Mom phoned Donna on the Tuesday after. She asked if Paige’s friend Nathan could come for supper on Friday. Donna said yes before Mom had finished asking.
“She sounds nice,” Donna said, hanging up. She was trying not to smile. “Tracy. Very chatty.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“She asked if you had any allergies. I said you eat everything now.” Donna looked at me. “You used to be so picky.”
I let that one go. Gordon said “He’s a growing boy,” and took another bun.
* * *
I took the bus. Brett had offered to drive me in the Civic, and then said he’d changed his mind, and then drove me to the bus stop on Hawkwood Boulevard anyway and sat there with the engine running until the bus came. He didn’t talk the whole time. When the bus came he said “Okay,” and I got out.
I knew the stop. I’d got off at it in June, twice, with Mom, the week before the birthday, when the Sunfire was in the shop.
I walked up the crescent from the stop. The For Rent sign was gone out of the flower bed. The garage at the back had a dent in the door low down on the left, about the size of a tennis ball. I’d put it there. Forty times in a row.
I stood on the back step for a second before I knocked. The step was the same. It had a crack in the top one.
Mom opened the door.
She had her hair up with a pencil through it. She had on a sweatshirt that said COULEE FAMILY BBQ 2008 and jeans and a pair of slippers I’d never seen, purple ones, fuzzy. She had to look up a long way at me.
“Nathan! Come in, come in. You’re so tall. I keep forgetting how tall you are. Paige! He’s here. Do you want to take your shoes off? You don’t have to. Come in, it’s cold. Are you hungry? I hope you’re hungry. I made too much.”
She always made too much. She’d made too much my whole life.
“Hi, Ms. Dekker.”
“Tracy,” she said. “I told you. Tracy.”
She took my jacket and hung it on the hook by the door. There were four hooks. On the first one was her coat. On the second was Paige’s jean jacket. On the third was my grey hoodie.
Not mine. The one that used to be mine. The grey one with the zip, the strings chewed flat at the ends. It was hanging by its hood, like it had been there a while and was going to be there a while longer.
Mom hung my jacket on the fourth hook, beside it.
* * *
The house smelled like spaghetti sauce and the fabric softener. It looked about the same as in June. The living room had a rug now. There was a picture on the wall over the couch of a lake with mountains. The dining room was still boxes. They’d gone down a bit, from the edges, but the middle was the same, stacked to about my chin when I was a different height. Now it came to my chest.
Mom saw me look.
“Don’t look at that,” she said. “I’m going to get to it. We eat in the kitchen. We’ve eaten in the kitchen since June. The table’s under there somewhere.”
“I could move them,” I said.
“Oh, no. No, you’re a guest.”
“I don’t mind.”
She looked at me. Then at the boxes. Then at me again.
“Well,” she said. “If you’re sure. Paige, honey, help him. Just put them along the wall. Just anywhere.”
I moved them. It took about fifteen minutes. In June, in the other body, the boxes had come up to my chin, and I’d had to hug each one to my chest and walk it from the truck, and my arms had shaken by the end. Now I could take two at a time and set them down without bending all the way. I put LIVING ROOM and LINENS and BOOKS along the wall under the window, labels out, the way I’d stacked them the first time.
Paige carried the small ones without a word. She knew which ones were heavy, the same as I did. She knew because I’d told her, or because she’d lived here three months, or both.
The KITCHEN box was near the bottom, under BOOKS and a box that said BATHROOM 2. I lifted BATHROOM 2 off it and put it on the wall stack. Then I took hold of the KITCHEN box by the sides.
It was heavier than kitchen. It shifted when I tipped it. Paper, a lot of it.
Paige was watching me from the doorway with a box of bathroom stuff in her arms.
I didn’t open it. It wasn’t my house. I put it down at the end of the wall stack, labels out, and stood up.
Under all of it there was a dining room table. It was oak, with a scratch across one end where I’d done homework on it in Lethbridge with a compass in Grade 5. Mom came in from the kitchen with a dish towel and stood in the doorway and looked at the table.
“Oh,” she said. “Look at that. There it is.”
She put her hand on the scratch.
“We’ll eat in here,” she said. “Paige, get the placemats. They’re in... God knows where they are. Get paper towels. We’ll eat at the table.”
* * *
She set it. She went back and forth from the kitchen with plates. She put down a plate for herself at the end, and one for Paige on the side by the window, and one for me across from Paige. Then she came back with a fourth, and put it at the other end, and got halfway through laying a fork beside it before she stopped.
She stood there with the fork in her hand.
She picked the plate up again and took it back to the kitchen. I heard her put it in the cupboard, quietly, like it might wake somebody.
The other end was Dad’s. It had been Dad’s place at every table we’d had. In Lethbridge, when Dad still lived with us, she’d laid four places for three people for a year after Grandma died, without noticing, and then he’d left, and she’d laid three for two.
Paige was looking at me across the table.
* * *
It was spaghetti. Mom’s spaghetti, with the sausage cut up in it and too much garlic. I hadn’t had it since the twelfth of June. She’d made it the Thursday before the birthday, and I’d had three plates, and she’d said, where are you putting it, you’re a bird.
I had three plates.
“Where are you putting it?” Mom said.
She laughed. She was delighted. She sat at the end of the table with her chin on her hand and watched me eat her spaghetti like she hadn’t watched anybody eat anything in a long time.
She asked me about football. She asked me about Gordon and Donna and what Gordon did, and said heating, that’s good, that’s steady, people always need heat in Calgary. She asked if I liked Bow Crest. She asked if I had any brothers and sisters. I said a brother. She said, “Older or younger?” I said older, and she said, “Is he nice to you?” I thought about the orange, and the fence at camp, and the Civic sitting at the bus stop with the engine running.
“Yeah,” I said. “He is.”
“Good,” said Mom. “That’s good. Paige doesn’t have any. I always wanted to give her a brother or a sister. It just didn’t happen.” She looked at Paige. “She’d have been a good big sister. She was always so good with the little ones at soccer.”
Paige smiled at her plate.
It had been me. I’d been good with the little ones at soccer. I’d helped coach the U8s on Saturdays the summer I was twelve. One of them, a kid called Tate, cried every time he missed the ball. I taught him to kick with the inside of his foot. He scored at the end of the season and ran all the way across the field to hug my legs.
Mom remembered that. She’d been on the sidelines in her lawn chair.
“Does she ever talk about Lethbridge?” Mom said to me. “To you?”
Paige stopped eating.
I put my fork down. Mom was looking at me with her chin on her hand, waiting, the way she waited when I was small and she’d asked me something that mattered and was pretending it didn’t.
“All the time,” I said.
Mom’s face did something.
“She talks about the coulees,” I said. “How you can stand on the top of them when the wind comes up out of the river, and lean on it. She says the wind holds you up.” Paige was looking at me. I kept going. “She talks about the pool. The big slide. And the dog. Rusty. She says he used to put his whole head in her lap when she was sad. Like he knew.”
Mom put her hand over her mouth.
“She told you that?” she said through it. “About Rusty?”
“Yeah.”
“She doesn’t remember,” Mom said. “The doctor said. She remembers the vent, the heat vent, she told me that, but she doesn’t remember.” She looked at Paige. “Honey. You remember Rusty?”
“Some,” Paige said. “Bits.”
Mom got up. She went to the kitchen. She stood with her back to us at the counter for a minute, with the water running, not washing anything.
Paige looked at me across the table. She didn’t look angry. She looked like I’d taken something heavy off her and put it on myself.
It was mine to put. That was the thing. It was all true. I’d said it about her, but it was me. I’d said what I missed. And Mom stood at the sink with the water running because her kid missed her dog, and her kid was sitting at her table eating three plates of her spaghetti, and she’d never know it.
That cost me something. I don’t know what. I sat there and let it.
When she came back she had the garlic bread and she was smiling.
“More?” she said.
* * *
After supper Paige took me upstairs to show me her room.
It was my room. It had the window over the lane and the bed, and the bed frame with the bare corner and no rubber cap. I looked at the corner.
It wasn’t my room. The purple duvet was the same, but there was a pillow on it shaped like a heart that I’d never have let in the house, and a stuffed owl. The soccer cleats were gone from the corner. The pink dress was gone off the chair. There was a desk, built, with a purple binder on it, and a lamp, and a calendar with a Co-op store on it pinned inside the open closet door with Xs on it. There were clothes on the floor. Tops, jeans, a cheer bow. There was a poster on the wall of a bird, a big blue one on a branch, with BIRDS OF ALBERTA across the bottom.
Paige shut the door and leaned on it.
“You didn’t have to do the coulees,” she said.
“She asked.”
“Now she’ll ask me about the coulees. Tomorrow. At breakfast. She’ll say tell me about the wind, and I’ve never been.”
“So I’ll tell you.”
“That’s not the point.” She had her arms crossed. “Every time we do it, it’s one more. The vent. Now the coulees. Now Rusty’s head in my lap. She’s going to think it’s all coming back. She’s going to think I’m getting better.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I knew what it was like to be somebody getting better.
“She was happy,” I said. “Just now. At the sink.”
“I know she was.”
“So.”
“So nothing.” Paige uncrossed her arms and sat on the bed with the heart pillow. “So it’s one more. That’s all I’m saying. Somebody has to remember which ones we said.”
Downstairs Mom was singing along to the radio, the wrong words.
On the shelf over the desk was my soccer medal. Beside it was the wizard, facing the window.
“You kept the medal,” I said. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“It’s yours,” she said. “I didn’t want to throw it out.”
“It’s not mine. It’s the kid’s who won it.”
“That’s you.”
“It’s not me,” I said. “It’s whoever I was in it.” I picked it up off the shelf. LETHBRIDGE YOUTH SOCCER, U14 GIRLS, 2ND PLACE. “Keep it. Your mom’ll notice if it’s gone.”
“She’s your mom.”
“I know,” I said, and put it back.
* * *
Mom put the TV on in the kitchen while she did the dishes. She always did. Paige and I sat at the counter and dried.
It was the news. It had been the news all week. A man in a suit stood in front of a screen full of red numbers going down, the Dow and the TSX both. He said the word contagion, twice. He said the markets were in free fall. He said it was the worst week in seventy-five years. Behind him there was a picture of a trader in New York with his hands on his head.
On the fridge, under the cow magnet with the 911 paper, there was a photo. It was me at twelve, at Henderson Lake, in the grey hoodie with the hood up, squinting at whoever was holding the camera like they owed me money.
Mom saw me looking at it.
“That’s her,” she said. “Two summers ago. Look at that face. She hated that picture. She’d kill me if she knew it was up.” She laughed and pointed at Paige with a wet fork. “Look at her now. You’d never know it was the same kid.”
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t.”
Paige dried a glass for a long time.
Mom stood at the sink with a plate in her hand, not washing it.
“Is that bad for you?” I said. “For your work?”
“Oh, it’s New York,” she said. “We’re oil. Oil’s different.” She put the plate in the rack. “We’ve got the big contract with Houston through the spring. It’s fine.”
She said it fine. She said it like she’d been saying it to herself in the car.
Then she turned the TV off. She did it with the back of her wet wrist, without looking, and the screen went black, and the kitchen was quiet except for the fridge.
“Who wants a Nanaimo bar?” she said.
* * *
When I was putting my jacket on at the door, she came out from the kitchen with a black garbage bag, tied at the top.
“I almost forgot,” she said. “These are for you. If you want them. If you don’t, just give them to Goodwill, I won’t be offended.” She held it out to me. “They’re Paige’s old hoodies. She doesn’t wear them anymore. She got all new things.” She smiled at Paige. “And they were always way too big on her, she wore everything huge. I thought, you’re a big guy. They might fit you.”
I took the bag. It was soft and light. I knew what was in it without looking. Grey, navy, black, green, grey.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I kept one,” Mom said, and nodded at the hook. “Just the one. I don’t know why. I like seeing it there.”
Paige was looking at the floor.
“It’s a good one,” I said.
“It was her favourite,” said Mom. “She wore it every day for two years. I had to wash it while she was asleep.”
* * *
Paige walked me to the bus stop. It was cold. It was the end of the crescent and down the hill to Royal Oak Drive, past the dark garages along the lane.
I carried the garbage bag over my shoulder.
We stood at the stop under the light. There wasn’t anybody else there. A car went by with its music up, then nothing.
“Thanks,” Paige said. “For the stuff. At supper. The coulees.”
“It was true.”
“I know.”
The bus was coming. I could see it at the bottom of the hill with its sign lit up.
“She looked tired,” I said.
I hadn’t meant to say anything. It came out. Paige looked at me.
“She is,” she said. “She’s tired all the time now. She stays up. I hear her on the computer at night, looking at the news.”
The bus pulled up. The doors went open with a noise like a sigh.
“Okay,” I said. I got on. I paid. I sat at the back with the garbage bag on the seat beside me, and through the back window Paige was still at the stop under the light with her arms crossed against the cold, watching the bus go, the same way Mom used to watch me get on the school bus in Lethbridge every morning until I was ten, when I asked her to stop.
I untied the bag on my knees on the way down Crowchild. I took out the grey one, the second grey one, the one that wasn’t on the hook. I put it on over my T-shirt.
It fit. It was tight across the shoulders. It fit.