I squeezed between two burly guys with beards and knit beanies, and placed my hands on the smoothed-down bar top. I still felt the absence of my wedding ring; I’d taken it off nine months ago, but the skin underneath remained stubbornly puckered and pale. My heart felt that way too.
“And what can I serve you, young lady?” Sam asked in a two-beer voice, without looking me directly in the eye.
“You still working that line?” I said.
A smile flashed when he realized who was speaking. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Just what every girl wants to hear. Whiskey back.”
He grabbed the bottle and poured the shot. “Sorry to hear about your grandfather.”
“Thanks.”
“I always liked him. I should’ve called.”
“Probably.”
I took the drink and tossed it down. Sam had the bottle ready to pour me another as I set the glass back down. I resisted the temptation to place my hand on his forearm, feel the warmth of his body travel through me.
He watched me for a moment, a look of concern crossing his face.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Did you know your father’s been in here?”
My heart sank, barreling past the effects of the whiskey.
“He has? When?”
Sam was leaning on the bar now, focusing only on me, which was always dangerous. “The man just lost his father, jujube. Cut him some slack.”
“The man didn’t give a shit about his father. What is it? Cards? Numbers?”
Sam wiped the bar with the towel he usually kept across his shoulder. “I hooked him up with a card game a few nights back.”
I set my mouth in a grim line. “Which game?”
VI
Walk of Shame
In the early glow of morning, I found a left-behind pair of panties in the back of Sam’s underwear drawer. He lay flat on his back, his arms flung over his eyes to keep out the light slanting through his bare windows.
In my younger days, I would’ve slammed the drawer loudly, made sure I did something to wake him up, provoke some kind of reaction. But I knew how that scene went. He’d be distant and wanting me out of there, or he’d be affectionate, tell me to move back in. Either way, it ended the same. Too much drink, too much bed; nothing that could survive outside these four walls in the full, bright glare of life.
And I was so tired of the dark.
I got dressed in the living room and twisted my index finger and thumb once around the puckered skin on my left hand and left soundlessly.
Outside, I stood on Sherbrooke, staring at the mountain. Some of the maples near the top were already starting to change color. I knew from experience that the trail of red, orange, and yellow would make its way down the hill until it was a beautiful riot of color.
My grandfather loved the fall. When I was small, he used to rake huge piles of leaves for my brother and me to jump in. I can still remember the smell of wet earth and slightly rotten grass. The way the leaves were wet and slippery. The snap of the enormous orange garbage bags as he opened them, threatening to scoop us up with the rake.
I swiped my tears away and turned north.
I wasn’t sure what was driving me. Perhaps I felt like I owed my grandfather, who always took my father’s behavior badly. If his death had caused my father to teeter off the wagon, I owed it to Grandpa to hoist him back up.
My first stop was the poker game Sam had set him up with. I was fairly sure my dad had left it only moments before he’d shown up at the graveside, and promptly beetled back there as soon as he could. These games were mobile, and went on for days. The janitor who swept the floors at the McAuslan Brewery — and played bouncer for the game that took place in the basement, among the brass vats and empty bottles — was open to the twenty I pressed into his hand.
And so I followed my father’s trail across the city.
He wasn’t in the flour-dust room above St-Viateur Bagel. As I chewed my still-hot poppy seed bagel, the man who ran the poker game there said it had been awhile since he’d seen my father, which could mean anything from several months to several hours. Time was money, piled up or torn down. Everything else paled in comparison.
My next stop was above the Portuguese chicken place on Rachel — Rotisserie Romados. As I walked up the stairs, feeling the airborne fat coat my skin, I wondered why so many of these bootleg poker places were linked with some of the better food Montreal had to offer. Must be the ready-cash business, the perfect front for ill-gotten gains.
A large man in a black T-shirt told me my father had been there overnight while I was wrestling with my past. He wouldn’t tell me if Dad was winning or losing, but I knew my father’s patterns well enough: if he was winning, nothing could get him out of his seat. So, he was losing, and wandering, hoping to find a lucky streak, imbued with that magical thinking that keeps gamblers coming back to the table.
One more hand, one more card, and I’m made.
I pulled my grandfather’s coat tight against my body as I stepped back out into the ever-present rain.
VII
A Love Story
It was coming on five p.m. by the time I made it back to Westmount. I found my grandmother in the living room, sipping a gin and tonic, a bowl of nuts and Chex mix on the chairside table. I noticed that her skin seemed papery under the lamp; she seemed so much older than the last time I’d looked properly.
She was flipping through the day’s Gazette. I thought I heard her swear under her breath.
“What’s that, Grandma?”
“Bullshit,” she said, this time more clearly.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard my grandmother swear before, and I wondered what the paper could possibly contain that would get her cursing. She hadn’t said a word since my grandfather died, her muteness a testament to her grief.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Nothing ever changes,” she said. “It’s all the same.”
I sat down in the armchair next to her. “Ain’t that the truth.”
She squinted in the way she did when she wasn’t sure she’d heard me. She’d been a beauty, my grandmother, in her youth. Even now, in her midnineties, traces of her beauty remained.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked.
“Wandering around, really.”
She sniffed the air around me. “You smell like sin. Your father been gambling again?”
I looked at the floor. Someone had left their muddy print on the rug. I added it to the mental list I was keeping of all the things we’d have to take over now that Grandpa was gone.
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t you lie to me, girl. You always were a terrible liar, even as a little thing.”
“Did I lie often?”
“All the damn time.”
I smiled. This new, swearing version of my grandmother was a hoot. “How awful of me.”
“Your father was such a sweet little boy.”
“I know.”
I’d seen it in the photograph albums and the old reel-to-reel movies they’d made. A happy kid. Earnest. The kind who always put his hand up in class and stayed in at recess to help clean the erasers.
But something had broken somewhere along the way. When I was younger, I thought the cause of that break was me.
“I hate to ask this, Grandma, but has my dad been asking you to sign checks or do you keep a lot of money in the house?”
“What are you getting at? I know better than to write checks to your father. Learned that long before you were born.” She picked up her glass and drained the remainder of its contents. The ice rattled in the bottom as she shook it.