My limbs heavy with exhaustion, I trudge up the driveway toward the front door, pat down my pockets, realize I have no key, and then remember that Laura hardly ever locks the door when she’s home anyway. And she’s definitely home. Through the broken blinds I see the dull orange ceiling lamp and the flickering lights of the TV. From the porch, I can hear what’s on, a game show no one’s watched in ages. Well, I guess we now know why it’s still on the air.
I twist the doorknob, which turns without resistance. Once I’m inside, I’m stricken by the aura of coziness that envelops me. In the warm evening light, you can’t immediately tell how shabby and run-down everything is, and the first impression is that of warm, fuzzy childhood nostalgia: the couch with its flowery pattern, the faux wood paneling on the walls, and the boxy old TV set.
“There you are,” Laura says as if she only now notices me. “Sorry, I had dinner without you. You never told me what time you were coming back.”
On the coffee table, I spot the foil tray of a microwavable pizza and sigh discreetly. “It’s fine.”
“Heard you had your backpack swiped.”
Now I sigh not so discreetly. “Yes, someone stole my backpack. Does that amuse you?”
She chuckles. “You’d think you’d learn, after living in the city for so long.”
She doesn’t seem drunk, or at least I don’t see a box of wine or a beer can anywhere. So why is she so mean? “I really should have,” I concede because she’s not wrong there. “Frank promised he’d look into it. But I’m not holding my breath.”
Laura frowns. “Frank?”
“Mr. Bergmann,” I say, subtly rolling my eyes. “The dad of my high school boyfriend?”
“I know who Frank is,” Laura grumbles. “Didn’t realize you were on a first-name basis. Have some respect for your elders, Stephanie.”
For God’s sake. “Yeah, because I’ve always had such a great role model in that regard.”
She lets the remark sail over her head. “I’m just worried about you, you know. What are you going to do? Do you have a plan?”
The feeling of coziness evaporates. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up reflexively. I’m in the territory of an altogether different childhood memory now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, you’re broke, you have no job, and you show up here with nary a warning. What are you going to do? I heard they were hiring at the gas station—not the one in the town center, the other one. I can’t imagine it pays a lot, though.”
My breath actually catches. It’s the last thing I expected to hear. Of all the snide put-downs and cutting remarks I’d expected from Laura, this is a record low.
“I’m not here to work at the gas station, Laura.” It’s a serious effort to keep my voice from rising.
“Oh, excuse me, your highness. Of course that’s not good enough for you. Not sure there are many journalism gigs in these parts. I don’t know if you heard, the town gazette went out of business three years ago.”
“Maybe I can just follow in the family tradition,” I say acidly. “Get on social assistance and call it a day. Works wonderfully for you, doesn’t it?”
She gives me an unexpectedly shrewd look. “Stephanie, you know I’m not on social assistance. I’m on disability.”
She knows what to say to make me feel bad. Well, worse. But nevertheless, this is new to me. I had no idea her health had deteriorated further. I can’t help it—a lump appears in my throat, and I have to gulp before I can speak again. “The cancer… did it come back?”
She huffs. “I’m sure you’re praying for the day, but you’ll have to pray for a little while longer, okay?”
“Mom, I didn’t mean—”
“And it doesn’t have to come back. When you get a nice chunk of your intestines removed, turns out you can pretty much forget about getting back to normal. I’ll spare you the lovely details—wouldn’t want to ruin your appetite. So in light of that, I got on disability. Sorry if it offends your sensibilities.”
“I had no idea,” I say. My mouth becomes dry.
“Of course you have no idea. You hightailed it out of town just in time,” Laura says cheerfully. “Leave it to my Stephanie to make her mother’s cancer all about her precious self.”
My mind goes right back to where I least wanted it to go—my last year of high school. Everything seemed clearer then, not because it was clearer but because I saw things through that lens of teenage certainty. I had a future outside Marly, a future I was sure of, a future filled with success, and I had a boyfriend who was going to share that future with me. We made plans. We got accepted into the journalism program, both of us. I was counting down for the school year to end. I didn’t yet know that Luc would chicken out and that I’d be stuck going to the city all by myself.
But long before that, long before the graduation dance where everything went to shit, things had already begun to fray at the seams. I should have known nothing would work out as it should when Laura first became moody and started disappearing during the day. I wondered if she suspected something, but that was a stretch, since few parents were more inattentive and oblivious than Laura, a fact of which I’d often taken advantage. With Laura, I could sneak out in the middle of the night and not come back until after school the next day, only to find her in her usual spot on the couch, having figured I’d simply gone to school before she woke up.
Yet even with this paragon of aware parenting in the house, I took special care to hide my plans. I hid the acceptance letter in my locker at school the same day it arrived in the mail. She never laid eyes on it, I was certain. She never really approved of me dating Luc, and if she got wind of our plans to run away to Montreal together, she would have had a meltdown.
I remember the day when I started to suspect that things were about to go south. I came home from school to an empty house.
Maybe in normal times, it wouldn’t have seemed so alarming. But I was already on high alert and ready to expect the worst. Most days I’d come home to find Laura on the front porch, flipping idly through the town paper or even one of the many discount pamphlets we got in the weekly Publisac that Laura religiously saved, while she smoked a cigarette over an overflowing makeshift ashtray. That, or she’d be on the back porch sipping from a beer can and listening idly to staticky music or news on the radio. But that day, she was nowhere to be found. Her car wasn’t in the driveway, but that wasn’t so odd because she often made a run to the convenience store in the middle of the day. What she didn’t do was lock the door.
I used my front-door key for the first time in a while, and it got stuck in the rusty lock that wouldn’t budge the first couple of times I tried. Then I realized I’d inserted it upside down—I really was that out of practice. That’s what first tipped me off that things weren’t as they were supposed to be.
I finally turned the key and went inside. The house was dark. She’d closed all the blinds, another thing she wasn’t given to doing. A stale smell floated in the air, and another, malty odor that was all too familiar. By the kitchen sink, I saw a neat row of beer cans, all of them empty. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she’d emptied her recently bought six-pack into the sink.
Frantic, I opened the blinds and turned the lights on for good measure as I circled the house in search of clues. Her bedroom was in a bigger disarray than normal. Clothes sat piled on top of her bed, and makeup tubes were scattered across the top of the dresser—normally she kept them in the top drawer and hardly ever touched them.
My mind didn’t jump to the potentially-fatal-illness scenario. Instead, I’d rolled my eyes. There was a guy involved, I was certain.
Laura hadn’t exactly been a nun as far as I could remember, but she at least had the decency to be discreet about it. She never subjected me to the indignity of some wannabe stepdad with beer breath and tobacco-stained facial hair and maybe a faded prison tattoo to complete the picture. I never had to sit on the couch next to Laura and some loser, playing the perfect family while he not-so-discreetly groped my thigh. You have to give Laura this much credit. But there’s a first time for everything, isn’t there?
I gritted my teeth. Fighting my reluctance all the way, I went over to the landline and called the one place I was pretty much certain to find her. The line at Bar Marly rang for what felt like several minutes. Then a click, and the muffled cacophony of music and rowdy voices filled my ear, making me wince. “Bar Marly, bonjour,” barked the voice of Charles, the owner.
“Hey, Charles. It’s Stephanie.” I needed no further introduction.
“Stephie! Yes, your mom’s here.”
I glanced at the clock. It was four in the afternoon.
