I didn’t leave home because my father didn’t read – I left because he started. He followed me into the library again the next Saturday and he signed up for his card and checked out The Grapes of Wrath. He finished it at Don’s Breakfast, where all the retired farmers went for coffee. I can only imagine how many times he was asked, “What the hell you readin’ for, Tom?”
When my shift ended he picked me up and as we drove home he told me about his parents living through the Depression, and about his father and his Grandpa Burford and jack drives, these mass hunts for rabbits in the woods behind their fields. Southwestern Ontario didn’t seem so different than Oklahoma, he said – everyone in Currie Township grew vegetable gardens and hunted or raised the meat they needed, planning always to sell the excess though there never was any and no one had money, anyway. He exhaled at the end and said, “I wonder why my parents never went west.” I looked at him as he went quiet and I didn’t know what to say. “It just seems like so many people put so much into getting out there…” He trailed off and thought a moment. “But Burfords, we just stuck around here. I mean, there must have been work somewhere we could have left for – the forests up north, or the mines in Quebec, or…”
“Did your parents speak French?” I asked.
“Maman did,” he said. “Her family was from Pierre – you know, just up the river.”
“Yes, I know.” Pierre. Another go-nowhere town in the empty triangle between London, Sarnia, and Chatham, only this one was settled by some Tremblays. At five hundred, its population was twice Waubnakee’s and nowhere near the five thousand in Currie. All the towns were shrinking as people left for London, or Toronto, or beyond, and though my older sister Susan still lived at home, she was already working twelve-hour days at Vaughan’s Bakery. Her future was sealed and mine seemed to be, too, with sixteen hours a week at the library and a promise from Lori-Ann of more when I graduated. I had the marks but no one expected I’d go to college. The few times I mentioned it I was asked the same questions: “Since when do you need a degree to speak English?” or “Oh, yeah – and what are you going to do with that?” People read only in brief stretches in Currie Township, on benches outside structures bearing Centennial plaques that commemorate the one year there was federal money, the granting program that built the ball diamonds in Waubnakee and the hockey arena in Currie and come to think of it, the county libraries, too. You’d say you were waiting for a ride if someone asked, and when the inquirer left you’d race to the end of your paragraph and sneak away so no one would think you’d been stood up.
Sitting in one place too long could be dangerous, as I found out one time when Dad forgot about me, and Art Matthews, the boys’ Phys. Ed. teacher at Currie High School came by and offered to drive me home. He insisted – No trouble at all – and took backroads the whole way. He told me how beautiful I had become, that I was a woman now and this town was too small for me, lingering at every yield sign where two dirt roads met and placing his hand on my thigh. There was nothing but farm fields in sight, and both of us knew no other cars were coming, but Art stared extra long in the passenger direction anyway. When he finally dropped me off it brought Dad to the front door, where he presumed the worst as Art’s Monte Carlo pulled away. After that, suddenly, it was time I took my driving test.
*
Lori-Ann was actually waiting for someone to come ask her hand: a visiting agricultural engineer or even a hockey dad from a town where books mattered. My ticket out was Scott McLaren, who was finished high school – or finished with it, anyway – and three years older than me. He worked at Mueller’s Garage where the owner Herm paid him mostly in parts for his rusty VW bus. I don’t remember exactly how it started with us, but there’s always been just one bar in Currie and it’s always let you in well before you were of age.
We spent most of our time just driving around, I was the new accessory for his Kraut Kan, but this didn’t mean I hadn’t learned. On trips to the library, Dad was my passenger, and he followed me into the building on every trip to make increasingly flirty small-talk with Lori-Ann about Steinbeck. I had read East of Eden and Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men and even The Moon is Down, but Dad never asked me what I thought of them, he just went on and on in the car about how well-written the books were, an observation he was incapable of elaborating on and which didn’t actually mean anything – and how would he know? The victory for him was just in getting to the end, book after book after book, never talking about the story or the characters and the things they did. Did he sympathize with them? Question their motivations? Did the story even seem believable? The whole charade was just so that I’d see him reading, or so I thought.
It got worse the day he brought home a typewriter.
*
The police station in Currie was on a corner lot, with ten parking spaces and a two-door garage. Dad’s had long been the only cop car in the township, and the second bay was occupied by Gord MacIntyre’s junk shop, a trinket heap the poor fool had mistaken for antiques. The typewriter had sat atop the front pile for years, in plain view when the door was up, which was almost all the time – and on a day when crimeless Currie had Dad just bored enough, he bought it. He started coming home at irregular hours in the evening, stopping first for a coffee or three while he read at Don’s, and after dinner he’d retire to the garage and peck away. I honestly think it was about the noise for him, a payoff for every little movement of his fingers. I never knew what he was writing, or if he even had paper.
It got to be six-thirty, seven, seven-thirty on the night that Scott and I left. Dad had promised me the Nova but he hadn’t come home yet. Tonight was my first turn to drive Scott anywhere, and Dad had seemed excited for me. I closed the book I was re-reading, Huck Finn, and I got off the porch swing. I called Don’s from the kitchen. Though she seemed to always be at the counter, it wasn’t crotchety Marlene Simmons who picked up, but Don himself. In his gruff voice he told me that Dad wasn’t there. I slammed the receiver down then picked it up again to dial Scott. Afterward, I started packing my suitcase – Mom’s suitcase – with as many clothes as would fit and of course, my favourite books.
When Scott pulled in he still wore his greasy work clothes. I climbed into the passenger seat and tossed the bag on the bench behind. I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“First, you’re going home to shower,” I said, touching my index finger to the tip of his nose. “And then, I reckon, we’re lightin’ out for the territory.”
*
Huck Finn was the only school book Scott had read. He was proud of it, though not as proud as he was of his van. He had never been into sports or the trivia team or students’ council. Shy in all the right ways, he was an ideal first boyfriend – everything was on my terms.
We didn’t have much money and we didn’t buy a map, we just crossed into Michigan from Sarnia and took I-75 south all night and into the next day, expecting we’d hit Sixty-Six for California somewhere. We finally stopped to eat at a dingy diner outside Knoxville, Tennessee, fourteen hours east of the road we were looking for. I weakened before we left and called home from a payphone. On the other end Mom’s voice quivered.
“Are you alright?” she asked. “Where has he taken you?”
“I’m alright,” I said.
Deep breath.
“I’m far away, and I’m never coming home.”
Mom sighed.
“Well. I didn’t expect you would,” she said.
Her dismissal stung.
“You know, you don’t have to live there, either,” I said. “Where does Dad even go in the afternoon? He wasn’t at Don’s last time I called – and neither was Marlene.”
She exhaled.
“I took a vow, Claire,” she said. “I took a vow.”
*
Scott and I ran out of money in New Mexico, mercifully in Albuquerque and not on some stretch of desert road, out of gas, too. We spent the last bit on a motel room and two bottles of cheap wine, and that night we made love three times. In the morning Scott walked until he found a service station, and he struck a deal almost as good as the one at Mueller’s: work till you drop, parts at cost, and cash under the table.
In the motel office was a Help Wanted sign, so that was the job I took. We got a one-room apartment and I went to secretarial school for a while. The weather was always warm and convertibles always passing through, their drivers whistling and yelling about my legs or my skirt or promising not to pull my long brown hair. Some even did this with their wives in the front seat. I still haven’t quite dropped the weight from Thomas, but Brad says I’m the same sight for sore eyes I was when he checked into the Pueblo Motor Inn, just out of med school at the University of Toronto, confident he had passed his exams and driving to meet an old friend in Vegas to celebrate. I counted my week’s pay from the till the morning he checked out of Room 204, after I’d snuck away from my night shift to see him, and I handed my key ring to my supervisor, Manny, before leaving in the shiny red convertible. We stopped a block from Scott’s garage and I walked the rest of the way, finding him staring baggy-eyed and pale-faced as I approached, obviously worried after waking up and finding me not home yet. He opened his arms and strode toward me but I showed my palms and stopped him. He was covered in grime.
“Thanks for everything,” I said. “I won’t forget it.”
He tried to hide them, but tears welled in his eyes. He opened his mouth but nothing came out. I reached into my purse for my dog-eared Grapes of Wrath and handed it to him.
“It won’t be different when you get there,” I said. “Just go home.”
*
Susan mails me pictures every Christmas of her and John and their kids Mike and Nancy, with a letter noting somewhere near its end that Mom and Dad say Hello. I call in the morning after the boys open presents and though they’re still too young to know who they’re talking to. Brad and I make them say Merry Christmas into the phone. Susan tells me all about Mom and Dad’s year, and about Dad still banging at his typewriter, writing his life story and looking forward to retirement. She asks if I’ll get home next year and I say I’ll think about it. Then I put it out of mind for three hundred days, until the phone rings and corners me again the next fall and messages start to pile up on the machine. Lucky for me, Brad closes his practice every year and takes care of gift shopping while I drink wine, for the most part, and ask myself why I don’t pick up. When I weaken I think of Dad at the library, grabbing at the bookshelf the way dogs piss on fences, and it strengthens my resolve for another year.
I know. I could call him and everything could be normal, but that would mean adopting and civilizing. I’ve been there before, and I can’t stand it. We’d have to talk every second Sunday or once a month or something; to stop him calling all the time, I’d have to let him call all the time. Today is Thanksgiving, and here goes the phone again. I snatch up the handset and scream, “What do you want?”
“It’s Susan,” the voice on the other end says. “I’m at Mom and Dad’s.” She clears her throat. “He died.”
I set the receiver down. My throat lumps, my eyes burn, but no tears come. Susan sounds far away.
“Claire…?
“Hello? Claire…?
“Are you still there?”
I don’t say anything. Her shuffle-click-hang-up takes forever. Silence, then beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep– I re-cradle. My shoulders slacken and my jaw relaxes and I hate myself for feeling a release. I lift the receiver again and push the first digit tentatively. I gain force with each one until I pound the tenth. I hold my breath and listen to the rings. Susan answers but she doesn’t speak. Her breaths are short gasps.
“So when should I come home?” I ask.
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