Donna phoned Tracy on a Wednesday. I heard Tracy’s half of it from the kitchen while I was doing math at the counter.
“Oh, hi. Yes, this is Tracy. Oh! Nathan’s mom. Hi. Yes. She talks about him all the time. Well. Not all the time.” She looked at me over the phone and made a face. “Sunday? For supper? Oh, that’s so nice of you. No, she doesn’t have any allergies. She eats everything. Well, she eats everything now. It’s a long story.”
She hung up and stood there with both hands on the counter.
“You’ve been invited for supper,” she said. “By his mother.”
“Okay.”
“On Sunday. At five. She sounded very nice. She sounded very organized.” Tracy put the kettle on and took it off again. “Do you want to go? You don’t have to go. You should go. Bring something. You can’t go to somebody’s house for supper the first time and not bring something. We’ll make the Nanaimo bars.”
“Okay.”
“Do you like him?” she said.
“Mom,” I said.
It came out by itself. I heard it. She heard it. She stopped with her hand on the kettle and looked at me, and I looked at my math, and neither of us said anything about it.
“Okay,” Tracy said, very lightly. “Okay. Nanaimo bars.”
* * *
She drove me there on Sunday with the Nanaimo bars on my knees in a plastic container with a lid that didn’t quite shut.
I knew the way. I’d have known it with my eyes closed. Down Nose Hill Drive, left at the lights by the Petro-Canada, past the playground with the red slide and the house with the boat in the driveway that had never once moved. The cul-de-sac. The fourth house on the left, beige, with the basketball hoop with no net.
Gordon’s truck was in the driveway. The ladder rack. The Stampeders sticker in the back window.
“Is this it?” said Tracy, slowing down, reading the numbers. “Is it this one?”
“I think so.”
“Very nice,” Tracy said. “Very big.” She pulled in behind the truck. “Six-thirty? Call me if it’s earlier. Call me if it’s terrible. Do you have quarters for the phone?”
“They have a phone, Mom.”
That was twice. She didn’t say anything this time either. She just put her hand on the back of my head for a second, the way she did, and then let me go.
I walked up the driveway past Gordon’s truck. I could have put my hand on the tailgate without looking. I didn’t.
The front door was the same. The brass knocker nobody used. The doorbell that went bing and then forgot the bong. I rang it. It went bing.
Donna opened it.
She was in her good cardigan, the cream one with the pearl buttons, and her apron over it, and her hair was done. She’d done her hair for me. She smiled at me with her whole face, the polite smile, the one for people from church.
“You must be Paige,” she said. “Come in. Come in. Oh, you brought something. You didn’t have to bring anything.”
“They’re Nanaimo bars.”
“Oh, my favourite,” Donna said, and they were.
I stood on the mat. I took my shoes off and put them on the mat side by side, and then saw what I’d done and moved one a little out of line. The house smelled the way it smelled on Sundays, of roast beef and the lemon stuff Donna used on the hall table. Under that was something that was just the house, the smell I’d never been able to smell in fourteen years of living in it.
Now I could smell it. It smelled like somebody else’s house. It smelled like home.
“Nathan!” Donna called up the stairs. “Paige is here.”
* * *
He came down the stairs two at a time, the fourth one loud. He was in a clean T-shirt with the fold lines still in it. Somebody had told him to change.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“You want the tour?” Donna said, behind me. “Nathan, give her the tour. Supper’s in twenty minutes. Brett! Supper’s in twenty minutes!”
From somewhere in the basement Brett said “Yep.”
Nathan gave me the tour. He did it very seriously, standing in each doorway pointing, like a real estate agent. “Living room. That’s the couch. That’s the TV. That’s Gordon’s chair, you can’t sit in it. Kitchen.”
“I know,” I said, very quietly.
“I know you know,” he said, very quietly back. “She’s listening.”
She was. She was in the kitchen with the oven door open, basting the roast and listening.
He took me upstairs. The trophy shelf on the landing had a new trophy on it. It was small, with a gold football player on top, and the plate said BOW CREST BEARS, JR. FOOTBALL, PLAYER OF THE GAME, OCT. 2008. It stood at the front of the shelf. The plastic medal that said PARTICIPANT was gone.
“Where’s the...” I said.
“In my room,” he said. “I didn’t want Gordon to throw it out.”
He opened the door at the end of the hall.
The posters were down. The quarterback in the frame was gone, and the Flames poster, and the Stampeders schedule from the back of the door. There were tape marks on the wall where they’d been. The bedspread with the footballs on it was still there, but folded at the end of the bed, and there was a plain blue blanket on top. On the desk there was a football, a real one, scuffed, with BEARS written on it in marker, and a soccer ball under the desk. Beside the lamp, where the wizard had been, there was a plastic medal on a ribbon.
PARTICIPANT. NATHAN R.
I stood in the doorway. It was my room, and it wasn’t. It was the same window, the same desk with the chip out of the front corner. It was the same ceiling I’d looked at every night for fourteen years. And somebody had lived in it. Somebody had picked things.
“It’s nice,” I said.
“It’s okay.”
“Gordon asked why.” He shrugged. “I said I wanted it plainer. He said fair enough.” He looked at the tape marks. “I don’t know who the quarterback is.”
“He was the Stampeders quarterback,” I said. “He signed it at Market Mall. Gordon stood in line for two hours.”
“Okay,” said Nathan. He went over and put his hand flat on the wall where the frame had been. “I’ll put it back up.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I’ll put it back up,” he said.
* * *
“Supper!”
The dining room table had the extra leaf in. That meant company. Donna had put out the good placemats, the ones with the geese on them, and the cloth napkins in rings, and the gravy boat shaped like a gravy boat. Gordon was already at the head of the table in his golf shirt, sharpening the carving knife on the steel with long strokes, shing, shing, the way he did every Sunday.
“Well, hello,” he said, standing up. “You must be the famous Paige.”
He shook my hand. His hand was big and warm and dry. He squeezed too hard, the way he squeezed everybody’s. I’d forgotten that, and I hadn’t.
“Hi, Mr. Reimer.”
“Gordon,” he said. “Mr. Reimer’s my dad. Sit, sit. Anywhere.”
I stood by the table and didn’t sit. The chair on the near side, by the window, wobbled. It had wobbled since I was eight. Brett had tipped back in it, and Gordon told him to cut it out, and he didn’t. The back leg cracked. Gordon glued it, and it was never right again. Nobody ever sat in it unless there were seven people.
I didn’t know which chair was supposed to be mine. Not my old one. I couldn’t sit in my old one.
“Take this one,” Donna said, pulling out the one by the window. “Nathan, you sit across from her.”
I sat in the wobbly chair. It wobbled. I put my weight forward and it stopped.
Brett came up from the basement. He was in sweatpants and a Crowchild hoodie with his hair wet from the shower, and he sat down at his place without looking at anybody and reached for the potatoes.
“Brett,” said Donna. “We have a guest.”
He looked up. He looked at me across the table for the first time. He had a long face that didn’t give anything away.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Paige,” Donna said, “this is Brett. Nathan’s brother. Brett, this is Paige.”
“I figured,” said Brett, and took the potatoes.
* * *
It was roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots with brown sugar on them, and the green beans with the almonds. It was every Sunday I’d ever had in that house, all of it, the same, down to the Yorkshire puddings that Donna always said hadn’t risen right and always had.
“Can you pass the...” I said, and stopped. I’d been going to say the horseradish. I’d been going to ask for it the way I always did, before Gordon could take it. He always took it first and left the bottom.
“The what, sweetheart?” Donna said.
“The salt. Sorry.”
Gordon did most of the talking. He talked about a furnace job in Edgemont and a guy who’d tried to install his own heat recovery ventilator off a YouTube video, and about the price of copper, and about how it was supposed to go down to minus five on Wednesday, the first real cold, good for business. He talked about Nathan. Player of the game. He said it twice.
“So, Paige,” he said, carving more beef, “what does your dad do?”
“He sells combines. In Lethbridge.”
“Combines! Good business. Farmers always need combines.” He pointed the carving fork at me. “Who’s he with? Case? John Deere?”
“Case,” I said. Nathan had told me.
“Good outfit,” Gordon said, satisfied. “Good outfit.”
Donna asked me how I liked Bow Crest. She asked if I liked cheer, and if the girls were nice, and what my mom did. She asked if we were settled in, and whether I’d been to the library at Crowfoot. She asked them one at a time and listened to every answer and nodded at it. She was so nice. She was nicer to me than she’d ever been to me. She was nice to me the way she was nice to the dental hygienists at work, to company, to somebody else’s girl.
I’d wanted her to look at me like that my whole life. Now she did, and it was because she didn’t know who I was.
I ate my roast beef. It was the best roast beef I’d ever had. I’d had it every Sunday for fourteen years.
Across from me, Nathan was eating like it was his job, the way he did now, quickly and a lot. He didn’t look at me much. When Donna asked me about cheer, he said “She’s good,” without looking up from his potatoes, and Donna and Gordon looked at each other, and Gordon smiled into his gravy.
Brett was watching me.
He’d been watching me since he sat down. Not the way the girls at school watched, to see what I was wearing. He was watching me the way he’d watched Nathan in the hospital doorway in June, and on the dock at the lake, the way Nathan had told me about. He was watching my hands.
* * *
I needed the washroom after the Yorkshire puddings.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Can I use your washroom?”
“Of course, sweetheart,” Donna said. “It’s just...”
I was already going. Out of the dining room, left at the hall, past the coat closet, second door on the right, the one with the brass handle that stuck so you had to lift it. I lifted it.
I stood in the little powder room with the guest towels that nobody was allowed to use, and the soap shaped like a shell that nobody was allowed to use, and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. I’d never once looked in that mirror. It was the right height for me now. It had always been too low.
When I came back, Brett was in the hall.
“You’ve been here before,” he said.
“No.”
“You went straight to the bathroom.”
“Nathan told me where it was.”
“Mom was still saying it’s just,” Brett said. “You were gone before she got to down the hall.” He looked at me. “You lifted the handle.”
“He told me about the handle.”
“Sure,” said Brett.
He didn’t move. He looked at me until I looked away. Then he unfolded his arms and went back into the dining room. He sat down and took the last Yorkshire pudding. When Donna said Brett, our guest, he said “She’s had two.” That was true.
* * *
There was apple crisp, and then my Nanaimo bars, and Donna had two of them and said they were better than hers, which they weren’t. Gordon had three. He said the custard was runny and that was how he liked it.
After the dishes, Donna brought out the albums.
“Oh, Mom,” said Nathan. “Don’t.”
“She’ll want to see,” Donna said. “Everybody wants to see.” She sat down on the couch beside me with the first one across both our knees, exactly the way Tracy had in June. “This is Nathan the day we got him. Changsha. February. It was so cold in that hotel, Gordon slept in his parka.”
It was a baby in a red quilted jacket on a hotel bedspread, with Gordon’s big hand flat beside it for size.
I’d seen it every Christmas of my life. It had been on the fridge until I was five.
“He was so little,” Donna said. She touched the corner of the photo with one finger. “They said he was eight months, and he was the size of a four-month-old. He had a cold. He wouldn’t stop looking at me. Just looking. He didn’t cry the whole way home on the plane, not once, and the lady across the aisle said he was the best baby she’d ever seen.”
“He didn’t cry?” I said.
“Not once.” Donna smiled at the picture. “He was a very quiet boy.”
Across the room, Nathan was standing by the TV with his hands in his pockets, not looking at either of us.
Donna turned the page. Me at one, at two, at three, on Gordon’s shoulders at the parade with a cowboy hat over my eyes. Me in a Timbits hockey jersey, crying. Me at the lake in a life jacket, on the dock, looking down at the water.
“Does he remember any of it?” I said. I didn’t know I was going to.
Donna’s finger stopped on the dock picture.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.” Then, a little too brightly: “But the doctor says it could come back any time. Any time at all.”
She closed the album. She held it on her knees with both hands flat on the cover, the way she always held things.
At twenty past six Tracy’s car pulled up behind the truck. I saw the headlights through the front window.
Donna walked me to the door. She got my coat off the hook for me before I could reach it. She held it out, open, the way you hold a coat for a little kid, and I put my arms in, and she pulled it up onto my shoulders and smoothed the collar flat.
“It was so nice to meet you, Paige,” she said. “You come back any time. You hear? Any time.”
“Thank you for having me.”
She hugged me.
It was a quick one, a polite one, a hug for somebody’s daughter on the doorstep. Her arms went around me and her chin bumped my head. I could smell the lemon stuff on her sweater, and roast beef, and her hand cream, the same one she’d had since I was born.
I held on.
I didn’t mean to. My arms just went around her and stayed for one second, then two, longer than you hold on to your friend’s mom.
Donna went still.
“Oh,” she said, into my hair. “Okay.”
And she hugged me back. Properly. Both arms, hard, her hand flat on the middle of my back, the way she used to when I was little and I’d had a bad dream and come down the hall in the dark. She held on as long as I did.
Then she let go and stepped back and looked at me with her face doing something, and smoothed her own cardigan down the front with both hands.
“Well,” she said. “Drive safe. Tell your mom thank you for the squares.”
* * *
Nathan walked me down the driveway to the car. It was cold. The first real cold. He had his hands in his pockets.
“She hugged you,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“She doesn’t hug me.” He kicked a bit of gravel off the driveway onto the lawn. “Like, she hugs me. At night. At the door. But not like that.”
We’d got to the bottom of the driveway. Tracy was waving through the windshield.
“She’s scared to,” I said.
He looked at me.
“She was always scared to,” I said. “With me. Not that she didn’t want to. She thought if she hugged me too much I’d go soft. Gordon said. When I was six. I heard him.” The cold was getting into my eyes. “So she stopped. Mostly. She’d do it at night when he wasn’t looking.”
Nathan was quiet. He looked back up the driveway at the house, at the light in the front window, where Donna was standing behind the curtain pretending not to watch.
“Okay,” he said.
I got in the car. Tracy said “Well?” before I’d got the door shut. I said it was nice. She said “Was his mom nice? Was the food good? Was the brother there? What’s the brother like?” all the way down the cul-de-sac.
When we turned out of the cul-de-sac, Nathan was still standing at the bottom of the driveway with his hands in his pockets. The light was still on in the front window behind him.