The New Normal (13 page)

“I'm sorry, sweetie,” Dad said. “But I'm glad
I
get to hang out with you.”

I closed my eyes. That didn't make me feel any better. It made me feel worse. I had been stood up. Stood up! And I could have gone with Roy or Scott, but no, I had to say yes to Eric “Bubblehead” Gaines and wait around all night for him to show, and now it was too late. I couldn't go with Roy or Scott, and Eric wasn't coming. I wasn't going to the prom. I could do nothing but sit on the couch in absolute misery with my sallow father and watch a kooky movie about boys who get leeches
stuck to their dicks and then find a dead body in the woods.

I had been duped! He had done it to make me look stupid. To make me feel shitty. So he and his rugby friends could have
a laugh at my expense. I was a pathetic loser who people pulled
mean tricks on. Either that or he was killed in a terrible car
crash on his way over here. Which is the only excuse he would
have for not calling and not showing up, and the only way I
could possibly save face in this whole sordid situation. I was, to
say the least, crushed. I felt like one of the beer cans that guys
like Eric Gaines put on the pavement and then stomp into a flat disk. I should have known that someone like him would never actually want to go to prom with someone like me.

“His loss,” my dad said.

Yeah, right. I brushed away a tear that had escaped without warning.

“All right. I'm going to show you something,” Dad said. “It's time.” He reached for his crutches and got to his feet with some effort. I stayed seated, hanging my head in disgrace.

“Come on.” He reached over and gave me a few light slaps on the arm. “No use feeling sorry for yourself.”

I closed my eyes. Another hot tear slipped out.

“Let's go.”

I pulled myself off the couch as if I weighed a thousand pounds and followed my dad through the laundry room and into the garage. He flicked on the light.

Two little airplanes and a helicopter hung from the ceiling; they were made entirely out of beer cans. Their shiny aluminum bodies glimmered in the brightness of the bare lightbulb.
The top shelf held four beer-can model cars. Dad reached to pick up the one closest to him.

“I thought I'd start with what I know, so I made a Honda.” He glanced at me, a boyish grin curling his mouth. “This here is a replica of the first car Honda ever made. The S
500
. It debuted in
1962
.” He handed me the car. “It had a five hundred thirty-one cc engine with forty-four horsepower at eighty-five hundred rpms, weighing in at fifteen hundred pounds. This one weighs about two.”

“A sports car.” I opened and closed one of its tiny doors. “Cool.”

“But then I thought, why should I just stick to Honda?” He grabbed the next can-car on the shelf and handed it to me.

“A Lambo?”

“Yep! And check this out.” He slid the car door up to open it.

“Just like the real ones!”

“Yeah! You know, I've always said I wanted a Lamborghini. Now I actually have one.” He laughed and so did I. “Then I made this.” He pointed to the next vehicle on the shelf, a Hummer. “Just for fun, you know.”

I smiled. I couldn't picture my dad driving around in a Hummer. He was more of a wood-paneled-station wagon type of guy.

“And this one I just finished today.” He gingerly picked up a Model-T Ford.

I put the other cars back on the shelf so I could hold it. I turned it over in my hands, examining all the tiny details and miniature pieces.

“Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the name Tin Lizzie, doesn't it?”

“Tin Lizzie!” Dad laughed. “I never thought of that. That's perfect!”

“These are really good, Dad.”

“Nah.”

“Yes!” It was true. I was amazed at what he had made in the weeks since he'd broken his leg. “You could sell them.” I handed the Tin Lizzie back to him.

“You think so?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I don't know. It's just junk, really.”

“No way. They're awesome.” I touched the propeller of the helicopter. Its blades spun multicolored beer logos around and around, until they all blurred together.

“Well, I'm glad you like them.”

“I do.”

“You can have one, if you want.”

“Really?”

“Sure, any one you like. Or I could make another one, just for you.”

“Cool.” I let my eyes slide over the cars and aircraft. I kept coming back to the Model-T. It was so classic. I picked it up off the shelf. “Can I have this one?”

“It's yours.”

“Wow, thanks, Dad.”

He put his arm around me and gave me a sideways hug. I let myself be squished into his rib cage and caught his crutch before it toppled over.

fourteen

That weekend I started working at Mik's Milk and Gas. I had to wear a uniform, but at least I didn't have to pay for it. It was a blue-and-white-striped shirt with that stupid thumbs-up cat on the breast pocket, blue polyester pants and a baseball cap that also had the cat on it. I had to learn how to work the till, check lotto tickets, make coffee, pump gas and diesel, check oil, wash windshields, fill fluids and pump propane. I hated pumping propane because it smelled disgusting, like being trapped inside a crate full of rotten eggs. I was terrified that a tank would explode on me. If Scott was around, I would get him to do the propane, but he was usually out pumping gas and yakking with truckers. Scott trained me and it was only the two of us working, so that was good.

“This is your emergency button. Wear it around your neck at all times.” He handed me what looked like a green plastic doorbell on a chain.

“What does this do?”

“If you press it, the security company will call the store. If you don't answer, they'll wait five minutes and call again. If you don't answer the second time, they'll recommend that the police send someone by to check on you.”

“I could be dead by then.”

“Exactly.”

And that's pretty much how things worked at Mik's. I still made five forty an hour, even though I was risking my life every time I filled a propane tank or pumped gas for someone who refused to put out a cigarette. Once in a blue moon I made a dollar or two in tips, but it was usually from some scuzzwart in a pimped-out Honda or a little shiny truck with a lift kit, desperate for a date. A lot of kids from school came in and sucked up to me to try to get me to sell them smokes.

“Hi, Tamar. I really like your, uh, hat.”

“Tamar! You look so great today! I just love your new look. You're so gutsy.” Etcetera, etcetera. Sometimes I'd sell them the
ciggies, sometimes I wouldn't. It depended on my mood that
day and if I thought they deserved to die of lung cancer or not.

Mik's Milk was okay. Instead of smelling like a grease trap, I smelled like gasoline, diesel and propane. Delightful.

Roy had ended up going to prom with Marcy Mavis, aka Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. I could just see her on Roy's arm, wearing a pink ball gown, lighting up the room with her sunshine-yellow hair. I tried not to picture Marcy and Roy kissing in the limo, at the hotel after-party, in the indigo light of dawn, but I knew they probably had. And that knowledge sat heavy in the pit of my stomach, like rotten fruit. I guessed I should just be glad that he hadn't gone with Beth. She had asked him, of course. But he'd said no. Obviously. After what she'd done to me, his friend, he was morally obligated to say no. Big Boobs Dewitt sure didn't play her cards right on that one. Scott went with Andrea, for old times' sake, I guess. I heard he wore a pink tuxedo. He was really coming all the way out of the proverbial closet.

I didn't see Eric Gaines at school for a while, and I secretly hoped he had died. Okay, okay, I didn't really hope he was dead, but I hoped he was seriously injured. Then one day, not long after the heart-crushing prom stand-up, I saw him hunched over a water fountain. My heart plummeted into my belly, then bounced back up to my throat. Should I confront him? Or should I avoid him?

I had to know, so while he noisily slurped up water, I went and stood behind him, preparing to call him a shitfaced asshole. When he turned around and saw me, he looked right through me as if I were invisible and started to walk away. I moved to block his path.

“Hey, Eric. What the hell happened to you on prom night?”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

“Pff, what an assmunch,”
I heard Alia say in the back of my head.

“You could have called me. I thought maybe something terrible had happened to you.”

He shrugged again, as if it was no big deal, as if he hadn't done anything wrong, as if he hadn't left me totally and utterly devastated.

I rolled my eyes and speed-walked away, holding my head up high. I vowed never to speak to him again as long as we both shall live. Jerkass.

I caught up with Roy at his locker.

“Guess what I got this weekend?” he said, grinning.

“Uh, venereal disease?”

“No…” He frowned at me.

“Oh. What?”

“I got my full license.”

“Really? That's great. Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Want to go for a drive sometime?”

“Um…yeah, sure.”

“How about today after school?”

“Okay, I guess that could work.” My dad would assume I was at rehearsal, so I wouldn't bother asking his permission. He would never let me drive with Roy because he was only eighteen.

“Cool, I'll meet you here at last bell.”

“Great.” The valves in my heart fluttered as he sauntered away.

We got Coke slushies and then climbed into Roy's mom's red Toyota Tercel and cruised south. I switched the radio to CJSW, the University of Calgary's student-run indie station. It was playing “Walk on the Wild Side,” and we sang along with Lou Reed:

Went to the Apollo,
you should have seen him go, go, go.

They said, “Hey, Sugar, take a walk on the wild side.”

I said, “Hey, babe
,
take a walk on the wild side
.”

All right. Huh!

We laughed, and I stuck my hand out the window, letting the warm spring air rush past my fingertips.

Roy never went over the speed limit. His driving was smooth and calculated. He seemed pretty comfortable at the wheel, as if he had been driving his entire life instead of only a year. I knew he was nothing like the boys who had played Chicken with my sisters in the backseat. He drove us out to The Big Rock in Okotoks.

The Big Rock is a massive chunk of mountain that hitched a ride with a glacier sixteen thousand years ago. In its original form it weighed nearly seventeen thousand tonnes
. According to Blackfoot legend, it split down the middle when bats attacked it to make it stop rolling.

Roy and I scaled the larger piece of rock and sat down when we made it to the summit. We looked out over the pale yellow fields that lay in all directions. The sky above us was flaming orange and pink and gold.

“I have some other news.” Roy scratched a piece of shale into the rusted rock face beneath us.

“What's that?”

“I've been accepted to the engineering program at UBC.”

“Really?”

He nodded.

“Roy! Congratulations!”

“Thanks.”

“That's great!”

“Yeah.”

“So, are you going to go?” I tried to swallow the stone that had lodged itself in my throat.

“Well, yeah. UBC was my first choice.”

I looked down. “That's so great.”

“You could come with me, Tamar. We could rent an apartment together. We could eat sushi, we could go to Science World—that big silver dome, you know?”

“That would be amazing,” I said. “But I have to finish high school.”

“There are millions of high schools in Vancouver!”

“Millions?”

“Okay, hundreds.”

I flicked a mosquito off my arm.

“Promise me you'll at least think about it. I would love to have you there,” he said, staring into my eyes.

“Okay.” I tried to smile. “I'll think about it.”

“You're my best friend.”

“And you're mine.”

Roy put his arm around me then, and I leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder. He tilted my face toward his and ever so gently kissed my lips. It was sublime and pure and perfect. I wished it could go on forever.

He pulled away first, smiling, his eyes glazed. I tucked my head back into the warm crook between his neck and shoulder. Coyotes yipped and whined in the distance as Roy and I watched the scarlet sunset melt into a searing pinprick of light, then disappear.

I felt a great chasm divide what could have been my heart, splitting it right down the middle and crumbling it to pieces.

fifteen

In biology class we learned that the average person takes seven minutes to fall asleep. That night it took me about seven hours. My mind spun with thoughts of Vancouver. And beautiful British Columbia. I could imagine myself living beside the ocean, going to sleep to the sound of gently lapping waves. Imagine the mountains right there at my doorstep, and the cherry blossoms floating through the streets. No one could ever tell me what I could and couldn't do or say or think or wear because the parents would be an entire province away. No one would know about my sisters or my hair or my life
history as a geeky, awkward, loser chick. I could start fresh. Get a clean slate. It was an incredibly exciting possibility.

In the week that followed, I was entirely consumed by thoughts of Vancouver. I checked out books about it from the library, I read about it on the Internet, I asked Scott about it, because he had grown up there. I told the guidance counselor, Ms. Nixon, that my family might be moving to Vancouver, and she found a high school right near the university that I could transfer to, no problem.

I imagined myself going to coffeehouses in Vancouver where artists and writers and actors hung out, where people would admire my smooth and shapely head and my courage, and we would have interesting conversations about music and literature and film and art and theater, and maybe, just maybe, I would feel like I belonged.

Roy and I went garage sale-ing on the weekend. He said he wanted to start collecting kitchen stuff so he would be all ready to set up his apartment in Vancouver.

“Do you like these?” he asked, holding up an ugly set of mustard-colored bowls.

“It doesn't matter if I like them or not.”

“It might,” he said.

At a garage sale in Woodbine, I found an old Nintendo with two controllers and a Duck Hunt gun. But the only game that came with it was Tetris. I bought it anyway and hooked it up that night for Dad and me to play. Dad loved it. We got supercompetitive and ended up playing until two in the morning for the first couple of nights we had it. I have never heard my dad swear so much as he did when we were playing Tetris. He got better, though, with practice. We both did.

“You know, T, Tetris is a lot like life.”

“How do you figure?”

“Well, you never know what's going to come next,
but you sure as shit have to deal with whatever it is.”

Finally, the second of April arrived, the day my mom was due back. The night before, I had cleaned the whole house until it sparkled and made peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies, her favorite. I got fifty bucks from Dad and bought a bunch of groceries, stuff I knew she liked: salad fixings, rice cakes, fruit, yogurt—what Dad called rabbit food.

I could barely sit still all day in my classes because I couldn't wait to get home and hug her and tell her I had missed her and that I loved her. After school, I burst through the front door ready to squeal, but she wasn't there. And neither was Dad. I checked the answering machine. No new messages. I stood in the kitchen and looked out the sliding-glass door into our backyard. Two young deer were devouring the new purple crocuses. Their eyes were like puddles of liquid chocolate. I tapped on the glass and they skittered away.

I heard the front door open and my heart leapt. “MOM!” I raced to the door.

“Nice to see you too, T,” said Dad. He clasped a bottle of wine in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other, using his crutches like a pro.

“What's that for?”

“To celebrate your mom's return, of course.” He went into the kitchen and put the wine in the fridge and the flowers in a vase. Then he washed his hands and started chopping up vegetables.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“What's it look like?”

“I—”

“I'm making my world-famous spaghetti sauce.”

“Dad!”

“What?”

“You're back!” I threw my arms around him and didn't let go. He peeled me off and told me to start chopping garlic.

The sauce smelled so good, I nearly cried. I sat at the kitchen table and did my homework. Then I filled out a questionnaire Ms. Jane had given us to help us really get to know our characters and presumably play them with more authority. It was full of silly questions:

Auntie Em

What is your favorite color?

Sunshine yellow.

What is your astrological sign?

Cancer—I can get crabby.

If you were stranded on a desert island and could only bring one other character in
The Wizard of Oz
, whom would you bring and why?

Tin Man, because I could make a boat out of him and row away. Plus, he's a sweetheart.

Dad and I waited as long as we could. At nine thirty he put the pasta on to boil, because we were both starving.

“We'll save her some,” he said.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

We ate in silence and sat at the table afterward, staring at the clock. We moved into the living room and watched
The Late Show
. Then
The Late Late Show
. Then the news. Still no Mom.

“I knew it,” I said.

“What?”

“She's not coming home.”

The look on his face was so dejected, so destroyed, that I wished I had kept my mouth shut. But it was too late; I couldn't take my words back. I suppressed a yawn.

“I'm tired. I'm going to bed.”

“Okay.”

“Goodnight, Dad.”

“Goodnight, T.” He reached toward me and I gave him an awkward, sitting-down hug. I pressed my face into his shoulder for a second but refused to break down in front of him.
I ran up to my room and collapsed into bed. Tears flooded my pillow. My own mother had run away from home. The knowledge pierced my heart with a slow and terrible pain
.