always. And so, she had another baby. There are worse things that could happen. Since working for the Disaster Board, Mercy had a new life philosophy: to name what you fear, to look it in the eye and embrace it. And so she named her new daughter Mayhem.

You might think that my dad and me caught up on the years we had lost or talked about my mom or declared our love for one another. Wrong. After Mayhem’s birth, he and I and Dill went back to my apartment. He sat at my little kitchen table and drank a diet Coke with ice and gave Dill a present. It was a microscope. He hoped Dill could use it when he was older. We talked about the rain, his wrecked basement, not much else. But there we were.

That night Teresa had a tequila Scrabble party. It was only going to be a Scrabble party, but then after adding up all the positive things that had happened, she decided it had better be a tequila parry, too. Even Sing Dylan was celebrating, though not with tequila. Hart had managed to convince the women in Serenity Place not to sue Sing Dylan for flooding their basements. He told them that it would take months to get money for that but they could get money right away from the Disaster Board if they said their basements flooded naturally like everyone else’s. Welfare mothers all understood the appeal of quick cash, and we rarely let convictions stand in our way of getting it. So Sing Dylan wasn’t going to have to go back to wherever the hell he came from after all. Which was good. He had even managed, finally, to wash off every last trace of the graffiti on the North wall.

What was bad was the new graffiti. The morning after Mayhem was born, Lish and I looked out of her kitchen window and saw Sing Dylan back at his wall with his pail and his hose. Nobody could miss those big fresh yellow letters: EAT THE POOR THERE MORE TENDER. Lish really liked the sound of that, despite the spelling. Again. She said it was like a welcome sign to Half-a-Life.

Another thing we were celebrating was the success of Mercy’s blackmail campaign. Bunnie Hutchison met with Mercy in person, secretly, and guaranteed that the child tax credit would be brought back, if she didn’t breathe a word about Bunnie’s bogus flood claim. An extra thousand bucks? When you’re only pulling in nine grand, an extra thousand bucks in worth a little blackmail.

Unfortunately, Bunnie Hutchison has decided to set up what she called a Snitch Line to catch welfare cheaters. People are supposed to call some number if they know someone guilty of welfare fraud. So now Half-a-Life and Serenity Place, we’re all battening down our hatches and gathering our ammo, ’cause there’s sure to be a war. Again. Don’t even ask me how Lish reacted to news of the Snitch Line. The Snitch Line, the Fingerprints, the Surprise Home Visits, geez, you’d think we were dishonest. Which brings me to Lish and the Gotcha problem.

I was troubled by Lish’s unchanging mood. The whole point of that stupid exercise had been to resolve things for her, to stop the wondering and the waiting, to cement his love for her, to create a dead father for the twins to love instead of a missing one. About one day after I’d done it, I realized I had done the wrong thing. But still, Lish didn’t know the truth and, in my mind, she should have been acting differently. Based on what she thought she knew. Instead she was pretty much the same. She burned her incense, played her music, read her books, cooked her garlic dishes, hung out with her kids, helped Mercy with her baby, made cracks about everything, railed against the system. Nothing had changed!

As for my dad, well, he asked me if it would be alright with me if he stayed for three days while he had his basement cleaned out, installed a back-up valve and a sump pump, and replaced his weeping tile. With the ground as saturated as it was, there’d likely be more flooding next spring when it thawed. My dad decided to forget about having a finished basement and just live on the main floor. Dill and I didn’t really see a lot of him during those three days. The first night I let him sleep in my bed, and Dill and I slept on Lish’s air mattresses. The second night he said he would sleep on the air mattresses and when I said no no, he said, “I honestly would prefer to.” In the morning we drank coffee together and watched Dill perform feats of derring-do, as my dad put it. I hadn’t, up until then, really had anybody else to enjoy Dill with. And it was a wonderful feeling. I mean I had Lish and the other women in Half-a-Life, but my dad was far more thrilled with the little things Dill did. He saw them as incredible achievements. I think he was even proud.

Whenever there was a ruckus in the parking lot or a loud thud he’d scurry over to the window to check his car, and at night he’d ask me twice if the coffee was off and the chain was on the door. He was mostly at his house watching the men work, but he’d always come back at suppertime and take us out to a restaurant. Dill was still mostly breast-feeding and eating rice cereal with the odd piece of actual food thrown into his diet, but my dad figured hamburgers and french fries were the way to go. It wasn’t because he was cheap or anything; I think it was because for him I was still kind of frozen in time at the age of fourteen: the year before my mother died and before I went off the deep end. When his life made more sense to him. I didn’t want to tell him that Lish had properly introduced me to things like curry and rotis. I didn’t want him to think he should change his mind from thinking what he had always thought. That’s the kind of relationship we had. At least it wasn’t pasta he was taking us out for. I’d had enough noodles to last me a lifetime.

At the restaurants we went to Dill would fuss a bit and my dad would say to me, “Why don’t you nurse him, Lucy?” So I would, and my dad would cross his legs, sit kind of hunched over, and chew on a toothpick and stare out the window, not saying anything. He always nodded at anybody who walked by us, kind of like a cop on his beat, as if he should have said, “It’s okay, this lady’s feeding her baby, nothing to see, keep moving, that’s it.” When I was finished, my dad would say to Dill, “Bet that hit the spot, eh?” or “There, that’s the ticket. Yup,” or “Dillinger’s favourite restaurant, eh?”

His last night at my place, like I mentioned, we were having the tequila Scrabble party at Teresa’s. Everybody was there. Kids were running in and out. Nobody complained, because everybody’s kids were doing it. Sing Dylan couldn’t tell us in his polite way to keep the noise down, because he was at the party too, and it was partly in his honour to boot. Tanya brought in a vat of homebrew, and Teresa and Angela and Lish were already half cut. Nobody was playing Scrabble. Teresa made the smokers go out on the balcony because of little Mayhem, and there were some kids there, too, dropping stuff onto the parking lot. I noticed that Sing Dylan hadn’t managed to get any of the EAT THE POOR THERE MORE TENDER graffiti off the wall, or maybe he’d decided to leave it there. Terrapin had trapped my dad in a corner and they were discussing the merits of home births versus hospital births. Well, Terrapin was discussing, and my dad was nodding, looking nervously around the room for an exit.

Eventually we all headed outside for the parking lot — all except Mercy and Mayhem. They stayed on the balcony like the royal family and waved periodically, at least Mercy did. She couldn’t walk yet, not too easily, anyway. Teresa brought her ghetto blaster, covered in a plastic bag in case it should rain, and we all sat around in the grass behind our building, talking and listening to music. My dad was trying to talk to Sing Dylan about ducts. I heard Sing Dylan saying ducks? ducks? and looking around shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders. I noticed that Lish was drunk. Really drunk. She was telling Gypsy that she was not a mean drunk. Sometimes she was mean, she said, and sometimes she was drunk, but she was not a mean drunk.

She said she was a gentle drunk. That she should get drunk more often and she’d probably get a Nobel Peace Prize. She was rambling on like this and moving her hair around from one side of her head to the other. She looked over at me and waved and then she smiled and then she whispered something into Gypsy’s ear. Gypsy smiled and looked at me and waved too. Then they left, hand in hand, laughing and whispering, and went inside the building. I sat on the grass wondering whether or not I should have another shot of tequila, watching Dill pull grass out of the dirt and put it carefully on his head. Every time he leaned over to pull more out, the grass on his head fell off, and every time he looked surprised. I was about to go over to where my dad and Sing Dylan were when I heard a scream and then Lish came careening around the corner, black hair flying around her head like a dust storm.

“It’s him, it’s him!!! Oh my god I can’t believe it!! It’s him!”

“Who? Who? What are you talking about?” I had run over to her and she was kneeling on the ground like she was in labour. Everyone had started to crowd around her and some had run to the other side of the building to see who it was.

“It’s … it’s … it’s … oh my god, Lucy, this is a miracle.”

“What’s a fucking miracle Lish — just say it already!”

“Oh Luce, Luce, It’s … it’s …” She belched.

“It’s whoooo??” I yelled.

“It’s … it’s…GOTCHA! He’s come BACK! He’s HERE! HE’S HERE!!!” And then Lish swooned like a silent movie actress and fell to the ground, dropping her beer bottle, her hair splayed around her, her white hairy legs sticking out of her gauzy skirt.

It was my turn to fall to the ground. My head was reeling like a cheap midway ride, and I felt like I was going to throw up. Out of the corner of one eye I saw my dad, holding Dill, walking over to me. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Gotcha was not supposed to turn up at Half-a-Life. Lish would never believe that he was dead and then came back to life, and besides, she’d tell Gotcha, and he’d say, “What? What? Denver? Drug deal? Drive-by shooting? Postcards? What?” And the gig would be up and Lish would be onto me and be furious and hate me and I’d lose my best friend and I’d have to move out of Half-a-Life, probably to Serenity Place, and spend the rest of my life an outcast, a liar, a loser, a good-for-nothing pathetic broken-down bitter welfare mother with no friends. But wait! If Gotcha was here and Lish was so thrilled, where was he? Why weren’t they running up to Lish’s apartment, to her kitchen floor, to the twins, to the older girls, to their new, life together?

Lish opened one eye and then the other. She stood up and put her hands on my shoulders. Her breath reeked of tequila and beer and her hair was full of grass. She pulled me close to her and hugged me hard for all she was worth. Then she stood back, her hands still on my shoulders, and said, “Lace!”

“What!”

“GOTCHA!!!”

And she fell back onto the ground, laughing and looking up at me with what could only be described as love in her eyes. And then, poof, she closed her eyes and fell asleep. She had always loved a good performance.

“But Lish,” I asked her over coffee and Tylenol the next day, “how did you know?”

“Thresa, your accomplice who can’t keep a secret for a second, told Sarah, thinking Sarah wouldn’t talk because she never does. Anyway, Sarah did talk. She told me before the party last night that the whole thing was just a big joke. She said she wouldn’t want anyone else getting hurt from a lie the the way she did. And besides, when you wrote about the silver spoon? Gotcha didn’t even know about it. I took it after he had left. So even then I was on to you.”

“It wasn’t a joke, Lish, I was doing it to stop you from wondering. And waiting. I thought it would, you know, make things better for you and the twins if—”

“If he was dead instead of just out there?”

“Yeah.”

“Lucy.”

“Yeah?”

“Why don’t you try to find Dill’s father? It would be weird, but you could try to contact them all and get blood if they’d cooperate. You never know, it might work. Call their parents and see if you could see baby pictures of these guys, if there are any. They might hang up on you, but they might not. Why don’t you do what you can? You might get lucky, you never know. Figure out when you conceived Dill and try to remember who you were with at that time, that sort of thing. You could do these things, you know.”

“And if I never find out?”

“Then you never find out.”

That afternoon my dad said goodbye to all of us at Half-a-Life. He had gone up to Mercy’s apartment and had given Mercy a book about rocks, to give to Mayhem when she was older. Later Mercy showed us what my dad had written inside: “Dear Mayhem, We probably won’t ever really know each other. But you will always be a special child to me. I’m sure your mother will be able to explain everything. Mothers are good at that sort of thing. Yours truly, Geoffrey Van Alstyne.” Then it said, “P.S. Good! Luck!”

Downstairs Sing Dylan shook his hand and Teresa gave him a big wet kiss and a pack of cheap American smokes. “In case you wanna start,” she said. He said, “Thank you, Teresa. Thank you kindly.” He and Dill and I walked to his car. Joe and Pillar were leaning against it. Joe had his arm around Pillar’s waist and they were talking to each other. For the moment, they were happy again. As we approached my dad’s car they smiled and wandered over to a different car to lean against while they talked.

“Dad. How come you and Mom never had any more kids?”

“Well. I guess … it just didn’t happen.” Which I took to mean that sometimes it just did. He took my hand, It was dry and very big. I looked at Dill’s own big hands, and finally saw the similarities. For a second my dad and I were racing to The Waffle Shop. Nobody else existed.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah?”

“Life is not a joke.”

“No.”

I walked back to the front doors of Half-a-Life. I looked up and saw Lish on her balcony. She had on a t-shirt that read “I’m With Her,” and it had a hand on it with a pointing finger. She stood in a square of sunlight and brushed her black hair. Halfa-Life. Half-a-Laugh. Winnipeg, Manitoba, city with the most hours of sunshine, the centre of the universe. I was home. It’s true that life is not a joke. But I knew my life was funny. And Dillinger Geoffrey Van Alstyne was a lucky boy.