Winning Chance Read online

  “In the last few weeks, Mother slept all the time. She welcomed the drugs.”

  Buster took another two fingers of Scotch, looking deep into his glass. Cloudy was sure both of them could hear Prayer now.

  I don’t believe in pain.

  Cloudy left the last of his Scotch. He sloshed it around while Buster started up again.

  “I had to be here on business. That’s why the reception was today. I put a notice in the newspaper. Fourteen people came for lunch, most of them oldsters I didn’t know, and a few neighbours I did, and the caregivers, her friends. A good turnout and over by three.”

  Prayer called people friends but Cloudy knew all her real friends were dead. Except him. But he’d been under a rug.

  “Today’s my birthday,” he said, and wondered why, with Buster, he felt like he’d woken up, solid against the heaviness, the heat. His bare foot stroked the floor.

  Always take another chance. That was Prayer again.

  “Too bad you missed it. We had cake. Very elegant, at the Macdonald Hotel. As Mother would have wished.”

  But Buster was wrong. She would have wanted it at home, with peach pie and her golden statues and gold-rimmed teacups and no drafts and her own good Scotch after. And Scotch mints filling the crystal bowl. Cloudy would have passed them around. The mints were the best part. Buster poured himself another.

  “Where have you been, anyway? Caused me a lot of trouble, not having someone I trust around here. What happened to you?”

  “Mom died.”

  “I heard about that. Mother had the reception here. Have you had trouble since then?”

  Get it out of your head. Once and for all.

  Okay, Mom. Okay, Prayer.

  “That day, Prayer was not sick or tired,” Cloudy said. “She was in charge. We had tea and sour cherry pie from the freezer because that was Mom’s favourite. There was Prayer and me and Sally the Safeway lady, Tom from Pet World, and Avelina the bank teller.”

  That was five. Five people, but everyone there knew Mom and loved her.

  Avelina was Mexican, with a long thick braid, and she was smart. Cloudy didn’t want to do banking tomorrow in bare feet.

  “I have to wash some socks.”

  “I have to show the house to an agent.” Buster corked the bottle. It was down to one-quarter full.

  “I’ll go clean off the walks first.”

  Buster yawned. “I’m catching the red-eye back to Toronto.”

  Married to his work.

  “You need a wee wooly nap.”

  Buster smiled, put on his glasses, and opened the mail. Cloudy went to the front closet. Prayer’s rainbow of coats for every kind of weather was gone. The broom stood alone.

  The sun had softened the crust, and Cloudy brushed off the front sidewalk in minutes. The light exercise felt like opening a window. Cloudy’s job from the age of fifteen to thirty-one had been the upkeep of Prayer’s back garden and front yard. Now they could get carpeted like next door.

  I have my standards. But Prayer was gone.

  Cloudy went in to wash the glass tumblers. He had forgotten how soapsuds settled him and looked forward to the dirty dishes waiting for him at home. His job now, from thirty-two on.

  Honest work makes you honest. Mom again.

  Buster wrote out a cheque. Cloudy dried and put away the tumblers, looking out at the yard.

  “This is a good house. And the garden, too.”

  “I hope to make a private sale.”

  Prayer would approve. Lawn signs are vulgar.

  Buster added, “Probably sell to a buyer wanting to build.”

  “When was the last time she went out?”

  Buster looked at Cloudy over his reading glasses.

  “To the doctor, two months ago. After that, her doctor came here.”

  Cloudy nodded. People did extra for Prayer. But Cloudy had left her to strangers and taxis and AstroTurf. The hurt in his heart bled all through his chest. He felt drained inside, like the sink. He watched it suck the last of the water.

  Buster put the cheque in an envelope.

  “Now. Keep the walks clear. I want the house key back; you keep the key to the garage and take the tools in it and the broom. Put the mail in the backdoor milk chute from now on.”

  Cloudy had fixed the milk chute once. Mom had used it as a hiding place for pies cooling. Hot pain, not on top of him like a heavy fur coat, but inside him, in the empty spaces, filled Cloudy up.

  On the envelope Buster wrote his phone number in Toronto and said Cloudy should call in case of emergency. Cloudy shoved the envelope in his pocket under Mom’s hair so soft. That morning last fall when she didn’t get up, he tried to wake her by touching the wispy curls by her ears.

  Cloudy turned back to Buster at the front hall.

  “Buster, do you think—?” A warm teardrop fell on Cloudy’s bare foot.

  Buster looked down at his mother’s Persian rug. Another drop fell.

  “Mother left you the Oldsmobile.”

  “Oh, no. I can’t drive alone. I wouldn’t know where—”

  “Then I’ll cancel the insurance. When it sells, I’ll reimburse you.”

  “Could I … Buster, what about the birdcage?”

  “That’s my man. An empty birdcage won’t sell the house. Looks like something died in here.”

  The tears kept coming, one at a time. Cloudy reached with his tongue. The salt tasted good after all that Scotch. He put on his jacket and fumbled the keys to Prayer’s house and the Oldsmobile off the ring.

  Buster returned with the cage and a bag of Budge’s food and bird treats and toys, most of them new from Cloudy’s last trip to Pet World with Prayer in the fall. Cloudy hooked the cage with two right fingers and put the keys in Buster’s open palm and then gripped the bag in his left hand.

  “When did he…?” Cloudy bet he was the reason. No water, no food, no cage cleaning.

  “He wouldn’t eat. So Budge went with her. In her hand.”

  Prayer spoiled all her budgies. But this Budge stayed with her at the end. Prayer was not alone. Cloudy took a breath that felt like going up the stairs, then a loud sigh. The crying was over. Cloudy would not be alone, either. He put the cage in his bag-holding hand.

  Cloudy laid his free hand flat against the wall, to feel its warmth. Prayer’s house.

  Bye Cloudy. Be well. Her last words. He never did say bye. The day of Mom’s funeral lunch, the leftover piece of cherry pie balanced on his palm, he went out the door and sunk into a bear hole.

  Buster pulled one of the full Scotch bottles from under his arm.

  “Take it.”

  Cloudy shook his head. Buster held it up.

  “I can’t fit them both in my suitcase.”

  Cloudy’s eyes remained fixed on the cage, which he took back into his spare hand. Buster waved the bottle.

  “Come on. For your birthday.”

  “It’s for dying.”

  Buster was quiet then, with his two hands gripping the bottle like a rifle, like his father in the dead great ibis picture. Buster, a boy without his mother, without his father, like Cloudy.

  “I know why all the Budges died,” said Cloudy.

  Buster inspected the label of the Glenlivet 25 Year. He turned away and found his hankie.

  Hands full, they didn’t shake like they usually did.

  The next morning when the bank opened, Cloudy had Buster’s cheque and the Be Kind to Our Planet bag full of bills and a shaved face and two clean socks on, first in the lineup for Avelina.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Prayer’s funeral was yesterday.”

  “I know. I had to work. So, we need to change the name on all your bills from your mom to you, with your legal name, Clarence.”

  “My Daddy gave me
that name.” It was on his driver’s license.

  Avelina called to pay and hook his telephone back up. She was firm.

  “Bring your bills every week. If you forget, I’ll phone you.”

  Today was Tuesday but yesterday was his birthday, his lucky day, so they decided on Mondays at 11 after the rush so they could take their time. Avelina showed him her business card with her phone number. It even had her picture on it. Then she copied Buster’s number off the envelope to the back of her card.

  “Keep that in your wallet. And here’s your money until Monday.” Avelina offered him a mint from the jar and another one for later. He stashed that one in his pocket, where Mom’s curl caught his finger.

  “Do you like bowling?”

  “I never tried it.” Avelina flipped her braid behind her shoulder.

  He always waited for the braid. That’s how he knew it was time for the next person in line.

  “Bye, Avelina.”

  “See you on Monday, Clarence. Eleven o’clock.”

  He took the bus to Pet World. As he walked by Bear Paw Bowling, someone came out the door and he heard a strike, then a cheer. The strike sounded like his name, Clarence, straight and clear. He would come back tomorrow with his leftover money. He would bowl with himself.

  “Ha, no waiting.” But maybe, no fun. Maybe one of the workers would play with him on their break.

  Inside Pet World, he breathed deep. Wood shavings and lemons. He loved this smell. He looked at all the budgies from both sides of the row of cages. He talked to them. They chuckled to him.

  The manager, Tom, shook his hand and was happy to call him Clarence from now on. He was sorry to hear about Prayer and Budge eleven.

  The name Budge was from Prayer’s dead husband, so the bird was always male and his nose was blue. Clarence knew how to tell the females because Mom had brought books from the library about budgerigars with lots of pictures and they read them over and over. Clarence picked out two green female budgies. He named one Mom and the other Prayer. Mom was a lighter green than Prayer. These two, Prayer and Mom, had noses the colour of his hands.

  Clarence helped Tom catch the birds, inspect them carefully, and box them up. Then he counted out his cash.

  “I know why all the Budges died.”

  “Why?” Tom’s eyebrows went up.

  Clarence murmured gently to the birds one by one as he fit the cartons inside the Be Kind to Our Planet bag, put the bag under his jacket, and zipped it up for the bus ride home.

  “Why, Clarence? Why did they die?”

  “One needs another one.”

  Tom nodded. “You know your budgerigars.”

  “Tom, do you know bowling?”

  Broken Plates

  Wally made the coffee from a fresh bag of beans, but was running a little late and, without having taken his first sip, dropped his full cup. The red porcelain lay in a cracked mess on the kitchen floor.

  “No!” yelled Wally.

  “I’ll get it,” Mina said, and swiftly filled a travel mug and handed it to him. “You didn’t get any on yourself, anyway. Go on. I’ll wipe it up.”

  “I hate being late. I hate dropping things! I hate getting old.”

  Mina put an apple and granola bar in his other hand. “Drive carefully.” Wally left the kitchen.

  She picked up the big pieces and laid them on the counter, sopped up the rest with paper towels, and threw it away. Even with Wally gone, his frustrated energy lingered. She took her own coffee and the broken pieces outside.

  August, already hot this morning, but she and Wally hadn’t eaten a single meal outdoors all summer. After laying a clean tarp out on the picnic table, Mina retrieved a bulky bag from under her potting bench and dumped out the pieces of dishes, cups, and bowls saved over thirty-one years. She put the pieces of Wally’s red cup on top of the heap. Sparrows and finches and chickadees flitted to the feeders, active and excited for the new day.

  As Mina picked up each piece and cleaned it with a soft rag, the birds consoled her as they had, season by season, those busy days raising three boys: the endless cooking, the laundry, the groceries. Watching the birds in their tiny moments at the birdbath mimicked her half-hour gaps at the pottery wheel, running to short classes here and there, borrowing bits of time at friends’ kilns, and entering a few pieces in small group shows. Later, her feather-imprinted plates got noticed in bigger shows; she installed her own basement kiln and now supplied a list of regular clients online.

  Mina folded over one edge of the canvas, rolled the clean pieces up in it, and moved it over to the lawn. The overlarge bowl had originally been part of a fountain, salvaged from Wally’s parents’ place. It weighed a ton. She had positioned it, with the help of all three teens, on a circular patio left over from a cast iron fire cage she no longer wanted (the smoke rose directly into the master bedroom above). The birdbath, as they now called the old fountain bowl, was big enough to curl up in. Their youngest, Sam, used to hose it out on the hottest, most humid days, fill it to the brim, and float with his legs sticking out. The paint on the bottom, a midnight blue, eventually began to crack, and pieces of the interior concrete crumbled off with it.

  Mina unrolled and spread out the tarp on the grass. She strapped on some knee pads and brought over a tray of glue and a few kids’ paintbrushes. It felt good to move, sing if she wanted, make a big mess. Mina had to tiptoe around Wally’s moods, his appetites, his temperature level, even. It was worse since Sam moved out. Wally was drinking more, especially at night when she worked in the basement. He rarely came down to her workshop. He was often put off by her pottery, her studio, the time she spent there. Her work puzzled him, she suspected, as much as his habits sometimes

  bothered her.

  She swept out the cavity of the birdbath. More chunks of aggregate plunked out onto the patio. Wally was worried about retiring, when she was only getting started. Mina fully appreciated that Wally helped build her kiln, but he only did it because she convinced him that it would someday make a profit. He, like her own father, never used the word, “art,” never mind “art school.” Mina wondered why they felt it necessary to quantify an activity to a dollar value. If it kept her sane, wasn’t that enough? If it meant something to her, didn’t that count?

  Her pottery was popular. But once, when she needed a cash infusion for materials, Wally said, “You can always have a bake sale.” Mina had relayed that to each of her sons, and they agreed that the comment was demeaning, promised her never to say it to their own partners or to any woman, and all offered to pitch in a hundred bucks. Instead, she took the money out of savings and replaced it later. She was looking for a moment to ask Wally to take over the business part, which completely bored her. Maybe then he’d regard her work seriously. She had to force herself to do her accounts. She was supposed to do it today—long overdue—but none of it mattered right now. Not with this undone concave mosaic demanding her, all of her, today.

  She began with midnight blue, from a coffee mug, in the centre, which matched the original paint underneath. With a paintbrush, she thickly daubed glue into a pitted spot and brushed glue on the back of the blue piece, then pressed it down and held it there firmly. She remembered that blue, the freedom they felt when she and Wally moved out of their parents’ houses and into that spartan apartment downtown. Their first pair of coffee mugs, lifted from the communal laundry room. Over the years, in their starter home they never left, boys dropped cereal bowls, she dropped plates, and Wally dropped cups, all completely normal. None of them had hurled the porcelain across the room, like in some of her friends’ lives: volcanic marriages, seething hatred, and ring-throwing fights. That hadn’t happened here, in this house they’d bought after years of saving and hoping. But other things had, periods of time that perplexed her, plagued her, even, that needed smoothing out at her potter’s wheel before she could face anyone again.

&nbs
p; She spread out the puzzle pieces of her family, her life, right side up on the tarp. A kaleidoscope. She didn’t group by colour or size, preferring to let her hands do the selecting, picking each piece by feel, by instinct, intuition. Mina had long ago decided they’d eat off of mismatched dishes gleaned from garage sales. Then it didn’t matter if they broke. Wally had to leave the room if he dropped anything, if it broke or even if it didn’t. He must have been severely punished by his mother, a woman Mina had never met, who died right before they were married. Wally said, so she didn’t have to come to the wedding. His mother’s English bone china went to Wally’s sister, Shauna. Mina was so relieved.

  Wally was an air traffic controller. When she met him, she supposed he was calm guy with a job like that. And he was, at work, according to his workmates, who nicknamed him The Wall.

  Mina rebroke the red cup that Wally had dropped this morning to make it fit next to some lime green. This cup had little airplanes on it. Maybe, she thought, dropping dishes was like dropping planes to Wally, mini-metaphors for disaster because the planes he controlled were full of people.

  She held up a tangerine half-plate and found the other half. A split down the middle, like two sides of the moon. She could glue them side by side or separate them, which is what she did, tilting them suggestively toward, but not touching, the other. Working from the inside to the outside perimeter, she eyeballed the number of pieces she had for the amount of space to fill. She might not have quite enough and considered how many chipped plates lay in the kitchen cupboard. No need to replace them with only two at the table now. She stood, stretched, and went in for the extra shapes, colours, and sizes she needed and a hammer.

  Mina smiled. Breaking the red one and the yellow one felt so good, but she had to wonder why, when she herself was in the “business” of making dinnerware. Because, she decided, she was making something else with them. A giant bowl of plenty, showing the efforts of love over the entire lifetime of her sons, a story bowl. She thought of the podge, white like glue but clear when dry, to smooth the surface, leaving no pokey places in case one of her (hoped for) future grandchildren took a (supervised) dip in the big birdbath.