“As you may know,” Linda said, “Jack’s mother and stepfather live in Australia.” Jack was Jack Flynn, Linda’s current husband, Hilly’s stepfather. Not a bad guy, as husbands of former spouses go, except that he got to see a whole lot more of my daughter than I did. He was good to Hilly, though, and she liked him, although she frequently referred to him as the “Fat Food King of Southern Ontario.” He owned a dozen or so fast food franchises in and around Toronto. Bags of money.
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“Jack’s stepfather is terminally ill.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Thank you,” Linda said. “Naturally, Jack wants to go to Australia to be with his mother.”
“Naturally,” I said. Then it dawned on me. “And he wants you and Hilly to go with him, is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you expect me to object?”
“No,” she said, a little too emphatically, I thought. “Well, maybe, a little.”
“A few months in Australia would be a great experience.”
“I think so too,” Linda said. Hesitantly, she added, “But we could be gone for up to a year. After his step-father, um, passes, he wants his mother to come and live with us.”
“I would miss Hilly,” I said. “But a year isn’t such a long time. Besides, like I said, it would be a great experience.”
“That’s very understanding of you, Tom,” Linda said, as if bestowing upon me an award for behaviour above and beyond her expectations. She paused, then said, “But that isn’t the problem.”
“What is, then?”
“She doesn’t want to go. She wants to stay with you while we’re away.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed. I want you to talk to her, Tom. Tell her what you told me, that a year in Australia would be a good experience for her.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “You want me to tell my daughter that I think she should go to Australia with you and her stepfather and watch her step-grandfather die rather than spend the year with me?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly.”
“What way would you put it? Exactly.”
“You don’t really want her to go, do you?”
“I didn’t say that. I actually really do think she could learn a lot from it. How to play the didgeridoo, for instance. Or to like Vegemite.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Tom,” Linda said with a heavy and martyred sigh. “Why must everything be a big joke to you?”
“Put Hilly on,” I said.
Silence, punctuated by the hollow hum of the long-distance connection, followed by a wary, “What are you going to tell her?”
“Listen in, if you like,” I said.
Linda gave another long-suffering sigh, then called to Hilly, “Hillary, your father would like to speak with you.”
A few seconds later, Hilly said, “Daddy?”
“Scout, about this Australia thing — ”
“Mom?” Hilly said, interrupting. “Hang up the phone.” She waited, then said to me, “Do you think she’s listening in?”
“Probably,” I said. There was a hard click. It might have been Linda’s teeth snapping together, though. “Look, Hilly — ”
“I don’t want to go to Australia,” Hilly interrupted again. “I want to come and live with you.”
“Okay, fine.”
“Really?”
“Sure. But hear me out, okay?”
“All right,” she agreed warily.
“Someday you’ll regret not going to Australia with your mother.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Yes,” I said. “You will. Trust me. When you’re older, you’ll regret all kinds of missed opportunities. This will be one of them.”
“How do you know?” she challenged.
“Because I do. Regret things, I mean.”
“Like what?”
“That’s not important,” I said.
“So what you’re saying is you really don’t want me to come and stay with you?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All I said was that someday you’ll regret not going to Australia. Of course,” I added, “if you do go to Australia, you might someday regret not spending the year with me.” There was an angry hiss and a harder click as my former spouse banged down the phone.
“I knew she was listening in,” Hilly said.
“Weren’t you?”
“Yah, well,” she admitted. “So, I can stay with you?”
“Yes, you can stay with me.”
“Beatrix too?”
“Beatrix too,” I said. Beatrix was Hilly’s pet ferret, a sort of domesticated weasel. Cute, insatiably curious, but a domesticated weasel nonetheless. I wondered what I was letting myself in for.
“Oh, thank you, Daddy,” Hilly said. “Love you big time.”
Okay, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Sea Village is a community of a dozen or so floating homes moored two deep along the quay between the Granville Island Hotel and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, next to the Pelican Bay Marina. Some people, even some Sea Villagers, who should know better, insist on calling them houseboats, but houseboats are boats, and floating homes aren’t, even though they must be registered as such. A boat has a motor and a rudder and you can unhook it from the utilities and sail off into the sunset. Floating homes are houses that just happen to float, courtesy of the ferroconcrete hulls upon which they are built.
Mine was one of the smaller ones, in appearance not unlike a New England two-storey wood-frame cottage, except it was painted forest green and the roof was mostly flat and surrounded by a cedar railing. There was a kitchen, dining room, living room, and powder room on the first floor, and three bedrooms and full bath on the second floor. None of the rooms was large and there was no basement; however, there was a bilge in which you could store things that didn’t mind the damp. I’d lived in it for six years. For four of those years I’d paid a nominal rent to Howie Silverman, a friend and retired real estate developer, currently residing in Fort Lauderdale, plus the taxes, mooring fees, utilities, maintenance, and insurance. Two years before, though, I had purchased it (and Howie’s share in Sea Village Inc.) for, well, not a song exactly, but Howie had taken pity on me after my insurance carrier had gone south and I’d had to pony up a small fortune in repairs when a deadhead (not a Grateful Dead fan; a semi-saturated log that floats more or less vertically below the surface of the water) had cracked the hull when the tide had gone out.
Immediately across the finger dock from my house was Daniel Wu’s house. It was almost twice as big as mine, not the largest house in Sea Village, but a close second. Daniel was an architect, diminutive and sixty-odd years old, and one of my closest friends. We were sitting in his roof garden, surrounded by a small jungle of greenery. The sun had just gone down over the Granville Street Bridge, which loomed high over the western half of Granville Island, and I had just finished telling Daniel about finding the dead man on my roof deck.
“Never a dull moment, eh, Thomas?” he said.