afterwards with a damaged shovel, having learned to pick on something closer to its own size. As a child, you never admitted you came from the Flourmill District. Not only was it the wrong side of the tracks, it had seemed the worst place to come from in the entire country.
Dan passed a tavern he hadn’t thought of in years, a shallow trough where he’d been sent more than once in search of his father. “Get your father home for supper,” his Aunt Marge instructed in her chirpy voice, though Dan knew supper would be long put away by the time he returned, with or without his father. Dan never had a problem getting into Sudbury’s bars. The bartenders, if they guessed his age, simply turned a blind eye. Or perhaps they knew him for Stuart Sharp’s son. More than one son or daughter had shown up to fetch their parents over the years. Many returned for a longer stay once they came of age. More likely, they assumed Dan was as old as his dark looks proclaimed, which was significantly older than his actual years.
Inside, he knew, was the latest generation of miners, the hard-working men who earned their living pulling precious metal out of the bowels of the Earth, a whole under-class who spent their hours toiling in darkness, not seeing the sun for weeks at a time, who woke one day wondering where their lives had gone and how they’d managed to miss out on them. Meanwhile, their children had grown up without them, their wives had become bored and discontented, and no one could tell them what it had all been for. Until his death, Dan’s father had been one of these men, his personality stuck on edgy, his face so expressionless it had probably not exercised its muscles in years. Permanent immobility was written all over it.
He found the house on the hill at the top of Bloor Street, the same flowered curtains in the windows as when he was a child. Probably they weren’t the same, but no doubt his aunt had replaced the originals with curtains of the same style and colour. He sometimes wondered if growing up surrounded by rock had convinced her that all things were more or less permanent, and that efforts should be taken to preserve them just as they were.
He stepped down the crumbling concrete steps and stopped for a moment where his four-year-old self had heard one of the neighbours say, “She’s gone, poor thing.” The woman had looked at him with such a pitiful gaze that it etched itself onto his heart forever. His mom was gone again, that much he understood. Where she’d gone or when she’d return, no one could say. Except that time she hadn’t come back.
Leyla was waiting at the door with open arms and a ready smile. He wanted to say something like, “You haven’t changed a bit,” but it was such an obvious lie it would only have caused embarrassment. Pretty as a teenager, her looks had been fleeting, like her youth. Her skin sagged, her pallor the colour of oatmeal. She hadn’t gotten stout, but her once impressive breasts were, he gathered, more of a hindrance now than an enticement. She seemed to have wrapped them in an old sweater to keep them from getting in the way. The one thing that hadn’t changed was the glint of joy in her eyes. Dan gave her a peck on the cheek and squeezed her in his arms. She felt tiny.
“Mom’s been so excited knowing you were coming,” she said, in a way that told him his absence the past few years had been more marked than he cared to believe. “How’s Ked?” she asked.
“He’s good. He’s really tall now. Almost as tall as me.”
“They grow so fast you can’t keep up with them. Geez, eh? It’s funny. Mine are nearly grown too. I hardly see them any more.”
She still talked like a high school majorette. Dan recalled her fondness for mohair sweaters, pleated skirts, and hair barrettes.
She put a hand on his shoulder and nodded to the bedroom door. “Go on in, Danny. She’s been waiting for ya.”
Gloom met his eyes, a half-drawn shade simply masking the fact that the light was permanently obscured by the house next door. The wallpaper was Sedona Rose on Pickle Green, some daft artist’s rendering of happiness and cheer. Paper daisies in a snow-white vase sat atop a dresser. The room smelled of disinfectant covered with something homely. If he were to die of a wasting disease, he knew, he could do worse than come back here to be tended to by Leyla. Everything had been tidied up and put away, the room almost too clean to admit to any suffering. He imagined the dull days winding ahead for his aunt, but with a fixed value attached to their number.
On the mantle ranged the usual collection of cards: Get Well Soon, Heard You Needed Some Cheering, and Hope You’re Feeling Better — his own hadn’t reached them yet. All with the usual compulsory euphemisms that said everything but the truth: Goodbye For All Time or Prepare To Meet Your Maker. From behind one card peeked the corner of a photograph: himself as a dirty-faced kid of three or four, with a grin to break your heart. What had happened to that boy? Dan wondered.
His eyes adjusted. His aunt lay on the far side of the bed, as if avoiding the light. Flannel rose in soft swells around her sleeping head. A hearing aid curled around one ear like a pink foetus, her hair Marcel-waved into tiny seashells. As a boy he’d watched, fascinated, as she egg-whited the tips of curls and stuck them to her cheeks. Imagining herself glamorous, no doubt. Maybe she’d fancied herself a movie star: Joan Fontaine or Lana Turner. And why not? Life held few enough rewards for someone like her.
At one point she’d briefly turned Jehovah’s Witness, driven for comfort by a husband’s beatings and a brother’s drinking. Eventually the husband vanished, though Leyla said for years afterwards her mother would turn a hopeful ear to the door if there were footsteps outside at night, still praying for his return. It never came. No one knew if he were still alive or, if dead, where he’d been buried. The consensus was that he’d come to a bad end somewhere and that it had been well deserved, whatever it was. Dan recalled her sweaters that always smelled of dampness. She would wait till his dad had gone to work and then start in on him, clutching him to her chest and making him promise he would never drink, smoke, or swear. Devil’s work. His father did all three, Dan knew. He used to wonder if she’d asked him to make the same promise. He hadn’t listened, if she had. But even religion hadn’t lasted forever, like most things in her life.
He remembered her as a woman who spent much of her time planning diets of one sort or another: the grapefruit-only diet, the no-bread diet, the sugar-free diet, and various others with no particular name. All of them defined by a lack. She’d never been a great cook, but she always made sure there was food on the table for Dan and Leyla. Her specialty was peas in gravy on white bread, with greasy ground beef mixed in. Her version of a balanced meal, no doubt. Some days there might be mashed potatoes instead of the sliced bread with its tan leathery borders. Afterwards, orange fat lay congealed at the bottom of the electric frying pan — her one frivolity — until its rounded corners slid under the iridescent soap bubbles in the sink. Most of her days were spent in silence, which was just as well because when she spoke people looked in fright at the sound of her voice, like a whoopee cushion on Prozac. But more than anything, he remembered her as a woman who had taken in another woman’s child to raise as her own.
Someone — probably Leyla — had propped a chair in the corner. He dragged it close and sat next to her. Here she was, his aunt who had always been kind, always accepting. His aunt, who had spent thirty years selling tickets at the movie theatre before retiring on a government pension. Goodbye and thanks for a job well done. When she was younger she’d dreamed of reinventing herself by opening the classifieds to see what fascinating job she could apply for that might just blow her horizons wide open and make all her dreams come true. What’ll it be next: waitress at Kresge’s Red Grill or counter help at Herb’s Bowl-a-Rama? Another time it was a day cashier at Woolworth’s followed by a stint as stock clerk at Zeller’s. The options were stupefying. Maybe she thought they’d go on forever, but one day they ran out and she ended up where she began, dying of emphysema, her life and choices behind her forever.
Dan leaned over the bed, taking care not to bump the fat green cylinder that pumped itself out via the long thin tube attached over her
