“Don’t worry. Wish I had.”
I watch him continue to move the cards around. I can’t figure out what the colors mean. Where the peaks and valleys in the action are. Whether there will be surprise twists and turns.
“How’s this all shaping up?” I ask.
“Too soon to tell, I think.”
My phone beeps. It’s a text from Cassie. She’s having dinner at a friend’s and will be home by curfew. Henry texted me something similar earlier. After all the togetherness of the memorial, we’re now scattering to the four winds—or three. Ugh. Is this the beginning of a pattern? As our grief shifts, will we find there isn’t anything holding us together anymore? Was Tom, despite everything, our glue?
“I should go.”
Teo looks up. He has an expression on his face I haven’t seen before. Shyness, maybe. Uncertainty. “What about you get dinner with me instead? Or do you have to get home to the kids?”
“I . . . No, Cassie and Henry are both out tonight.”
“Then you’re free.”
“I am, in fact.”
“And you’ll come?”
“Off the record?” I ask.
“Off the record,” he says.
12
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE PLACE
KATE
As Kate walked the twins home from the park, she was struck, as she often was, by the contrast between the environment in which she’d spent her first week in Montreal and where she was living now. Westmount was full of large brick homes built in the early 1900s sheltered by mature trees. Some of them on the flat that lay at the base of the mountain. The rest, climbing in neat rows until the overlook that gave a perfect view of the city and the sparkling Saint Lawrence River. That fall, Kate had watched the colors march down the hill in brilliant reds and golds. In the spring, she’d watched the green creep up, knowing that when it reached the top, she’d feel better. Sherbrooke Street, a few blocks away, was full of expensive shops where you could buy imported artisanal cheeses. Coffee shops and places that sold expensive yoga clothes. Aspirational furniture stores and a large wine store. Enough restaurants to eat a different expensive meal in each night of the week.
In contrast, the Montreal bus terminal was more depressing than the one she’d left in Chicago. Sad-looking people. Decor from the seventies. When she’d gotten off the bus, the first thing she’d seen was a group of drunks sitting in the corner passing a large can of something in a brown paper bag.
This wasn’t the Montreal Kate had dreamed about visiting. The cobblestone streets and old stone buildings that featured in the online postcards. Had she picked wrong? If the rest of the city was like this, how could she survive? But no, it couldn’t be. No city should be judged by the state of its bus station. Kate was panicking because it was actually beginning now. Her new life. Whatever that meant.
She’d arrived in the midafternoon. She made sure to gather everything she had with her on the bus and thanked the driver as she left, then kicked herself for doing so. It wasn’t natural to her to be anonymous, though she’d felt invisible for years.
Kate had gone into the bathroom and counted up her money in a stall that smelled of sharp detergent and urinal cakes. Of the original $1,200 she’d started with, she was down to $960. That was probably worth more in Canadian dollars. She might as well find out. There was a money exchange window in the station. She was pleasantly surprised to learn that she had more than $1,600. That should be enough for the next couple of weeks. Put a roof over her head. Buy a few more things to wear, purchase food. Get herself squared away until she could find a job.
She had asked a few people to direct her to the nearest Internet café, praying such things still existed. She missed her iPhone. She knew this was ridiculous, the least of her worries. But its easy access to everything she needed—everyone—had become so woven into the fabric of her life that its absence felt like a phantom limb.
The third person she’d approached told her where she could find one. It was located on a seedy street a few blocks away. Ten dollars got her an hour online. She didn’t check her e-mail or search for news of her family. Instead, she set up a new Gmail account and spent the rest of her time looking for a place to stay and at job postings. She answered a few “looking for a sublet” ads and applied for the only positions she seemed qualified for. With her hour dwindling down, she found the cheapest hotel she could, a single room within walking distance.
She passed a corner store on the way, one that sold cigarettes and burner phones. She purchased a cheap prepaid phone that would allow her to check her e-mail. She bought enough food for dinner and breakfast. Crackers and cheese. A waxy apple. Some cereal and milk. Then she shoved her items into her backpack and went to the hotel.
The old man behind the counter wrote her passport number down with a blunt pencil in the large ledger that rested on the counter. He never fully took his eyes off the television that was still showing the Chicago coverage. He handed her an old-fashioned key to room number seven. As she held it, her thumb rubbed at the worn-down grooves. Would it bring her luck?
It was hard to think so when she got to her room. A dirt-caked window. A bed whose lumps were visible from the doorway. A listing dresser made of plywood. A desk fit for a school-age child. The predominant color was brown. Kate thought immediately of bedbugs, then reasoned that if she ended up infested, she had almost nothing to throw away.
Exhaustion took hold. She put her meager possessions away. And though she desperately wanted a shower, she couldn’t muster the energy to take
