On the morning of the Stampede parade, Tracy woke me at a quarter to five by sitting on the end of my bed in a white cowboy hat.
“It’s the parade,” she said. “Coulee does a breakfast. Everybody brings their family. We have to get a spot. We have to get the train by six or we’ll be standing behind some guy’s head the whole time. Are you awake? You’re awake. Wear the sandals. No, wear runners. You’ll be on your feet.”
I’d been to the parade twice before, with the Reimers. Gordon liked to stand at the very front with Brett on his shoulders, and then, when Brett got too big, with Brett beside him, and I’d stood behind them both and watched the backs of their hats.
Tracy had bought two folding chairs from Canadian Tire. She carried both of them to the car and both of them from the car to the train at Dalhousie, and wouldn’t let me take one. The train was full of people in hats at five-thirty in the morning, half of them asleep standing up. A man across from us had a baby in a sling, and the baby had a cowboy hat on too, tied under its chin with a ribbon.
Coulee’s breakfast was in the parking lot under their building on Eighth Avenue. There were tables with checked cloths, and a man with a fiddle, and a long grill where men in aprons that said COULEE ENERGY SERVICES were flipping pancakes as big as plates. Tracy got us two plates each.
“Tracy!” A woman in a red bandana came through the crowd with her arms out. “You came! Is this her?”
“This is her,” Tracy said. “This is Paige. This is my daughter.”
She said it the way you’d set down something heavy you’d been carrying a long way.
“Oh, honey,” the woman said, and hugged me with a pancake in her other hand. “We heard. We all heard. How are you feeling?”
“Better,” I said. “Thank you.”
“She’s so polite,” the woman said to Tracy, over my head. “Mine just grunts.”
Tracy introduced me to what felt like her whole floor. Some of them hugged me. A man in a big belt buckle with a Coulee hat on said oil had hit a hundred and forty-five that week and it’d be two hundred by Christmas, mark his words. Everybody around the grill laughed and lifted their coffees. Tracy laughed too, and put her hand on my back.
This is my daughter.
We got a spot on Sixth Avenue at the front, and sat in the folding chairs, and Tracy bought me a straw hat off a man with a cart. The parade went past for two hours. There were marching bands and floats with country singers on them. Mounties went by in red on black horses, then a pipe band in kilts. A chuckwagon rode past on the back of a flatbed with a whole family waving from the seat. Clowns threw candy. A clown threw a candy straight at my head, and I caught it, and the clown pointed at me and honked a horn.
Tracy held my hand when the horses went by. I let her.
* * *
On Sunday morning the phone rang at ten, and Tracy picked it up in the kitchen and said, “Murray. Hi. Yes. She’s right here,” and held it out to me with her hand over the bottom part.
“It’s your dad,” she said. “He calls on Sundays.”
I took the cordless out onto the back step, because that seemed like where you’d go.
“Hey, kiddo.” He had a slow, flat voice, like somebody reading the weather on the radio in a small town. “How you doing? Your mom says you’re doing good.”
“I’m okay.”
“Good. That’s good. I’m real sorry I couldn’t get back up there. The dealership’s crazy right now. Everybody and their dog wants a new combine.” He laughed a little. “How’s the big city?”
“Okay.”
“You got your soccer sorted out for the fall? I looked it up. There’s a club up in the northwest there, girls’ U15, they’ve got a team that went to provincials. I could call the guy.”
I looked at the garage across the lane. Somebody had spray-painted a smiley face on it a long time ago and somebody else had painted over it, not very well.
“I don’t think I’m going to play,” I said.
He let that sit. I could hear a TV behind him, and a dishwasher, and a woman asking somebody named Murray if he wanted the last of the coffee.
“Since you were six, kiddo,” he said.
“I know.”
“Okay.” He breathed out through his nose. “Okay. Your call. You’re the boss.” Then, a little too fast: “Listen. I wanted to tell you something, and I wanted to tell you myself, before your mom does, or your Aunt Trish. Deanna’s going to move in. In August. I know that’s a lot. With everything. You met her at Easter, at the restaurant. You won’t remember.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“She’s nice. She’s real nice. You’ll like her.” He waited. “Anyway. That’s my news.”
“Okay,” I said. “Congratulations.”
There was a long pause on the line, all the way from Lethbridge.
“Thanks, kiddo,” he said. He sounded surprised. “Huh. Thanks. That’s real nice of you to say.”
When I went back in, Tracy was standing at the sink with the water off and a dish in her hand. She’d heard all of it through the screen door.
“Congratulations,” she said, looking at the dish.
“Was that wrong?”
“No.” She put the dish down. “No, honey. It was the nicest thing anybody in this family’s said to him in a year.”
* * *
We ate mini-donuts out of a paper bag while they were still too hot, and burned our fingers, and kept eating them. We walked through the barns and looked at the 4-H cattle, which were bigger than the car. Tracy read every sign out loud in a fake cowboy accent until a girl brushing a steer looked at her, and then she read them in her normal voice.
At the Zipper, she looked up at it going around and turned pale under her hat.
“I’ll hold the bag,” she said. “You go. Are you allowed? Is it okay with your head? Dr. Anand never said anything about the Zipper.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’ll hold the bag too.”
We stood at the bottom and watched it, and held the bag between us, and ate the last of the donuts. I’d always been too scared to go on it, at fourteen, at twelve, at ten, with Brett going on it twice in a row and Gordon saying come on, bud, it’s just a ride. I was still too scared. Now nobody was asking me to go.
“Next year,” Tracy said.
“Next year,” I said.
* * *
On Thursday, after lunch, it happened.
I was home by myself. I knew what it was right away. I’d known about it since Grade 5, when they split us up for the videos and sent the boys to the library with a teacher and a ball. I’d sat in the library with the ball and wanted to be in the other room so badly that my stomach hurt for the whole hour.
Knowing what it was didn’t help with what to do.
I went through the bathroom cupboard. There was shampoo, Tracy’s hair dryer, a box of Band-Aids, cough syrup, nail polish remover, the two toothbrushes. Under the sink there was a toilet brush and a bucket. I went through the hall closet. I stood in the middle of the upstairs hall in a house I’d lived in for two weeks and didn’t know where anything was, and felt about eight.
So I phoned her at work.
“Tracy Dekker, accounts payable.”
“It’s me.”
“Paigey? What’s wrong? Is it your head? Is it your head? Do you have a headache? Did you fall? Are you on the floor?”
“No. I’m okay. It’s not my head.”
I told her. I told her in about four words.
“Oh,” Tracy said. “Oh, honey. Okay. Okay. Okay.” I heard her put her hand over the phone and say something to somebody, and the somebody say something back. “The blue bag. In my closet. On the shelf, on the left, the blue bag. It’s in there. I’m coming home.”
“You don’t have to come home.”
“I’m coming home,” she said. “Don’t move. I mean, move. Go get the blue bag. Then don’t move.”
She was home in forty minutes. She came in the back door with her purse and her lunch bag and a bag from Shoppers Drug Mart with three different boxes in it, because she said she didn’t know what kind I liked anymore. She’d bought chocolate, too, two bars of Caramilk and a bag of Smarties. She’d bought a hot water bottle, and then on the way home she’d remembered she already had a heating pad, so she’d bought that for nothing.
She was out of breath. She’d run from the car.
She sat down beside me on the edge of the tub and looked at me.
“You don’t remember any of this either,” she said. “Do you?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She nodded. She was holding the Shoppers bag in her lap with both hands. “Okay. Then we’ll just do it again. That’s all.”
She showed me everything. She was practical about it, the same way she was about the crossword and the boxes and the train. She told me what was what, and how, and what to do if. She told me where she’d keep everything from now on. She told me what she used to do at my age, at school, with no locker. She told me her mom had told her all of this in the car in a Safeway parking lot in 1978 without once looking at her, and she’d sworn she’d do it better, and look at her now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her work shoes on.
Then she laughed. Then she cried a little, with her hand flat on her chest. Then she laughed at that.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. It’s not sad. It’s just a lot.”
“It’s okay.”
“My baby,” she said, and wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “My big girl. My goodness.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon on the couch. Tracy found the heating pad in a box marked BATHROOM and the cord in a different box marked BATHROOM 2. She plugged it in and put it on me, then put a blanket on top of that, even though it was twenty-eight degrees out. She put on a DVD of Enchanted, which she said was dumb, and which I would love. She was right about both. She ate most of the Smarties. I ate both Caramilks.
At one point the princess in the movie sang to a lot of rats and pigeons until they cleaned her apartment. Tracy laughed so hard she snorted. Then she looked at me, and I was laughing too.
I was sitting on a couch in Royal Oak under a blanket with a heating pad, watching a movie about a princess, with my mom.
I didn’t let myself think the last word of that sentence. I thought around it, carefully, like stepping around a sleeping dog.
* * *
On Friday night she taught me to do my hair.
She’d come home with a pack of elastics from Shoppers and a clip shaped like a claw. She stood behind me at the bathroom mirror and showed me. Bring it all up. Don’t pull from the front. Use your fingers, not the brush. Hold it with this hand. Twist the elastic with that one. The source of this chapter is g.com.
My first ponytail had a bump on top like a hill. My second one fell out. My third one was lopsided but stayed.
“Better,” Tracy said. “That’s better. Look at that.”
I looked at the mirror. I looked at it straight on, at the girl with the lopsided ponytail, and the woman behind her with her hands still up in the air. Then I looked at Tracy’s hair, up the way it always was, twisted at the back with a pencil through it.
“How do you do yours?”
She laughed. She took the pencil out, and her hair came down, and she showed me. Twist it. Fold it up. Pencil through. It took her about four seconds. It took me twenty minutes and three pencils. In the end it held. We stood side by side at the mirror with pencils through our hair, and Tracy said, “Well, we look like a couple of accountants.”
The TV was on in the kitchen while we made Nanaimo bars. Tracy had her mom’s recipe on a card so old the corners were soft. The custard layer went runny and slid off the edge when we cut it, and we ate the broken pieces off the pan with spoons. On the news a woman said oil had hit a record that day, a hundred and forty-seven dollars a barrel, and the man beside her said it would keep going.
Tracy turned it off.
“Oh,” she said. “Did I tell you? The company’s got passes for the grounds tomorrow. Family day. Everybody brings their kids.”
* * *
On Saturday the grounds were twice as full as on Tuesday.
Coulee had a tent by the Big Four Building with a lemonade stand and a face painter, and Tracy talked to the woman in the red bandana for a long time about her ex-husband. I said I’d go look at the midway. Tracy said meet back at the tent at three, and gave me ten dollars and her cellphone number on a napkin, even though I knew it, and watched me go.
I walked up the midway in my sandals and my bird top and my straw hat, with my hair in a ponytail that had held since breakfast. Nobody looked at me. I was a girl at the Stampede with ten dollars and a ponytail, and there were about a thousand of us.
By the Ferris wheel a little girl was crying. Then somebody put a pink stuffed horse nearly as big as she was into her arms, and she stopped crying and held on to it with both arms around its neck. Her dad said, “What do you say? Say thank you to the boy.”
I looked to see the boy.
He was big, broad in the shoulders, in a Stampeders T-shirt, with a buzz cut and a healing pink line over his right eyebrow. He was already walking away from the little girl, back toward the milk bottle game, where the man who ran it was setting up a stack of bottles again and shaking his head.
It was my face.
It was my whole body, walking. It was my walk, except it wasn’t. It didn’t stoop. It didn’t keep its elbows in. It went across the midway like the midway was its idea.
Beside it, talking, waving his hands around, was Manny.
I stood in front of a booth where you throw darts at balloons. A man in the booth said “Three for five, sweetheart,” and I didn’t move.
They went to the Zipper. They got in the line. Manny was talking the whole time, the way he talks, with his whole arms, and the boy with my face was listening with his hands in his pockets. When they got to the front, Manny held his ticket out flat to the guy taking them and said something. I couldn’t hear it. I didn’t have to. I knew the voice from the shape of his face. He was doing the lunch supervisor.
Ticket. TICKET.
The guy with the tickets looked at him like he was nuts.
And the boy with my face laughed.
He laughed at Manny. Not at the voice. He didn’t know the voice. He laughed the way you laugh at your friend’s face when your friend is being an idiot, his head back, his hand on the railing. Manny stopped doing the voice. He looked at him laughing. Then the cage came around. They got in, and the bar came down.
I stood by the dart booth and watched them go up.
That was the kid. The kid who’d been Paige Dekker for fourteen years, who chewed the strings flat and fed the dog at the end and wouldn’t let anybody do their hair. He was in my body. He was on the Zipper with my best friend. He was laughing harder than I’d ever heard my body laugh.
The cage turned over at the top, and over again. Somebody in it was screaming. I could tell it was Manny.
I didn’t wait for them to come down.
I walked the other way, down the midway, past the corn dogs and the pickles on sticks and the big slide, all the way back to the Coulee tent. I sat down at the end of a bench beside the face painter and put my hands between my knees.
Tracy found me there at quarter to three.
“You’re early. What’s wrong?” She crouched down in front of me. “Is it your head? Is it the other thing? Honey, what is it?”
“I’m just tired,” I said.
* * *
We took the train home from the Stampede station. It was full of people with sunburns and stuffed animals and kids asleep on their dads. Tracy got the last two seats together, and I sat by the window.
I put my forehead on the glass. It was cool. The city went by: downtown, and the river, and then the backs of houses and the tops of trees, all the way out to the northwest, one station after another.
If he was in there, he’d want it back. Of course he would. He’d want Tracy, and his dog’s grave, and his soccer medal on the mirror, and his long hair. He’d want to come home. All he’d have to do was find me.
And Manny. Manny was his now, too. Manny would never know.
Tracy put her hand on my knee and left it there. She didn’t ask again. I kept my forehead on the window all the way to Dalhousie, and when the train stopped there was a smudge on the glass where I’d been, and I wiped it off with my sleeve before anybody could see.