Mark. Thank you.” She put her arms around me and gave me a tight hug. “I know it’s a sacrifice you’re making. I’m so proud of you.” She dabbed at her eyes and tucked the tissue into her purse.
I felt a little like a hypocrite. It wasn’t all sacrifice. I was sparing myself the humiliation of having my grandfather show up here again in his pyjamas. Or worse.
My friends were waiting for me outside the school when I got off the bus. Jason had already told Travis about what had been happening at our place last night.
“So? What did you decide?” they both wanted to know.
“We’re going, I guess.”
“Jeez, Mark. That’s a rip-off!” Travis declared.
“Naw. Not really. My grandfather’s too sick now to live alone.”
“So you guys have to move? Why don’t you just put him in a nursing home? My great-grandmother’s in one. It’s not so bad.”
“Mom thinks that’s what’ll happen when he gets too sick for us to look after,” I said.
Jason must have been remembering the times we’d visited my grandfather’s together. “That would be too bad,” he said. “Remember the time he took us to the carnival after we’d helped him close the store for the night? Remember all the stuff we won? Could he ever throw those darts!”
I swung my book bag over my shoulder, remembering too. “Well, Mom and I are going to see that he stays in his own house just as long as he can.”
“Too much!” said Travis, and the bell rang for us to go inside.
On Saturday, Mom and I went over to see what Grandpa thought about all this. She told me that change in routine sometimes upsets people with Alzheimer’s. So we were going to have to approach the subject slowly, just let him get used to the idea.
We found Grandpa puttering around in the tool shed at the back of his place.
“Are you busy, Dad?” Mom asked. He seemed surprised to see us, although we came over every weekend.
“I look for piece of chain,” he said. “To fasten that gate. Those chickens they going to get out if I don’t find it.” He was rummaging through a basket filled with bits of wire and pipe and stiffened paint brushes.
“Can you come in the house a minute, Dad? I’ll make us some lunch. Mark and I want to talk to you.”
“I ate already,” said Grandpa, but he followed us anyway, keeping a hand on my shoulder and letting Mom lead the way up the broken sidewalk to the kitchen door.
There weren’t any chickens around here for miles, except in my grandfather’s imagination. But then, you never knew in this neighbourhood. Mrs. Salud down the street kept a goat.
Grandpa lived in what everyone called “the East End.” In this part of the city, the houses were older and smaller and closer together than in other neighbourhoods, and everyone spoke with a different accent. In the summertime, the people here grew all sorts of weird stuff in their little yards, strange vegetables which crawled up and over the fences, squashes and melons the size of basketballs. And in the front of the houses, where you’d expect grass to be growing, tomato and potato plants often replaced green lawns.
Grandpa had no objections to Mom’s plans, but I’m not sure he understood what was happening.
“We’ll try not to make too many changes too quickly, Mark,” Mom decided, as we rocked together gently on the streetcar ride back home that night.
I told her even Grandpa was bound to notice he had two extra people living in the house. That made her laugh and we both felt better. But maybe we’d have to wait a bit before we introduced the idea of a dog in the family.
CHAPTER 2
It was Easter weekend when Mom and I moved our stuff across the city to Grandpa’s. On Sunday, Jason and his mother brought over some of the smaller boxes from our place and Jason stayed on to visit. Together, we checked out the neighbourhood. It wasn’t something you could do on your own. People would stare at a kid walking up and down the street by himself. This wasn’t a new neighbourhood to me, but I was looking at it now as someone who was going to have to live here.
Back at home, Travis and Nicole were making a working model of a volcano for their science project. They’d probably win. They deserved to; they’d worked together on it every night for two weeks. I guess Nicole wasn’t going to miss me after all. I never did anything to let her know I’d hoped she’d be my girlfriend.
I knew a lot of Grandpa’s older neighbours already. More than once someone stopped Jason and me on the street. “Hey, kid. How’s Luigi doing?” they wanted to know.
The shops on what passed for the main street in this part of the city were small and run down. Today, if it wasn’t a video store or a donut shop, it was probably closed, the inside of the windows covered with brown paper, the battered doors plastered with posters which advertised some wrestling match coming to the local arena, as soon as the ice came out.
The shop where Grandpa had sold fruit and vegetables now sold yogurt and something called tofu.
“What’s that?” asked Jason, making a face.
“Search me,” I said.
A man in a white uniform was changing the letters on an advertisement board in the window. Behind him, we could see baskets of trailing plants hanging from the ceiling. The walls were painted pastel shades of pink and green. The place gleamed with stainless steel and glass.
But the store next to Grandpa’s had the same pieces of dusty leather luggage in the window that had been there as long as I could remember. The shop on the other side still sold long lengths of blood red sausage.
We drove Jason home when we took back the truck we’d rented to move our stuff. On the way, Mom took us by the school I’d be going to. I wished she hadn’t.
The building was ancient, with classrooms on two floors and a schoolyard made of pavement.
“It looks like one of those correctional institutions,” observed Jason, adjusting his glasses up onto his nose.
“How would you know? You ever seen one?”
“Well, no. But it looks the way I figure one’d look. You know.”
“It looks the same as it did when I went to school there,” said Mom. She’s nearly 40, so you know how old the school had to be. “I’ll bet it’s still got those old wooden floors that creak.”
It had and they did.
The first day, as I climbed up and down the stairs from one Grade Eight classroom to another, I started to appreciate the modern school I’d left behind—all on one floor, with skylights in the halls and grass beyond the cement in the schoolyard.
At first, the kids in the class pretty much ignored me, which was okay by me. I couldn’t see any of them being my friends anyhow.
