Summer of My Amazing Luck

four

One morning I looked out my living room window and on the fence surrounding the small parking lot (parking lots for public housing are always small because they know few of us have cars and they think they discourage overnight visitors that way) was painted in big red letters FUCK THE RICH THAN EAT THEM. When I saw that I thought Teresa must have done it because of the spelling of “then,” but I realized it might have been a kid, or kids. Besides, Teresa hadn’t seemed miserable at all, especially since she had been studying French two evenings a week. Sing Dylan was in the parking lot trying to scrub the painted letters off, but he wasn’t having much success. Sarah was laughing, standing in the rain wearing one of Emmanuel’s t-shirts and her jeans were rolled up. She was barefoot. I had never seen her laugh before. Sing Dylan was shouting at her for something and this made her laugh even harder. At first I was worried that she had finally gone insane over Emmanuel. But eventually she stopped laughing and handed Sing Dylan his pail and acted normal again.

Sarah had cut her hair and she looked like a little boy. She looked good. Seeing her and Sing Dylan out there laughing and shouting in the rain made me feel so pathetic. I wanted to run out there and be crazy too. I actually envied Sarah for a second, not having her kid with her. I was an old woman. I never had any fun anymore. I should have been hanging out in cars with guys my age, drinking beer and staying up all night, sleeping in. At least I could go out into the rain and laugh for a while. But that would have been ridiculous, walking out there and then just laughing. Sarah and Sing Dylan would have thought I was insane and I would have felt like Gore-Tex Guy. They were content, just the two of them, and my life seemed like one big mistake from start to finish. I thought of my mom and wondered if it hurt her to see me this way, that is, if she could. My mom was always telling me, “Good Luck Lucy, Good Luck.” I’d leave for school, she’d say Good Luck, I’d take out the garbage, she’d say Good Luck, I’d go to bed, she’d say Good Luck. I’d tell her I wanted scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast, she’d say Good Luck. Ha ha. But she didn’t just say Good Luck just like that. She said it like it was two sentences, both with exclamation marks after them. GOOD! LUCK! and move her chin down with each word, like someone saying FUCK YOU! but of course not at all the same as that, just with the same vigour. Was I lucky? Had it worked? Is this the kind of life my mom would think was lucky?

I remembered some crazy woman in a laundromat on Broadway telling me her mother was very disappointed in all of her children, but mostly in her, because she once had had potential as a TV journalist and now had become like all the rest of her siblings: her older sister ran away from her kids and joined the army, her younger sister was dead, well not technically, but she may as well have been because she let men walk all over her and never batted an eye, and her brother was, well he seemed to be okay, but his wife kept trying to kill herself, so he must not have been that hot. This woman in the laundromat said that she could live with her own disappointment, but she just couldn’t handle her mother’s.

She said she was going to start telling her mom big lies about all her career successes and start sending fake positive upbeat letters from her surviving siblings who, from what I could tell, lived in Northern Ontario, and then she was going to replace her mom’s liver medicine with vitamins so she’d die quicker and terribly thrilled with the way her family had worked out. She said that if I mentioned it to anyone she’d find out where I lived and slit my throat from ear to ear, it wouldn’t bother her. I could see her actually carrying out her plan with the liver medicine and the letters and everything, but I had a really hard time imagining her as a TV journalist.

My apartment seemed too big for Dill and me: we had an extra room and some of the other women used theirs for craft things, easels, sewing machines, drum kits. But I didn’t have a hobby. I hated crafts. Angela was forever making piñatas for the kids in the block. Terrapin and her organic friends, Gypsy and Deb, made jewellery and wove friendship bracelets and tried to sell the stuff on the street and through a women’s co-op. There was a woman in the block who was sculpting sex toys out of clay: rocking chairs with big multi-coloured phalluses sticking out of the seats. She had a teenage son, and his girlfriend lived there, too. The woman was very shy. I don’t even know her name but I suspect her son and his girlfriend forced her to be their slave.

My apartment, like most, had a long hall as its central feature. On one end was the bathroom, on the other the kitchen. In between were the bedrooms and living room, which were more or less the same size. The rooms had big windows that opened out. Off the living room was a door to the outside balcony. Lish had woven a fishnet around the bars of hers and put a plastic wading pool out there that was continuously filling up with rainwater. The kids loved it. The couple below weren’t thrilled about the water splashing over the sides down onto their balcony, but their kids played in it too, so they couldn’t really complain.

Joe and Pillar had been at Half-a-Life almost as long as Lish had. Theirs had been one of those perfect storybook marriages. Until about one week after the wedding. That’s when their first kid was born. Apparently they both fell so in love with the kid that neither one wanted to leave the house and work. Joe had always been kind of unemployable and Pillar had once been a computer programmer. But after Duncan, they hung around at home, had more kids, fell in love with them, went on the dole when their money ran out, and eventually joined the ranks of the nouveau poor. Give a big warm welcome to Joe and Pillar!

Like I said, they lived right under Lish, and whenever she had one of her skinny boyfriends over and her moaning and groaning got too loud, Joe would stand in his apartment, in his kitchen, right under her kitchen, where she always did it with her boyfriends, and imitate her moaning. Then Pillar would call him a jerk and they’d fight and all along Lish didn’t even hear it or care because she was too wrapped up in her own fun.

I didn’t have enough stuff to fill my apartment. I marvelled at Lish’s apartment. It was full of junk mostly, secondhand furniture that she painted or the kids had painted, art from a lot of her boyfriends, kids’ art, plants, old books, records (she didn’t have a stereo to play them on), jars of organic food stuff, boxes of leather bits and material the kids could use to make things with, lamps with big fringy shades and two or three old-fashioned typewriters, photographs of her kids and her family, her great-grandparents, her friends. She almost always had music playing in the background and incense burning and big vats of soup or vegetables boiling on the stove. Mint and dill were her favourite smells, and she put huge amounts of garlic into everything she cooked. She had transformed her standard issue public housing suite into a marvellous home. I loved going over there. In comparison, my apartment was cold and depressing.

Over the summer it got better. Lish took me to all the secondhand furniture shops and gave me some blue and yellow cloth to hang over my windows. I bought an old Persian carpet from an estate sale and my dad gave me the bedside lamp from Mom’s side of the bed. Rodger, Hope and Maya’s dad, let us use his van to pick up the stuff. When I picked up the lamp my dad wasn’t home, but he had left a note telling me where the lamp was, as if I had forgotten where my mom had slept. We picked old wooden chairs out of back lanes and sanded them down and painted them green and mustard, fuchsia and black, I draped a lacy tablecloth over my old couch and bought a few plants from Safeway. Lish suggested I take the cupboard doors off my kitchen cupboards. That way the dishes and food would be visible and make the room look more lived in and colourful. I wasn’t so sure boxes of Kraft Dinner and Melmac plates were so hot to look at, but off came the cupboard doors anyway. Angela gave me a big clay pot and I hid my crappy food behind it. Lish told me I needed a cast iron frying pan and wooden mixing spoons. These I got from my dad’s place, too. Again he wasn’t home when I picked them up. I guess there’s a lot to do when you’re a geology professor. My mom had never used these things because they were lodged too far back in the cupboard and she didn’t really care whether she was cooking on iron or Teflon.

My dad never cooked for himself. He ate all his meals at The Waffle Shop or at the Pizza Hut. When I was a kid he’d take me to The Waffle Shop. We would walk there holding hands. Well, it was more like me flying behind him like a kite because he was a huge man and covered the ground with enormous quick strides. My dad had this weird talent. He could pick out four-leafed clovers in the grass. One four-leafed clover surrounded by thousands of regular three-leafed ones and grass and stuff and he’d see it. Every once in a while that would happen on our way to The Waffle Shop and he’d stop and home in on the thing and then point it out to me, but that was it. He never picked them and I never asked him how he did it and he never told me. It was very strange. I remember telling my grade two class that my dad could do this weird thing with four-leaf clovers and they were not impressed. A boy got up and said his dad could crow like a rooster and they were impressed. Then I told them, well, my dad was the only baby ever in the world to be born wearing a little grey suit. I had overheard my mother tell this to one of her friends on the phone. They were not impressed and my teacher asked me to please sit down.

I don’t think my dad could even feel my hand in his big one. I think often he forgot I was with him until we actually got to The Waffle Shop. That’s when I landed back on the ground beside him, huffing and puffing. Every time we were at The Waffle Shop he’d say the same thing to the waitress: “An egg salad sandwich for my bombshell blonde.” My dad was human when he was outside of our house. He talked a bit and smiled. He tousled my hair. Inside the house he was dead, terrifying. He sat in his chair and silently shook his head at me when I made a lot of noise or ran around too much. On weekends when he wasn’t working, he stayed in bed all day. We’d forget about him.

There was a woman in the block who was really truly crazy. Betty took seventeen pills a day to try and keep herself “between the ditches” as she said. She hadn’t always been nuts. At one point she had been studying for her Master’s degree in English Literature. She was married to an engineer and they had a son. When her son turned five, things started to unravel for her. She lost it. Her husband left and took the kid with him. He couldn’t handle her madness. Somehow she got to Half-a-Life, probably because her son was allowed to spend one week of every year with her. I don’t know. I never asked her because I didn’t want to upset her. She scared me. Once she dropped in on Lish and me, at Lish’s place, and started talking to us like we were old friends. Before that she had never spoken to us.

The kids used her as their ultimate insult. “You love Betty.” “No, you.” She was pleasant around them, always saying, “Hi, how’re you doing?” But all that medication made her twitch and shudder a lot. It scared the kids just like it did me. She showed us a picture of a guy she had been writing to and was hoping to visit. She got his name from a prison pen pal catalogue at the library. He was in jail in Baltimore for murdering a woman. That’s all he had told her. She told us she was going to hitchhike out there and they were going to get married. She was worried about telling him she was nuts. Lish pointed out to her that he had a few quirks himself. This made her laugh.

Once, she broiled frozen bagels for us in Lish’s oven. She took them out gingerly and said “ouch” because they were hot. I noticed that the oven hadn’t even been on. But she smeared cream cheese over them anyway and handed them out to us. Frozen bagels with cream cheese. Then she went running upstairs and brought down the dress she was going to wear to get married in. It was really stunning. It was beige silk, simple and very elegant. I thought she had good taste for a nutcase. She asked us about ten times if we thought she had a soft laugh because Andre, the murderer she planned to marry, told her over the phone that she did and he liked it.

Lish told her that she didn’t think it was a good idea to plan to marry this con without visiting him first. “The guy’s a murderer for Christ’s sake,” Lish said. Betty said, “Yeah, but it could just have been a backhand that happened to kill this woman.” “Or he might have chopped her into little bits,” Lish said. “The two are very different.” “If he chopped her into little bits,” Betty had said, “I’d reconsider.” But basically, she thought he was a very sweet guy. He was completing a university degree in psychology. She also pointed out that he was black, male, poor and eighteen when he killed this woman, and might be taking the rap for someone. People like him are thrown into prison in the States all the time, Betty claimed. Anyway, she was excited about hitchhiking out to Baltimore to see him and was preparing herself for the trip.

“I want to get really long fingernails so I look like one of those Jewish broads who’ve never worked a day in their lives,” she told us. I looked at Lish. She had longish nails. I thought she might say something to set Betty straight, but she just laughed. A couple of days later Betty told us that Andre had called her and said he wanted to be honest with her. He had killed his grandmother, doused her with gasoline and lit her on fire. But he had been young and she had always nagged him. Betty decided she didn’t care whom he had killed or how. She wanted to wear that silk dress more than anything and be Andre’s wife. Though she had wondered out loud whether or not they would actually be married if they didn’t have sex. Apparently that prison didn’t have a conjugal trailer or room or whatever.

After that first visit we’d had, I’d say Hi to Betty when I saw her in the hallway. She’d purse her lips at me and wouldn’t say a thing. Once I saw her with big black stitches on her chin and she told me she had fallen off her bike. Lish told me that Betty had shown her the photograph of Andre and had told Lish it was her brother Dean. Toward the end of the summer she moved out and none of us saw her again.

The woman who moved into her apartment was very friendly. Her name was Tanya. She had two children, a boy and a girl. They had different fathers. On the weekend her son went to his dad’s place in the country. His dad had a girlfriend who had a daughter. His dad and the girlfriend had a son together. So Tanya’s son had a half-sister and a mother with whom he lived during the week, but on the weekend he had a step-sister and a half-brother and a step-mom. The girl went to her dad’s place in the suburbs on the weekend. Her dad had a girlfriend who had a son. Her dad and the girlfriend had a daughter together. So Tanya’s daughter had a half-brother and a mother with whom she lived during the week, but on the weekend she had a step-brother and a half-sister and a step-mom.

Tanya had the weekends to herself. On the weekends she brewed beer in huge vats and bootlegged it to people in the block. Once, somebody from Serenity Place called the cops on her. One of the cops turned out to be the full brother of Tanya’s daughter’s weekend step-mom. Tanya and this woman got along all right. The cop knew that his sister wouldn’t invite him over for Sunday dinners anymore if he arrested Tanya and, like most cops, he was lonely. So he gave Tanya a warning, tongue in cheek, enjoyed a mug of home brew with his partner, and left. You see, it pays to be well-connected and Tanya certainly was. She made a fine beer with a higher than usual alcohol content. She let us buy it on credit and half the time she’d forget about it. She really enjoyed brewing beer. When her kids came home she put all the tubes and funnels and bags of sugar away and she and Sing Dylan and Sarah carried the bubbling vats of beer downstairs to Sing Dylan’s apartment. Sing Dylan didn’t drink it, of course, but he didn’t mind storing it for her. I don’t think her kids ever knew their mother was the Beer Queen of Half-a-Life.

There was one other woman in Half-a-Life I sort of got to know. Her name was Mercy. Lish told me that her real name was Mercedes. Her mother had given her that name when she was still in the womb because it was the last thing she saw of Mercy’s father after she told him she was pregnant: a big black Mercedes pulling out of the driveway of her parents’ home. He was the son of a banker or a judge. Mercy’s mom raised her alone on the top floor of her parents’ elegant home in River Heights. Lish said Mercy and her mom were invited downstairs to join the grandparents for dinner every Thursday night. Other than Thursday nights they never saw each other. When Mercy turned eighteen she turned wild. She set fires around town until she was caught. She did every type of drug available. She screwed anything that moved, male or female. Eventually her grandparents turfed her. Heartbroken, her mother committed suicide on a Friday afternoon and they didn’t find her body until the next Thursday evening when she didn’t show up for dinner. Or so the story goes around Half-a-Life.

Anyway, Mercy belonged to our group only because we loved to gossip about her. Actually she would have been very funny if she hadn’t been so uptight about everything. After a while her uptightness became the joke. She confused me. She had one daughter. The father of this girl was a Trinidadian Rastafarian. But he lived with a different white woman and they had a whole whack of children together. From time to time he’d stay overnight with Mercy. Seems his wife knew about Mercy, and Mercy certainly knew about his wife and that was the situation. I knew he had hit her a couple of times. I found it interesting how a person like Mercy could be attracted to a violent married man. She and her daughter went to bed every night at 7:30. She saved money on everything she bought. She always rode her bike everywhere with her daughter bobbing around behind her in a kid’s bicycle seat. Her apartment was spotless. They seemed to bathe incessantly. When her daughter had been a baby, she had changed her diaper every time she urinated, even the smallest amount, to prevent diaper rash. She rarely got a sitter. She only read books by female feminist authors, mostly black ones, and she didn’t own a TV. She was in control of everything — everything except her peculiar and violent love life. This guy walked all over her, showing up drunk late at night, banging on her door, agreeing to take the girl out to the park, then not showing up, asking her to marry him and the next day telling her she was a whore and hitting her. She put up with his shit. I guess he was the only unpredictable thing she could handle. She probably didn’t want to end up alone like her mom had, so she didn’t complain. She compensated for his randomness with her own precision.

One Saturday morning she asked Dill and me over for tea. Her daughter was surprisingly free and charming. Every time Dill dragged some book or toy out of place Mercy quickly put it back. When he spilled his juice, she spent about fifteen minutes wiping it off the floor, not complaining about it, just very focussed on it. Mercy showed me photographs of her trips to Trinidad. She travelled there with her daughter every year. She saved money on food and clothes and stuff so she could do this. She said she wanted her daughter to know where she was from. But these pictures were very odd. A lot of black people crowded into the photo, smiling and barefoot, holding chickens, wearing ripped t-shirts, dancing. Then there in the middle of the shot was Mercy. She was always wearing bright white knee socks and long khaki shorts. She had on hiking boots and longsleeved men’s white shirts. She wore a big-brimmed straw hat, tied around her little head with a yellow ribbon. Her face was obliterated almost entirely by huge black sunglasses. Her expression was always grim. Her daughter was usually off in the background dancing with her cousins. When she had finished showing me these pictures she carefully put them back into their plastic-backed envelope and then into another one and then another. Then she put them into a file folder entitled Trip Photos and put that file up high on a shelf in a cardboard box made especially for folders.

Each time she went to Trinidad she brought the family of her daughter’s father gifts. For the children she brought thick-soled leather hi-top runners and puzzles and books. For the women she brought perfume and tampons and for the men she brought white dress shirts like the ones she wore. Mercy told me that in Trinidad she and her daughter slept in a dirty one-room shack with about six other people. There was no running water and no electricity. Almost everyone went barefoot. They joyously welcomed Mercy and her daughter, their granddaughter and cousin, into their home and hated to see them go.

She was also the only one of us who worked — outside of the home, that is. Once I asked Terrapin if she worked. She said, “Yes, I work very hard raising Sunshine and Rain. If you mean do I work outside the home for wages, no, I do not. It’s more important for me to be at home with my children.” I was going to ask her why her kids always looked so grim, but instead I said, “Oh. Cool.” I had decided not to talk to Terrapin about anything concerning me or Dill, anything that was meaningful, anything about life or kids, nothing but Hello, nice day for her. God, she bugged me. One time Lish and I were moving a dresser from Lish’s apartment to mine and Terrapin happened to show up on the stairs. She was wearing a shirt that read “Have a Special Delivery.” She asked us how we were managing. Lish said, “Oh terrible, this is so heavy I’m going to have a miscarriage and I’m not even pregnant.” I laughed and Terrapin said, “That might not be funny for all of us?”

Lish sighed, “Yeah, that’s very true, Paraffin. What, am I supposed to be like court jester here or what?”

Actually, that is exactly what we expected Lish to be. She was funny. She was meant to be funny. Even if she wasn’t making you laugh outright, she was uplifting, good for the soul. She had an attitude towards life that I wish I had. She did her own thing and she never noticed when people stared at her stupid spider hat or her long square-toed shoes. She loved to hang out with her kids, but if they wanted to do foolish things like attend school or join Girl Scouts, that was okay with her. She let them do their own thing because she knew how much she needed to be able to do hers. She had successfully separated her identity from her kids’ identities and so she could really enjoy them. She wasn’t afraid to be alone, as I suspected a lot of us at Half-a-Life were.

The next morning, it was raining as usual. I cleaned up Dill’s breakfast mess, and took him over to Lish’s place. I couldn’t call to tell her I was coming because her phone had been disconnected. But she knew just about everybody in the block and could use one of theirs anytime, provided they hadn’t been disconnected, too. I brought my own coffee because Lish had stopped buying it. “Too expensive for something that makes me all jittery,” she’d said. I knocked but nobody answered. So I walked right in to the living room. Hope and Maya were in school. Alba and Letitia were in there playing and singing the alphabet song as best they could. “A B C D E F G H I J K alimony please.” I was about to say “Hi” to them when I heard moaning from the other room. At first I thought it was Lish and whoever having sex in her bedroom.

“Good morning Lucy Goosie and Dilly Willy,” said Letitia in her most agreeable teacher’s voice. They were playing school. Then I heard it again. It wasn’t sex at all, Lish was crying. She must have been muffling it in her pillow or in all her hair, because it sounded far away. Nothing sounds far away in a Halfa-Life apartment. I didn’t know what to do. Lish crying. It was too weird. She never cried.

Alba said, “Lish is crying because she has a tummy ache. And she can’t come to school right now.”

“But she’ll come in the afternoon.”

“Yeah.”

I figured I’d just slip out and come back later, but by then Dill had been made a pupil and was being taught the alphabet. Alimony please. He’d scream if I tried to take him home now and then Lish would come into the room and be embarrassed. So I stood there smiling at the kids, wondering what the hell I should do. I flipped through a wicker basket full of letters she had saved. Love letters? I was tempted to read some but I was afraid the twins would tell her I’d been snooping through her stuff while she wept in the other room. I looked around at her photographs. Her parents looked normal. John was even smiling. Her mom had a happy expression and was holding John’s hand. A picture of her brother from the ’70s when he had an Afro. Someone had stuck two straws into his hair to look like antennae. A picture of Lish and Hope and her dad. Lish was enormously pregnant, with Maya, I guess, and wearing a bikini. They were on the beach. A picture beside it showed Rodger digging a hole in the sand and Lish standing beside him laughing. Hope was playing in the background. Then another picture beside that one. Lish was lying on her stomach with her huge belly nestled comfortably in the hole Rodger had dug for it and reading a book. Maya was sitting on her back and Rodger was drinking a beer. You couldn’t even tell Lish was pregnant.

Pregnant, that was it. Maybe Lish was pregnant and that’s why she was crying. No, Lish loved being pregnant. She’d be celebrating if she was. Not with tequila though. She kept crying. I stood there. I tiptoed over to the kitchen table, thinking I’d just sit there quietly and wait for Lish to be through.

That’s where I saw the program. It was a festival program from years ago. 1989. It was open to the page with the buskers’ descriptions and one of them was circled, about a hundred times, as if someone had spent a whole day with a pen going round and round it. The picture was small and blurry and black and white. It was a close-up of a dark-haired guy eating fire. It was the busker, the twins’ dad. She was crying her eyes out over this guy. The twins were four years old. How long had she been crying in her hair over him? Four years, my god. I would have had to have started crying at fourteen and not stopped to have been crying for four years. Lish was so funny. Why was she crying after all this time? Obviously she was really hooked on this guy. I was envious. She had a real reason to get worked up. To throw herself down on her bed and sob, bawl her eyes out thinking of lost love, of happier times. I thought then that would be easier than looking forward to them like I was. At least she knew what life was like, at least what it could be like. She could see it. I was still trying to picture it.

Alimony please … Dill wasn’t catching on quickly to Alba and Letitia’s teachings. I stared at the picture of the performer. I read his blurb. Fire-eater, magician, not afraid to risk his life for your cheap thrills … Lish kept on with her muffled crying. I guess she thought she was keeping it a secret from the kids. That bastard, I thought. Why did this always happen? I had built Halfa-Life and the women in it into a kind of shrine I worshipped. I had to, it was all I had. I really wanted it to be a good thing. I wanted the women in it to laugh all the time. I wanted them to be tough. I wanted them to roll their eyes at trouble and crack a joke. I enjoyed the stupid arguments but I didn’t want them to become complicated. In my mind these women had escaped from horrible lives and had come to seek solace in Half-a-Life. And Lish? I needed her to laugh at her life, not cry. Then my life would be funny, too. And Dill would be a lucky boy.

I looked at the wicker basket full of letters. Each one had been opened very carefully, and they were stacked neatly, according to size, smallest to largest. I ran my finger around the rim of the basket. Lish was still crying and the kids were having a good time. I looked out the window and it was then that I had my brilliant idea. I felt like I was Pierre Elliott Trudeau and I had just gone for a walk in the snow. I looked up, big wet snowflakes like chunks of cake falling on my face, and there it was, the answer: QUIT POLITICS. Or it could have been, probably, QUITEZ LES POLITIC. I’d have to ask Teresa. Anyway, in my case, of course, it wasn’t QUIT POLITICS or anything, it was WRITE LETTERS. And I wasn’t really walking in the snow, I was staring out the window at the rain — but still. It came to me.

And I would sign them, “Love, Gotcha.”

When I was a kid my cousin Delia and I played a trick on her brother. He had told his mom that there was a girl he liked. Delia and I overheard him talking about her. He said her name was Sandy and she had hair like Farrah Fawcett and was really cute. He had doubled her on his bike all the way to the Mac Store. “I hope she likes me,” he’d told his mom. Delia and I made a plan. We wrote her brother a letter from Sandy. She must have been three or four years older than us so we wrote the letter in big swooping letters instead of printing it in our own square hand. We dabbed my aunt’s perfume on it. Dear David, I like you a lot. Please meet me at the Mohawk after school if you like me too. And if you don’t already have a girlfriend. Love Sandy. Then we dropped this letter in the mailbox and waited. We were bursting to find out what happened. We couldn’t even look at each other without laughing our heads off. We were so brilliant. After school we ran home and threw ourselves on the couch, pretending to watch TV like any other day. We waited and waited and waited. Finally the front door opened. Slowly David walked into the house. He dropped his jacket and his books on the floor in front of the door and started walking down the hall to his bedroom. He had on his stiff new Lee jeans. When he saw us in the living room, he said in a really nice soft voice, “Hi.” He kept on walking slowly toward his bedroom. I was worried and I could tell Delia was, too. We were frozen, staring at the TV. “What if he shoots himself?” I whispered to Delia. “As if. He doesn’t even have a gun,” she whispered back. I wanted to cry.

We had always played jokes on David and he’d get mad and tell my aunt and she’d tell us to leave him alone. But this was different. We’d broken his heart. What if he became a serial killer of women because of us? The next day his mom found out what happened and she took both of us into her sewing room. She told us we had done a very cruel thing and had made David very sad. We would have to apologize and promise never to do anything like it again. I had hoped David would beat us up like he usually did when we bugged him, but instead he just sat there. After we apologized he said, “Kay.” Then we said we were sorry. We told him we had been assholes. Neither one of us had ever said that word out loud before. We hoped this would really convince him we were sorry. He just said “OK” again. After that we stopped bugging him and he never beat us up again. I think we were all sad about that for a long time. Anyway, now he’s married to a nurse and almost bald and helps disturbed teenagers by canoeing with them and teaching them to camp. I don’t know what became of Sandy.

But that whole thing with my cousin Delia had been a bad joke. I was much older now, and serious about keeping Lish happy. I think even Pierre Trudeau would have approved.