“Would you like another?”
“Why not?” she said. “You’ll make it like he did?”
Her eyes were brimming, nearly spilling over. Seventy years she and my grandfather had been together. Day in and day out. All the rubs of life, its joys too. I couldn’t imagine that level of commitment, strength, sticking power.
I gave her a quick hug, almost knocking the glass out of her hand.
“I’ll make it with love.”
VIII
Finis
“I hear you’re looking for me,” my father said, startling me as I made my grandmother’s drink.
On TV, or in movies, there’s any number of ways to tell that someone has been up all night doing something dissolute. Unshaven, wrinkled, hair askew. But what the screen can’t convey is the sour mix of whiskey, sweat, and greasy food, the bitter taste of coffee that followed him like a cloud, the damp reek of sex he didn’t have time to shower off.
Those scents told me he’d found his winning game, that it had lasted just long enough for him to pay a one-hour hooker before someone alerted him I was on his trail.
“You could at least make an effort,” I said.
He ducked his head behind the fridge door. “An effort to do what?”
“Hide what you’ve been up to.”
“Why should I have to hide?” He straightened up, a milk carton in his hand, as if that wholesome drink would dissipate the cloud of deceit that followed him.
I turned away from him in disgust, and reached up into the cabinet for another glass. I poured gin into it, straight. Right then, I didn’t care what it would taste like. I only cared about the effects.
“That’s not how she likes her drink,” my father said, his voice slushy.
“It’s for me.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why do you care?”
He slammed the carton down. A splash of milk flew up and onto the counter. “Goddamnit, how could you say something like that?”
I turned to face him. Despite all the years of estrangement, anger, and suspicion, the little girl inside of me wanted to dive past the cloud of scent and into his arms, capture that safe feeling I hoped was more than a false memory. But my father was a drunk gambler, which meant he was an excellent liar and manipulator. I should know.
“Forget it, okay? Just forget it.” I picked up the glasses from the counter and tried to move around him. He was standing there like a stone. I wondered for a moment if he’d fallen asleep, but his eyes were still half open. “Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“You going to move?”
“Oh, sure.”
He stepped to the side, then swayed into me, knocking my glass to the floor. The gin spread across the dirty linoleum. “Oopsie,” he said, grabbing a cloth off the front of the stove and leaning down. “I’ll clean it up. You take that drink out to your grandmother.”
“Let me make another first.”
“Just leave it, I’ll make you another one. A better one.”
I nodded. As I stepped over him, some of my grandmother’s drink sloshed against the side of the glass and landed on my hand. I raised it to my lips to siphon it off. God, it tasted awful, way worse than I remembered. Bitter, and not just from the tonic.
Oh my god. Oh no, no, no.
My mind flew past the present to the many conversations I’d had, years ago, with my father about difficult-to-trace poisons. He had an obsessive personality, and at one point in time, when I was a teenager, that’s what his brain got stuck on. He’d made it into a bit of a game: what was the best way to hide a slow-acting poison so you could administer it without the victim knowing?
My hands were shaking as I walked into the hall and put the glass down on a table. I found my phone in my purse and started an Internet search.
My eyes raced past the symptoms: Thinning skin... Blood clots... Stroke...
Oh, Grandpa, I thought. You were right.
Coyote
by Brad Smith
Westmount
They gathered at the Sunflower Diner in the mornings, never before ten because they weren’t the kind to get out of bed early, even to go kill something. The core group was generally the same, a dozen or so men most days, although the number could double, depending on who was working what shift where. They’d have breakfast before heading out, slopping up egg yolks with Wonder Bread toast, and calling for more coffee, those bottomless cups.
They were older, the majority of them, half-assed farmers who called themselves retired even though they had never worked full time, having years ago rented out the acreage they’d inherited from their fathers to the big US cash croppers. They still called themselves farmers, living on the fat of the land rather than off it, but most had worked other jobs sporadically over the years, and nearly all of them had wives who worked. The men drove big pickup trucks that served no practical purpose other than a participation in some vehicular pissing contest. Splattered with mud, like some badge of honor, the trucks had loud diesel engines and tires the size of Volkswagens.
From time to time, Joanna would see some of their working wives in town, driving their husband’s trucks. They practically needed stepladders to climb in and out of the monstrosities.
Breakfast was leisurely and long, the conversation revolving around sports — the Maple Leafs, the Canadiens, and sometimes the NFL. The weather, if commented upon at all, was quickly determined to be fucked up. They didn’t need to talk politics; they all voted the same way so there was nothing to discuss. Some days it would be close to noon before they left the diner, Ben Dubois deciding when it was time to go. Anybody walking into the diner wouldn’t exactly pin Dubois as the leader, and the other guys wouldn’t readily admit it, but he was certainly their captain.
He would sit in the same corner booth as always, not saying much, too busy concentrating on his eggs, pancakes, and sausages, cleaning up his own plate before helping himself to the scraps on someone else’s. He would then sit back, toothpick in his mouth, a slight look of contempt on his face, some undisclosed disdain for his surrondings. He couldn’t care less about hockey or football, and the weather was going to do whatever it wanted. But Dubois held himself in such a way that suggested he knew more about the matters at hand than the rest of them put together, and if someone came up with an inordinately stupid statement, all eyes would turn to his reaction, even if it was nothing more than a condescending smirk.
Leaving, they’d stand in the parking lot for a few minutes, light the cigarettes they weren’t allowed to smoke in the diner, and watch the sky, deciding what concession to hit first, rifles in the racks, whiskey in flasks tucked into their hip pockets.
The hunting had started just a few years earlier, so Joanna had never known about it. She had come home in the spring, and didn’t notice the bunch until late fall, when the crops were off the fields, the leaves off the trees. One afternoon, washing dishes in the kitchen sink, she spotted trucks parked alongside the road, north of the farm, exhaust pipes puffing smoke rings into the cold November air. Homer was just two days quit of the latest round of his chemo, and was in the front room by the fire, trying to stay warm and positive, his skin as gray as day.
“What’s with the trucks on the side of the road, Dad?”
He didn’t look away from the flames. “Dubois and that bunch.”