The Co-op had the new calendars out by the doors in January, in the same pile, under the same sign with the two exclamation marks. This year’s had a different Co-op on every month again, and a cow on the cover for some reason, wearing a scarf.
I took one. I took it home and turned the pages until I got to June.
It was there. Sunday the fourteenth. A square like any other square. I’d been looking at December’s calendar run out for weeks, at the last page with nothing after it, and now here was the fourteenth of June, real, on paper, five months away.
I didn’t circle it. I didn’t need to. I took down the old one and pinned the new one up inside the closet door. I put an X through the first of January, and the second, and so on, up to that day, and stood back.
Five months.
That was all it was. That was all we had to find out what together meant. And everything we needed was in a sealed file in Edmonton or an office in Ottawa, behind a form with a line at the bottom that said Signature of Adoptive Parent.
* * *
January was cold. It went down to minus thirty on the second week and stayed there for four days. The car wouldn’t start without being plugged in. The snow squeaked like Styrofoam. Our breath froze on the inside of the bus windows, and at the stop on Royal Oak Drive people stood in a clump with their faces in their scarves and didn’t talk.
Cheer went to four practices a week. Provincials were the twenty-first of March, at the Big Four Building on the Stampede grounds, and Ms. Dufresne had a new routine with a pyramid in it that had never been done at Bow Crest.
“Never,” she said, on the first day, with her mug. “Not once. The Bow Crest pyramid has historically been a pile. This year it will be a pyramid. Flyers. Sadie, Paige. You’re the top.”
I was the top. I stood on Cassidy’s and Kendall’s hands at the very peak of it, higher than the basketball hoop, with Sadie beside me on Jocelyn and Tiffany, our hands linked, and looked at the far wall.
“Hold,” said Cassidy, from under my foot. “Hold. Hold. Smile. You’re supposed to be smiling. Smile like you mean it.”
I smiled like I meant it. I did mean it. Up there, nobody could see me shake.
I took the camera Tracy had given me to practice and got Tiffany to take a picture of us at the top. It came out blurry. Tiffany laughed while she was taking it. In it you can see me and Sadie at the top of the pyramid holding hands, and our faces are two smudges, and it’s still my favourite picture of that year.
* * *
Sadie came over on a Saturday in January. It was the first time anybody from school had been to Royal Oak except Nathan.
Tracy was beside herself. She’d made a whole lasagna. She’d cleaned the bathroom. She’d bought new towels.
“For one girl,” I said.
“For your friend,” said Tracy. “Your friend is coming over. I haven’t had one of your friends over since Mackenzie.”
Sadie came in her mom’s car and stood on the back step with her hands in her pockets, the way she did, and said “Hi, Ms. Dekker,” and “Thank you,” and “This is good,” about the lasagna, and nothing else for an hour. Tracy kept looking at me across the table, worried. Then after lunch we went up to my room and Sadie sat on the bed with the heart pillow in her lap and looked around.
“You like birds,” she said, looking at the poster.
“Yeah.”
“My grandpa had a feeder. In Brooks. He used to tell me all the names.” She was looking at the poster, not at me. “That one’s a jay.”
“Steller’s jay,” I said. “It’s not really from here. It’s mountains. Banff.”
Sadie looked at me. She looked at the wizard on the shelf. She looked at the soccer medal beside it.
“You don’t play soccer,” she said.
“Not anymore.”
“You don’t seem like somebody who ever played soccer,” Sadie said.
She didn’t say it mean. She said it the way she said everything, quietly, one true thing at a time. Then she put the heart pillow down and said “Do you want to see something?” She took out her mom’s cellphone, a flip one, and showed me a video of her little brother trying to do the pyramid on their trampoline. He fell off, got up, and fell off again. We watched it nine times. Tracy came up the stairs when she heard us laughing and stood in the hall outside my door, pretending to put away towels.
* * *
Tracy came home quieter in January.
She came home at the same time, six, on the train from downtown and then the car from Dalhousie. She made supper and did the crossword and asked about my day. But she was quieter. She didn’t sing in the kitchen. She watched the news at six-thirty with the sound up and her arms crossed, standing, the way Gordon watched hockey when Calgary was losing.
Oil was under forty. The man in the blue tie said it every night. He said job losses. He said the patch. He said a big company in town had cut two hundred people and another one had cut five hundred. He said there were empty offices downtown, whole floors, with the lights on and nobody in them.
“Is Coulee okay?” I said.
“Coulee’s fine,” said Tracy. “We have the Houston contract.”
She said it every time. She said it the same way every time, in the same words, like a thing you say so you don’t have to think about it.
One night I came down for water at midnight and she was at the computer in the living room in her housecoat, with the light off, scrolling. It was job ads. I could see the website, the logo in the corner. She heard me on the stairs and closed the window fast.
“Just checking my email,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Go to bed, honey.”
I went to bed. I didn’t sleep.
* * *
On the last Friday in January, she came home at two in the afternoon.
I was home. It was a professional development day, no school. I was on the couch with a math worksheet and the TV on, and I heard the Sunfire in the lane. It was too early. It was four hours too early.
She came in the back door with a cardboard box in her arms. On top of the box was the spider plant from her desk at work, the one she’d shown me a picture of on her phone. She stood in the kitchen with the box. She didn’t put it down.
“Hi, honey,” she said. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
I got up. I went into the kitchen.
In the box there was a mug, a calculator, a stapler, her good pen, and a little cactus somebody had given her. There was a photo of me in a frame, from the first day of Grade 9, in the bird top. There was a big envelope with COULEE ENERGY SERVICES on the front and her name.
“They let a third of us go,” Tracy said. “This morning. They called us into the boardroom in two groups. I was in the second group. They did it like a fire drill.” She laughed. It wasn’t a laugh. “The Houston contract got cancelled on Monday. They didn’t tell us till today.”
“Mom,” I said.
“I’m fine.” She put the box down on the counter. She put the spider plant beside it. “I’m fine. It’s fine. They gave us six weeks. Severance. Six weeks. That’s... that takes us to the middle of March. And there’s EI after that. And I’ll find something. I’m good at what I do. I’ll find something. There’s lots of places that need accounts payable.”
She was talking fast. She was saying everything at once, one thing after another, the way she did when she was frightened.
“Did you eat?” she said. “Have you eaten? Do you want lunch?”
“Mom. Sit down.”
She sat down. She sat at the kitchen table, in her coat, with her keys still in her hand, and looked at the spider plant.
I put the kettle on. I’d never put the kettle on for her before. I didn’t know where she kept the tea. Then I did. It was in the cupboard over the toaster, in a tin that said BISCUITS. I made her one with milk and two sugars, the way she had it, and put it in front of her, and sat down across from her.
She held it with both hands. She didn’t drink it.
“I’ll find something,” she said again.
“I know.”
“I will.” She looked at me over the tea. “But I have to tell you. I have to be honest with you. I’m always honest with you.”
I waited.
“The lease is up at the end of May,” Tracy said. “On this place. I signed for a year, when I took the job. And if I don’t have something by then...” She stopped. She started again. “If I can’t find something by then, we can’t stay. We can’t afford it. Not on EI. Not in Calgary. Not with what rent is here.”
“Okay.”
“So if I can’t,” she said, “we go to Aunt Trish’s. In Lethbridge. Into the basement. Just till I find something there.” She put the tea down. “The first of June.”
The first of June.
I sat at the kitchen table and did the math. I didn’t need a calendar. I’d been doing that math every night since September. June first. Thirteen days before the fourteenth. Two and a half hours down Highway 2. A basement in Lethbridge. A different school for the last three weeks of Grade 9. No Sadie, no Tiffany, no Cassidy yelling hold. No Bow Crest. No Nathan.
No Nathan, on the fourteenth.
Wish again, together. In the hospital Tracy had read it upside down and laughed. Go back where? Lethbridge?
“I’m sorry, honey,” Tracy said. “I’m so sorry. You just got settled. You just got friends. You’ve got cheer. You’ve got Nathan.” Her face went. “You were so happy. You’ve been so happy here. I’ve never seen you so happy in your whole life.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
It was the furthest thing from okay that had happened since the door in the stairwell. But she was sitting there in her coat with her keys in her hand and her face going, and she’d just been let go in a boardroom like a fire drill, and she was apologizing to me.
I got up and went around the table. I put my arms around her from behind, over her coat, the way she’d done to me at the computer in November. I put my chin on the top of her head.
“We’ll be okay,” I said.
She put her hand up and held onto my arm.
“You’re the best thing in my whole life,” she said. “You know that? You’re the best thing. Since the minute they put you in my arms in that cold hotel. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”
I held on.
She didn’t know. She’d never know. The baby they’d put in her arms in that hotel in Changsha was in Hawkwood, lifting weights. She was holding on to somebody else. And I was holding on back, as hard as I could. She was my mom. I was all she had. I didn’t know what else to do.
* * *
That night after she’d gone to bed I sat at the computer with the volume off.
It was two minutes to midnight. I’d kept to midnight since November. dekker #7 says:
my mom got laid off today nate says:
what dekker #7 says:
a third of the office. the houston contract got cancelled. six weeks severance nate says:
is she ok dekker #7 says:
nate says:
she does that dekker #7 says:
the lease is up the end of may. if she cant find something by then we move to my aunt’s in lethbridge. june 1
The little line at the bottom said nate is typing.
Then it stopped.
It didn’t start again. His little man was green. He was there. He was reading it. He wasn’t typing anything. I sat in the dark in my blanket and watched the cursor blink in the box. The clock in the corner of the screen turned over to midnight.
A full minute. Then a little more.
Then the line came back. nate is typing. nate says:
june 1 is before june 14 dekker #7 says:
i know nate says:
then we have to know what together means. for sure. before june
I looked at it for a long time. dekker #7 says:
how nate says:
i dont know yet nate says:
but we have to
Upstairs, Tracy was crying. Very quietly, the way she did, into a pillow, so I wouldn’t hear. I could hear it through the ceiling anyway.
I turned off the computer. I went upstairs and stood outside her door.
Then I knocked and went in. I got into bed beside her, the way I’d never once done with anybody in my life. She put her arm over me, and we lay there in the dark.
* * *
We met at the library the next afternoon, at the table by the pillar. We didn’t sign up for a computer. We didn’t need one.
I’d brought the Maple Bridge form. I put it on the table between us and smoothed it flat. The line at the bottom of the second page, Signature of Adoptive Parent, with the X beside it.
“I could sign it,” I said.
Nathan looked at it. He looked at me.
“I’ve seen her sign a hundred things,” I said. “Permission forms. The cheer forms. The cheques for the paper. She does a big T and then a line. I could do it. I practised last night on the back of a flyer.” I took the flyer out of my pocket. It was covered in Tracy Dekker, Tracy Dekker, Tracy Dekker, getting better down the page. “And I could take forty-five dollars out of my babysitting. And mail it Monday. And it would be six to eight weeks, and that’s still before June.”
Nathan picked up the flyer. He looked at the signatures going down the page, the T getting bigger and surer.
Then he folded it in half, and in half again, and put it in his own pocket.
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Not her name.” He said it very quietly. Somebody at the next table was reading a newspaper about the layoffs. “You can do anything else. You can say anything. You can do the vent and the coulees and Rusty’s head. But not her name. Not on a thing she doesn’t know about.” He looked at me. “She’s lost her job. She can’t lose that too.”
“She’d never know.”
“I’d know,” he said. “You’d know.”
I sat there. The form lay on the table between us with its empty line.
“Then what?” I said.
“I don’t know.” He put both his hands flat on the table, on either side of the form. They were my hands. They were big and steady. “Something. We’ll think of something. We’ve got till May.”
“We’ve got till June first.”
“We’ve got till May,” he said. “Then we’ve got till June first.”
I put the form back in my binder. I didn’t sign it. I never signed it.
That night, when I went up the stairs past the dining room full of boxes, I stopped at the bottom of the stack and looked at the one that said KITCHEN. Not kitchen, Tracy had said, in June. I know it’s not kitchen.