Robert S Dawson was raised in Badin, North Carolina. He received an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is currently an adjunct English professor at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College. His first book, The Plains of Moab: A Novel in Stories, of which this story is a part, is due out later this year. His stories have appeared in The MOON Magazine, Cowboy Jamboree, Page and Spine, The Missing Slate, and Junto Magazine.

​She was a nice girl, Josh thought, how could anyone so cute not be a nice girl? So he’d gone to her apartment after class to smoke some pot and, sitting on the floor of Carmen’s room and smoking a bowl, she started telling Josh about all the clothes she had.
    Balancing the bowl, a blue piece with a green swirl, in her left hand, she leaned over and lifted the bed skirt to reveal her winter outfits, vacuum-sealed and packed into long, rectangular totes stacked two tall from the base of the headboard to the base of the footboard. She was wearing khaki shorts that stopped just above her knees and a green tee shirt that couldn’t hide her shapely figure, but didn’t flaunt it either. When she reached her arm out, the shirt lifted just enough to reveal her porcelain stomach. He wanted to touch it, kiss it. But she was very conservative compared to the other girls in college, giving Josh the notion that she was a modest girl. He had his eye out for a girl like that, a girl he could be with. He was tired of being alone, but he didn’t want to just settle; he wanted an honest girl, a good girl. And he was tired of just having sex with girls, there had to be more to it than that.
    Did he want to see all the new clothes she’d gotten, she asked with a smile, so excited that her hands chattered together like one of those mechanical wind-up monkeys with cymbals. She was on her way to get the clothes before he ever had a chance to answer.
    “Sure,” he said, already regretting it.
    One at a time, she pulled out four deep, paper bags bearing different logos from popular clothing stores, filled to their brims with clothes. Jeans, sweaters, tee shirts, panties, bras, all folded neatly and packed so that the maximum amount of clothing fit in each bag. On her knees in front of him, so that she was above him some as he sat Indian style smoking, she began unfolding each item. She held it up in the light, flipped it around so he could see the back, talking all the while about the clothes and other things that all blurred together. Josh sat smiling, looking at each object and saying, “Oh cool. Oh cool. Cool. Sexy...” but never really understanding or caring or knowing for sure what to say.
    “How could you afford all this stuff?” he asked, about half way through the second bag, having to break the monotony. Who knew there were so many kinds of panties?
    She smiled guiltily at the question.
    “You stole it?” he asked. He had suspected from the amount of stuff and the way it was packed, but he had hoped that her parents had bought the stuff for her or something.
    Glee carved the smile deeper into her face.
    “What else have you stolen?”
    Her eyes moved around the room. Josh looked around at the three big bookshelves she had. Every shelf had books, pictures, knick-knacks, or Rapunzel dolls on it. There was a flat screen television on the short shelf.
    “All of it?” he asked, unbelieving.
    “No, not all of it. Just some of it. My parents bought the TV and a lot of the books. And those up there,” she pointed to the top of the bookshelf and desk combination where some very old books sat collecting dust. “My pappy gave me those.”
    For a moment he was quiet, contemplating this mysterious girl he’d met at school. Her kinky brown hair seemed to burn red against the light of the lamp behind her, like embers hiding on a charred log, waiting to blaze up. “Have you read all these books?”
    “No,” she said.
    “Then why do you steal them?”
    “Because I want them.”
    “What about all those clothes. Are you really going to wear all of them?”
    “Probably not all of them. But I need those panties.”
    “But you didn’t need to steal all that shit. You could have gotten caught.”
    She wrinkled her nose. “No one’s going to catch me. I know how that place works. It’s so easy it’s impossible not to steal.”
    “Well, I don’t like it.” She had sat back down and started breaking another bud up in the grinder as he spoke, twisting the metal apparatus back and forth in her hand. “You shouldn’t steal.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because it’s one of the Ten Commandments.”
    “God’s not real,” she replied.
    “Well,” he said, after a long moment, not really knowing how to respond to that, “there are laws against stealing that are real. Very real.”
    “There are laws against smoking pot, too,” she said. “Yet here you are, smoking pot in my apartment.”
    Another even longer moment. “Well,” he finally said, sure of his answer, “I don’t like it when people steal from me, so I, therefore, make the statement that stealing is bad.”
    She laughed. “But I’m not stealing from a person, I’m stealing from a corporation.”
    “But that corporation is owned by a person,” he said, without hesitation.
    “It’s a corporation,” she said, as if it were a monster from another planet about to swallow the world whole. “It’s owned by many people. They make cheap ass shit and sell if for a fortune.” She held up one of the sweaters. “Do you know how much this cost to make? Like, seventy-five cents. Some poor woman in China works to the bone to make it for pennies. And they charge a hundred and twenty dollars! Who’s the real thief, huh?”
#
    She worked for one of the retail stores in the mall, which is why she knew so much about security in all the different stores. In particular, she liked her own store because she could pack up bags full to the brim with whatever she wanted, place the bag in a fitting room, then assign that fitting room to whatever friend she’d gotten to come in and “pick-up” that day. All the workers and security see them as just another customer with various bags that they’d already purchased in other stores throughout the mall. Typically, payment was a bag of their own, into which they would pack whatever they’d picked out and brought in to the dressing room to “try on.” She explained it all to him on her lunch break as they sat in her car and smoked a bowl. “I don’t know about this, Carmen.”
    “There’s really nothing to worry about. The trick is to use bags from a different store so they think you just have things you already paid for somewhere else.”
    “I don’t believe in stealing.”
    “I told you, they’re the bigger thief.”
    “I still don’t feel right about it.”
    She leaned over and kissed him. When she leaned back she had a hunger in her eyes that he thought was for him. “You do this and I promise it’ll be worth your while.”
    He wanted to pull her in for another kiss but she pulled back. “No. Nothing else till after.”
    “Okay,” he capitulated.
    After she went in from break, he was to wait ten minutes then wander into the store as if he were just a normal customer. He wanted to smoke but she wouldn’t kiss him if he smelled like cigarettes, and most certainly wouldn’t have sex with him if he did, so he went in the mall and got a pretzel and Coke. Junk food was the only thing that seemed to curb the craving, but then he wanted a smoke after he ate, so he ate more and thought about the fact that, if he got through this, he would be getting laid. It had been months since he’d last had sex, but it made him feel better about Carmen that she wouldn’t. She may be a thief, but she wasn’t a slut at least. He didn’t keep track of the time, just ate at his own pace then wandered over and began gazing around at the clothes. Most of the clothes were overpriced and looked as if they would fall apart after one hard day’s work. As he stood there looking at the clothes, trying not to look around for Carmen, someone stepped up next to him. His heart pounded with fear that it was a manager or security already on to him.
    “Hi,” came the sweet, bass-less sound of Carmen’s voice. “Don’t act like you know me,” she whispered. Then in a louder voice, “How are you today, sir? Finding everything you need?”
    She didn’t allow him time to answer.
    “Only take clothes from the tables and racks in the back.” In a louder voice she said, “Over here, sir.” As they walked she whispered, “You have to pick out something,” as she looked around to make sure no one saw them talking. “You have to be trying something on to get a fitting room. These clothes back here don’t have security tags on them. I’ll signal you when I’m ready. Hurry up.” She spoke quickly and didn’t wait for a response. In a louder voice, “Well you have a good day, sir. Let me know if I can help you find anything else,” and she moved on about her way as if he were just another customer asking stupid questions.
    The racks of clothes she had led him to had a sign above them that read CLEARANCE and the tables had little signs on stands that were marked SALE. He found some tee shirts and some jeans on the table and then paced the racks, waiting for the signal. When it came it wasn’t what he thought it would be. He expected some secret sound or hand gesture, like they do in espionage movies, but she simply motioned with one move of her head, like they were friends in a normal every day situation. It was so simple, yet it sent a chilling shiver down his spine.
    “Hello,” he said, walking up with the four items folded over his arm.
    “Hello,” she said, smiling. “Need a fitting room, sir? Follow me. How many items do you have?” Then she whispered, “Four things? That’s it?”
    He shrugged. She smiled and shook her head at his floundering morality.
    They went down the narrow passage of doors for what seemed like forever before they came to the dressing room. Most of the time he watched her ass when he walked behind her but, in that hellish hallway, he felt like someone was going to jump out and catch them at any moment. He couldn’t focus on anything, just gazed around at the closed doors waiting for security to pop out of one. They stopped at a door that she opened for him. In the door was a mirror, distorted to make customers look thinner, and he frowned at the image of himself, still pudgy despite the illusion. Two bags sat on the bench below the beguiling mirror.
    “Okay,” she said, snickering. “Make sure it all fits first.” The door clicked closed.
    Shut up inside, he began to feel as though this were a trap and the walls were closing in around him. A stifling box he couldn’t escape from. Failing miserably to avoid looking into the mirror at his slimmer image, he could still see the chubbiness sticking out at his waistline, and the distortion did nothing to improve the chaos of brown curls on his head.
    He tried on the clothes, trying not to go quickly. She had told him to relax and be calm, “Just do everything like normal.” But how does one who never really feels normal act normal? He breathed and just tried to take a long time doing what he was doing, because that’s typically what normal people seemed to do. If he were acting as he normally did, he’d have already been out the door, but he wasn’t supposed to be normal Josh, he was supposed to be a normal person. So he took his time, which still wasn’t very long. Then he packed what little he had in the half full bag, trying to be soundless --
    --knock, knock, knock--
    Holy shit, he thought, what the fuck do I do now?
    “You ready?” a whisper asked. It was her.
    “Yeah,” he whispered back.
    “Okay, come out in like fifteen seconds.”
    He took a deep breath and started to count in his head. Fifteen seconds seemed like an eternity. At eight he started rushing through the count and didn’t even make it to fifteen before he was out the door, taking deep breathes like a man who’d been under water a long time, and headed down the hall of doors. Remember to breathe, he told himself. Carmen’s head was down but she looked up just as he approached and her eyes caught on him as if he were the most desirable thing she’d ever seen and, for all his doubts, that gave him some courage.
    Walking across the sales floor was the most terrifying and exciting thing he’d ever done since he lost his virginity, something comparable to riding a roller coaster, but he was moving on his own two feet. A manager with a headset on walked right at him, even made contact with her piercing eyes. “Find everything you’re looking for?” she asked with what looked like an accusatory smile, her eyes darting down to the bags then back up at his eyes.
    “Fine, thank you,” he said, trying to walk on steadily. Doing his damnedest to look normal. His mind raced. Was any of what Carmen told me really true? Were the managers really not allowed to chase you? My clothes had no security tags on them, but did any of the clothes she packed? Was she really in love with me? The manager kept looking at him confused. What had he said? “Yes, I did,” he blurted. Turning away, he sped up his walk, feeling like she was walking right behind him, so close he could feel her exhale against his neck.
    It wasn’t until he had made it to section nine of the mall that he dared look back. There were people everywhere, but he didn’t see the manager anywhere. Two security guards stood on Segways, talking and laughing, next to the Cinnabon. They paid no attention as he passed by to the exit doors.
    When he got to the car his heart was pounding with excitement, fingers tingling, and legs wobbling like jelly. It felt like he was about to collapse right there in the parking lot.
    Even though he didn’t want her stealing, there was still a level of excitement that came with being part of the act. They were both still buzzing from it when they got back to the apartment and it only increased when he kissed her in the doorway to her bedroom. They wrestled, tearing off each other’s clothes. The stolen items spilled out on the floor, already forgotten.
#
    She was smooth. One hand worked as usual, holding things and inspecting things and basically drawing the attention of anyone watching, while the other hand went to work sliding things into her canvas bag. They had split up because he wanted to look through the discounted Blu-ray’s, but he caught a glimpse or two of her moving about on the next aisle.
    “I want you to quit stealing,” he said, as they met up again at the end of the aisle and headed for the door.
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s wrong. You could get caught or in trouble,” he said. “And stealing is the same as lying and I can’t be with a liar. I mean, would you lie to me?”
    “No. I could never do that,” she said, her eyes round and trembling. “And I would never steal from you either. But it’s not the same thing. You can lie about stealing, but stealing isn’t lying, it’s just borrowing without asking, and when you’re asked and you don’t give it back, then it’s stealing. But, I could never lie or steal from you.”
    “Oh no? What about that pot you stole from me when we first started hanging out?”
    “That was different. It was just pot. It’s not like I don’t smoke with you.”
    “True, but I smoke with you. I’ve never taken any from you and smoked it with someone else.”
    “Okay. I’m sorry I stole that pot from you. It was just like a gram though.”
    “It was all I had.”
    “Well, I’m sorry.”
    “It’s okay.” He was sure that she wasn’t lying. She loved him and that meant she couldn’t do to him what she did to other people. He decided to finally use the one thing he had to use against her, even though he really didn’t want to. “What if I quit smoking cigarettes if you quit stealing?”
    “Okay,” she agreed, almost without any hesitation, like she knew he was going to ask that. Her eyes lit up and she started getting excited, like when she first started showing him all the clothes she’d stolen. “But I’m not putting any of this stuff back.”
    “Okay. And I’m going to finish this pack of cigarettes.”
    She smiled and took his arm as they walked out of the store with the stolen goods.
    He had it all figured out. This was it. This is what people were supposed to do. Find someone you could compromise with and who had similar beliefs as you, then you were set.
    Later that night, he kissed her and started to take her clothes off when she stopped him. “Tie me up,” she said.
    “Tie you up?”
    “Yeah. I like it rough and kinky. You’re too soft.”
    “That’s because I’m making love to you. That’s what people are supposed to do when they’re in love. I’m not fucking you. There’s a difference.”
    “I like it kinky.”
    “Okay,” he agreed. “But tomorrow, can we do it my way?”
    “Maybe.”
#
    He made it six months without smoking a cigarette and, as far as he knew, she hadn’t stolen anything. One morning when they were lying in bed, she asked him if he ever thought about them living together and getting married. They were wrapped together in warm blankets with the smell of lilies and incense all around them.
    “Would you marry me?”
    He laughed.
    “Why are you laughing? Answer the question.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I thought about it, but I’ve never met someone who’d even be willing to marry me. I thought I did once, but it didn’t work out.”
    “I’d marry you,” she said. “You’re the perfect guy. You have this kind of protector quality, but you listen very well. If a girl is out to get married, she’d be a fool not to pick you.”
    He laughed again at the ludicrousness of her statement. “What makes you say that?”
    “I don’t know,” she said, laughing. “You’re just...you. You’re a man, and stubborn, but you’re less stubborn than most I’ve met. I’ve dated older men than you, but I don’t know, there’s just something different about you. You’re...a nice guy. A good man.”
    “Really?” he asked, not impressed with her flattery. In comparison with some of the men he’d known, he still felt much like a boy.
    She sat up and stared down at him as if she suddenly realized something that she liked and hated at the same time. “You remind me of my father.”
    “Oh boy. So, the moment you saw me you knew you wanted to marry me?”
    “Well. No,” she said looking away. “I don’t believe in all that kind of stuff.”
    “What kind of stuff? Love at first sight?”
    “Love in general, I guess.”
    “You don’t believe in love?”
    “No.”
    “So, you don’t love me?”
    She looked into his eyes with the most sincere expression. “I do love you.”
    “But you just said you don’t believe in love.” He grinned.
    “I don’t believe what they say about love. About it just happening to you. Love is a choice. You choose who you love and you choose whether to fall in or out of love with them.”
    “So, if you choose to marry me, then that’s it? It’s forever? Because when I get married that’s it for me. There will be no divorce.”
    “Oh no,” she said. “Me either.”
    “But that’s a long time from now, right?” he said.
    “Why? Do you have a problem marrying me?”
    He shrugged. “No. It’s just not something you rush into.”
    “More insight from the great guru,” she laughed.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Nothing.”
    “It means something.”
    “It’s just a joke. Relax. You’re always so serious about these things.”
    “Because these things are important.”
    “You’re always contradicting yourself.”
    “So are you.”
    “Because there are no right answers, Josh.”
#
    By the end of the year they were living together in an apartment near enough to campus they could ride their bikes or walk to class. Life seemed good. His grades were excellent despite having to take on extra shifts to pay the bills. When he started to feel as though he was stretching himself too thin, he’d look at her beautiful face and breathe a sigh of relief. But she did not find his presence as gratifying as he found hers. She’d begun to doubt her decision for a major in school, it didn’t cross his mind at the time that she might be having other doubts too.
    “It’s okay to be unsure of what you want to do,” he told her, trying to calm her from one of her panics about life. “Just keep working at it. You’ll find yourself.”
    “But I feel like I’m holding you back,” she said. He’d heard that line before. Why did girls always feel like such a burden?
    He stood up from the couch and walked over to where she stood with her arms crossed by the electric fireplace. She turned when he tried to kiss her. “Look at me,” he said. “You are not a burden to me. You will never be a burden to me. You are not holding me back. I’m doing great in school. What’s the problem?”
    “You said you’re going to have to postpone grad school and I don’t want you to have to do that.”
    “I chose this life with you,” he said, “fully knowing the consequences. There is nothing wrong. I’ll get a real job after college and work until we can afford grad school for me. It’s no big deal. Experience will be key in landing a real job anyway.”
    “But what if you can’t get a job after your bachelors? What if you wind up waiting tables the rest of your life? I know how much you hate it.”
    “Don’t worry,” he said, putting his hand on her cheek, “it’s going to be fine. Waiting tables isn’t that bad. Besides, once I get my screenplay finished, we’ll be rolling in money.”
    “Oh, Josh. That’s a pipe dream. When are you going to give that up?”
    “You sound like my mother.” She jerked and her lower lip started to quiver. “Oh no,” he said, almost laughing because of how beautiful she was when she cried. “Please don’t cry. I love you. Please don’t cry.” But she only cried harder. He kissed her and held her. After she calmed down he started to slide his hand up under her shirt to unsnap her bra.
    “No, no, no,” she said, pulling away. “I haven’t showered. I’m dirty.”
    “So,” he said. “I’ll eat your pussy after you run a marathon. Come here.”
    “No,” she said, going to the sink to wash the dishes that had slowly been escalating from a small pile to a mound.
    “Come on,” he pleaded, walking up behind her and pressing himself up against her. “It’s been like two weeks.”
    “No. It’s gross. After I take a shower.” She turned on the water and rinsed the sponge.
    “Okay, well, I’ll be working on some homework,” he said, knowing that, after her shower, he’d try again and fail. It was as if, once they actually lived together, she was done with him or was at least done trying to please him. She had him where she wanted him. “There is no more need for that foolishness,” she seemed to say with the flip of her hair and that blank expression. He hoped he was wrong and kept trying. Promised himself to do his best, promised her and hoped she’d do the same. She persisted that she would do her best and that she loved him dearly with those big, doughy, lying eyes and her trembling lips. But he could not help suspecting that something was wrong.
    “Why don’t you do some damn dishes every once in a while?” he heard her say just loud enough to travel around the corner.
    He stepped out of the extra room that they’d converted to a library-office for his schoolwork and sparse screenwriting, filled mostly with stolen books, and glared at her for a moment before answering. “I was the last to do the dishes, remember? And I almost always cook. The cook shouldn’t have to wash the dishes.”
    “I can count on one hand how many times you’ve washed dishes since we’ve been here.”
    “But how many times have I cooked?”
    “You make the mess, you clean it up.”
    “You eat the food, you contribute.”
    She cut her eyes at him and he knew she was thinking about throwing the plate she was washing at his head, so he jumped back into the library-office and slammed the door shut. When he heard her leave the kitchen and turn on the shower, he paced the apartment, too frustrated to think about anything but his nonexistent love life. What the hell has happened to me? To us? I was better off alone. He heard the shower shut off and was pulled out of his thoughts. His eyes were on a shelf in the nook they had designated as her office. On the shelf sat a family of clay mushrooms painted in vibrant, trippy colors. Those had certainly not come from her Right Wing parents, nor had she bought them with his money because she always gloated and flashed everything off that she bought with his money.
    She walked around in her towel for a while and the mushrooms slipped from his mind. He snuck up behind her and followed her back into the bathroom. He started kissing her neck and undoing the towel, letting it fall. She caught it in the air, pressed it tight to her chest, and grabbed his hand before he could get a good grip on her half-exposed breast.
    “No.”
    “But you said...”
    “I’m really just not attracted to you anymore. I never really was.”
    “What the hell? Really?”
    “Well, yeah. You’re...fat.”
    It’s true, he had gained weight since he quit smoking cigarettes; about twenty pounds. He only weighed 195 pounds though. Not as skinny as he was when he met her, but not as fat as most Americans. “But don’t you still love me?”
    “Yeah,” she said, like a child answering a parent in a certain way because the child knows that’s what the parent wants to hear.
    “But you’re not going to have sex with me?”
    “I’m just not in the mood ever. Maybe if you weren’t so heavy.”
    “If you wouldn’t have made me quit smoking--”
    “Don’t blame that on me. Eat healthier. Stop going to McDonalds on your lunch break.”
    “--and not even quit stealing!” he shouted over her.
    “What?” She suddenly changed from enraged shouting and arm flailing to perfect composure. “I haven’t stolen anything.”
    “What about those mushrooms in there with your poetry books? Where the hell did those come from?”
    “Jen gave me those. What the hell?”
    “Fine, if you say so,” he said. “I’ll lose weight, I promise, but can’t we have sex now? Like a down payment?”
    “No.”
    “Well screw this. I’ll just find some other girl to have sex with.”
    “Good luck with that. You’ll never find a girl hotter than me that actually will.”
    “Oh, I’ve had plenty of hotter girls than you.”
    “Oh, yeah? Who?”
    “Sylvia. Jessie. Jo. Michelle. Alice--”
    “Bullshit any of the girls you had before were hotter than me. Let me see some pictures.”
    “I don’t have any pictures.”
    “That’s because you’re lying. You think you can find a hotter girl than me that will actually be with you, fine. Go.” She slammed the door behind her when she went into the bedroom.
    Maybe she’s right, he thought. Those other girls had all left him in the end, but Carmen was still here, and she was hot. He’d catch other girls looking at him in class, they’d give that little smile and he’d think, “I could have her, but I’ve got Carmen.” They were all beautiful girls, but Carmen was beautiful. “I’ve got what I need, no need to screw it up.” Sometimes he would wonder if one of those girls was more suited for him, like the brunette with the crooked nose or the blonde with the bushy eyebrows, but then he’d shrug it off as just a test to try and bring him back to his old ways. He had something good with Carmen. She was with him. He slapped his belly, watched it shake in the bathroom mirror and resolved to lose weight. He was going to get as buff as he could. Sex was something he just couldn’t live without.
#
    The walking and biking to class must have already had some effect on him because he suddenly began to lose weight, as if setting his mind on the goal simply made it happen. Carmen had been hanging out with her friend Jen a lot and often got in late, but he intended to show off his new body when she got home one night, so he waited up for her. He tried his hardest to stay awake, but it was nearly three-thirty, what was taking her so long? The front door woke him up, drool running down his cheek and sunlight coming in through the windows.
    “Hey,” he said, his voice rough.
    She looked at him as if he were a stranger or a ghost. “Sorry. I fell asleep on the couch and Jen didn’t want to wake me.”
    “Really?”
    She wouldn’t look into his eyes and he knew then that something had happened. She was not going to her friend Jen’s, or her and Jen were more than just friends or something, but he knew things were off. He just couldn’t prove it and Carmen never faltered once. Lies poured from her like water from a river’s source. “Jen and her boyfriend are having problems, so I was being supportive. I’m so glad we don’t have those kinds of problems.” Or, “Jen’s dog got ran over so she needed a friend.” He states that she doesn’t have a dog, thinking he’s got her, but she quickly answers, “Her childhood dog. It’s at her parents’ house.” He had no idea how to tell the truth from the lies, but he knew that she was lying, despite that look in her eyes. She was never so calm when she was telling the truth. He was so mad he wanted to leave right then and never look back, but, when he looked at her beautiful little face, he didn’t want to leave. What if he was wrong? What if she was right and he really was just being paranoid?
#
    A girl that looked familiar walked up to him at the coffee shop on campus a few days later. She had light brown hair and was about the same size as Carmen. He thought she was remarkably attractive but, before he could really make a full thought about what was happening, she walked up to him and gave him a big, fake smile. “Hey, Josh,” there were tears welling in her sky-blue eyes and he realized it was Carmen’s friend Jen, he’d only met her a few times and barely recognized her. “I’m sorry I can’t talk long.” Her voice was cracking. “Carmen and Dean have been fucking behind our backs. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but I thought you should know.”
    Dean? he thought. Who the hell is Dean? But then it came to him, Dean was the boyfriend Jen had had “problems” with. A flame of anger rose in him and he literally felt his skin get hotter. There was nothing he could do about it though. He ran across campus to the Circle K and bought a pack of cigarettes. As he walked back to campus, he called his brother, Carl.
    After school, he went straight home and started packing his stuff. He did it completely silent, as she stood over him explaining herself.
    “Are you not going to say anything?” she asked.
    Silence.
    He had cancelled the bank accounts to make sure she couldn’t rip him off any more than she already had. When Carl showed up at the door she quit explaining herself, just stood glaring at them with red eyes and her arms crossed.
    When they had everything packed up and climbed into his truck, Carl shook his head and said, “That sucks brother. It’ll probably turn out for the best though.”
    “Yeah.”
    “You just gotta move on. Look at the bright side. At least you weren’t married. Divorces are expensive. Just take some time at my house to get yourself back on your feet and you’ll be able alright. Maybe get laid or something. Clear your head.”
    “Yeah,” Josh said, looking down defeated. When he had called the bank, he found out that his accounts were nearly dry already and the credit card just shy of being maxed out. He didn’t know how he would be able to get back on his feet from that, the only thing he knew was that he needed to get through the semester.
    One day, Josh ran into her on campus as she was walking sexily across the quad. Her hips swaying like a model, but she was still wearing those deceptively modest clothes. Just seeing her made him feel tingly all over.
    “Hi,” she said, stopping in front of him.
    “Hey,” he said. He wanted to take her right there. Rip her clothes off, slap her around and hold her down while the entire school watched him claim what was his. But he resisted. She would have enjoyed it too much.
    “Want to get some lunch? There’s that Indian place across the street we never tried.”
    It was the first time that he had really looked at her since he found out. He turned his head, not daring to look directly at her, as if she were Medusa, her evil power already starting to seep into his heart from that simple glance.
    “No thanks,” he said. “I gotta go.”
    “Okay.” She smiled weakly.
    Quickly, he turned and started walking before that creeping desire to go with her took over him completely.
    “See you later,” she shouted at his back.
    He threw his hand up but didn’t turn around until he’d walked a good distance. When he did, he could still see her walking away. Her ass was still as perfect as ever. He did wish he had it back. He wanted to bury his face in it. He went home and took a cold shower, but he couldn’t shake the thought of her, so he just went with the thoughts and relieved himself into the drain. When he got out he toasted her with a bottle of Carl’s whiskey. To that fucking whore. All hail the thief.
 
 

​Underneath a full moon, the sound of cold steel echoed throughout an open field where two warriors stood locked into combat. What should’ve been a reunion between two friends was quickly met with a pent-up rivalry that was destined to be settled. Each precise swing of their katanas gave the fight an illusion of a formal dance. Their katanas clashed, but instead of riposting, both warriors stood with swords locked, panting.
            “You’ve gotten weak in your years away,” says Amani.
            “What are you talking about? I’ve barely broken a sweat, but you, you’ve definitely lost a step or two since I’ve been away,” says Dwyane catching his second wind. “No doubt about it, I could’ve ended this in any of our exchanges. But we haven’t fought like this in almost two years. Since, what? When you were trying to get your father's approval to wield that katana of yours?” Dwyane laughs. “How’s the old man?”
            “You piece of shit. You know very well that I’ve bested you then, and after your mockery… I’ll kill you now!”
Amani goes on an all-out assault, leaving Dwyane on the defensive against a fury of swipes from her blade. They both showed extraordinary mastery of their skills with a sword, meeting each other blow for blow, ending in a stalemate.
            “I hate to admit this, but…” Dwyane dropped to a knee, overwhelmed by Amani’s strength. “You’ve gotten a lot prettier since the last time we saw each other,” as he looked up at her with smile.
            “Shut up… and fight.”
Amani slowly lowers the tip of her blade to his eye level. As Dwyane stares into the fury in Amani’s eyes, he catches a glimpse of the moon perfectly set over her shoulder. Amani, puzzled over this distracted gaze upon Dwyane’s face, suddenly feels the tension shift as he uses his leverage to get back to a vertical base and delivers a massive headbutt.
            “Ahh, dammit! You idiot,” Amani groans as she falls onto her knees.
            “Yeah. Not my best option,” Dwyane says, trying to laugh off the pain. He returns his gaze to the moon. “But, you know, tonight seems like such a beautiful night.”
            “The night would be a lot better if you would just let me kill you.”
Dwyane goes to check on Amani.
            “Harsh as always. You’ve really impressed me.” Dwyane reaches for Amani’s katana. “How’s your head?”
Amani has an eye locked on Dwyane.
            “Dummy,” Amani whispers as she loosens her grip of her katana for Dwyane to take.
            “We haven’t been close like this in a while.”
            “Stop making this weird.”
            Dwyane places the katanas on the ground and helps Amani to her feet.
            “I’m not. Relax. We haven’t talked in ages. When we finally get to see each other - we’re out here trying to tear each other apart. There was something more behind those attacks, which, I probably hold some responsibilities for.”
            “You’re damn right your responsible. You humiliate me, and then have the nerve to leave.”
            “Whoa… what? Humiliate you, how?”
            “In front of our sensei. My father. You let me beat you for succession of master of my father’s sword style. So, how could I go on based on that false victory? Then, when I went to seek you out to truly settle this debt, you’ve gone abroad; to fight in other peoples’ meaningless war, while I was left here, alone. Coward! I’m not going to waste this opportunity to beat you,” Amani says, venting her frustration. She throws a punch at his face. Dwyane blocks her punch and grabs her arm, wrapping his arms around her, holding her tightly. Amani struggles to get released from his grip, but to no avail. She hangs her head.
            “Happy birthday,” Dwyane whispers into her ear.
Tears run down Amani’s cheeks as she glances up at the full moon. She smiles as she rests her head on his shoulder. She pulls out a small blade, unknown to Dwyane as he continues to admire the moonlit sky, easing his embrace. Amani closes her eyes.
            Dummy.
 

​It was a normal day…or so it seemed.
I was renovating the house. Ripping tiles from the floor, replacing the sink and the cabinets as the hours went by. I was missing a few odds and ends and decided to run to the local hardware store. As the hours passed by, the day felt off; as if something was wrong. Couldn’t quite place it, but there was just that feeling, that intuition that something was off about that morning. The feeling slightly faded as I went on about my day. I finished grabbed the nails and screws I needed to finish my giant mess of a home and got in my truck and left.
As I pulled into my driveway I noticed a man in a suit in the distance, just standing there. I waved, he did nothing. “Creepy” I remember muttering under my breath. I step in the house and start working, several minutes go by then suddenly I heard a knock on the door. Soft thuds as if someone gently raised their hand and let gravity take control as their hand fell on the wooden door. I was several feet away and heard it through the commotion of my tools, by the time I got to the door the person was gone. All that was there was a box. Just a black box. No bigger than your typical shoebox.
I pick it up and sit down on the makeshift chair I have in my living room. I turn the box over trying to find an opening. Nothing. There’s no way to open this thing. No crease, no folds. Nothing. I get up and place it on the counter nearest to the kitchen and continue about my work. Hours go by and all I can hear is this noise inside the house.
“Dammit, what is that noise?” I remember saying. I remember hunting around the house trying to find the source of the sound. Each room I went it, the sound would dissipate or grow louder. I spent at least an hour looking and to no avail, I found nothing. I put earbuds in, thinking that would mute the sound. It did…for a second and it was back.
It was starting to drive me crazy. This sound would come and go. Now when I went to look for it, each room I entered the sound would stop. It would pick up in another room the minute I left that room I was just in like it was a game. Like this sound knew what it was doing. I go back to the room I was working on, put the earbuds back in, turn my MP3 on, I put another set of headphones on, some expensive noise canceling ones that I never use anymore, but they seem suitable now.
They seemed to work. Nothing but quiet. “Finally,” I remember saying with a heavy sigh. I continue work in the room for about two hours until suddenly the noise came back. No warning. It was just there, in my head like an annoying neighbor that doesn’t know when or how to mind their business. “Son of a bitch” I remember saying as I ripped the headphones off my head and the earbuds from my ears. I take my tools and I go room to room, tipping the carpet from the floor, tearing the drywall down. Nothing was out of touch for me. I was going to find the source of this sound.
It’s the following morning, I haven’t slept yet, I have the house stripped to the bare bones. You can practically look inside the house from the outside. I had an audience from the neighbors watching the show of me tearing my own house apart looking for this mysterious sound. Suddenly, I realize that not too long after I brought that box into the house, I started to go mad. I go back into the destroyed room where this started, I can’t find it.
I look under the rubble that is my kitchen just to find it, I know I look crazy now, but it has to be here & I have to open it. I know it’s there, but I can’t find it. Now I start to panic. First, the sound that haunts me and now I can’t find the box, the very thing that could’ve started this mess.
“Excuse me, sir?” I hear from behind me, it’s a cop and his partner. “What’s going on here?” he asks. “You don’t hear that?” I remember asking. The cop looks at his partner and looks back at me, “Hear what, sir?”. “WHAT?! The sound. QUIET!!! You’ll hear it.” As soon as I say that, the sound is gone. There’s nothing there. “OH, COME ON!!” I yelled. “Sir, you’re coming with us.” The cop moves closer to me, places handcuffs on me and they both proceed to move me to the cop car.
I look up and I see this man in a suit holding a black box, the very one I was looking for.
“LOOK!” I yelled. “There it is!!” The cops both look back and see nothing. “I’m not crazy!! LOOK it’s THERE!!” Now I’m in a white room with four corners and padding…though the sound is back. I look out the tiny crack of the door and I see that man in the suit, clutching the black box in his hands. He stares at me. All I can do is tremble. “It’s there” I mutter, under my breath. “It’s...he’s there.” I say softly, “Make it stop...what did I do?” The sound starts to become deafening and I cannot do a thing. I’m constricted to a straitjacket, my movement limited.
            I lay there, succumbing to the sound and my own madness. I feel as if the world is closing in on me, as if I’m in the box and the Man in the Suit goes door-to-door collecting the madness of his victims. Maybe that is the point of his boxes, to collect the sanity of those around him as some sick trophy?
 

​March 6, 1995 - A Beautiful Life
Last week I was a rock at the bottom of my swimming pool, challenging/taunting life to step on me. The blue, chemical laden, water sloshed and swirled, encircling my body. Katie and Quinn giggled at the surface, splashing each other with renewed exuberance. I watched their little toes wiggle. Max, our yellow lab, howled from the deck. He was deathly afraid of water, some aberration in the breed, poor thing. He had two different colored eyes, gray and green and a big black tongue that drifted in/out of his mouth like a sail devoid of wind. A honeybee danced, buzzed near his head and he’d occasionally snap at it.
 
Six different varieties of roses carpeted the hill: Belle Rouge, Old Fashioned, Grandiflora, Hybrid Tea, Miniature, and Standard. I’d planted them a year ago, and they were now in full bloom, sweet, fragrant, lush. It was spring in L.A. The air was warm but not uncomfortable.
Everything seemed healthy.
 
Sept 27, 1985 – Motherhood
“I’ll name him, Quinn. It means wise one.”
They wrap him in a blue animal print blanket, the nurses that is and place him in my arms. I lean over and kiss his cheek, nuzzling into it, savoring the moment like no other. Oh, that beautiful fragrance, the sweet, clean scent of his skin. It is the smell of pure, unadulterated innocence.
I love him like a warm breeze in autumn, and I have big dreams for his future.
 
Ten Years Later – Broken
“He’s failing.” “What?”
“He hasn’t turned in any homework.” “Quinn?”
“Failing? He’s got a very high I.Q.”
 
There were little things, clues here and there that something dark was brewing in the sweetness of our lives. I ignored them, figured he was too smart, like me a little sensitive. I found the best private school when he had trouble with the public one. Then reclaimed him from that teacher, the one that dared to criticize his performance.
 
It was my job to shield him from the blight, and I took it seriously, wrapping him in bubblegum kisses. His little sister Katie was different, happy as a songbird, drifting free like a cloud in the summer sky. Katie was independent. She did not need me, not really. Quinn was grounded, heavy with the ways of the world. You could see it on his face, his eyes; in the way, he moved his legs, slow and methodically with each step.
 He overthought everything.
 
March 11, 1995 - The Phone Call
The phone rang at 12:47 pm, a time permanently etched in my memory.
 
It was an average day. I’d dropped the kids off at Waldorf School, a twenty-minute drive from home, then came back to work on the garden. We lived in a beautiful Spanish bungalow in a canyon filled with wild oak and honeysuckle. Quinn was ten and Katie six.
 
The sky was blue as the Caribbean Sea, the air dry, warm, and heavy. I was digging a hole for a little orange tree when I heard it ring. I shook the dirt off my hands and ran in to answer it.
 
“Hello. This is Jennifer,” I said.
A little voice quivered as if straining to speak. “Mom,” (then a pause) “Mom?”
“Yes, Quinn?”
“I got kidnapped. He dropped me off on the side of the freeway.” My heart stopped.
 
If you’ve never imagined what’s it’s like to have a child cry out for help on the end of a phone line, I can tell you now, it’s like being struck by lightning. I couldn’t breathe. Fear invaded my being, spiraled down towards the hardwood floor. It left nothing untouched-even my toes contaminated.
 
“What? What did you say?” I sputtered.
“After you drove away, a man grabbed me/ threw me in the back of his truck.” “What?” I shook my head in disbelief.
“Did he hurt you?”
 
My imagination went wild. Four hours had passed since I’d left him near the entrance. My hands shook, tears welled in my eyes. Be strong, I thought to myself. Then I slammed my back against the wall for support. The cold plaster helped me regain composure, my mother sense.
 
“I’m okay Mom.”
He was struggling to speak, the pitch of his voice rising with stress.
“Quinn where are you exactly?”
“I’m on the side of the freeway by the new movie theaters. You know where. He dropped me off, and I started walking. These people stopped and let me use their cell phone.” “What people? Are you safe?”
“Just a man and lady. I’m safe.”
“I’m coming, Quinn. Stay right there.”
 “Okay Mom, hurry.”
Life was spinning away from me.
 
Missing
“Quinn, Josh, and David miss you. Everyone at preschool misses you. They’re asking where you are. Do you want to go play with them?” “No!”
“Quinn honey, Mrs. Rosaline misses you too. She wanted me to tell you that she has a special treat for you in your cubby.”
“No! No! No! I want to stay with you, Mommy. I don’t like school.”
 
March 11, 1995 – Gone
Racing, my heart, this car, other people on the freeway, running somewhere, I wanted the quiet feathery moments, life under my fingernails. Instead, I got fog. I searched everywhere and didn’t see him. I hit the leather-covered steering wheel with my fist and then dialed Lee’s number into my cell phone. It rang three times.
 
“Lee, it’s Jennifer. Quinn was kidnapped and left on the side of the freeway. He called me, but I can’t find him. “He took a long deep breath before answering. “Did you call the police?” “Not yet. Quinn said he was near the theaters, but I've looked.
“Let me call them, and you keep searching.”
Six lanes on either side of the freeway cut jaggedly through the California hillside, light traffic, typical for that time of day. No disabled vehicles, no lost children perched precariously on the shoulders edge. No Quinn.
 
The ring of my cell phone was shrill, like the sound of an alarm in a concrete building. “Hello? Hello?”
“He’s on the shoulder of the 210, not the 134. The highway patrol is there. He’s safe and in their car. They’re waiting for you. I’ll meet you there.”
“Thank God.”
 
Quinn was safe. I reveled in those words; my relief rolling around like a child doing somersaults. Finally, I spotted them; three patrol cars lined up in a neat row. The staccato pulse of lights matched the rhythm of my heart. What would I say? It was different now. We were different.
 
A late model Chevrolet Impala, silver with wire rim wheels lingered in the rear of the line. I pulled up behind it. There was a vulture inside. He got out holding a video camera. Walk past him, and you’ll be fine, I said to myself.
 
“Ma'am, Ma'am could I have a word with you. Is your son okay?” A tall, lean man in a uniform raced over to shoo them away. “Please stand back,” he said in a deep, authoritative voice.
 
The officer was strong as the oak tree in my front yard. He reached out and offered me his arm.
 
Marriage
“He needs more time with you. We never see you anymore.”
“I have a two-hour commute each way, Jennifer. What do you want from me?” “He misses you.”
“I’m doing the best I can.”
“We’re doing the best we can.”
 
March 11, 1995 - Men in Blue
“Mrs. Jacobs? The officer questioned.” “Yes. What happened?”
“A couple saw him walking on the side of the freeway and pulled over to help.”
 I shuddered. The officer seemed sympathetic.
 
“He told them he’d been kidnapped and dropped off about ½ mile away. He gave us a good description, and we have an APB out on the truck and suspect.”
“Thank God. Did he say if the kidnapper? Aww… touched him?”
“No. We want to take Quinn back to the station and question him if you don’t mind. We’ve already contacted the school, and they’re going to notify all the parents.”
“That’s fine. Can I see him?”
“Of course, he’s in my car. You can talk to him in there. I don’t want that reporter to get any pictures.”
“Thank you,” I said.
 
I rushed to the black and white car, and the officer opened the door for me. Quinn was sitting in the front passenger seat eating candy. They’d given him Gummy Bears. I leaned over and gave him a hug.
 
“I love you so much, Quinn. Thank God, you’re safe. Daddy is on his way here, and then we’re going to the station so they can ask you some questions. They want to get this guy!” Quinn blinked his eyes as if holding back tears and said, “I love you too, Mom.”
 
I sat down in the seat and closed the door so we could have a little privacy. The officer stepped away. I was a mess, dirty from my gardening, sweating from fright and emotionally spent from the whole ordeal.
 
“How did he grab you, honey? I watched you walk up the path towards your classroom.”
“He was hiding behind the second bungalow. When I walked by, he grabbed me from behind then put his hand over my mouth. He carried me to his truck, threw me in the back and told me to lie still and stay quiet. I was really scared.”
“Yes, honey. Of course.”
 
He looked at me with his big blue eyes and said, “I figured that if I did what he said, I wouldn’t get hurt.”
 
I couldn’t argue. He hadn’t been hurt physically, as far as I knew. Suddenly, there were other voices, but I didn’t turn to look at them. I couldn’t take my eyes off my son. He was perfect/precious. 4’8” with a little button nose and a head full of curls. Everyone had said they were baby locks, that'd he’d lose them, as he got older, but he hadn’t.
 
“Hello Officer, I’m Lee Jacobs, Quinn’s father. Is he okay?”
“He's okay Mr. Jacobs. I’m Sergeant Riley. Your wife is sitting with him.” “Thank you for all you’ve done,” Lee said in his calm, flat manner.
“We haven’t done much yet, unfortunately. I need you two to follow me to the station so we can get a little more information on the suspect.”
“Oh? Let me get Jennifer then.”
 
I bolted out the car and gave Lee a hug. He looked shocked. “Quinn, how are you buddy?” he shouted over my left shoulder. “I’m fine Dad,” he smiled.
“Okay then. Why don’t you follow me? I’ll drive Quinn over,” said the officer. I squeezed Lee’s hand. “He’s OK honey. He’s going to be okay.”
 
Lee pulled away from me. I felt empty inside. We walked in silence, across the asphalt, towards Lee’s white Mercedes Benz. He got inside and shut the door. I winced slightly and turned back towards my own car.
 
School Days
“You have to go to school, Quinn.” “I can’t go, Mom. I’ll vomit.” “You’re not sick.”
“I puked on the grass in from of the school yesterday. Do you know how embarrassing that was?”
“I don’t understand what the problem is Quinn. You have to go to school.” “You can’t make me.”
 
March 11, 1995 - Interrogation
At the station, Officer Riley separated us from Quinn, taking him down the hallway to another room. The lobby was small, cluttered with desks and stacks of paperwork. About ten officers were milling about, trying to look busy. Lee and I were directed to a small room, eight by ten at the most. I got a tattered brown office chair, and he got a metal folding one. We weren’t comfortable. Lee’s legs shook uncontrollably, up and down, up and down. My eyes darted from wall to floor, floor to the corridor and back again. It was a long thirty minutes before someone approached us.
 
This time it was Sergeant Nicholson, thick, mid-forties, white with graying hair. My first impression was this man doesn’t like us. I wanted Officer Riley’s kind brown eyes.
Nicholson’s were steel gray. I gasped for breath.
 
“We’ve talked with your son, and I have to tell you this whole thing doesn’t make sense. Has he ever lied to you in the past? He questioned.
I spoke first. “No, Quinn never lies to us. Never.”
Lee nodded his head in agreement. I glared at him. He blinked me away. His legs started marching in place again.
 
“Quinn is a very articulate child. He talks about the kidnapping in detail, but when we ask him to describe the truck bed, we get very little. He says it was dirty, smelled like old paint or something. He supposedly rode around in it for hours, and he remembers nothing.”
 
 
“He must be in shock or something. I don’t know. I’m telling you, things happened the way he says they happened.”
“I’ve questioned suspects for over twenty years, and I can always tell when someone is lying…”
 I looked at him incredulously. “Listen here, Officer …”
“Sergeant. I want you to find the person who did this to my son. Understand?”
“I don’t believe Quinn would lie. He has no reason to. He does well in school, has lots of friends,” Lee sputtered.
I swallowed hard. How would you know? I thought to myself. He coughed.
This was how we communicated: by mental telepathy.
 
“A great deal is at stake here. We have a school on alert and dozens of terrified parents. We have a child that says he was snatched off the school campus. Although he’s given us a general description of the events, we don’t have enough to piece together a crime. I want to bring him to the Altadena station. There’s an officer there that’d I’d like him to talk with.” “Fine.”
I knew the truth. I knew Quinn.
 
I watched him in his cradle, tiny baby breaths, sweet bubbles of life on his lips. Every few minutes a smile crossed his dimpled cheeks, then a quiet murmur. I used to think he was dreaming of me, that he loved me, even in those Buddha baby dreams.
 
 
The Altadena station looked much like the first one. Lee absent-mindedly hummed to himself. They took us into another waiting room where we waited for answers.
 
“This is it, Lee! Let’s get Quinn and head home. They have no right to keep him from us like this. They’re victim blaming.”
“They’re just trying to sort out all the facts,” he countered.
 
“Quinn has been traumatized by this. He needs to be home with me so that he can recover.” I stared at him in frustration.
“If it goes on much longer we’ll take him out of here. Okay?” he said softly. “Thank you.”
 
Three hours into our ordeal the Sergeant came back. From the scowl on his face, I knew it wasn’t good news.
 
“Mr. And Mrs. Jacobs please come with me. Quinn has something he’d like to say to you,” he said, his tone serious.
We sat down at a long conference table. Quinn looked utterly dejected. I’d never seen him so limp. His checks were flaccid, pale, his head hung down. His eyes were focused on the floor. What had they done, these officers of peace?
Nicholson spoke, his voice booming, self-satisfied. “Quinn, do you have something to tell your parents?”
Quinn’s voice quivered, and he let out a sound that was barely audible. “Yesss.”
“Go ahead then.”
 
“I lied. I wasn’t kidnapped. I made it up because I didn’t want to go to school. I tried to walk home, but I only knew the freeway route.”
I gasped and then tried to regain my composure. Nicholson looked at me with scorn. “I’d like to talk to you both alone,” he croaked.
 
Quinn refused to meet my eye. I wanted to tell him it was OK, that I loved him, but the Sergeant drug us to an adjacent room. I had nothing to say, and nothing to add but contempt.
 
“Quinn is the most convincing liar that I have ever interviewed. Most adults break down faster than he did. He’d only admitted to the truth after I’d threatened him with a polygraph test. He told me I’d have to get parental approval because he was a minor, and I said we already had it. That’s when he broke down, admitted making the whole thing up.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I whispered, devoid of emotion, completely numb.
 
My brain was nothing more than soft gray matter, dissolving; I was a kind of stone soup.
“I have to tell you; it’s a serious issue now that the school is involved. The principal sent home notices to the parents, and everything has to be retracted. We spoke to her a few moments ago, and she asked that Quinn stays out of school until things settle down.” “What?”
“He also needs a psychiatric evaluation and some counseling. We don’t want him back here.”
 
“Okay, then,” I said, flabbergasted. I knew there was no point in arguing. I stood up and collected Quinn, completely fragmented. I wanted to flee as much as he had wanted to flee, yet somehow Lee was the one that managed to escape, scurrying back to work with his tail between his legs.
 
“I’ll see you when I get home. You better apologize to your mother,” he said in an attempt to sound fatherly as if that could exorcise Quinn’s ghosts.
 
The drive home was filled with sniffles, snorts, odd expressions and no language. Quinn made no attempt to justify his actions, expecting me to know, expecting me to forgive. I’d lost the wondrous spring day, the happy, proud life of last week.
 
I was no longer a rock at the bottom of my swimming pool, watching soggy little toes dance with delight. I was a pebble, fragile, eroded, damaged. My son seemed unconcerned and mysteriously unburdened.
 

I was driving Reid back to New Jersey after we attended a Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden. When we glided into the Lincoln Tunnel, I rolled up my window to filter out the fumes. Reid did the same on his side, so the only sound was of us talking. He smoothed his blonde ponytail with his palm, which was always a signal he was about to say something he considered important.
 “I’m done with the community college shit,” he said. I side glanced him and noticed a devious smile on his face.  “Come September, I’ll be going to your alma mater.”
“City College?” I said.
 “On top of that, I’m going scot free. “
 “Nothing’s free, dude,” I said.
“No tuition, man.”
“But you don’t live in the city. Fuck. You don’t live in the state.”
“My ass, I don’t.” Then Reid reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a thin book of receipts, and tossed it onto the dashboard. “Check it out.”
We exited onto the Jersey side of the tunnel. I took the first turn that led into Jersey City, and merged onto the local traffic. When we reached a red light, I grabbed the pad, and tried to open it, but couldn’t. I tossed it over to Reid. “What is that?”
 “Book of rent receipts.” He raised the booklet to his nose and inhaled as though savoring its aroma. “Half a book, actually. I filled out 12 receipts with a Manhattan address, one month apart. Spread them out on the registration counter like a royal flush.”
“They bought into it?”
 “Lady at the office was suspicious. But she’d just learned her nephew was killed in Iraq. She said she was too frazzled to deal with the whole verification thing.”
Before I could respond, I heard tires squealing. I turned towards sound. A pair of headlights blinded me. A florist truck had run a red light, and was heading straight at us. It t-boned into the passenger side. Reid lost his life.
I was supposed to start my first teaching job that fall, but I soon realized I was too frazzled to start any career. So on the advice of a therapist I joined a boxing gym. The psychologist suggested working out might help me channel my anger and my guilt. The trainer, a short guy with a cigar butt perpetually between his lips, taught me basic footwork, how to bob and weave, work the speed bag, and use my reach to advantage.
That’s where I met Joseph and Diego. Joseph was planning to become a lawyer, and Diego was studying philosophy. The three of us got friendly, which was fortunate for me because I’d been isolating myself in my parents’ house since the accident.   When May came around, Diego told us about a summer job program operated by the city. They needed boxing instructors to travel around the five boroughs and offer boxing workshops for the neighborhood kids. The three of us were hired, but I wasn’t sure if I really qualified. We were supposed to take turns driving, and I didn’t mention that I got panic attacks behind the wheel. I’d have to come up with an excuse once we’d start working, but that didn’t end a problem. It turned out that only Joseph drove the old Dodge Ram that the city provided. Joseph didn’t trust Diego behind the wheel because he got easily irate, smashing his fists into the horn if a car ahead of us took too long to get moving once a light turned green. I told the guys I had been working for Uber and needed a break. Joseph said no problem. He liked to drive.
We were driving back to Queens where the city garage was located. Joseph was maneuvering through the southbound expressway traffic. He was his usual unflappable self, his Izod shirt dry and pressed even though it was a hot New York night, and we had been conducting a workshop in a church basement that evening. I sat beside Joseph in the passenger seat. Diego was stretched out on the rear bench, his face pressed flat against the vinyl, using a philosophy book as a pillow. Diego was taking a graduate course, and his final exam was the next morning. Joseph was entering Georgetown Law School in the fall, which surprised people when they asked him about his career plans. Diego and I thought the reactions were because Joseph was black, which made us incensed. But Joseph would just wink at us and smile. I heard a deep nasal sound coming from behind me. It was Diego, snoring.  
“Diego,” I said. “Smell the coffee.”
“What coffee?” Diego’s eyes snapped open.  He rolled over and faced forward. Then he swung his legs around until he was sitting upright. With the book a few inches from his face, he started reading.
“It’s the heat,” he said flatly, eyes stationed on the worn paperback. “The city couldn’t install some goddamn air conditioning?”
“I warned you about working and taking summer classes,” I said.
“Effing instructor schedules the final for eight a.m.,” Diego said, addressing the book more than me. Diego didn’t appear to be in a conversational mood, so I tried to talk up Joseph.
“Didn’t I warn him, Joseph?”
“About the slings and arrows of summer school?” Joseph said. He had taken it upon himself to teach me to speak properly. Joseph was a resolute type, a perfect model for the kids. When he taught, he exuded a quiet authority, while the little rascals barely responded to Diego’s uninspired instruction. When their attention waned, Diego would select someone from the group, and give him a smart little jab on the nose.
“I believe you did warn him,” Joseph said. “It’s common knowledge that the length of class periods is extended in the summer, and the number of periods per week is increased owing to the truncated semester.”
I appreciated what Joseph was trying to do, but the problem was I felt like a vulnerable child. So when I spotted the green sign up ahead, announcing Flushing Meadows ½ Mile, I began to relax. In five minutes, we’d be off the highway.
“Hear that?” Diego said, snapping his book shut.
“Hear what?” I said. Diego had the look of someone focusing on a radio dial in an attempt to get a clear signal.
“That.” Diego leaned forward and looked out his side window. “Like an electronic bug killer zapping a mosquito.”
Then I heard it: a harsh, snapping sound. Joseph slowed down, and with a subtle head nod, indicated we should look up ahead. “There’s the problem,” Joseph said.
Through the windshield, we saw that a fuel tanker had jackknifed. It looked like the truck driver, noticing that the top of his tractor wouldn’t clear the overpass, had jammed on his brakes too late.
“That’s one dumbass driver,” Diego said. We scanned the insides of the truck’s cab, but it had been abandoned.
“Quiet,” Joseph said. He slowed further. We could see pulsating flashers on each of the trailer’s four corners. The reflectors that lined the truck eerily glittered, catching glints of light from our headlamps. Drivers on either side of us weren’t being as cautious. They threaded their way through the one open lane. Once past the disabled truck, they accelerated. Not seeing oil dripping from the tanker, some slid into the retaining walls of the underpass. That’s what accounted for those menacing thuds.
“Check out that fuel leak,” Diego said, as we watched a puddle form and glisten on the road.
“Another one,” Joseph said, pointing ahead as we watched a Lincoln Town Car smack into the wall.
“There goes my final exam,” Diego said. He shook his head in disgust and tossed the textbook over his shoulder. It landed somewhere in back where the gloves, helmets, and duffel bags filled with shorts and shirts were stored.
Joseph eased towards the far left, aiming for the only unobstructed lane. When he pulled parallel to the tractor-trailer, he stopped, turned on the warning flashers, and then yanked up the emergency brake. The highway was blocked now. Joseph pushed open the side door, and sprang out of his seat. Before Diego or I could say something, Joseph had already rushed into the underpass. Diego and I watched Joseph stick his head inside the first car, apparently to check on the driver. He stepped back a few feet, and turned towards us.
“The orange cones,” Joseph shouted, adjusting his forearms to mimic their pyramid shape.
Diego and I hustled to the rear of the van, where our traffic cones were stacked. We had lots because we used them to mark off an imaginary boxing ring during our classes. Diego grabbed a stack in each arm. I could barely manage one stack with both arms, not surprising because while I was only an inch shorter, Diego had 50 pounds more bulk. He raised his leg, stomped his foot down on the inner latch, and slammed his shoulder against the door like a defensive end in football crashing into a running back. The door flew open, and we jumped out. Facing us was a bevy of stalled cars, headlights blazing in our direction. The scene reminded me of a horde of stranded vehicles trying to flee an apocalypse.
“The fuck’s going on?” a guy wearing a Yankee cap said, his head stuck out his window.
“Back the fuck up,” Diego shouted.
“Back up where, genius?”
“Why are we arguing?” I shouted. Diego shrugged and began laying out the cones across the highway. I ran to the opposite shoulder, and began dropping the ones in my stack until we met in the middle.
“This is bullshit. Cones are supposed to be a hundred feet ahead of an accident,” Diego said.
“Where did you learn that?”
“Friedrich Fucking Nietzsche.”
More drivers were standing by their cars now, most staring perplexedly ahead. Others remained behind their steering wheels, honking like a flock of pissed off geese. This was New York, though, so at least half of them were honking just for the hell of it. Diego picked up one of the cones, and raised it to his lips like a bullhorn.
“Any one of you runs me over, I’ll kick your ass,” he shouted. Then he paced back and forth across the four lanes, warning about the oil on the road. Diego’s performance caused the drivers to quiet down considerably. Then Diego threw down his improvised loudspeaker, and the two of us ran towards the ghostly underpass, squeezing through the two-foot space between our van and the tractor-trailer. Joseph was now at the far end, pacing alongside a stalled school van It was facing the wrong way, and the passenger side was pressed against the tunnel wall. Smoke was curling up from its engine. Joseph shouted at us.
“Did he say Bagels?” Diego said.
“Bag gloves, jerk.” Diego sprinted back to the van and hopped inside. A minute later, he was back out with the gloves. He tossed me a pair, and we began running towards Joseph. I could see an orange glow under the hood of the damaged vehicle. I also heard the sound of sirens, but they seemed strangely distant.
We passed four or five motionless cars that had smacked against the retaining walls. A couple of drivers were outside their vehicles, shaking their heads in disgust. The guy with the Town Car was angrily kicking his tires as though it was his car’s fault for having crashed.
Diego and I reached Joseph, who was using the thin edge of a lug wrench in an effort to pry open a door of the passenger van. Four doors on each side, but none wanted to budge. Meanwhile, smoke was entering the interior, and flames flickered up through the partially crumpled hood. There were a bunch of terrified kids inside, squirming and crying, their fists clenched, their eyes filled with terror. The driver was dazed, his forehead, bloody. Luckily, the children were wearing their seatbelts. Apparently, the driver hadn’t.
“Damn thing could blow up,” Diego said. He ran to Joseph and grabbed the wrench, but even he couldn’t get the door to budge. I grabbed the driver’s door handle, but it was stuck. Worse, it was hot even through the glove. That’s when I stepped back, and noticed across the side of the van was stenciled Escuela Para Todos. Underneath, in English, was School for All. The driver must have ploughed into the side, careened off the wall, skidded, and spun around. Unlike our van, this one had no rear door.
“It’s like a sardine can without a key,” Diego hollered. Then he rushed up to the driver’s window. “Hey Mario Andretti. Who taught you how to drive?” he shouted through the glass.
“Doors are stuck,” Joseph hollered.
“No shit,” Diego said
“Watch the handles,” I said.
“Fuck the handles.” Diego bent over until he was inches from the driver’s window. He showed his fist and shouted, “Pendejo, muévete si no quieres recibir un puñetazo.” Then in English: “MOVE YOUR ASS!”
Despite his stupor, the driver finally understood, and leaned back a foot or two. Diego cocked his arm and slammed his fist through the driver’s window, shattering the glass. Then he rushed to the next window, signaled the kids to back up, and then knocked in the second window. With my gloves on, I felt around inside the driver’s door, searching for a clasp or handle. I got my glove on a door latch, twisted it until I heard a snap, and pulled hard. The door opened. I grabbed the dazed driver and pulled him out. The two frightened kids in the front seat scrambled after him. Diego punched out the windows of the remaining two doors as Joseph and I extracted the kids. When everyone was outside the van, Joseph guided the kids until they stood in a line several yards away. One by one, Joseph placed his hands on the kids’ cheeks, examined them for bruises, broken glass, or burns. His touch alone seemed to make them calmer.
“Now, who here is a big brave boy or girl, and not some little crybaby boy or girl?” Joseph shouted.
“Me!” “Me!” “I am!” There was a chorus of shouts as they eagerly waved their hands.
“Now, I want you all to line up in a single file just like you were in school, and follow me,” Joseph shouted.
“En fila,” Diego bellowed. And despite the mayhem, the kids magically obeyed, and faithfully followed Joseph as though he were the pied piper. He led them beyond the underpass to the highway shoulder while I brought up the rear. Diego scurried behind me, the driver in his arms.
“You could get sued for moving him,” I said.
“Not if he doesn’t want me to drop him,” Diego barked, right into the guy’s ear.
No sooner were we out of the tunnel, when seemingly out of nowhere, a swarm of fire trucks and ambulances were on the scene. Several medical workers were examining the kids while two others were transferring the driver from Diego’s arms onto a wheeled stretcher. Others were checking on the disabled vehicles and their drivers. A group of fire fighters was carrying huge absorbent pads, laying them on the oil spill.  The coup de grace was watching several fire fighters shot foam from their extinguishers at the van, covering it with foam as it took on the appearance of a dilapidated vanilla frosted cake.  After a few minutes, it was evident we were no longer needed.
“Guys!” Joseph called. He was five yards ahead, standing in a patch of grass by the side of the highway, a bevy of multi-colored flickering lights illuminating him. He motioned to us to approach.
“I’d like to pray.” Joseph said as we reached him. Diego and I nodded our consent, and following Joseph’s lead, bent down on one knee. Then Joseph lowered his head, cleared his throat, and paused a moment.
“We give thanks to you, oh, Lord, for keeping us safe, and for allowing us to be of aid to those in greater need than we.” Then Joseph closed his eyes, and for a second I could swear his eyelids seemed to flutter like a pair of angel wings. I side eyed Diego, who only offered a befuddled shrug.
“Amen,” Joseph said.
“Amen,” Diego and I quickly repeated.
“Good work, lads,” someone interrupted. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned. It was a short, solidly built fire chief with greying hair. An axe rested on his left shoulder. “Is that your van back there?” He asked.
“That’s us,” Joseph said.
“Nice job,” the chief said. He reached out and shook hands with each of us. “Good Samaritans. A dying breed, lads.” Then he displayed a delightful grin. I saw Diego trying to suppress a smile.
“Let me get a few of my guys to escort you back. Then you’ll be on your way. We still need to keep the highway blocked off, though.” He called over four fire fighters. Two carried axes, the other two, long pikes. The chief consulted with them briefly. They approached us, and soon we were walking three abreast with Diego in the middle—two fire fighters leading the way, the other two behind. It felt like we were having a special escort. Like we were celebrities.
“I’m driving,” I said to Joseph, who was on the other side of Diego. Joseph hung a hook shot, and the keys made an arc in the air, traveling over Diego’s head. I caught them.
“Two points,” Joseph said, holding up his middle and forefinger. Then Diego broke in. “Hope I didn’t lose my fucking book,” he said, pointing towards the van.
“Diego,” Joseph said, stopping abruptly. He turned and put a hand on each of Diego’s shoulders. Diego halted and took a deep breath. Joseph looked into his eyes.
“I’ve been informed by a higher power,” Joseph said.
“Informed of what?”
 You are going to get an A on that exam.”
Diego looked suspiciously at Joseph. He seemed to chew on the idea. He looked at me, back at Joseph, then at our van.
“Whatever,” Diego said.
The following week was our last working for the summer program. I drove the van a couple of nights, and felt pretty calm about it. On our final day, Diego came to work humming. When we were done and garaged the van for the last time, we headed for the Flushing Meadow subway, and waited on the platform. Diego had an impish grin on his face.
“Diego,” I said. “We like a good joke too.”
“Yea, big guy. What are you hiding?” Joseph said.
“Philosophy isn’t so bad,” Diego said.
“Who said it was?” I said.
“I got an A,” Diego said, trying to stifle his glee. “Professor said he thinks he can get me an assistantship.”
“Diego,” Joseph said. He smiled as he put his arm around Diego. “You’re the man.”
Diego looked at Joseph, then at me, as though looking outside himself for a clue about how to react. “Whatever,” he said.
When the train finally came, we sat down three across in the near empty car. Not a word between us as the doors closed and the train was on its way.
“My rideshare days are over,” I said. “Driving for a living is no fun. Took me a summer to figure that out.”
“All things considered,” Joseph said, “a couple of months is admirable.” Then he side glanced me, and winked.
Diego was half-following our conversation, and nodded half-heartedly. Then he slumped down against the seat as though it was a lounge chair. A minute later, he was asleep.
 
 
 

​Today Lisa attended the funeral for her father, who died during open-heart surgery. She couldn’t believe he actually bought a prepaid funeral, since he seemed forever young and lived his life as if he would never die, or as if he would die at an advanced age. She expected he would prefer burial in Red Lake, in Northwestern Ontario, where he matured and prospered, beside his wife, her mother, who died prematurely of breast cancer, or beside his own parents in Sioux Lookout, where he was raised, or near the First Nations reservation of Lac Seul where he was born. Citified, he came to rest amidst his own personal chaos of Toronto, his adopted Southern Ontario hometown. She hadn’t expected his corpse would be interred in a chilly vault, so high from the marble-like floor, the epitaph, plaque, and cover for which she couldn’t reach with her own hands, so faraway from home, so near strangers. She needed a stepladder to reach her father’s tomb, whose mausoleum was a short distance from the Eaton’s family mausoleum. Her expectations betrayed her own hometown loyalties and roots, even though she was now a mature woman living and working in Toronto as a schoolteacher.
The person she had not expected at the funeral in the church and at the mausoleum was Durrell. Twenty years ago, Durrell shot her father. Everyone expected her father to die then, but he miraculously recovered from those injuries. After he was discharged from Mount Sinai Hospital in downtown Toronto, her father changed his life, again. He lifted weights, bicycled, and stair climbed at the York University gym every day, while he attended the faculty of education as a mature student and volunteered to work with less privileged and at risk youth in the inner city and around troubled neighborhoods. After he finished training to become a schoolteacher, he started teaching on a First Nations reservation during the school year. Each summer, however, he returned to a condominium he bought in a gentrified neighbourhood near Ryerson University and Eaton Centre. He even started hanging out in the cafes and bars of the Rainbow Village around Church Street and Wellesley Street. On hot days, he posed and preened on the clothing optional beach and cruised the sand dunes of Hanlan Point on the Toronto Islands, where he also swam and danced with the naturists and nudists to the music from booming stereos aboard big, and expensive yachts. (No sixteen-foot aluminum boats with outboard motors trolling for lake trout and walleye, fishing for smallmouth bass and northern pike on Lake Ontario off Toronto Island, he joked.) She was actually shocked, when her father  came out of the closet. Life was beautiful, her father said, especially if you stir it up, but the way he stirred life up, right to the bittersweet end, left her surprised.
Ironically, Durrell was now working as a streetcar operator for the Toronto Transit Commission, twenty years after he expressed his disdain for transit drivers and his hijinks helped get her struck, broadsided, by a speeding taxi, at the crosswalk down the street from the café where they left her injured father. She couldn’t believe Durrell attended her father’s funeral. After Durrell mentioned, seemingly offhand, he worked as a city transit driver, she thought she recognized him from the Queen Street streetcar route. Before he drove away, he even gave her his cellphone number and his e-mail.
An old-fashioned kindergarten teacher, Lisa still preferred pen and paper and a landline and avoided e-mail, social media, and computers. After Durrell drove away from the cemetery and mausoleum, she discarded the monthly transit pass Durrell gave her in the nearest wastebasket. Lisa remembered how she once loved Durrell, but muttered, “Good-bye and good riddance.” Having finally overcame her driving phobia, she took the wheel in her compact imported car. She remembered those fateful days years ago.
Then a man, nattily dressed in a colorful suit, rapped her windshield and told her his Jaguar wouldn’t start. He asked if she could give him a ride to Rosedale subway station. He said he recognized her from her father’s photographs and snapshots. She saw him at the funeral and the interment, but failed to recognize him. He said he and her father were lovers, and she grew churlish at the imputation. When her father had emergency open-heart surgery, he interjected, the surgeons were amazed to find bullet fragments embedded in the muscle and flesh around his chest, millimetres from his heart.
“Did you know your father had bullet fragments in his chest?” he asked.
She was surprised to hear, but she didn’t bother to mention she remembered when her father was struck by a bullet. And so her mind was transported to a time more than twenty years ago.
 
“I can’t believe that bus driver,” Durrell said, “accusing you of stepping in front of the bus like you’re trying to commit suicide.”
“You made him afraid.”
“Because I’m a colored man.”
“No. You looked like you were ready to attack.”
“I should have punched him out.”
Averting her eyes in shame, she gazed up the sidewalk lined with shops and stores. “You were so aggressive, so in his face. I was really afraid you were ready to hit him.”
“I should have punched him in the head or face; he was so accusatory.”
“Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, lost in thought.”
“Are you trying to tell me he’s not to blame? He was practically accusing you of trying to end your own life, stepping in front of the moving bus.”
“Why were you so in his face, arguing and fighting? The driver had enough trouble operating the bus.”
“That’s exactly the problem; he should concentrate on driving, not making accusations. We paid the fare. What business does a bus driver have trying to blame my babe?”
“Please don’t call me your babe; I’m no longer your babe. You need to understand we are no longer boyfriend-girlfriend, whatever the past.”
They walked along Eglinton Avenue West, past barbershops, hair salons, and a jerk chicken restaurant, whose placard sign said, “Get Jerked Inside,” searching for the café Caffeinism, where they planned to meet her father.
“And if what the bus driver said is true? He sounded like a psychologist, an expert on human behaviour. He must have read my mind. They say Toronto has more PhDs’ and medical doctors driving taxicabs and buses because they can’t get recognition for their foreign credentials.”
“You mean you’re trying to kill yourself by throwing yourself in the bus?”
“No, no, no. I just read an article in the newspaper about commuters throwing themselves in front of streetcars and subway trains. It scared me. Now when I’m waiting for a bus or streetcar I get frightened and freeze. Or when the subway train is roaring into the station I panic, I’m paralyzed.”
“Maybe you should get some help.”
“Help from who?”
“You’re asking me? You’re supposed to be the smart one. Think: a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a social worker, a counselor. Come on: enough talk. These bus drivers make me angry. Let’s go see your Dad.”
They strode along Eglinton Avenue West eastwards from the Ossington bus to the café.
“I should warn you, my father’s self-taught. When he was a teenager, he dropped out of high school and moved to Toronto. Then he moved back to Red Lake, but he’s always been a big reader and a fan of book learning. He also tries too hard—to speak precisely. If someone uses contractions, or doesn’t speak in complete sentences, he thinks it’s evidence of some kind of inferiority. He’s afraid people will think he’s a hillbilly, or a country music fan, which deep down he is.”
Durrell snorted, commenting, “Caffeinism, that’s an odd name for a café.”
“It’s the condition you get when you drink too much coffee, consume too much caffeine.”
“That’s great. We’re meeting your father at a café where he’s wired on caffeine, and he’s packing a pistol. Did I hear correctly: did you actually say he’s bringing a gun?”
“Yes. He’s got this handgun or revolver he got from an American. When I was in elementary school, a Vietnam war vet, dressed in camouflage, came to fuel up at Dad’s store in Red Lake. After the trolling motor for his bass boat broke down, this tourist wanted someone willing to sell or trade. Dad swapped a small used outboard motor for the handgun.”
Durrell shook his head, keeping ahead, as they walked the short distance through the Jamaican-Canadian neighbourhood to meet her father at his favourite café on Eglinton Avenue West, near the house basement apartment, which he rented from an aged homeowner. Her father grudgingly brought the money, the only cash he had available, he said later, but he didn’t mention anything about bringing a gold bar, in a large duffle bag, which weighed heavy in his hand. Lisa was uncertain if his actions were premediated, or if he even yet decided whether he should endow her with what she suppose might only be called an inheritance or a legacy, or if he brought along the precious metal to simply show off. Salvatore recognized her as soon as she entered the café, but, even though Lisa requested the meeting because she needed the money, she didn’t acknowledge him, and she supposed he must have reluctant to meet anyone. He didn’t even recognize him beneath his long curly greying hair and his thick unruly beard, when he was usually clean-shaven, with his head shaved bald. Durrell walked into the café behind Lisa and took a seat at a nearby table after she ordered a coffee for Durrell and latte for herself, while she overheard her father order pistachio ice cream and espresso.
When she finally spotted her father, forcing herself to smile, joined him at the table. “You’re living in Toronto now?” she asked. She knew her father loved the city, with which he first became enamoured as an awestruck teenager. After he dropped out of high school in Red Lake, he argued violently with his father, called him a racist, and ran away on the passenger train to Toronto. Later, after he inherited his father’s business, he constantly talked about moving back to the city and enrolling as a mature student at a college or university.
“I’m hiding away in Toronto for the present time, and haven’t decided whether I’ll move permanently,” Salvatore said.
“But you can’t just walk away from your business,” Lisa said.
“I already have,” Salvatore said. “The convenience store and gas station can run itself, for the time being.”
“But I thought you were thinking of buying another convenience store and gas bar in Ear Falls.”
“Your mother made any expansion plans economically unfeasible.”
“My mother? She’s your wife.”
“Do we need to go through this again?”
“So you two have broken up again?”
“If you actually took the time out from your busy day and preoccupied life to talk to your mother, you’d know she and I aren’t a couple. We’re separated for probably the same reason you haven’t talked with your mother for so long.”
“I don’t think the reasons are that simple. Do you have to be so cynical about everything and everybody?”
“Yes and no. But I even brought a gun. Once again I’ve found it necessary to carry a concealed weapon.”
“Necessary? This isn’t roustabout Texas or even the bush of Northwestern Ontario; this is cosmopolitan Toronto, in multicultural Canada. Do you realize the kind of trouble you can get into carrying around a concealed weapon?”
“Lisa, I’ve been a convenience store operator and owner, and I know the kind of trouble I need to avoid. The last time I defended myself with a loaded sidearm and held an armed robber at bay the police said nothing and chose not to even mention the handgun in reports.”
“I think you’re going insane.”
Her father gulped his coffee and went to the counter for another espresso. “I must be going soft in the brain—agreeing to give you more money.”
“Look at it as an investment—in my education, my future.”
“Whatever the money is for—”
“Did you bring the money?”
“Yes, I brought the money and I brought the handgun.”
“A handgun!”
“Lisa, I’ve met a handsome young man.” He motioned to the barista behind the counter of this café, brewing espresso, grinding beans, filling the air with the aroma of fine coffee grinds. “He always works alone, he’s happy to work alone. I come here regularly: he knows how I love my espressos and cappuccinos. He’s taken a liking to me and even invited me to his family’s home in Jamaica.”
Salvatore stood up, reached over the counter, and kissed the slender man on the lips. The barista warned him about getting physical with him on the job. Shocked, appalled, outraged, she couldn’t believe this flaunting of conventions and disregard and disrespect for her mother: her father kissed a young man, whom he treated as a woman. Distracted with anger, needing time to process this information, she also needed to discuss the matter thoroughly with the only man she felt she could trust with this revelation: Durrell. But she said nothing and her face was a mask.   
“This is a fine, remarkable, brave young man. He manages the café all by himself even in the middle of the night. I wish I employed a worker like her to run my store.”
“Why did you bring your handgun?”
“Because I brought the money.”
“So bringing a revolver will protect you?”
“Do you remember the calibre?”
“Nine millimetre, I think.”
“I’m glad you remembered the cartridges. It’s an M1911, a single-action, semi-automatic.45 calibre pistol. Maybe you’ll inherit this pistol someday. The handgun is from the Vietnam War, even though the design is based on the original First World War model. I got this beauty from an American tourist, a Vietnam war veteran, who couldn’t repair his broken boat motor. I traded him an outboard motor for the pistol so he’d finish enjoying his fishing trip. He never experienced such excellent lake trout and pickerel fishing.”
“Dad, you didn’t bring cash, did you?”
“Unfortunately, after debating with myself, and you don’t want to hear what I argued, I did.”
“I can’t believe you. You brought twenty thousand dollars in cash?”
“Slightly more. That’s about all I have left in cash. You said you needed ten thousand dollars for tuition and ten thousand for room and board for a year. That sounds like more than what the average student needs, but who am I to argue, even though I want to dispute and debate this: it’s not as if you’re entitled to any inheritance now, and the money I’ve invested in your education so far has had zero returns. I wonder why, instead of giving it to you, I don’t use my money for my own education. I suppose my parenting instincts kicked in again. Make no mistake: I do genuinely want you to succeed in life and, if you think you need more education to attain that goal, I’m enough of a risk taker to try to help again. After all, it doesn’t look like anybody else is willing to look after you.” Her father glared at Durrell, as if her former boyfriend was somehow responsible. “Anyway, the money is from your grandfather’s safe.”
“Granddad’s safe? As in the safe you refused to open for years, the safe you never wanted to open because it had sentimental value?”
“Yes. What were you expecting?”
“How about a bank draft.”
“If that’s the case, I would have transferred the money to your bank account from mine.”
“Well, why didn’t you simply transfer the money?”
“Because my personal and corporate bank accounts are frozen.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your mother engaged in certain actions with tax authorities, divorce lawyers, and family courts, which resulted in me having difficulty accessing my own funds and business accounts. She took this action for the sole purpose of enriching herself.”
“I thought it was called separation, as in a divorce settlement and alimony. Anyway, you sound like a lawyer.”
“Funny you should mention lawyers. Your mother said I should apply to university as a mature student and attend Osgoode law school. She says she’s going to York University to become a teacher. When I visited the campus and discovered Osgoode is affiliated with York University, I had to ask myself why she wanted me so near. Regardless, the consequences of her actions are the same, so I needed to open the safe.”
“You are talking about grandpa’s safe. I thought that massive safe had so much sentimental value you never, ever wanted to open it, not until you reached some special milestone, like retirement or selling the business.”
“That time arrived, but I couldn’t remember the combination number. Then, when I was ready to blow the safe sky high, I remembered I wrote the numbers on the back of a snapshot of your grandfather and I fishing. I stored the Polaroid picture in a reinforced cash box I dumped and buried in the outhouse at camp. So I had to dig through a composting shit pile just to get the combination number. Happy?”
“That is insane.”
“Your mother left me no choice. All the cash I could access was stored in that safe and is now in this duffel bag.”
“That is crazy.”
“That’s why I brought the handgun.”
“You mean you flew all the way to Red Lake to get the cash from grandpa’s safe?”
“I took the train to Red Lake Road and your mother gave me a ride to Red Lake, so she could vent and direct more of her animus and anger at me. Purging all these negative emotions, I guess, was therapeutic for her. The trip gave me the perfect excuse to return to my adopted hometown for the Canada Day long weekend. I checked up on my business and the house and cabin and dug through the shit pile in the outhouse. I drank Diet Coke at the Legion and drank coffee at the Tim Hortons, even if no-one wanted to join me.”
“You ransacked the same safe grandpa had when he was robbed by the two gold miners who were fired—”
“They weren’t fired or laid off—they were on strike, locked out of the mine, and broke. They didn’t even have money to buy their babies food and diapers.”
“These are the same guys who tried to rob grandpa.”
“Years ago, before you were born.”
“Then it’s blood money.”
“It’s money your grandfather earned and kept in the safe after he was robbed and became paranoid and stopped trusting anyone, including the bank. By the way, before she left, your mother took one of the two four hundred ounce gold bars from the safe. Apparently, she remembered the combination number on the safe. That gold bar she took from me, which I inherited from my father, is hidden in some safety deposit box in Winnipeg, but she refuses to disclose the precise location. Read the business pages and check the price of an ounce of gold for an idea of the figures involved.”
Following the conversation closely, with amazement, Durrell asked, “Well, if there are two gold bars, where’s the second?”
“That’s none of your business,” Salvatore snapped.
“This is the money from the safe that grandpa refused to open when they robbed his store at gunpoint.”
“With a sawed off shotgun, no less.”
“Instead of opening the safe and handing them the money, he somehow locked them in the office and set the store on fire.”
“Even I have trouble believing he deliberately set his store on fire. Either way, the robbers were roasted alive in the office from the fire. They couldn’t even identify the victims of the blaze from their charred remains and what was left of their teeth and dental records. Then so-called Indian agents from the federal government, which had their medical records, refused to cooperate with the provincial police and wanted the RCMP to get involved, but the Mounties had no jurisdiction. This happened during the sixties. The two robbers were actually respectable members of a nearby reservation. One was actually a native American who didn’t recognize the border with Canada and dodged the draft when the US Army recruited him to fight in Vietnam. Later, he tried to return home to visit a dying family member on a reservation in Minnesota, but was nabbed at the border in International Falls. He did a tour of duty in Vietnam with the US Marines, and was awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for rescuing pilots at Khe Sanh. After he received an honorable discharge, he decided to return to Canada. The other, from the Pikangikum reservation near Red Lake, even received a citation after he rescued American tourists from drowning when their boat got caught in the current and flipped in the rapids—it was even in the local newspaper. Good country people, they might say in the American South, but they were totally broke. The gold miners were on strike against the company for too long, endless months, and they didn’t even have money for bread, milk, and diapers for their babies. But they picked the wrong storeowner to rob. Your grandfather was disgusted with being ripped off. Besides, when these two striking miners robbed the store they seemed a bit intoxicated and probably weren’t thinking straight because your grandfather tricked them and escaped his business office. He had an emergency plan for whenever he was robbed, but instead of calling the police or fleeing he went straight to the gas pumps and filled a jerry can. He didn’t go to the police because he was tired of dealing with them. He didn’t like their attitude, obstinacy, and what he perceived as their incompetence; they never solved any break-ins or burglaries or apprehended any motorist who sped away from his gas station with a full tank without paying. They didn’t believe him and always treated him with mistrust, skepticism, and disdain. Can you blame the police for being weary of his calls: some miner or trapper on a bender intoxicated at his store; a single mom or teenager shoplifting; a deadbeat dad passing bad checks? He also wasn’t liked by the pillars of the community, the business owners, and property owners who ran for municipal council to influence community affairs in their favour and benefit financially, lining their own wallets and purses, instead of serving the townspeople. Conflict of interest wasn’t in their vocabulary, he complained at town council meetings.
“Anyway, he was so disgusted with the town’s authorities and institutions and being disrespected and a constant victim of crime he took matters into his own hand. Taking the initiative was something he believed in firmly, along with self-help and self-reliance. He took a jerry can, filled it with gasoline at the gas pumps, returned to his business office, stuck the nozzle in the mail slot in the reinforced steel door, and poured the gasoline. Then he lit the match while the robbers shouted, threatened, and pounded the locked door. There’s one interesting detail to this story my father liked to add. Apparently, the Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman made a sales trip through town and sold a truckload of sets of encyclopaedias to those gold mining families, who were big on education. Your grandfather was also an autodidact—I guess it runs in the family. He purchased a set of encyclopaedias, planning to read from A-Z while he minded the store. So the wall was lined with boxes of encyclopaedias he agreed to store until the buyers picked them up. All that fine paper only accelerated the fire and flames exploded like napalm. The whole building and the fuels pumps burned to the ground, but it was his store. He was so fed up and disgusted he didn’t care. He had insurance, but he never expected the insurer would pay. In fact, they sent a vice-president from Winnipeg to Red Lake to hand him a check for a hundred thousand dollars. There was a grip and grin picture of the check presentation, featured prominently on the front page of the weekly community newspaper. The fire and killings, which were ruled self-defence, only enhanced his standing in the community, but some local liberals, city slickers, and residents of the reserve accused him of racism. They didn’t know he could have held a status card; he was a native by today’s standards, a half-breed by the standards of the sixties, half Ojibway Indian and half Scots, born on the reserve of Lac Seul and raised in nearby Sioux Lookout, the son of a Hudson’s Bay store manager and a native seamstress.”
“I hate to digress,” Durrell interjected, “but how does somebody with a Scots and Indian background end up with a name like Salvatore?”
“I was born and raised on the Lac Seul reservation, near Sioux Lookout. The doctor who delivered me worked at the Sioux Lookout General Hospital, but the nurse there said not to bother, by the time the ambulance drove to Lac Seul reservation, my mother would be dead trying to deliver me. I was a breech birth, my legs coming out first, the umbilical cord tangled, and mother was wracked by seizures and extremely high blood pressure. The doctor came from an Italian background, though, and believed in that outdated concept famiglia. So he cycled from Sioux Lookout to Hudson, a distance of fifteen miles, with his medicine bag strapped to his bicycle. Thirsty, he stopped at the liquor store, the only store open in Hudson, and bought a bottle of wine, alcoholic beverages being the only drink readily available, unless he sipped the cool clean water straight from the lake at the roadside. He cycled down a long bush road to the reserve, took a canoe with a fishing guide across the lake, and helped carry it on his shoulders across a portage. Then they paddled across a bay in Lac Seul to my mother’s cabin in Whitefish Bay. He helped deliver me and saved mom’s life and, by the same token, mine. The doctor’s name was Salvatore and naturally it became mine. I’ve heard the story many times, with only slight variations, and I’ve heard similar stories involving others he cured and rescued I’ve trouble disbelieving them. They should erect a statue of him in town.”
“Anyway, it sounds like more than grandpa went off the deep end,” Lisa said.
“People in town didn’t understand your grandfather always thought, as a matter of survival, about looking out for number one, and that was him. In fact, if you paddled together and the canoe flipped, with only one lifejacket or buoy, he would beat you with his fists or the paddle for it, unless you were a woman or child. That’s almost how the struggle ensued when he drowned.
“The money and gold bar in the burnt safe survived, of course; the safe was fireproof. He left the safe in the office of his new store, which he rebuilt on the same site, but he never disturbed the safe or its contents, a reminder of that horrific event, which he came to regret, especially when he learned his assailants were striking gold miners with children. Yes, one dodged the draft but later did a tour of duty in Vietnam and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star, but he learned the hard way a war medal can’t buy you groceries. Still, your grandfather rebuilt the store from scratch, bigger and better than the original, with the very first upright freezer in Red Lake.”
“Then this is blood money.”
“This is legitimate business profit and your grandpas’ savings.”
“Then grandpa died in a boating accident.”
“No, he got in a wrestling match with the fathers of one of his girlfriends from the nearby reserve. The old man wanted your grandfather to support the woman and her child.”
“So philandering runs in the family,” Durrell commented, offhand.
“I will not dignify that comment with a reply. Your grandfather and the woman’s father were drinking beer and wound up fighting over the identity of the child’s father. The boat rocked and a struggle ensued. Dad tripped, fell overboard into the lake, and drowned.”
“Then this is blood money.” Lisa reached into the duffel bag and expressed amazement at the worn, faded, aged Canadian currency her hands felt, including bundles of one, two, and even twenty-five dollar bills. “This cash—it’s old twenties and fifties, even vintage twos and ones.”
“Those old bills are probably collector’s items. If you found an honest and upright coin collector, you might be able to sell those one and two dollar bills and the other vintage denominations for a sizeable profit.”
“How am I supposed to take this to a bank? They’ll be suspicious; this money is worn and faded.”
“Just tell them the truth. You can pull it off; you are taking acting classes at Ryerson, aren’t you? I don’t even know if I can believe you anymore. Maybe you’re acting right now. Before you were studying journalism at Humber College, then television and radio broadcasting at Seneca College, then psychology at York University—”
Durrell, sitting across from their table, looked wide-eyed at the exchange and the barbs traded between father and daughter. As he listened closely as they continued to quarrel, he eyed the duffle bag, which felt suspiciously heavy. Did he have a shotgun or rifle in the bag as well?   
“I actually studied social work at York University.”
“I can’t say your experience has instilled much faith on my part in the value of postsecondary education.”
“I want to find a fulfilling career, and Ryerson has the best acting school in Canada.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Dad!”
“I’m worried this money is just for drugs, and I could use the money myself. I’m debating with myself over whether I should go to college or university as a mature student.”
“Dad, how can you talk that way? You’re just trying to annoy and anger me. You know I don’t do drugs and earned a diploma and degree already.”
“Then why aren’t you working?”
“I had to go through a gruelling admissions process to get admitted to Ryerson, which has the best acting school in Canada.”
“Come on, Lisa, let’s just leave.” Sitting at the table across from the quarrelling duo, Durrell reached for the duffel bag.  
“Just wait a second, who the hell are you?”
“Dad, meet my friend, Durrell, like you and me, a small town boy from Cobalt, in Northern Ontario.”
“We’re from Red Lake, in Northwestern Ontario, the gold mining capital of the world, by way of Sioux Lookout and Lac Seul, and none of us are kids,” Salvatore countered.
“His grandfather played hockey for the Cobalt Silver Kings and his father played for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Durrell originally moved to Toronto to play junior hockey for the Oshawa Generals.”
Durrell gazed at Lisa as if she mentioned the unspeakable, the unmentionable. Meanwhile, Salvatore decided he wasn’t looking or speaking with Durrell and wouldn’t address him directly. “So I’m supposed to be awed by his lineage, playing hockey for the Oshawa Generals.”
“I actually quit the Oshawa Generals after only a season because they wanted a goon and a hitman. I wanted to help make plays, score goals, puck handle assists, and got tired of being bullied. I wanted to play hockey, not act as an enforcer, using my ice time to beat up an opposing player the coach targeted, like my father for the Leafs.”
“If his father played hockey for the Maple Leafs, why haven’t I heard of him? I’ve lived in Toronto before; I’ve been a Leafs fan and followed the team closely at times.”
“My father was an enforcer—he only played a few NHL games before he got in a fight in a bar in Montreal and accidentally killed a man.”
“Dad, you just want to argue with us.”
“Yes, I’m upset with you. You’re my daughter, and I want to help you pursue your career as a professional student, even though it against my better judgement, but money is tight. Now you want to make me broke and more self-sacrificing. I’ve already seen enough martyr parents in my Red Lake store; I used to sell them smokes all the time. Cigarettes was their medication; they didn’t have Prozac then. Sometimes they’d ask me advice or needed to talk. If I was giving advice now I’d say, ‘If they want to go to school, let they flip burgers for tuition money, and, see if you, a high school dropout, can get your GED or some formal schooling yourself, before you’re laid off from the gold mine.’”
Durrell seized the duffle bag, which felt surprisingly heavy, particularly since he expected it only contained cash.
“And he isn’t taking the money, friend or not.”
“I’d feel more comfortable with a bodyguard like him, if I have to handle so much cash.”
Salvatore pulled out the revolver from the inside breast pocket of his leather jacket and vaguely waved the muzzle in the direction of his daughter’s strongly built friend, in denim, a jean jacket and pants, and running shoes. “You told me this was for college.”
“Yes, but, if you gave me a bank draft, or even transferred the money to my account, I wouldn’t have to haul around cash. Hello, it’s 1996, there are computers and telephones.”
“Lisa, you understand your mother’s desire to ruin me financially and take every single penny I ever earned. It’s led to frozen and flagged bank accounts, so I’m forced to resort to schemes and money laundering to protect my own assets.” Her father waved the revolver, like a wild man, out of control; he figured intimidation might work in his favor.
“No, this money isn’t for him or any drug deals.” Salvatore gestured with the gun at the young man he perceived to be an interloper. When the barista saw the pistol, he forgot their friendship and intimacy with Salvatore, and ducked beneath the counter. Governed by fear, he sensed conflict brewing out of control, strong emotions seething beneath the surface, with no sign of de-escalation. The barista decided against calling the police, since he was young, black, and gay, and, in his experience, if there was a young black man the police were more biased against, it was a young gay black man. He put his hair, braided in cornrows, beneath the hood of her sweatshirt. He unbolted the back door and fled through the caged barricade to the back alley, with its barred windows, garbage bins, dumpsters, containers of recyclables, and graffiti cement and block walls.
 Expecting minimal resistance, Durrell lunged at Salvatore. Then she threw herself between the two, trying to control the fight and struggle, but Salvatore’s finger pressed the grooved trigger. As he struggled with Durrell, she tried to break through the testosterone and pull the young man and middle-aged man apart, a bullet shot cracked the confines of the café and grazed Lisa’s arm before exploding, ricocheting, smashing a display of carafes, coffee percolators, mugs.
“I can’t believe it,” Lisa sobbed, in shock, as she gripped her bloodied arm. “My father shot me, my own father shot me.”
Salvatore snapped insistently, gasping and hissing fiercely through his clenched teeth, “Accidentally, accidently.” The two continued to wrestle and struggle, with Durrell grabbing his arm and shoulder, grappling with his forearm, and twisting Salvatore’s wrist. He struggled with him for control of the sidearm and turned the muzzle sideways, effectively aiming the revolver, at Salvatore’s torso. A shot exploded from the sidearm clenched in Salvatore’s trembling, weakening hands, around which Durrell’s stronger hands intertwined and locked. The bullet struck her father full force and at point blank range in the chest. Salvatore staggered around the café towards the counter and stumbled until he gripped the doorway, then collapsed against a wastebasket and utility pole bordering the sidewalk and narrow boulevard of Eglinton Avenue West. Astounded at the madness and rage that exploded into gunfire, Durrell seized the duffel bag, which he found suspiciously heavy. Upon examining her pale arm, he saw the bullet had grazed the flesh. When he saw the superficial nature of the injury, he tried to clean the wound with paper napkins, which he took from the dispenser, beside the packets of sugar and the bottles of honey, cream, and milk. He seized Lisa’s hand and forced her along, as she tried to check on the condition of her father. Dragging her along, he fled in a panic along the sidewalk of Eglinton Avenue West. Carrying the leather duffle bag, slung by a braided belted strap over his shoulder, he moved quickly, in a fright. Lisa worried about the condition of her father, as they fled, hurrying along the sidewalk. Durrell moved ahead, dragging her along Eglinton Avenue West, cursing, saying he never intended for any violence to occur, he hadn’t even wanted to join her in meeting her father because he knew her character and knew the encounter would turn confrontational. Some object in the leather bag bounced against Durrell’s side, hurting him. He wondered if the old guy stashed an old fashioned brick in the bag for protection. 
Durrell impatiently urged Lisa to hurry, as they fled past the beauty salons and barbershops, a few of which were open at the late night hour. Durrell said first they should catch a cab and then considered public transit a better idea. Frenzied, he impulsively said the safest choice might be catching the next 63 Ossington at the Oakwood bus stop, before blending in with the crowds of commuters in Eglinton West station. Lisa realized the pair were fugitives, escaping the scene of violence, eluding capture by law enforcement. She flung his hand away as he tried to guide her across the white lines on the black asphalt to the bus shelter at Oakwood and Eglinton Avenue West. 
He crossed the traffic intersection ahead of her, beckoned to her, and urged her to hurry from where he stood near the bus shelter. Worried over the fate of her father, she was distracted and gazed down in the direction of the cage, along Eglington Avenue and the sidewalk, cluttered with folded cardboard boxes, and garbage bags and bags of recyclables, where her father collapsed, where, she feared, her father might be dead or gravely injured, struggling to stay alive. When Durrell shouted at her to hurry, she was in the midst of a grim pause, and his loud voice aroused her from her torpor and distraction. She strode through the remaining distance in the crosswalk against a red light. When she saw the taxicab speeding into the intersection, she froze in her footsteps on the painted crosswalk, hypnotized by the headlights, ignoring traffic and pedestrian lights.
She stared into the eyes of the cabdriver, who, behind schedule, sped ahead to catch up on lost time. Worried about getting fired after he appeared late for his graveyard shift two nights running, the cabbie drove in a frantic hurry, obliviously bearing down on her. In the middle of the intersection, on a red light, before she reached the west side of the intersection, she was struck on the crosswalk by the speeding taxicab. Immobile, she lay on the asphalt. Durrell stood over her immobile body and tried to rouse some sign of life. The cabdriver, sought by immigration officers and scheduled for a court hearing, worried about being questioned by police while he was high on marijuana. He also feared deportation to Jamaica, where he feared a Kingston syndicate might target him for missing hashish he smuggled through Pearson Airport into Toronto. The cabbie thought he saw someone lending her aid, fled back into his orange and green taxi, and sped away.
Durrell stood over her prostate form on the street. While he didn’t want to leave her, she looked as if she was dead. He figured he could do nothing to help, and, if he contacted the authorities, didn’t want to face a murder rap when he tried to defend himself. As a colored man, he was tired of being scapegoated and figured he stood no chance against the police and the judicial system. He needed to look after himself for a change, instead of someone like Lisa. He took the duffle bag to the pay telephone outside the takeout pizza and chicken wings restaurant. He called 911 and asked for an ambulance to be sent to the intersection for a serious traffic accident. Then he put the duffle bag over his shoulders and hurried down Oakwood Avenue. When Durrell reached the next intersection, he saw a northbound public transit bus coming. He quickly crossed the street at the pedestrian crosswalk, and caught the bus, which drove north on Oakwood along its route past the accident scene, where a crowd of concerned motorists and pedestrians gathered and tried to help. The city public transit bus inched along its route on Eglinton Avenue West towards the subway station. Further down the avenue, cruisers, sirens screaming, lights flashing, rushed and swarmed the scene of the shooting from the nearby Metro Toronto Police, 13th Division headquarters. Durrell feared the bus would be stopped, but the driver only paused intermittently for congested traffic and the bottleneck of police cruisers before resuming his cruise along the usual route, along the avenue and into Eglinton West subway terminal. Durrell hurried down the escalators to the southbound platform and anxiously paced on the brick floor beneath the lights and low industrial ceiling for the subway train. The next train transported him downtown, and he briskly strode to his apartment, which he locked with the dead bolt and chain. Short of breath, sweating, his eyes bloodshot, wide, he dumped the contents of the duffel bag on his mattress and stared intently at the stacks of worn cash, with its musty smell. In amazement, he started counting the vintage Canadian currency, and then abandoned the effort, as his exasperation with the small denominations, the one and two dollar bills, and the sums and numbers grew. Then he gazed at the shiny, glistening brick, a gold bar, stamped four hundred ounces, Royal Canadian Mint, fine gold 999.9.
“400 ounces, Royal Canadian Mint, fine gold 999.9,” he whispered, almost afraid he’d be overheard. He lifted and raised the gold bar like a dumbbell, gauging its weight and heft, flexing his muscular arm. “400 ounces!” he whooped. “Royal. Canadian. Mint. Fine. Gold. 999.9.”
Born and raised in rural Cobalt, in Northern Ontario, he struggled to find his niche in Toronto. Earlier, he quit the Oshawa Generals in a storm and a fury, smashing and breaking a batch of brand new hockey sticks in the dressing room. He dropped out of Saint Michael’s College, after revealing he had an affair with a teacher, subsequently forced to quit. He worked at a succession of odd jobs, including telemarketing, pizza delivery, and door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, but now he figured he was home free and believed he made it. Maybe he could start a fitness gym, attend community college to train for a trade like welding or electrician or a paramedic, or try to apply as a mature student to university.
He literally slept with the gold and cash, but, plagued with doubt and guilt, his conscience started to nag him. He struggled to comprehend his rationale for abandoning Lisa. Because she dumped him? He learned through articles in the Toronto Sun newspaper, which he picked up in a subway train, a tabloid he usually avoided because he thought the coverage, especially the salacious crime reports, was sensationalistic, biased, and right wing, she was being treated in the trauma ward of the Mount Sinai Hospital. Her father barely survived the gunshot injury to the chest. In critical condition, Salvatore was being treated in the intensive care unit of Mount Sinai Hospital.
He called the hospital and asked the switchboard operator. “Are they under police guard?”
“Why would they be under police guard?”
He called the nursing station at the intensive care unit and asked the nursing shift supervisor if Salvatore would survive.
“The patient is in critical condition in the intensive care unit. You tell me.”
Calling the main switchboard gain, he asked to speak with Lisa. Over the telephone in her private room her father’s insurance company provided she insisted Durrell visit. She tried to reassure him he wasn’t under suspicion; the police figured she was the victim of a hit and run driver and suspected his father was attacked by a random mugger, possibly a crack addict. The only crime for which he was guilty in her mind was cowardice, but make no doubt about it, Lisa told him over the telephone, he was a coward.
Stung by her words, he decided he needed to confess, come clean with her, and assume responsibility for his actions. He decided to surprise her by returning the gold bar. After he asked her a few vague, but probing questions, he assumed she still hadn’t the slightest knowledge of the gold brick. He placed the gold bar in her father’s dufflebag, which impressed him even more when he realized it was made mostly from genuine leather. He also stuffed the larger denominations of worn, aged cash, which he neatly counted and bundled with elastic bands from the office supplies store across the street from his apartment, into the bag, which had adjustable straps and buckles that allowed it to be carried as a backpack.
Durrell also brought Lisa chocolate and flowers, which he bought from the office supplies store. She felt he must have yearned for penance and repentance; she couldn’t remember the last time he gave her, or anyone, chocolate and flowers.
Carrying the duffle bag over his broad shoulders, Durrell took the subway train downtown. After he climbed the stairs and escalator out of Dundas subway station, he strode along University Avenue towards Mount Sinai hospital. As he walked south, a thin reedy young man with a cigarette stuck between his teeth, sprinted towards him at a furious pace. Instead of noticing he was running straight towards him he admired his athletic prowess and was distracted by how graceful and skilled a sprinter he appeared, even while he was smoking a cigarette. The reedy man collided with him and seized the duffle bag. Durrell went crashing into a newspaper vending machine, and scraped his knee on the pavement, but he quickly recovered his senses, tossed the chocolates, kicked aside the flowers, and went after the young man running with Lisa’s father’s duffel bag. He chased his assailant along University Avenue, down Dundas Street, through Chinatown, but by the time he reached Queen Street West, he lost sight of him. He searched the alleys and back streets around the broadcast studios, shops, restaurants, fashion stores, and cafes near Queen Street West, near University Avenue and as far as Spadina Avenue and the fashion district and Chinatown, but he could find no sign of his assailant or the bag. Originally, he hoped for some reconciliation with Lisa, and redemption and forgiveness, but now he felt all hope was lost, including the gold bar and the cash. He returned to walk back to Mount Sinai Hospital, where they commiserated, and, agnostics and atheists to a T, prayed with a visiting priest for the survival of her father.
 
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

 
            Humming softly as she prepared dinner, Linda Miller noticed the backyard's blooming trees.  Her almost-teenage daughter, Susan, ready to graduate from elementary school, mentioned special things she’d liked:  'after Dad raked fall leaves into tepee-shaped piles, he'd let me jump into them and roll around.  Mom had to get the stuck ones off my sweaters.'
            Linda smiled;  she visualized the scene her daughter's words had set forth. Susan also said she was glad that many wishes made on first twinkling-stars at night really didn't come true because what was wanted at a moment wasn't wanted next day.
            Bob seemed tired as he pushed the key into the deadbolt brass lock.  Susan heard the sound, ran to open the door.  "Hi, Daddy."
            "Hi, princess," he said with a quiet sigh.  This wasn't his usual cheerful hello.  He pulled the long light cord to illuminate the small hall closet space, removed his felt hat straightening its wide grosgrain band, then carefully placed it on the top shelf. Then he hung his coat on a heavy wooden hanger, pulled the cord and the light went out.
            "In the kitchen, honey," Linda called.
            He walked over to her and kissed he with real affection.  "I'm not too hungry, dear."
            "But I have..," she stopped, wiped her hands on the cotton apron, then put the back of her palm against his forehead.  "You don't look well.  What's the matter."
            "Indigestion, I guess.  My chest hurts."
            "Where'd you have lunch?"  She looked at her handsome, thin husband and stared into his light blue eyes.
            "I took a client to Luchows."  He reached out his arms to circle her body.
            "No wonder you have indigestion!"  With an air of righteousness, she knew he'd eaten disagreeable food just to encourage business.
            He smiled at her.  He loved her and knew she loved him with the same caring, friendship, but not the same passion.  She was nurturing and gentle;  he felt as aroused, generally, when he touched her as he had as a groom.  Tonight, however, he felt a heaviness behind his breastbone;  it wouldn't go away.
            "You're right.  I ate wrong."  He stroked the side of her right cheek and went upstairs.  The flight seemed long and he paused midway to lean on the wide wooden bannister.
            "Daddy?  You all right?"  Susan asked.
            "Sure, monkey."  He kissed the top of her head as he went by.  He removed his suit jacket, went to the mirror by Linda's dressing table and studied his face.  His dark straight hair, smoothed down with hair cream, was still in place.  Did he look paler, he wondered?  The large eyes showed fatigue.  He slipped his pants' suspenders down, unbuttoned the ends, took them off.  He bent over to untie his shoes but felt dizzy so he sat on the velvet dressing-table’s bench slowly removing them.
            Susan came in.  "Hi.  Mom says you ate crap for lunch and don't feel well."
            "Come here,"  Bob said gently and cupped his hand around her small face. 
            "Gotta go help Mom," she pulled away, turned, bit her pointer-finger nail and left the room.
            Bob opened the tie knot and slid the silk patterned piece from his neck opening up the shirt’s collar.  He unfastened the top button of his pants to relieve the pressure he was beginning to feel there.  He exchanged his oxford shoes for camel colored leather slippers. "Oh, God," he said to the air, "keep me well so I can take care of my loved ones."  Fear was forming in his head.
            "Honey?"  Linda's voice carried from the kitchen.  "Come down and try some soup."
            "I'll get him," Susan responded.  She took two steps at a time first, found it too uncomfortable to stretch that much right now, ran up the rest.  "Hi.  At your service.  Did you order me the Crane stationery?  In yellow?"
            "Uh, huh," Bob smiled weakly.  "Would I forget?"
            "Nope.  Just wanted to be sure.  Come.  Take my arm.  We'll play old movies Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers."
            "Who'll be Fred Astaire?"
            "Oh, Daddy."
            They got to the dinette.  Soup steam seeped into the air from the rimmed bowls.  It made Bob nauseated.  "Honey.  I'm going to lie on the couch for a few minutes."
            "Call the doctor, Mother," Susan tried to sound grown-up.  "He doesn't act like this unless he is really sick."
            "Garbage for lunch.  He wouldn't eat that at home."  Linda tried to conceal her concern.
            "Just call the doctor."  Susan picked up the black phone.  She rotated the dialer with the receiver still engaged.
            "Don't play with the phone," Linda ordered.  "Come eat, Susan."
            Knowing when to stay out of trouble, Susan obeyed and sipped her soup with a slurping sound trying to keep the small noodles on her spoon.
            "Stay here and eat,"  Linda tossed the linen towel she had hanging over her shoulder.
            "You missed me," wisecracked Susan not realizing her mother was troubled.
            Linda went into the living room.  "Don't move.  Don't even turn on the radio. I'll call the doctor.  Just stay put, honey."
            "I'm concerned about you and Susan should anything happen to me."  Bob's eyes searched her face.  "I know I'm not my father, but he died in his thirties."
            "You're not dying," Linda assured.
            "I love you."  He touched her soft skin.  "I've loved you since the day, when I was eighteen, I saw you on that blind date."
            "I know."  She gestured a loving sign and left to make a phone call.  Within minutes, she returned, "I'll put Susan's  food out and be back.  The doctor said you're too young to have a heart attack and you probably have indigestion from lunch."
            Bob's left arm felt heavy.  He was afraid.  "Monkey," he called faintly.  "I love you. "
            "I love you, too, Daddy."  Susan had strained to hear what was going on in the living room. 
            "Don't you dare argue with me about these vegetables you hate."  Linda put the food on the table, then went into the living room.  "I'm here, honey."
            "I'm frightened for you.  I love you so much...and Susan... and life."  His eyes closed and lungs no longer accepted air.     
            The week was filled with pain and shock.  Little could be done to numb the intensity of either.
            A cotton pique dress was suspended from a hanger that clasped over the door to Susan's room.  Susan hated its shoulder pads.  White flat shoes with ankle straps sat on the floor below the dress.
            Susan talked to her walls.  "Goodbye grade school;  I'm now old."  She touched the mother-of-pearl belt buckle.  It felt cold.  She looked around the room as if she were leaving it forever.  "Guess I'm too old for you," she talked to her Terhune books about dogs.  "But not you, ‘Winnie the Pooh’," she stroked the jacket.  Her eyes found “Stars to Steer By”;  "I'll never be too old for you, either."
            "Are you dressing?"  Linda called.  Her voice was deep and unemotional.
            "Yes. Mom?"
            "What?"
            "Nothing."
            Susan pulled the fragile slip over her head.  "Some difference from the shapeless cotton I wore only a few years ago," she said aloud.            
            "Oh not today," Linda whispered to the air in her bedroom.  "Honey," she reached for empty space holding out both arms, "I miss you."
            Susan viewed the paper telling time-sequence for the day's event.  Luncheon for graduates and their families to follow the ceremony.  Families.  "Half an orphan." She crumpled the paper in her slender hand, then, realizing it, tried to press it back into shape on the maple desk.  She put a dictionary over it for weight.  "Why'd you die, Daddy!"
            Linda appeared in Susan's doorway.  "Need any help?"  Susan noticed how tired and old her mother seemed.  She didn't understand her mother's grief but only truly felt her own.
            "I'm fine," Susan lied.
            "Let me know.”  Fingers moved forward but pulled back.  Physical contact would only start tears and clutching togetherness. 
            "Ma.  Your stocking’s twisted."  Susan noticed and spoke up.
            Linda nodded several times with I-know-but-can't-do-anything-about-it movement.  She walked back into her room.  A brown wool dress was laid out on her side of the double bed;  she still couldn't use the other side even to merely hold clothes.  "I'll manage, honey."  She talked to a spirit she felt within the walls.  "I'll take care of Susan.  You'll be proud."  She lifted the dress.  "Oh, God I miss you.  We didn't get old together;  we didn't even get old yet!"  She turned and looked at the wedding portrait;  innocent eyes met her gaze.  She pressed her lips together and shook her head.  "More innocent of life than I knew," she said to the oils.
            "No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers dirty looks," sing-songed in Susan's head.  "Not really a summer vacation ditty anymore.  High school.  Grown-up.  I'm glad this is the end of elementary."  She raised her arms and the dress fell over her head, into place.  She tightened the belt, then sat on her bench before the triple mirror and parted her hair part very sharply.  "Middle.  That's almost.  Again.  Good."  She pushed the silk flowers into place on either side of her head.  "Wait 'till the teachers see this," she smirked.  Raising one eyebrow, she put on a fake accent: "Dahling!  You are not allowed to wear ze flowers in ze hair."  She giggled a bit.  Then, staring at the aqua flecks in her large grey eyes, she seemed to look beyond the mirror.  "Daddy?  Can you see me?"  Her mood changed and she yelled as loudly as she could "You didn't have to die!"
            "You think he wanted to die?"  Linda understood her daughter's frustration and came running into the room to comfort her.  "Susan, dear, he loved us.  He loved living.  He didn't kill himself.  He died.  He didn't want to die."
            "Well, he changed everything.  He had no right to go away and leave us here."  Susan folded her arms across her chest.  She tapped one white leather shoe with her right foot.  "I'll never forgive him for leaving us."  The tapping got faster.
            Mascara began clumping on Linda's lashes as tears spilled from her sleepless eyes and she tried to embrace Susan.  The tapping foot and clenched arms couldn't yet be halted.
            "I hate you for letting him die.  You didn't call the doctor right away.  You blamed lunch for his chest pain. I hate you." Susan spit out sentences staccato.
            "I didn't let him die."  Linda choked as words came out.  She coughed and continued.  "Nothing could save him.  He had a heart attack and, being young, the muscle had such a strong spasm it caused death.  No one could have saved him.  I did call the doctor," she defended.
            "Doctors are supposed to make sick people better!"  Susan stopped tapping as her foot was getting sore.  She turned her back;  her throat ached as it tried to contain tears from forming in her eyes.
            Sobs emitted from Linda's body.  Her underarms were getting wet. She went into her bathroom, locked the door, sat on the closed toilet seat and cried until she ached.  Then, not wanting to ruin Susan's special day, she washed, removed the mascara that was now blackening both cheeks, and began to re-dress her face and body.
            Susan held both hands over her ears blotting out the sounds her mother was making.  Part of her expected to really see her dad again, and the cemetery and mourning ritual was just some sort of game or test.  She removed the dictionary;  the paper was still wrinkled.  "An old fashioned bouquet will be given to all girl graduates before the procession," she read aloud.  "Girls enter from the left, boys the right, both meet as rehearsed, and pair off to march down the center aisle.  Separate.  Girls seat left. Boys seat right."  She stood upright, smoothed out her dress.
            The ankle straps pulled as she walked around her room.  She loosened the metal fasteners.  On the back of her door, she'd once hung a prayer of thanks for family, health, friendships:  Bless this house, oh, Lord, I pray.  Make it safe both night and day.  Bless....  She tore it from its thumb tacks and placed it in the metal wastebasket.
            Linda re-appeared.  "We are still a family.  Let's graduate." 
            Susan slid her hand into her mother's, squeezed it hard, nodded.  "I'm sorry, Mom.  I just don't know how to deal with this."
            "Me neither, honey."  A sigh left Linda's lips.  "We'll learn together."
 
 
A longer version was published April 1997 Rochester Shorts;  ©1990 Lois Greene Stone

​Morning light filters across the skyline, through the blossoming cherry trees, and onto a cluster of high-rises on the other side of False Creek. Julian Holmes squints, and then shivers and mutters to himself as he wakes on his wooden bench of a bed under the Burrard Street Bridge, where he has fallen asleep the previous afternoon, under the warmth of the spring sunshine. Dew has crept up and settled on his skin beneath layers of clothing, covered with a torn sleeping bag that bears the stains of the past eighteen and a half years. He rolls over, coughs hoarsely, and spits into a rumpled, greying handkerchief. Sitting up, he massages a crook in his neck, stiff from his make-shift pillow of Ulysses, wrapped in his trench coat and folded several times around the thick book. Following his ritual of so many other mornings, upon awakening, he checks the time on his Rolex solar watch. Lucid green liquid numbers flap forward into twenty minutes after six. He automatically makes the conversion from Pacific Standard to Eastern Standard time. Twenty minutes after nine.
 
Julian Holmes daydreams: young again, it is Saturday and he remains in bed as his wife, Pepper, sets about her morning routines. Her mussed auburn hair, spread out on the pillow, a reluctant gesture to rise, tanned legs stepping down onto beige Berber carpet. In her cream silk, with a glowing complexion, she is beautiful before she has even applied any make-up. He watches as she slips out of her nightgown, letting it drop in a circle around her feet. She steps out of it and through an open glass door into the shower, leaving him with the same feeling of unworthiness that is always there—her pedigree evident in every strand of her flawless look as she dresses; the perfect bob, the crisply ironed white blouse tucked tidily inside navy silk pants. Femininity and entitlement that belie every nuance of her character, her graceful movements, her pose as she sits curled on a chair or stands in front of the mirror—a tilt of her head that signals she has been well-protected, well taken care of.
           
It is April, and the morning air is cool. Brightly coloured tulips bloom in wooden tubs in front of the bench where Julian Holmes sits, still shivering. A seagull squawks and lands on a piling next to him, emitting a harsh wail that causes him to start. The seagull drops breakfast down from its beak—a leg of a red rock crab, now pinned under the gull's webbed foot. Pigeons coo in the rafters of the Market building above, and swoop to the ground beneath him, next to the soggy, ragged hems of his pants. They peck at a spray of seeds scattered there in the night by a kind-hearted old woman with a hunched back, a kerchief tied around her head, like a peasant, a thick layer of woollen clothing. Startled by the pigeons, a water rat, hidden until now, lunges out from behind one of the wooden tubs of flowers, skittering down towards the stone break wall under the pilings. Julian Holmes’ gut churns. He rustles through his pocket for a half-eaten donut wrapped in a paper napkin, devouring it in one bite.
 
Julian Holmes had wanted to meet Pepper from the moment he first saw her petite frame bouncing up and down on the diving board of the swimming pool in the back yard at her parent’s cottage. He watched as she stuffed her honey-coloured hair up into her bathing cap, her heart-shaped face studying the water with a look of fixed determination before making her descent. It was a fluke, really, that he was there, that first time, at Muskoka Lake, when he was sixteen and Pepper was fourteen. He was staying at the cottage next door, owned by his mother’s employer, for whom she worked as a secretary.
            Pepper’s father, Ethan Sachs, gregarious, social, and warm, like Pepper, invited his whole family over for a barbeque. It wasn’t a barbeque like his parents would have put on—hamburgers and hot dogs served with Safeway potato salad and coleslaw in the back yard, patterned paper napkins, Chinette plates precariously balanced on their laps in mesh lawn chairs under the maple tree. The table at Pepper’s house was under an awning, elegantly set with silverware on a fine white tablecloth, matching napkins folded and tucked into Waterford crystal goblets, summer floral Wedgwood china, candlelight, wine in decanters, a meal of several courses. Appetizers followed by a feast of fresh lobster flown in from Newfoundland served with lemon and drawn butter, a large prime rib of beef roasted on the rotisserie in the barbeque, cooked to perfection, medium rare and sliced into a thick cut. Vanilla gelato topped with a coulis of fresh local blackberries for dessert.
 
Julian Holmes hungrily reaches out for one of the overripe mangoes sitting in a box in the corner of his shopping cart, shooing away a mass of fruit flies circling above. Breakfast. He bites off the end and sucks the juice and pulp with his teeth, right down to the seed, devouring even the skin, wiping his hands on his filthy coat.
Sounds of life start to stir: dragon boat racers push past at a fast clip on False Creek in front of him, ‘ha, ho, ho’ they shout as they paddle, to increase their energy. The caretaker for the market jangles his keys as he unlocks the doors and the clang of metal roller doors being pulled up by the merchants signal the start of the day.
            Julian Holmes pushes his shopping cart around to the other side of the market, outside the Blue Parrot coffee shop, where he can see inside through the windows. His favourite waitress is there today so he goes in. She smiles in recognition as he digs into the tattered pocket of his grey suit pants, handing her a few coins for a coffee. He smiles at the waitress in return, taking care not to grin too broadly, ashamed of the few teeth he has lost after too many years of negligent dental hygiene.
"Good morning Candice," he says softly, by habit, looking up at her in a daze, fixing his gaze on her face, avoiding looking straight into her eyes.
The waitress looks at him with tenderness, shaking her head from side to side, and points to the name badge pinned to her sweater. 'ALICE,' it says "What am I going to do with you, hon?" Alice asks him. "Every day it's the same thing."
He looks past her, through her, as though he is in another world and she isn't quite there. With his mind slipping, slowly, distractedly, off in his head most of the time, he is lost to the world. Alice watches him walk away, with his nervous tic, and thinks he is beginning to look eccentric. But, from a distance, Julian Holmes still looks like an aristocrat, like any other businessman. His expensive Italian suit and trench coat have lasted all these years, a testament to the quality of the fabric and workmanship at Harry Rosen Men’s Wear. He saunters over to a table by the window with his coffee and smiles, breathing deeply in exuberant anticipation, anxious to get back to his solitary routines, to lose himself in his own thoughts, poring over the next chapter of Ulysses.
 
Pepper Sachs was ‘born with a silver spoon in her mouth,’ as the saying goes, and yet Julian Holmes always felt she was not a spoiled girl. Her parents had raised her well, he thought, and to him her values were more those of a Taoist—one prizing naturalness and simplicity—than of a girl with upper breeding. From the first moment he’d met her, Julian Holmes could see that she was beautiful from the inside out, and he sensed her softness, her gentleness, a bit of an underlying vulnerability in her large hazel eyes. She told him that first night that she believes in and practices the Three Treasures of Taoism: compassion, moderation, and humility. And yet, whenever they were together, her demeanour is one of spontaneity. Julian Holmes saw Pepper as poised and calm, self-possessed, confident. She knows from where she came.
The night they first met, when his family were invited to the Sach’s for dinner, Pepper sat next to him at the dinner table—purposely he’d hoped. When he was confused by all the different pieces of cutlery lined up in a row to the left of his plate, their bare shoulders brushed and Julian Holmes breathed in the fresh soapy scent of her as Pepper leaned in close—her soft, silky hair tickling at his skin—and told him which fork to use for each of the courses. They laughed about it in a way that said neither of them really cared about the forks; it was only an excuse to talk. They smiled warmly at one another and, when their eyes met, Julian Holmes felt her kindness and her depth. He knew then that he already loved Pepper. That she was the girl he wanted to marry.
            And when it finally came to that nine years later it was after a slow and methodical metamorphosis of Julian Holmes. Seeing that his daughter was smitten with a young man in need of some spit and polish, “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear," was all Mr. Sachs pronounced at the time, as he was given to forward and direct disclosure. “But I can see that he is a man who would never hurt you, and so if you wish to accept his proposal, I want you to wait until you are finished university to decide. If you still love him then, I shall give my consent.”
 
Julian Holmes slides Pepper’s photograph (torn a little now, after being handled daily for more than eighteen years), from inside the front corner of Ulysses, and looks at it closely. In the beginning—after he left and felt as though he had jumped through the billboard of life, from living one life one day, to living an entirely different life the next day, on the opposite side of the country—looking at the photograph would cause him to weep. But over the years, the photograph became a source of comfort, one of the rituals he created to get through the days. Sometimes, though, when he looks at her he still cannot believe he let that small girl on the diving board go.
 
As it was, Julian Holmes had caved in and converted to Judaism. Afterwards Mr. Sachs generously agreed to pay for his education, and had actually even chosen the university, Osgoode Hall, where he thought his future son-in-law should go. There was a subtle but persistent pressure to follow Sachs family tradition, to study law, and abandon his life-long passion for literature. A teacher of English or Creative Writing was not the sort of vocation Mr. Sachs had envisioned when introducing the husband-to-be of his only daughter to his cronies at the Bigwin Island Golf Club, or for the father of his soon-to-be conceived grandchildren. And so, in the end, Julian Holmes relented, he buckled in and weakened. What difference did it make anyway, how he earned a living, provided that he had Pepper, always there next to him, to marry and spend his life with? Nothing else mattered.
            Seven intense years at university, followed by long, gruelling hours articling at Sachs & Co. had taken their toll though, both on Julian Holmes’ temperament and on his relationship with his wife. Once their daughter Candice was born, Pepper’s attention was all on the little girl, who was a lovely small replica of her mother, save for his sea blue eyes. Pepper was occupied in the long hours and late nights of motherhood, while he put in twelve-hour days at his father-in-law’s firm. By the end of the day they were both exhausted and a gulf was forming between them. They were living separate lives.
One summer, when Julian Holmes was still articling at Mr. Sachs’s firm, he and Pepper took a two-week holiday at the family cottage. Candice was just a baby then, and Pepper was happily occupied most of the day. For the first time since he and Pepper met, he was able to spend leisurely days by the swimming pool, stretched out on a lawn chair, sipping gins and tonic, reading from the piles of books he’d brought with him. On the last weekend of their holiday he and Pepper sat, sipping wine, enjoying their dinner by the pool, Dave Brubeck’s Time Further Out playing softly on the stereo, Candice in her bed. They were happy. Julian Holmes smiled at his wife. “All I ever wish for are days like this. Where every day feels like another Saturday. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a thousand of these days, a thousand more Saturday’s, just like this one?” He kissed her mouth, gently, and she wrapped her arms around him, the warmth of his back leaning against her, her small soft chin resting on his bare shoulder. She held him for a long time.
 
Julian Holmes pushes his shopping cart outside the market, his coat flapping, and rolls down the hill towards Railspur Alley, past a trail of shattered glass, crumpled paper and cardboard boxes, stopping to check for pop cans and water bottles. Flies circle above the bin where he stops and he waves them away. He reaches in and digs around and his hand pulls out a Coca-Cola bottle, still half-full. He looks around to see whether anyone is watching, then downs the remaining liquid.  He tucks the empty Coca-Cola bottle into the plastic bag, dangling tidily in its appointed corner of his shopping cart, and digs his hand back in. A foul odour rises up as he reaches a paper-wrapped, half-eaten hamburger from The Market Grill. ‘The best hamburgers in Vancouver’ it says on the wrapper. There was a time, in the early days, when this would have caused him to retch. But Julian Holmes scrapes off a circle of green mould from the top of the bun with his blackened thumb nail, and packs the burger into the little Thermos cooler he found next to the garbage bin a few months back.
Over the years Julian Holmes has found many things he is able to make use of—shoes, hardly worn, his very own size, well, perhaps a half-size smaller, but still close enough for a fit, although his big toe now protrudes through the worn leather, exposing a long, yellowing nail and an oozing blister that somehow reminds him of his grandfather. He’d also found a lawn chair with a thick green and grey-patterned cushion, and one wobbly leg, but he’d managed to fix it with the screw driver in his tool kit he’d found underneath one of the yachts hauled out for repairs in the shipyard. In truth he knows deep down that the tools were left there accidentally by a man named Sammy who works in the yard, one who is known to have a particular drinking problem and no doubt went to The Dockside for a beer at lunch time and never made it back, completely forgetting he’d left the tools outside. Or remembering but too intoxicated to return for them, figuring they wouldn’t be missed by his wealthy employer. ‘Well, possession is nine-tenths of the law’ Julian Holmes said to himself at the time.
Mr. Sachs, indeed, had been generous in funding Julian Holmes’ education, and also in providing him with a position at Sachs & Co., at an articling student’s salary. But that is where Mr. Sachs’s generosity ended. Mr. Sachs, it seemed, had his boundaries. Any additional income beyond his base salary, Julian Holmes was required to earn from bringing in his own clients. Mr. Sach’s did, in the beginning, also send a few clients in his son-in-law’s direction. A few of those clients, mostly the smaller ones, stayed with Julian Holmes. But most, sensing his unease and lack of confidence in his own abilities, in time moved elsewhere.
Articling lawyers were expected to use their connections to bring in prospective clients, but Julian Holmes did not mix comfortably with the wealthy, upper-crust society which he had been drawn into. Pepper kindly and gently demonstrated what was expected of him, from what she had seen her father do over the years—of hob knobbing at cocktail parties at the Bigwin Island Golf Club, adhering to proper form and etiquette, playing tennis or shooting nine holes on the golf course—but he just did not seem to fit in; he couldn’t seem to shake the uneasy feeling that everyone else in the room was looking down on him.
           
Opening a black Moleskin notebook—the one he had purchased at Blackberry Books when he first arrived in Vancouver, to log the passage of time—he enters his nine-hundred and sixty-second Saturday, another of the routines Julian Holmes began when his life was unexpectedly altered. In actuality though, the turning of his life upside down should not have been a complete surprise. Deep down he knew that everything that had happened in his life up until that moment lead him to that exact moment when everything changed.
When he finishes his coffee, he packs Ulysses and the black Moleskin safely back into the corner of his Safeway shopping cart and shuffles through the market. Sifting through bags of beaten apples and anjou pears, a box of overripe mangoes and avocados, he selects what he wants, and digs into his pocket for the last of his coins. The cashier waves him away cheerily when he is twenty-five cents short. There is an unspoken comradery to watch each other’s backs. They are taken care of—Julian Holmes and the assortment of other unfortunates who live under the Burrard Street Bridge and spend their days at Granville Island Market.
 
One could say it was Mrs. Pendegrass who was to blame for what happened. Some days, when his emotions, for reasons he sometimes knows and sometimes does not, for instance on certain dates like Candice’s birthday or Christmas Day, Julian Holmes still curses old Mrs. Pendegrass. Mrs. Pendegrass had come to see Julian Holmes at the firm twenty-three years ago now to write up her will. She was only just sixty-three, but had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer, and thus, she knew, had only a matter of months left. Julian Holmes had heard of those stories of old women, widows and spinsters without any heirs, who lived sparsely, then left their fortunes to their cats, or the local Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In comparison to many of the clients at Sachs & Co., $465,000 was by no means a fortune, or even a small fortune for that matter, but it was unarguably a very large sum of money to leave to a paper boy whom you hadn’t seen for almost forty years. Although he had tried his best to convince her otherwise, Mrs. Pendegrass absolutely insisted that her entire estate be left to a paperboy she had known for only a few years. Those few years, though, happened to be the last two years of Mrs. Pendegrass’s marriage.
Her relationship with the paper boy began, innocently enough, on the days he delivered her husband’s newspaper, which was every day except Sunday. On some days Mrs. Pendegrass’s face would be so badly bruised, her lip cut from biting it herself from the force of the blow, that she could not go out in public. And so, one day it began, that Mrs. Pendegrass, who was not very old then and was, in fact, she told Julian Holmes, known for her exceptional beauty, a curse in a way, as this, or the jealousy it ensued in her husband, apparently was the cause of her beatings. At first the newspaper boy ran errands to the grocery store or to the drug store, getting things Mrs. Pendegrass needed. Then the boy seemed to ingratiate himself as Mrs. Pendegrass’s self-appointed guardian, stopping by each day to make sure she was all right, eventually helping her to escape, making the necessary arrangements, taking photographs, letters and information to her lawyer and then, later, to the police. Happily, in the end, Mrs. Pendegrass did manage to escape her abusive husband, and was left, seemingly, feeling indebted for life to the newspaper boy who helped her in her time of need.
Julian Holmes had dutifully drafted and executed Mrs. Pendegrass’s will exactly as she had requested and, in fact, by the time the will was completed, had come to understand and empathize with Mrs. Pendegrass’s unconventional reasoning in the distribution of her assets. And so, it didn’t actually occur to him—that ingenious, fateful germ of an idea—until after Mrs. Pendegrass had died.
           
Julian Holmes heads back to the Blue Parrot after lunch hour, just past one o’clock. There are usually scraps left on some of the tables, and discarded newspapers left behind, and it is very easy to sit down at one of the tables and inconspicuously eat the left-overs, while reading the paper, the other patrons none the wiser. He had cashed in the bottles and cans he’d scrounged this morning and now had enough for a small coffee. Alice slips him a stale muffin, ready to be thrown out, and smiles.
This has become another of Julian Holmes’s rituals. Each day, since the day he’d left, Julian Holmes sits in the Blue Parrot and scours through every newspaper he can find, looking for news about what happened. But none, so far, has ever come. On some days, after too many cups of coffee, he becomes riddled with paranoia, looking this way and that, expecting, at any moment, to be found. These episodes seem to be receding as time goes on, the frequency diminishing with each passing year. For one thing, he reasons, no one would ever recognize him. Eighteen years older, and the trauma having taken its toll, his reddish hair has thinned and, since he isn’t often able to find access to a shower, looks much darker from the oil that accumulates between his washings in the men’s room sink.
When Julian Holmes had spent long, gruelling, twelve-hour days at Sachs & Co., six or seven days a week, sometimes relying upon nothing other than Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts for sustenance, since there was no time to stop and eat, his complexion had turned a pasty white, at times with a greyish look, he'd thought, when he glanced at himself in the mirror under a certain light. Eighteen years of living outside, exposed to the elements, lying on his bench reading in the sun, walking in the cold seeking food and cans and bottles, sometimes feeling the wind on his face at night as he slept, and his colour was now, decidedly, a rough and roguish red.
One of the perks at Sachs & Co. was a weekly trim at a top hair salon—impeccable appearance was a must for the clients—but Julian Holmes’ hair was long now, hanging thinly down to his shoulders. One of his friends under the bridge gave him a pair of Wahl trimming scissors, because he happened to come by two pairs. Well, actually, Julian Holmes traded a pocket watch he brought with him that his friend coveted, in exchange for the scissors. The pocket watch had belonged to his grandfather; he’d inherited it upon his grandfather’s death, and his grandfather’s name was engraved on the back of it—Harley Rupert Holmes. But the watch no longer worked and so what use was it to him now anyway, Julian Holmes surmised, whereas the scissors were definitely of use, and so, in the end, with a slight regret, he’d made the exchange.
Julian Holmes still has the scissors now but has come to prefer his hair longer, so he leaves it that way. In winter it keeps him warmer, in summer, in the bright long days, it protects him from the sun and from being recognized. He knows he is taking a bit of a gamble wearing the suit, that it could be the one tell-tale clue to his identity, especially given that he is well over six feet tall and stands out in a crowd, but he needs it, he needs the suit to maintain his dignity. To feel right, to feel himself. He is the best-dressed person under the Burrard Street Bridge. It is possible there may have even been photographs of him wearing that very suit, provided to the police.
            .
Sometimes, on dark and drizzly nights, or when he suddenly looks up from his book and snaps into consciousness, as if awakening from a lucid, hypnotic trance, wondering where he is, Julian Holmes finds himself staring at families sitting at tables in the market around him, sipping cocoa, laughing, wearing stylish puffy vests and new winter clothes, and he thinks about going back. He will pull out Pepper’s photograph then, and look into her gentle eyes on the faded paper, now all that he has left of her, and he imagines she would never turn him in. That she has been desperately looking for him everywhere over all these years, frantically returning to anywhere they've ever been together, going back over and over again to each place, never remarrying, waiting only for his return. But he knows he could never do that to Pepper. Force her to choose between her father and him, for he knows he can never go back to Sachs & Co. That he would be distrusted, would likely be disbarred. And when he thinks of confronting Mr. Sachs, after all he did for him, paying his tuition through law school, allowing such a ne’r do well to marry his daughter, he becomes agitated. And he returns to his routines then, one of which is methodically cataloging all the books he is reading, forcing his thoughts to the task at hand, in order to divert his thoughts, to expel them, to push the interminable loop, the endless sadness, from his mind.
The very first thing Julian Holmes did when he first arrived in Vancouver was head to Blackberry Books in the Net Loft and buy up as many of the books he’d always wanted to read—'The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Faust, The Odyssey, Iliad, and Ulysses--everything he could find from his list on the shelves in the classics section, in exchange for all of the cash he had in his pocket. For awhile, that first year, he worked part-time at the book store and bought more books each week and even rented a small bachelor apartment so he would have an address, and he got himself a library card. That was another reason Julian Holmes had kept the suit. To him, the library is a sacred place, and he didn’t want his library card to be taken away. He needed to look like he belonged in the library.         
At other times, when he allowed himself to hope in order to go on, in order to give himself something to live for, Julian Holmes imagined that his daughter might come looking for him. She was only six years old when he knew he had to leave, on that Tuesday morning. He rose early, while Pepper was still asleep, and tip-toed into Candice’s room and kissed her face. He’d meant only to kiss her once but after he started he couldn’t stop. Under the light of her Bozo the Clown lamp, Candy looked just like her mother. He found himself, not fully aware of what he was doing, kissing her face again and again. In the end, he took a risk and held onto her, crushing her so tightly against him he feared squeezing the breath from her. Remarkably, she stayed asleep, her head falling limply back, her long soft hair more blonde than Pepper’s, hanging in the air beneath her, catching up in his fingers as he grasped her. He stopped to untangle himself, gently pulling the strands of hair so as not to rouse her, and patted them into place. He laid her back down on the bed, cradling her dainty head in his hand until he could safely roll it onto the pillow. Without looking back, he ran down the stairs to his car and away from there. Julian Holmes knew he was scuppered. He had no other choice.
            Now, he found himself looking for Candice everywhere. Some days—another of his routines and rituals—he will sit outside on the bench at the Kid’s Only Market on Granville Island, and watch the children in the playground, splashing in the wading pool. His eyes seem to have acquired genetically programmed vision to spot only children with blonde hair. He studies them intently, always wondering whether they have come for him, found him, always wondering if it could be her. Year by year Julian Holmes makes the mental adjustments to surmise what Candice would look like now. Today, well, just last month, Candice turned twenty-four on the ninth of March. The thought of this makes him start to cry. These are always the times he feels he can no longer go on as he is, that life itself is not enough. But this is where his routines come in—he pulls the photograph of Candice from his wallet—her school photograph taken in Grade One, and he talks to her. He tells little Candy what he has been reading that day, and he gives her advice based on what he thinks she would need at the age she is now and he feels, somehow, these messages are reaching her. Julian Holmes knows that this would sound a little crazy to anyone he had worked with at Sachs & Co., and to Mr. Sachs himself, for that matter, but the people who share the grass with him under the Burrard Street Bridge understand, and know exactly what he is talking about when he recounts these things to them.
            One day, when Julian Holmes was at the wading pool, watching, looking for Candice, he could remember, quite distinctly, that at that time, Candice would have been nine and a half years old, and he pictured her in his mind’s eye, a little more gangly, freckled, much of the roundness gone from her face. When he looked up and straight into such a face, before he even realized what he was doing, he got up from the bench, leaving and forgetting his shopping cart, with all of his worldly possessions in it, and ran towards that girl, calling Candice’s name. The girl’s mother, who was watching from the other side of the pool, started to run towards him, taking in his shopping cart with her panicked eyes, then looking back again to his face, and the mother began yelling for help. Julian Holmes, of course knowing now that the girl was not Candice, given that her mother was clearly not Pepper, berated himself for the risk he had taken. He ran down the pathway past the lagoons, on up Creekside Road, and continued towards Kitsilano Beach, back to the safety of his place under the Burrard Street Bridge.
For days afterwards Julian Holmes could not sleep for fear he would be woken in the night by the police, but they never came. Staying away from the Granville Island Market, and from the Kid’s Only Market, he prowled at night, without his shopping cart, and with only his plastic bag for cans and bottles, a precaution, should he need to run quickly on a moment’s notice. Weeks went by and nothing happened—the police, if they were called, no doubt believed the woman was an hysteric, afraid of the homeless. The police, by now, already knew who he was and that he had never caused any trouble. However, sobered by his near-miss, he vowed never to be so foolish again and that is when he had come up with the Candice ritual. Of talking to her photograph and telling her things.
           
Shortly before he’d left, with his resources slowly diminishing and the needs of his family, he, and Pepper, and little Candice, continually increasing, the thought had occurred in a most slow and natural sort of way, Julian Holmes’ survival instincts, as it were, breaking into the fore, born from necessity. Indeed, and it seemed, after he’d given it considerable thought, that it was a form of entitlement. $465,000 sitting in a trust account, entrusted to him, Mrs. Pendegrass now having gone the way of her maker and, with no heirs, no children of her own, it was he, Julian Holmes who, in the end, in the final days of her life, was there to console her, even going so far as to visit her in hospice. Yes, in fact, it was at Mrs. Pendegrass’s request that he went, a final tidying up of her affairs, but at least he had gone, had made the seventeen-kilometre trip to Heart House Hospice where she lay dying. And, in that last visit, he had delivered to Mrs. Pendegrass the final source of her comfort when he was able to impart the joyful news of having, after considerable effort, managed to locate Mr. Ryan Noble, the named benefactor in Mrs. Pendegrass’s estate, the paper boy to whom she seemed so morally and emotionally indebted.
It was on this return trip, after his last visit with Mrs. Pendegrass, on the long drive through the country, back to Toronto, when the thought had first crept into his mind. That this Ryan Noble had lost contact with Mrs. Pendegrass over forty years ago and would not even be aware of her current demise or of her death when it happened. And even if he did, he certainly would not be expecting anything or be having any feelings of entitlement about her estate. No, Mr. Ryan Noble would not be aware of her bequest unless he, himself, Julian Holmes, chose to inform him of the fact.
And that same thought occurred to him, less than one month later, when the attending nurse at the Heart House Hospice contacted him to say that Mrs. Pendegrass was gone. “She slipped away, quietly, in her sleep,” the nurse said, “poor thing.” It had been so easy, too easy, ridiculously easy, Julian Holmes supposed, guiltily, being in a position of trust. He who up to that point had never even stolen so much as a dime justified to himself that he had done it for Pepper, and for Candice. That he had been living well beyond his means for years, solely  because he was anxious to please his wife Pepper—who, after being at home with Candice for only a few years had been no longer satisfied and wanted, needed, more, to go back to University, to earn her Masters in Philosophy and Theology—and his well-meaning but demanding father-in-law, it seemed to Julian Holmes, had placed an unending burden of expectation, thrust upon him not of his own choosing, a responsibility that caused him to be in a constant state of anxiety, and fear. One quick transfer of funds, of $465,000 that really belonged to nobody, had ended all of that.
But Julian Holmes’ relief did not last long. The gnawing fear and worry about a shortage of funds was soon replaced by a dark feeling that settled into his mind, a feeling of impending doom, a feeling of foreboding, a lingering question of what would happen if somebody found out. Especially if Pepper found out. And Mr. Sachs. Some days, when a jovial mood seemed to erase the memory for awhile, when he would have some wine, several glasses, or a bottle, or two, Julian Holmes was able to forget, to compartmentalize Mrs. Pendegrass’s $465,000 into a quiet corner of his mind. On other days, his worry seemed to manifest itself into some form of growing sickness, a nausea that would not recede, a quickening of his heartbeat that turned into a form of panic, and he would take in deep breaths to calm himself. After some time, when these episodes of his quickening breath increased, he began to hyper-ventilate, and was unable to stop himself.
Pepper suffered feelings of guilt as she witnessed this, feeling she had pushed her husband into a life to which he was ill suited, to which his temperament and constitution were too delicate, too frail. Pepper’s fussing over him, and watching the fear in her eyes as he paced back and forth around the room in effort to regain his breath only added to Julian Holmes’ duress. Those old feelings of unworthiness reared up, and he pushed Pepper away. In time, her sympathy turned to exasperation, impatience, and, ultimately, to an underlying lack of respect.
 
It finally happened late Friday afternoon of the Victoria Day long week-end. Julian Holmes went into Sachs & Co. that day, a little later than usual, wearing his plaid designer shorts and a yellow Polo Ralph Lauren golf shirt. The car was loaded and packed to the rafters with non-perishable groceries, books and blankets, suitcases stuffed with summer clothes and bathing suits, Candy's games and beach toys and sandals, a box filled with wine, beer and liquor. He was leaving the office early and they were heading up to the family cottage at Muskoka Lake after work. A copy of Ulysses was tucked into the top of his overnight bag and he felt a sense of rising excitement at the thought of three glorious days of freedom, to sit poolside with a gin and tonic, reading. He remembers the precise time because he had just finished checking it on the Rolex solar watch he had treated himself to from Mrs. Pendegrass’s estate funds, to see if it was time to leave yet. Three twenty-one p.m.
Mr. Sachs poked his head in the doorway of his office and said, “I’ve arranged a meeting with the bank on Tuesday at ten a.m. and would like you to be there—so make sure you're back on time, we’ve got some business to discuss.” His father-in-law gave him a wry little smirk, Julian Holmes thought, and a bit of a wink, and told him to enjoy the week-end. Julian Holmes felt the blood drain from his face.    
After three long, excruciating days at the cottage, unable to concentrate on Ulysses, Julian Holmes stewed and anguished continuously, belting back double glasses of gin, pacing back and forth around the pool. Pepper tried to get him to relax, herself oscillating between annoyance and fretful worry, but by Monday afternoon her husband’s face had turned into a mottled patchwork of red splotches, and he could barely breathe, he was hyper-ventilating so badly.
            One of the things Julian Holmes loved most about Pepper was that she wasn’t one of those women who talked aimlessly and incessantly on and on. She was a thinker. And a good listener. They had always been able to talk to one another, and for the first four years, until Pepper had turned eighteen, this is what their relationship had been comprised of.
Pepper watched him closely that week-end and tried to get him to talk, to tell her what was wrong. But Julian Holmes just couldn’t. He realized what he’d done. On Monday-night they drove home in silence, the windshield wipers splashing frantically back and forth, a pendulum marking off time, clearing away a torrent of rain.
Julian Holmes rose extra early on Tuesday morning, unable to sleep, so early it was still dark outside, and almost vomited into the sink from the tension. When he arrived at Sachs & Co. no one else was in yet. He punched his code into the alarm panel and turned on only one of the lights. He sat down at his desk in the dark for a few minutes and began to execute his plan. He removed his wallet from his pocket and placed it on his desk. He took out his keys and sat them next to his wallet. He seemed to be acting by rote. He removed his wedding ring and put it in the pen box in the top left drawer of his desk. He hesitated for a moment, and then removed his gold cuff-links—a wedding gift from Pepper—with his initials—JCH—monogrammed onto them—along with the matching tie clip, and placed them in the drawer with his wedding ring. He removed his navy and purple pin-striped tie and draped it over the back of his chair. He felt a sense of relief. He could finally breathe.
Julian Holmes fled out the door and down the twenty-three flights of stairs. Wearing his grey Harry Rosen suit and carrying his trench coat, he walked brusquely to the Yonge Street Subway Station. He ran down the stairs and leapt over the turnstile and onto the platform, just in time for the advancing train. He stood on the platform and waited until the train pulled away. He was the only person there. He advanced to the edge of the platform and looked back and forth, up and down the tracks. After a few minutes, the sound of the next train came funnelling down the tunnel. He took a deep breath and whispered ‘God forgive me,’ as the memory of the first time he and Pepper had met flashed into his mind, and he could almost see her there, smiling, nudging him, laughing, when he had chosen the wrong fork for the salad. The train was in sight and Julian Holmes’ braced himself and took a step forward. All of a sudden, he heard footsteps behind him, running down the stairs to catch the train. He was perspiring. His heart was beating quickly. He looked up to see a woman, holding the hand of a small child, a girl, with long hair tied in a ponytail. The child looked up at him, quizzically. A wash of shame and guilt came over him. He shielded his face with his hands and ran back up the stairs and out onto the street. At the first corner he came to, he stuck out his thumb to catch a ride to somewhere, anywhere.
 
Later Julian Holmes learned that at ten o’clock precisely, Mr. Chamberland arrived on the twenty-third floor at Sachs & Co., and was greeted personally by Mr. Sachs, who seated him in the boardroom. They were each given a cup of coffee by Mr. Sach's secretary and then chatted amiably about their long week-ends, while they waited for Julian Holmes to arrive for the meeting. At seventeen minutes after ten, Mr. Sachs was becoming impatient, checking the time on his watch repeatedly, until he finally asked Miss Blumfeld to kindly go and fetch him. Miss Blumfeld arrived back at the boardroom door a few moments later, looking perplexed.
“Well, where is he?” Mr. Sachs growled.
“I think you’d better come and see for yourself,” Miss Blumfeld replied.
***
Always a dutiful son, Julian Holmes had called his mother shortly after he’d arrived in Vancouver, hesitating before he dropped a few of his coins into the payphone, not knowing what to say. It took him almost a week to get there, hitch-hiking in the hot sun, walking until his feet burned from the heat of his shoes scuffing against the tarmac, sleeping under the stars in the park at night, then walking some more until he could barely stand up, waking up in train station toilets or car parks. It was several weeks later that he finally got up the courage to phone her. He didn’t reveal to his mother where he was and she was so overcome with relief at the sound of his voice she didn’t bother to ask.
“Oh Julian, it’s okay! They know! They knew all along! Oh darling, you can come home now.”
Julian Holmes had given it a great deal of thought after his mother imparted the news, about what happened after he’d left. Unknown to him, shortly before he’d chosen to flee, Mr. Sachs had discovered that the funds for Mrs. Pendegrass’s estate were transferred to the wrong account, to his son-in-law’s personal bank account. Their external accountant found the transaction during the year-end audit and brought it to Mr. Sach’s attention. Seething and sickened by the news, but wishing to avoid a scandal, Mr. Sachs covered the $465,000 from Sachs & Co.’s account. The matter disturbed Mr. Sachs deeply, however, and he realized he needed to do something quickly—to find a large client with ongoing legal requirements in order to keep his flailing son-in-law on the up and up, to keep him, for the sake of Sachs & Co.’s reputation, on the straight and narrow. He managed to convince Mr. Chamberland from CIBC Wood Gundy to transfer their routine legal work for mortgages to Julian Holmes. Mr. Sachs secretly arranged the meeting for an introduction and, regrettably, had planned to tell his son-in-law about the arrangement, after he saw how the two men got along.
Julian Holmes thought of the weeks he had just spent, alone, and banished. By the time he got to Vancouver, he’d begun to realize what his life was going to be like and he was missing Pepper and Candice so much a continual physical pain had lodged itself in his abdomen. He gave a great deal of thought to whether he should go back. He thought of what his life might be like when he returned—that he might be able to own up to what he had done, to beg for another chance and step back into the other side of that billboard. The thought rolled around continuously in a loop through his mind, causing him distress, not knowing what to do. He’d gone to the Blue Parrot then—it was Saturday—and he entered week one into the black Moleskin notebook he had just purchased. He stretched his feet out under the table, took a sip of his coffee, and breathed in the sea air coming in through the open windows. He flipped to Jonathan Cainer’s Horoscope section of the newspaper and read first Pepper’s, then Candice’s, then his own, a ritual he started that day and would continue every day as a way to feel connected to them, to see what the stars said. It was his own Gemini prediction that had resonated with him:
'They took some honey and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five pound note...' More today, from the master of nonsense, Edward Lear. A five pound note is money - indeed, at the time the poem was written, it was 'plenty of money'. Why wrap up plenty of money in plenty of money? And how could you spend it if it all got covered in honey? Lear's poems had lots of rhyme but very little reason. That is why we like them. Try to take delight in a situation that exasperates you due to its apparent lack of logic.
Julian Holmes flipped open a page of Ulysses at random. The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.
            He interpreted these readings to be messages telling him what to do. He felt an immediate sense of relief. He hesitated for a moment, and then wrote a line next to the number one he had entered in the Moleskin notebook. Nine-hundred and ninety-nine more to go. Almost a thousand more Saturday’s to go, one thousand more Saturday’s, just like this one.

Julian Holmes makes his way back, towards his wooden bench under the Bridge, stumbling as he sits down, a cup of coffee teetering in one hand, and he remembers. He flinches, even now, at the memory. It is hard for him to believe that over eighteen years has passed. It has been a life lived, like any other––a friendship found, a conversation had, love won, and then lost again, a will to survive, days filled with routines and rituals, to enjoy, as best one can with the lot they have been given, or chosen, the passage of time.
He looks out at the boats motoring past through False Creek, and breathes in deeply, once again, the scent of the sea air. He takes a sip of his coffee. A seagull squawks on the piling next to him, nibbling at a half-eaten donut it has found. He rises and leans forward to pick it up. He squints into the sun and looks up into a halo of yellow before him. “Candice?”
His arms reach towards the halo. “Candy, baby, is that you?”
A sea of blue, where her eyes should be, seems like a blur, like a mirage, blending in with the halo of yellow. “I always knew that you would come.”
 Julian Holmes rushes towards her, towards the light. “I always knew that, somehow, someday, you would find me.”
 

Amber Galiley is a freelance writer specializing in horror and suspense. Currently living in Orlando Florida, Amber loves to explore the city and write in quiet little hole in the wall coffee shops. Amber is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing for Entertainment BFA at Full Sail University in Winter Park Florida. After her first academic year, Amber was inducted into the National Society of Collegiate Scholars.

​“Come on, Amelia! Put on your shoes. We’re leaving as soon as I take Severus out.”
 
     Okay, okay, I know I shouldn’t have yelled at her, but we were already late. I just didn’t have time to ask her nicely for the seven thousandth time. Why can’s she just put on her freaking shoes the first time I ask? As I put the dog on his leash I looked back at her again.
 
     “Shoes. Now!”
    
     Before I could open the door to take Severus out the doorbell rang. The dog barked and sniffed at a package on the doorstep as I looked out trying to catch a glimpse of the person that rang the bell. Whoever it was must have been fast because they were long gone. Not a single person on the street or car out of place. I lived in a quiet neighborhood, typical suburbia, and as head of the HOA, Neighborhood Watch, and the Carpool, I knew every person and vehicle in the area.
 
     “Sevey, leave it.”
 
     I haven’t ordered anything. The fundraiser items for the PTA shouldn’t be here for another week…  
 
     I kicked the package lightly, not wanting to get too close since I didn’t see any label or company information. Maybe I’d been watching too many action movies. I mean, come on, l lived in Short Hills, New Jersey, most people had never even heard of it before this incident. Letting Sevey back in I grabbed the package and set it on the table. Before I could stop her Amelia ran up and ripped the box open.
 
     “Hey mom, is this my birthday present?”
    
     “What? No! Don’t touch that! Your birthday isn’t even for another seven months.”
 
     I took the box from her and looked inside, and my heart started racing. Oh God, it’s a bomb. I don’t think I could have moved faster if I tried. In a matter of seconds Amelia, Severus, and I were outside, and I was dialing 911.
 
     “Hi, yes, I think someone dropped a box off at my house with a bomb inside….” I said as I rushed Amelia and Severus into the car. There was no way in hell I was taking my chances with a freaking bomb in my house. “Ma’am, I understand bomb threats are serious, that’s why I’m calling. It’s a red box attached to one of those cymbal monkey things. There’re colored wires coming out of the box. Please hurry!”
 
     Within minutes there were swarms of cop cars on my street, one of those “Bomb Squad” trucks too. I swore those were only in the movies, boy was I wrong. I explained the situation, again, to an officer and pulled my cell out to call my husband at work. The officers ushered me into my car while I waited for him to pick up, I was being escorted to the police station; so were my neighbors, the ones who were still home anyway.
 
     “Hey, Alex, it’s me… listen, we’re all okay but I need you to meet me at the police station ASAP. I’ll explain everything when I see you,” I said to his voicemail.
 
     We got all the way to the station and settled in before my husband called back, typical, work has always been more important.
 
     “What’s going on,” he asked as soon as I answered the call “I’m on my way!”
 
     “Well, I was taking Sevey out and trying to get Amelia out the door and someone rang the bell. Babe, there was a box on the porch and Amelia opened it…it’s a bomb. The police made us come to the station and they’re checking everything out.”
 
     “Why would you let Ames open the box, Catherin?”
 
     “I didn’t let her do anything… you know what, Alex? It doesn’t even matter. There’s a fucking monkey bomb in our house and all you care about is why I let her open it?”
 
     “Monkey bomb? Catherin, was it one of those cymbal monkeys with a red box on its back? Was it wearing blue?”
    
     “Um… ho-how did you know that?”
 
     “Damn it, Cat… it’s a Zombie Monkey Bomb. It’s a replica from Call of Duty, Catherin! Don’t you ever pay attention to anything I like?”
 
     I moved the phone from my ear and stared at it in silence for a moment before hanging up and turning to the nearest Policeman.
 
“Um, Officer, I think we have a false alarm.”

​It’s late October, my favorite time of year. I can smell the damp rust of autumn leaves in the crisp air. I vow to take my sweet time on this beautiful Saturday morning.  After mowing the lawn, I stand in my tool shed, staring at my Echo HC-152, 20" electric hedge trimmer hanging high on the redwood wall, on its designated yellow hook. The trigger-happy, 20” jagged blade reciprocal trimmer, with silver sharks' teeth I now wish I never purchased.  Even if it was nearly 30 percent off at Lowes. The steam from my 190 degrees Starbuck’s latte escapes its to-go Calderon like a caffeinated ghost.  
 
I snap-out of my foggy gaze and feel a slight pang of guilt. The disheveled hedges and shrubs must be annoyed from waiting, puffing their faces blue in the chill of a breeze. I can almost hear their green teeth chatter. I have good cause to make them wait. Fear. Maybe if I would have been a little more careful, or just kept using the manual clippers, the tragic accident would have never happened. After all, the manual clippers required the use of two hands, making it all but impossible to cut my hands. But no, I just had to take advantage of the sale.
 
There on the concrete floor, beneath the electric hedge trimmer, I see two fingers and a right thumb, thatched in a small bloody pile. The thumb still oozing, the metacarpal bone dull white and jagged.  The wound gapes like the gills of a dead fish. Next to my thumb, the phalanx index finger bone is splintered and the nail nearly black.
 
I wish my thumb had been spared. That haunts me the most.
From now on, it’s strictly air guitar for me. I am going to sell my Fender guitar.
 
 But I also mourn not being able to point out the brightest star in the sky to my young daughter, with my index finger. Now neither exists.  The singular event I won’t miss is walking Tiffney down the aisle someday.  I imagine it clearly, everyone staring at my narcissistic missing fingers and thumb with me getting more eyes than Tiff, all dressed up in her beautiful white wedding gown.
 
It’s early Saturday morning, long before I’ve made peace with the Photinia and Rosemary shrubs, now warming in the early morning sun. I dream that eternity is an itch I will never quite be able to scratch.  At exactly 3:00 A.M., I abruptly wake in the pitch black of dark, in a teeth-chattering cold sweat. Someone is in my bed, panting and gasping for air, as I frantically finger my eleven digits like a litter of newborn puppies. Somewhere, a Lowe’s night shift team member is hanging sales tags on brand new Echo Hedge Trimmers.
 

1

​My computer faces the window. So if there is any activity, I am always assigned a front row seat. Two sheriff patrol cars pull into the driveway across the street; Harry and Sharon’s house. The officer’s casually exit their respective vehicles, enter the home. So, I automatically assume nobody is shot in the gizzard. I continue surfing Google, paying intermittent attention to my daytime soap opera. 
 
Todd and Samantha live together, at his parent home. Todd 17, Sam is 14. Sam was recently kicked out of her parent’s home because they designated her a handful. Sharon convinces Harry to let Sam move in. Sharon rescues lost puppies, stray cats, and baby birds that stumble out of nests and teens apparently.
 
Todd and Samantha, not puppies, quickly learn the nuances of puppy love. Anytime you ferment a teenage Calderon of burgoo, and spice it with hormones and estrogen, you get an amalgamation yielding rocket fuel and sexy-time shenanigan. Sex under covers, behind hedges, in cars and sheds, and damn near anywhere shadows block light.  Today, as they march Todd down the stairs and into the back seat of a squad car, my interest level percolates. Yours would too, don’t act so sanctimonious and judgmental.
2
Where was I? Within 20 minutes, the back window of the squad car is bulging, from the mule like kicks of an out of control teenage boy. Thankfully, the glass is a one way, ballistic hybrid, apparently mule proof. After a stern lecture, from both officers, more patient than me, they take the handcuffs off and place him back in the squad car, drive him away. I suspect the officers have teenagers. I never hear what happened from Harry, who loves to get buzzed over Sangria, chips, and cheese.
 
One week later, Todd moves to his grandfather’s dairy, on the Smith River, near the redwoods in Northern California, a paradise on earth.  Sam stays with Harry and his wife, two more years, and then graduates with honors from high school.  She and her young son then join Todd at the dairy he now runs. Harry and Sharon divorce, and move far away, from here, and each other.
 
Much of the time, there is room for compassion, and tough love, but not both.
 
A few years after they move, my 36 year old stepson is murdered in Reno Nevada, by a Swat team, after his girlfriend calls the Washoe County Sheriffs’ office; not her first time.  After a two hour standoff, they smash in the front door, and the lead fires two shots. David dies instantly, from one of the .223 rounds, piercing his spinal cord. Hearing this, I am relieved no one else is injured. My Ex and her Ex-husband later meet at the Washoe County sheriff’s office, and all concur suicide by cop. 
 
 
3
I filed for divorce one year prior, because I was sick and tired of drinking someone else’s poison and expecting them to die.