— You let me know if you need me to go with you.
— Barry takes her, said Donna.
Donna put a piece of pie before Lee. She poured tea for Lee and Irene and then she stood near the counter.
— Well, like I say, it’s what I’m here for, said Lee. I’ll help you out, Ma, any way I can. I didn’t move back up here to get rich and famous. Would you sit down, sister?
Donna scooted into the chair Luke had vacated. She examined what the boy had been writing in his notebook. Lee forked off a piece of the pie.
— To tell the truth, I don’t know so much about the treatments, Ma.
— The doctor says it’s going good, said Irene. He uses words I don’t understand, but. He’s foreign. Coloured.
— Chemotherapy and radiation, said Donna. They can’t just remove the tumour at her age. You want to know, you take one look at all the pills in the bathroom. And you see what the chemotherapy does?
Irene grinned and said: I won’t win the beauty pageant at the fall fair.
Donna looked hard at her son’s notebook.
— You got the same thing as that kid, said Lee.
— Kid?
— That one-legged kid who tried to run across the country. I’m betting on you, Ma. We’re a bunch of survivors is what we are.
He reached across the table and grasped her hand.
— How is work going?
— Couldn’t be better, said Lee. You should just see the size of this place going up out there. It’s bigger than the boarding house where we used to live.
— People with money are buying up and down the lake, said Donna.
— I’m starting to make a buck or two myself. Before long I’ll buy a big godda- a big G.D. place like that and we’ll all move out there.
— Listen to you.
— You and Barry can have the east wing. We’ll send the boys to private school. Is that-Ma, take a look-is that Donna cracking a smile?
— Oh quit, would you?
But Donna was smiling. It changed her whole face.
The next day, Lee went to see the boarding house where he and Donna had grown up. It was a Saturday and the fall air was crisp and the sky was off-white. He walked up Union Street breathing in the smell of creosote from the rail crossing. Cars passed him trailing radio sounds. At the Owl Cafe he stood at the window. He cupped his hands around the sides of his face to block the light. He looked inside until Helen spotted him, as did a number of the patrons. She gave him a little wave. He waved back and went on his way.
The boarding house was on Merritt Street, on the north side of the river, a half-hour’s walk from downtown. It was a timber-frame structure from the turn of the century, and it had been variously added to over the years. There had been six rooms to rent when they lived there. Tenants had to share the bathrooms. Now, while the house retained its old exterior look, it appeared to have been renovated for business interests. He read a sign for LUCKY TAILORING amp; DRY CLEANING in a main floor window and a sign for CHAPMAN SOLICITORS on the second floor.
Lee was only six when George King died. The boy had been confused by what was going on, and so he’d wandered away from the house, from the policemen who’d come, from his mother lifting her cigarette and trying to light it, asking over and over how she could be left like this, how he could do it, leave her alone with these two kids. George’s heart had seized fast in his chest in the early hours of the morning when he had gone to open the store. The driver of a delivery truck had found him. And by noon his widowed wife, Irene, sat demanding, first from the policemen, then from her meagre surroundings, how it could be so.
The boy could go anywhere, he knew, with his mother so distraught. He could go to the lumberyard or to the river. But he didn’t even end up going across the street. Instead, he went to the back of the house and down the basement steps. It was understood that the basement was not to be ventured into, particularly by the children of tenants. The boy went anyway, pushing at the solid wooden door and finding it unlocked and watching it swing open into a place he had lived above his whole life, yet never glimpsed.
The basement floor was packed dirt and the walls were brick, once whitewashed. Knob-and-tube wiring was tacked into the cavities between the overhead joists. The basement smelled of earth and wood-rot. Against one wall was a cabinet choked with items: pipefittings, light bulbs, copper fuses, an ankle boot with a busted heel. The boy picked up a ball-peen hammer from the cabinet and turned it and felt its weight in his small hand.
He was drawn to the furnace, to see what made the noises in the vents at night. He was curious about the sullen glow inside the firebox. But then he heard something. He saw the crippled caretaker coming from the direction of the coal bin, carrying a load in a spadeshovel, walking heavily on his bum leg, not saying anything. The boy turned and ran.
The general store his father had operated on River Street now had VICTORY HOME APPLIANCES on the front signboard. Much of the interior had been rearranged, walls knocked out, the space made bigger. Lee stood where the grocery counter had been. There was a display of used televisions almost exactly where his father had been found dead by the delivery man.
A salesman came around.
— You look like a man who’s thinking about how to improve his house.
— No, just looking around. I’ll get going.
— No need to run off. Looking’s always free.
Lee left the salesman and went out onto the street, but then, abruptly, he went back into the store and over to the televisions. The salesman rematerialized quickly. Lee scratched the back of his head and said: Look, what I was thinking about was a television.
— You’re in the right place, sir. We have good colour sets. Brand new. Here we’ve got a whole selection of used outfits. Great condition each one. Inspected. Really good bang for your buck. This one is a ‘72 Emerson, eighteen-inch. The colours are still bright as can be. Hundred thirty.
— Hundred thirty? I don’t know about that. Maybe I’ll come back again some other time, see what you got.
— I could go you a hundred. Cash. Right now.
— A hundred bucks.
— A hundred bucks and it’s yours. Delivery included.
As usual, Lee had a sense of the money he’d earned passing out of his hands. He only had the hundred dollars on him because he’d cashed his paycheque the day before. But for the first time he could think of, he could bear the cost. Before he left the store he shook the salesman’s hand.
— This used to be my dad’s place.
— Is that right?
— It was a general store. He sold all kinds of things. There was a grocery counter right here.
— Well, there you go. I do some business and learn a little history in the bargain. Our delivery van will come around by five o’clock.
Lee went down the hill and into the A amp;P to stock up on food. He was thinking about the television he’d just purchased, and he was thinking about his long-dead father, what he could remember of the man, and he was thinking about the boarding house where he’d grown up. He didn’t know why he’d waited a month, after moving back to town, to go see the house. It had felt a little like a confrontation, somehow, one that he’d been putting off. It seemed to him his last tangible memory of town, prior to going to jail, was the boarding house-even though he’d been at a friend’s place when the police tracked him down and arrested him. All the same, he realized he would have been bothered if the old boarding house, with the basement of his recurring dreams, had been demolished.
When he was coming out of the grocery store now, carrying a paper bag of groceries, he saw they’d come for
