A Case of Mondays
“What happened?” Zlata demanded. His sister, the preachy schoolteacher, who made him read aloud a few chapters of War and Peace every day the summer she was forced to babysit him, called from the family house in Beaverbrooke in Northwestern Ontario, where even the phone number remained unchanged for fifty years. “You were the best ever parking enforcement officer, ever.”
“I never said anything so outrageous.”
“You raised more money in parking fines for the city than any other parking enforcement officer in Toronto.”
“I know a few parking officers who ticketed more.”
“But you were even profiled in the Toronto Daily News.”
“They were looking for a scandal, Zlata.” He remembered a reporter from the Toronto Daily News called him at home and at work every morning for over a week to interview him after reviewing documents obtained from municipal government for the city of Toronto under the freedom of information act. The investigative reporter loudly expressed amazement parking enforcement officers earned the city coffers so much money. Sergey’s ear was still ringing from the reporter’s booming voice after he hung up the telephone. “I wrote over a million dollars in parking tickets for the city in the most previous fiscal year, but still I was suspended without pay.”
“You’re easy prey for women,” his sister said.
“Easy prey?”
“Yes, you don’t know how to talk to women or relate to them, period. That’s why you’re willing to let off some pretty face without giving her a ticket.” He agreed he found certain women attractive and that vulnerability may have precipitated his downfall—that and a case of the Mondays. “Your niece is coming with your friend. Do you remember them? You looked after them over a decade ago.” Sergey couldn’t even remember how long over ago it was when he had first met his niece’s best friend, when his sister asked him to look after them, but he remembered them binge watching Walt Disney movies, while his sister travelled for several job interviews she lined up in Thunder Bay. “They’re grown young women now. They’re both entering their first year of nursing studies at Humber College.”
When Zlata called to ask if the girls could stay with him, Sergey thought she sounded exceedingly optimistic when she said, “The world is their oyster.”
He might have shared the same attitude when he was a youth, but age and harsh realities had made him jaded and cynical and he replied, “It is? That’s what I thought when I first moved from Beaverbrooke and went to the University of Toronto. I took an honours degree in sociology and a master’s degree in anthropology, and now I’m parking enforcement officer.”
“But Sergey you’re the best.”
“I’m not the best. I don’t get you.”
“You’re on the Sunshine List. You make over one hundred thousand dollars a year. I know because I clipped the article from the Toronto Daily News.”
“Those articles are a year old.”
“They say you were like a maniac: you never stopped handing out parking tickets; you made more money for the city than any other parking enforcement officer.”
“Over a million dollars year.”
“Anyhow, your niece and her friend are ready to go to Humber College for nursing.”
She opened a can of beer over the telephone. “They’ve just celebrated their nineteenth birthday over the summer. They truly feel as if they are adults, and, as if they know everything. I love them, but they’re going to learn plenty of tough lessons, but I suppose the experience will make them strong in the end. If anything, I think they’ll learn they’re not as smart as they thought they were.”
The girls were friends from childhood, possibly even infancy, as far as he knew. Sergey had been privileged to observe occasionally how his niece had grown. He could remember the large amount of time she had spent, growing up, with her friend Donatella. Now, making their sojourn to Toronto on the passenger train, he realized they probably would be late, since he had travelled the thousand-mile distance by rail many times, years ago, on journeys from his hometown of Beaverbrooke in northwestern Ontario to his adopted city of Toronto. His experience had taught him not to assume a hurried or frenetic state of mind while travelling on the train and not even to expect to arrive according to schedule. He remembered arriving in the city extremely late, which he hadn’t minded so much because he always made certain to bring plenty of magazines and newspapers to keep mentally occupied from becoming bored and ornery on the trip. Indeed, the girls arrived later than the train schedule indicated. Nonetheless, the lateness had only served to excite and arouse the young women, perky, gripped by the swift pace their lives had taken recently. They planned to spend two nights at his house, near Eglinton Avenue West and Dufferin Street, centrally located in city, and then they would move into their dormitory rooms at the suburban Etobicoke campus of Humber College. With the transcontinental train late, he camped out in the waiting lounge of the train station, reading a John LeCarre novel. Their quick footsteps on the hard floor aroused him from the funk into which he had fallen during a nap. He rubbed his eyes, the paperback book sliding the length of his plaid jacket.
