I nodded. I kept my hand on the door. Coffee money. I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee. Not even at Vi’s.
At Wheel of Pancakes, Jack Sousa smiled as I fumbled with the door handle, my shoulders tight. I hoped he wouldn’t decide to reach over and open the door for me. That’s what Sam would do. I might bite him if he did. He didn’t.
I jumped down and held the door open. I had no money at all and I wanted him to make good on his offer. We stared at each other for a long time, he with his grin, me working up the courage to ask for the money. Then he laughed his moist tobacco laugh and reached into his back pocket. I remembered the thick square bulge with the oily outline his wallet made when I’d visited his farm. Sam had said, “You wouldn’t think it, but there’s a rich man.” If I asked for more money, if I told Jack Sousa I was running away from home — or didn’t tell him anything, just that I needed it — he would give it to me. I saw myself reaching over to the open wallet, plucking out a handful of bills and dancing off into the bushes with a quick wave. Mr. Sousa wouldn’t follow, wouldn’t even say anything to Sam. But who knew what he might say to others? I had to resist the urge to put my hand out as I did with my father on allowance day.
Mr. Sousa leaned across the seat and pressed two one-dollar bills into my palm. One bill was crisp, new, unfolded. The other was dirty, tattered, with a corner missing and numbers written on it in blue pen. I mumbled “thank you” and was glad to leave. I didn’t want to spend a minute longer with Jack Sousa. The bills made him suspect.
I had been walking up the highway for almost half an hour when Vi pulled up in her black Duster and ordered me into the car. By that time, my calves hurt and my arms were chilly so I obliged.
I slunk down. Vi faced straight ahead, holding her back away from the seat, occasionally adjusting her horn-rims or poking a finger under her wig. Vi wasn’t fussy about wearing seatbelts so I pulled both my feet up on the seat and leaned my head against the door. I listened to the wheels on the road and tried to let the sounds of the car carry me to sleep.
Vi pushed the lighter in.
“I want you to get me my cigarettes, up there on the visor.” Vi held her shoulders as if they were resting on a shelf.
I struggled up and removed a cigarette as the lighter popped.
“Light it for me, please.”
I yanked the lighter out, mesmerized by the glowing red circle of its tip. Vi clamped the cigarette in the side of her lips and leaned over, both hands still on the wheel, left eye on the road. The cigarette tip flared orange and she pulled away, twin smoke streams flowing from her nostrils.
“I don’t think much of people who run away from their problems,” she said.
It took me a moment. At first I thought Vi was referring to Sylvia. Then I realized she was talking about me. But I wasn’t running away, only walking to sort out my thoughts. There was a difference. I turned to the window and pretended I had a chainsaw or a medieval hatchet that sliced through each pole as it raced past.
Vi loosened the grip of her fingers on the steering wheel, allowing one hand to drop down and hang from the bottom.
“Before I give you back to your father, I’m going to tell you about the first time Sam met Sylvia.”
I didn’t blink. Vi must have thought that if I knew more about Sylvia before she was married, I might not be bothered so much by her craziness. The opposite was true. I turned to face her, my body still. The more I knew, the more the craziness obsessed me and the more I saw myself as crazy. Crazy was the easiest thing to believe in. To believe in it, I needed to know the truth.
“It starts with Sam. He was always good in school and he was the top athlete. It was the same back in Drag. We moved down before his senior year and he picked right up where he left off. He was very popular, though to look at him now, you might not think so. He always had a girl. One after the other. I couldn’t keep them straight. That was nothing compared to his brothers. Or so I hear. I suppose that was to be expected if teenage boys don’t have their mother around. After Earl left, that’s when I moved down here. Larry and Reese went back north to Earl so he raised them through high school. I always said that’s what killed him, not the heart attack. Served him right, wild as those boys were. Sam was the best of them. It’s no wonder they ended up after the women the way they were at that age, their father’s nature being what it was. But Sam was no slouch, let me tell you.”
Vi took a long pull on her cigarette, letting the smoke filter out the corner of her mouth.
I had a hard time picturing Sam as popular. My father had a wide easy smile, but he hid his face behind glasses bigger and blacker than Vi’s own, and the front and top of his head were almost bare.
“On the day Sylvia came to town,” Vi continued, “things changed. She was dark-haired and dark-skinned with those sloe-eyes that the boys liked so much.”
“She had slow eyes?” My mother’s eyes weren’t slow. If anything they were quick as whips, able to spot the slightest imperfection and bring it to the attention of her sharp tongue.
“Sloe eyes? Well they certainly aren’t like yours. Do you know what a sloe is?”
“Isn’t it a kind of animal that hangs from a tree? The lazy one?”
I didn’t like to admit I didn’t know. Being wrong was better than not knowing.
“That’s a sloth. A sloe is a plum, a dark velvety plum. Your mother’s eyes have that same quality. Men love it. Your eyes are blue like Sam’s.”
There was nothing Vi relished more than handing out definitions.
“Anything else?”
“No.”
My grandmother talked about men a lot. Maybe she would fall in love and find a new husband.
“Alright, then. No one knew exactly where this new girl lived or even how old she was. She showed up at the high school and the kids could talk of nothing else, boys or girls. The girls all wanted to be her friend and when they couldn’t get close to her, they turned on her. The boys — well that was another story.
“It wasn’t that she was beautiful, exactly, because she wasn’t. Not if you ask me. Sure, her hair was dark and shiny and her eyes big with long lashes. But her face was pointy and she had a crooked nose. Besides, she was so tall and skinny. No curves on her. She wore her hair short, in a ducktail and the girls said she would stride into the washroom at school, take a handful of grease from a tin in her purse and slick it through her hair. No one knew whose class she was in, or if she was even in the school, but she was always there. And it didn’t take long for her to find Sam.”
Vi stopped to finish off her cigarette. She pushed in the lighter for the next one. Vi had never told me stories before. I didn’t know where she got them. Perhaps they’d always been out there, hovering, waiting for Vi to pull them in.
“I was running a laundry and a dry clean then. I had Sam in there most evenings after his track and field practice helping me load up the machines, then sorting and folding the sheets and shirts and whatnot. It was so hot we both wore elastics around our heads to hold our glasses in place.
“One day, Sam was out front, loading up the dryers while I was operating the steam press in the back. I could do that job with my eyes closed. Almost did — had to do it mostly by hand, like a blind person, because the room was so humid my glasses had a steam on them almost an inch thick.
“When that girl walked in, the air changed. All the moisture in the building seemed to be sucked upward and out the ceiling. Maybe she gathered it all into herself, but I know it was in one instant that my glasses cleared and the clouds of vapour pouring out of the sides of the steam press evaporated. Poof!”
I forgot about chopping the poles and focused on the glowing