mom.
I don’t look much like my mother. Sometimes someone will say we look alike, but I don’t see it. My hair is dark brown while hers is fawn coloured, and her skin is lighter than mine. My lips are a lot fuller than hers, too. Sometimes she jokes that I was born pouting, because my bottom lip is so full it seems to stick out.
I guess I look more like my father, though it’s a bit hard to tell from looking at the few pictures we have of him. Mom always says he was the most handsome man she ever saw. His name was Shane Gilmore and he’d come to Canada from Ireland three years before Mom met him.
She was working in a coffee shop and he started dropping in on his way home from his job with a construction company. After he’d been going there for a few months he asked her out and she broke her rule of never dating customers.
“I was so taken with him, his good looks and charm,” she told me often, reliving the happy time in her life when she’d been in love. “Shane loved excitement and we went to a lot of places that I’d never gone before. It was a whole new world for me.”
When they’d been seeing each other for about half a year, he asked her to marry him. Mom says that was the happiest day of her life, up until I was born.
“Your grandparents didn’t approve of Shane.” She’d frown, remembering. “They thought he was a bit too wild. But they were wrong. It’s true that he liked to have fun but he was a good man.”
Then, only seventeen short days after their wedding, there was an accident. I never got a lot of details because Mom didn’t like to talk about it. All I know is that my father was hit by a driver who was high on something. He died three days later.
Mom still gets upset when she talks about that. It must have been so horrible. One day she was a brand new bride and the next thing she knew she was standing beside her husband’s coffin.
A few weeks later Mom found out that she was going to have a baby. Me. It really makes me sad that my dad never knew anything about me. Not even that I was going to be born.
As a young child, I used to pretend that my father might come to the door one day and explain that it had somehow all been a terrible mistake. Of course I knew that was never really going to happen. I’d given up that fantasy years ago.
Well, there was no sense dwelling on any of this now. I made my way back to our seats just as the train was pulling into the station.
CHAPTER FOUR
My first impression of Miramichi wasn’t all that great. Mom had told me it was a city, so I was expecting something a lot different than the small town we’d just left in Ontario. But from the train station, which was on a hill overlooking the place, I could see right off that it wasn’t very big. There were no skyscrapers to be seen, just a bunch of houses on either side of the tracks.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked Mom. “It sure doesn’t look like a city.” We’d been to Toronto a few times and I’d imagined our new home would look something like that, only on a smaller scale.
“This is it, all right.” Mom took my hand then, as if I were going to get lost in the big crowd of about twenty people. “Let’s get our luggage.”
I followed along, trying unsuccessfully to tug my hand away from her. It’s kind of embarrassing to have your mom holding your hand when you’re twelve years old.
The luggage she’d referred to was an old set of four battered suitcases that stood out among the others on the cart. Once we’d picked them up Mom went to call a taxi.
The driver was a small old man who looked bored. He asked, “Where to?” without any sign of interest and seemed annoyed when Mom didn’t answer right away.
“We’d like an inexpensive place to stay for the night,” she said at last.
“Yeah? There’s a hotel not far from here, pretty cheap.” He glanced in the rear-view mirror questioningly. “Wanna go there?”
“That will be fine.”
A few minutes later we were deposited at a hotel and Mom arranged for a room.
“Well, then,” she said brightly, in a way that told me she was forcing herself to be enthusiastic, “first we’ll shower, change, and get some breakfast. That will leave us the whole day to go exploring and see what we can accomplish.”
I felt a bit better once my hair was washed and I had clean clothes on. When Mom was ready too, we went for a walk and found a restaurant called the Goodie Shop.
A friendly waitress served us bacon and eggs. Mom asked her about the street we needed to find.
“Wellington Street? That’s over in Chatham.”
“I understood it was in Miramichi,” Mom said, confused.
“It is, only most folks still call it Chatham. You’re not from around here, huh? Chatham, Newcastle, Douglastown, and all the small places around here became Miramichi a few years back.”
That explained things! We hadn’t moved to a city at all, just a bunch of towns that had been joined together.
“Where are we now?” Mom inquired.
“This here’s Newcastle. To get to Chatham, you have to cross the river and take a left at the lights. Or you can use the new highway if you want, but the Morrisey Bridge is closer from here.” She pointed in the general direction.
“We don’t have a car,” Mom sighed. “I was hoping we could walk there.”
The waitress startled us by turning and yelling to a man seated alone at a table across the room. “Hey, Stan, you going to Chatham?”
“Yep.” He smiled and nodded vigorously.
“Give these folks a lift over, would you? They’re going to Wellington Street.”
“No problem.” He turned his nodding, smiling face toward us. “Let me know when you’re ready. No hurry.”
Mom looked like she wanted to protest but couldn’t think of anything to say. I knew she felt dumb to be bumming a ride from a stranger. Still, we couldn’t be throwing around the little money we had left on taxis. As it was, we’d need to hire a cab to get back to our hotel.
About ten minutes later, Stan led us to his car and we were on our way. As we drove, he asked a bunch of questions about where we were from. Mom seemed a bit put out by his inquisitive nature but she answered politely.
“So, you’ve moved here. That’s great, then.” He nodded approvingly, as if we’d done something wonderful. “And you’re staying in Newcastle for now, are you?”
Mom allowed that we were.
“What time will you be heading back, then?”
“I, we, I really don’t know. We were going to take a look around for a bit.”
“Right.” He smiled and his head bobbed up and down again. “Well, I’ll be going back to Newcastle this afternoon. Be glad to meet you somewhere and
