And would you mind keeping Rajbeer too? I asked him.
A son, a van and a dog, he said. Anything else?
He shone the flashlight into my face for a second and I closed my eyes and smiled and told him no, that was it for now. Although, I couldn’t guarantee that his two daughters wouldn’t want to stay with him someday too.
No guarantee, he agreed. He asked me how Antonia and Lilah were doing and I told him they were fine and missed him.
I miss them too, said Cherkis. I miss everybody.
Then I told Cherkis a story about a day I’d spent years ago with Min and the kids, shortly after she’d run him out of town. She was away visiting some friends in Washington and I was looking after Logan and Thebes. Logan was about four and Thebes was just a baby, still nursing. Min had spent hours pumping breast milk and putting it all into small glass bottles that she marked Property of Theodora Troutman. She hadn’t really wanted to leave the kids but one of her friends was getting married and wanted her to be there and I was happy to stay with them. It was just for a few days.
So the day she came back it was her birthday, and it was a beautiful, sunny day and Thebes and Logan and I went to the airport to pick her up. Thebes was too young to understand much but Logan was really excited about seeing her again and was running around and jumping up and down in the waiting area, wearing little sneakers that flashed when he ran. I had put a bright pink dress and sunhat on Thebes and I was helping her walk around and around while we waited, holding her hands because she couldn’t quite do it on her own yet.
There was this glass wall separating us from the arriving passengers but we could see them coming. So, then, there was Min. We were all waving and smiling at each other. She looked really happy. And beautiful too. She was wearing this goofy orange beret and a long gauzy skirt. But then she had to stop at an official-looking desk before she could come through the door to the area where we were waiting, and so she had to turn her back to us for a minute while she was talking to the guy behind the desk. Logan asked me why she wasn’t coming out and I said I didn’t know exactly, but then someone standing beside us said that the desk was where arriving passengers had to pay the airport tax. I had never heard of it.
So, anyway, Min was talking to the guy for quite a long time, every so often turning around and smiling and waving or making these cartoony expressions of frustration, rolling her eyes a lot, and we’d all smile and wave back, but we didn’t know why she wasn’t coming out. And then, suddenly, Min was throwing her beret to the floor and she was dancing. She had turned to face us as she danced, and the kids both laughed and giggled while she did this comic combination of tap and ballet and the guy standing next to me asked me what she was doing and I said well, she’s dancing, looks like, and he said yeah, okay, cool. And then we saw Min look at a few passengers walking past her and she pointed at her hat and kept on dancing, and it was really beautiful in this odd way, like a silent film, because we couldn’t hear anything, and her gauzy skirt and all her hair was swirling around, and the kids were loving it.
And then some of those passengers started to smile at her and reach into their pockets and pull out change and bills and throw them into her hat. Some of them clapped, and Logan did too, and he told the guy next to us that that was his mom, the one dancing, and the guy said she was great, Logan was lucky.
Finally, she must have figured she had enough money, because she stopped dancing and dumped all the change onto the desk and it looked like the guy was counting it and then he nodded and I guess told her she could finally go, and she turned around and curtseyed and smiled and pretended to brush some imaginary dust off her hands and came through the glass wall to meet us.
Now Cherkis was crying and I took his hand and we stood around and watched the kids play under this big trouble light they’d strung up from poles. Some smaller fireworks were still going off and Rajbeer was running around, barking like crazy. Cherkis and I watched the white Ping-Pong ball bounce back and forth across the net for a while, it was kind of mesmerizing, and then Thebes spiked it hard and it hit Logan right between the eyes, and he laughed and the ball went spinning off into the darkness like a tiny plastic universe out of control.
acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor Michael Schellenberg for his magic and to my agent, Carolyn Swayze, for her tenacity. And to both for their patience. And to my beautiful and intrepid family and friends for their enduring love and, on that note, especially to NCR for moving mountains.
about the author
MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of three previous novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding and A Complicated Kindness (winner of the 2004 Governor’s General Award for fiction) and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Winnipeg.