“Why would we stay?” I ask Angie, folding the paper. The coffee machine starts spitting.
“Have you slept at all?”
“Yeah, I slept.”
In fact, I waited until Angie was asleep to pull out the maps again and spread them all over the kitchen table. I pored over the data, checking and double-checking, reviewing everything I knew to be true. There is an edge of doubt that seems to be wedging itself further into me. “Thom and Veronica are expecting us,” I say. “He barely leaves the house, you know.”
“Maybe we don’t need to be around that right now.”
“What difference does it make?” I throw some T-shirts into the last bag by the door. “We’re going to sit with our feet in the lake and drink beer.”
“Exactly.” She cracks a tray of ice and drops two cubes into her cup of coffee.
“Exactly?” I throw the duffel bag over my shoulder.
“I have a pretty clear idea of the way the entire weekend is going to go.” Angie sits down at the table and unfolds the newspaper.
“I’m taking this out to the car.”
THE HIGHWAY IS CONGESTED, cars packed to capacity, little faces pressed to back-seat windows, slack-faced boredom and wild eyes. In every car that passes I can see fights brewing like storm clouds sliding into a valley. When we got into the car the surfaces were so hot I could barely touch the steering wheel. Angie has been quiet since we left and just when I think she’s sleeping again she turns to me and asks, “Why do we always have to go somewhere on the long weekend?”
“Why would we stay home?”
“I don’t know.” She closes her eyes and rests her head against the window.
“You’re so tired all the time.”
“Too much sleep.” There’s a note of hopelessness in her voice, something I’ve heard before. Lately answers have been different between us, a slight shift, enough tilt to make a pencil roll off a table top.
“Maybe you should get that checked,” I say.
A few weeks ago Angie found a scrap of paper in my desk with the rough ideas for a poem sketched across it. It was something I’d done dead sober over a sleepless night, a few leftover thoughts from a poetry workshop I’d taken at university, scrawled so the words were barely legible. She was curious about it, excited by what she’d found, but for some reason seeing that paper in her hand made me feel shame. We had a huge fight. It was the white-paged honesty of it — the poem — that made me accuse her of being nosy, that made me say all sorts of insane things, that she was looking for girls’ numbers, that she thought I was heading to the bar after work to fuck waitresses. I told her that if I was going to get so much grief for doing nothing wrong, I might as well be fucking waitresses. We were standing in the kitchen and I stuffed the piece of paper into the garburator, barely getting my hand out of the hole before flipping the switch and setting the blades in motion.
“Look,” I say, checking Sophie in the rearview mirror. “She’s sleeping already.”
Angie’s taken off her shoes and placed a rolled-up hoodie behind her neck in preparation for the long drive.
“Close your eyes and sleep,” I say.
“I’m not going to sleep. I just don’t feel like looking at everything.”
After a while she asks me if I want to trade places.
“I’m fine.” I look over at Angie, but she stares straight ahead at an empty length of highway as though she hasn’t heard me. “I’m fine,” I say again.
“I know you are,” she says before closing her eyes.
THE LAST TIME WE saw Thom and Veronica was early spring. It was the first time they’d met Sophie — she was already nine months old — and Thom had looked stunned by her delicate hands and tiny teeth. He stuck a finger in her mouth and she bit him.
That night we drank until the sun came up. Thom and Veronica rent the main floor of a ramshackle house off Fraser Street in East Vancouver. Above them lives a Korean exchange student and below them a construction worker in his early twenties. The air is always thick with the smell of kimchi and weed, and whenever I smell those two things I have an overwhelming urge to drink a large amount of beer.
In the backyard, Thom had set up two folding chairs on the plywood flatbed of the construction worker’s truck, with an overturned plastic bucket as a table between them. The girls stayed inside talking about whatever women talked about when there were no men around and Sophie was asleep on their bed, surrounded by a barricade of pillows.
“Your neighbour doesn’t mind you drinking on his truck?” I’d said, taking a seat in one of the folding chairs. There were cup holders for the beer.
“I’m letting him park in my driveway,” Thom said, passing me a can.
We settled back in our seats, the sounds of a city neighborhood around us, rush hour traffic down Fraser Street, ambulance sirens and the strains of Sepultura coming from the basement suite. I’d already grown accustomed to the quiet nights in Kamloops. Thom had dragged an extension cord through the yard and plugged in an electric campfire. It flickered as the night dimmed behind us.
“So, congratulations!” Thom raised his beer can. “To the wee one!”
We clinked cans.
“You need to get down here more often. Leave Ange and the kid. Come crash on our couch.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said, smiling. Sitting on the flatbed, we could look down the yards of much of the street, take in people through the lit windows as they busied themselves inside their homes. “One day when you and Veronica have a kid you’ll see what I mean.”
“Who said I want any part in that?” Thom took out a pack of cigarettes and lit a smoke. “Ver been talking to you, or what?”
The construction worker came out to get his lighter from his truck and Thom tried to score some weed off the guy, but he said he didn’t have any. My sense was maybe Thom asked him a little too often.
“If Ver wants a baby she’ll need to find herself some other primo donor,” Thom continued after the construction worker had gone back into the basement. “You can buy sperm on the internet now, can’t you?”
“You try to be miserable.”
“What do I have to offer? Look at me!” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew rings skyward. “I won’t be paying for it either. She better start saving, ’cause that junk ain’t cheap. ’Specially the ‘intellectual’ kind.”
“It’s self-sabotage.”
“God!” He pointed his cigarette at me and shuddered. “What if it was one of my undergrad students? Jesus! She’d want the highfalutin literary stuff. And they’re so hungry, I bet they’re all selling their sperm. Jesus, that’s going to be our world population right there. Oh, sure. I’m going to have to move north. Hey, maybe I’ll come live with you in Kamloops.”
“There is something wrong with you and we all know it, yet none of us are willing to help you. What does that say?” I finished my beer and dropped it at my feet, opening another can.
“I don’t have your straight-and-narrow vision.” There was a hint of a sneer at the corner of his lip. “My mind,” he said, tapping his temple. He gave me a significant look and took a sip of beer.
“You’re not making much sense tonight. And who says I’m on the straight and narrow?”
“Hah! You’re as arrow-straight as they come. Are you kidding me?” Thom laughed long enough that I stopped smiling. “What I’m saying is,” he said, drawing out the words, “my mind doesn’t follow that trajectory — love, marriage, baby. I’d shrink into a little itty-bitty man. I’d become petite.”