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  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. I took it with two hands, like a gift.

  “When you’re ready, you call me,” he said.

  The gold-embossed letters seemed gilded onto the paper. Five Star Ford, New cars and trucks, Jack Lahanni, Proprietor.

  It was time to shake his hand goodbye but I was lost in a daze, still holding the card. Instead he gave me a solid, friendly thump on the back.

  “When you’re ready,” he said again, starting toward his car.

  I woke up.

  “I will!” I called. “Thank you, Mr. Lahanni! I won’t forget. Thank you!”

  He waved as he swung in behind the wheel. I put the card in my wallet, in one of the plastic sleeves to protect it.

  That spring Dad had the heart attack. The fancy name for it is coronary thrombosis. It means a clot has cut off the blood supply to an area of the heart, which damages it. But if the damaged area is small and doesn’t impair heartbeat, the attack shouldn’t be fatal. I know this because I read every paragraph on it in our Family Medical Guide, over and over.

  Daniel and I were allowed to see him two days later. He was in the coronary-care unit of the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, and he’d already had surgery that opened the blocked section of his artery.

  Mom took us in, one hand on each of our shoulders. I felt a kick, like a foot in my stomach. I don’t think I’d ever seen my father in bed – we weren’t even allowed into our parents’ bedroom and he was always up before us, anyway. He’d never had a cold so bad it kept him home. Now he was lying there, one tube in his nose, another in his arm, a machine still monitoring his heartbeat. I looked away, as if I’d just caught him naked. This was the man who used to hold out his arm to let me swing on it.

  When he came home, everything changed. How we ate, what we did, who we saw. Everybody in town seemed to come by – once. I felt people looking at me, the oldest, the biggest son.

  My mother went to work at the Capital Cafe, in Ile-des-Sapins’ only hotel. She’d never been a waitress before but she made more in tips than she did for a salary. She’s a pretty woman. With her dark hair tied back and the dusty rose uniform outlining her trim body, she was more than pretty. The women in Ile-des-Sapins said Mariette did so well because people felt sorry for my dad. The men didn’t say anything. I couldn’t bring myself to go into the Capital Cafe, not even for a Coke, once she started there.

  My eighteenth birthday came and went. That summer I worked four afternoons a week at the Rosetown Food Fare, unloading boxes from the big trailers, and it didn’t feel like enough. I spent a lot of time firing a lacrosse ball at the old wooden shed in our back yard. I never broke through but I cracked it in a lot of places.

  Dad was home the whole summer. He was encouraged to walk but not a whole lot more than that. All day he paced in the house or played solitaire at the kitchen table. I’ll always remember the summer by that sound, the frustrated snap, snap of cards against wood. I could hear it no matter where I was in the house, even above the sound of Daniel’s guitar drifting up from the basement. My father didn’t cheat. I never saw him win.

  In the fall I started grade twelve, and Dad cautiously began to feel out the small jobs. But there was such a backlog of bills that we all still tensed when the phone rang. And most days I would come home from school and see him at the kitchen table, his broad shoulders twitching as he snapped down the cards of that stupid game.

  That’s when I was ready. I put on my sport-coat and got a ride to the city with Mr. Gregoire, who took me all the way in to Five Star Ford. Jack Lahanni was surprised to see me – he knew I wasn’t supposed to graduate until the next June – but when I explained the circumstances he was good to his word. I came home flushed with the package he’d promised me: the training, base-plus-commission, even a demonstrator to drive.

  “Jens,” my father said, angry beyond shouting, his hand gripping my arm at the kitchen table. “Don’t do this, for God’s sake. This isn’t the life you want. If you leave school now, you might never get back.”

  “And maybe I don’t want to,” I argued. “Look, it’s time for me to do this, contribute something…”

  “It’s my job to support us, not yours.”

  “I’m not talking about that,” I lied, pulling out of his grip. “Listen, I’m good at sales. I’ve got drive. I can make money, real money…”

  “This isn’t about money, is it?” Dad’s voice was hushed. “Jens, what do I have to say to you? You don’t have to prove anything to me. You don’t have to earn your place in this family.”

  He was too close. I stood up, heart pounding.

  “You don’t understand anything! I want my life, not the one you didn’t have. And the world’s different now. Success happens for people who go out and get it.”

  He straightened in his chair. “I think I know how the world works. “

  “What do you know, Dad? You know windows.”

  It was too far and I knew it. My father stood up. He walked out of the kitchen.

  “This is going to work,” I called after him. “You’ll see! You’re going to be so…”

  He was gone. I was sick, scalding with shame. In the darkened hallway beyond the kitchen I saw the faint glimmer of a face, then the figure that hung back in the shadow, listening.

  “Get the hell away from me,” I whispered to my brother. “If I see your face I’ll break it.”

  FIVE

  It was full darkness when I pulled the truck into the driveway behind my parents’ house, beside the ramshackle shed my father said was an old garage but was too small to even hold a car. The kitchen windows beamed out at me, yellow and warm against the black yard. I’d never meant to come home like this — come home because I had to.

  Daniel opened his door and I came to life. ”Let me do the talking,” I said. ”You can’t lie worth shit. Leave the tapes in the truck until I think of something.”

  We got his guitar out of the back but before I closed the hatch, he stopped me.

  “Jens, give me some money. Just a few bucks. I always show her what I earned.”

  “Big man,” I snorted, pulling out ten dollars, the last money in my pocket. ”I want it back,” I said.

  I made him go first, ahead of me. My mother must have heard the truck because she flung the door open as soon as we stepped onto the walk.

  “What’s the matter? What happened? Your dad went to look for you.”

  “All the way to the Forks?” Daniel was horrified. Dad had driven an hour and a half each way to check a place he hadn’t been.

  “Well, that’s what you told me,” she snapped. ”I didn’t know where else you would go.”

  “He came to see me,” I said.

  “Jens…” Mom seemed to notice me in the darkness for the first time. ”Why?”

  “No big deal, he just did,” I said, but I turned my face away as I trooped past her. I didn’t know if I was a better liar than Daniel.

  The kitchen smelled like dinner and I inhaled a deep breath. I could tell it was rouladen in the oven, a thin cut of beef rolled up with onions and bacon that you roasted the hell out of and drowned in gravy. My mouth was watering. It had been a long time.

  My mother looked from Daniel to me as she closed the door, her radar at work. Walking past Daniel she leaned in close, head tilted. It was an odd movement, as if she was…smelling him.

  Daniel whipped out the ten dollars and waved it proudly in front of her.

  “I got it changed. There was more but I spent some.”

  She plucked the money out of his hand. ”Good. Now you only owe me twelve.”

  Daniel was surprised but not more than me. That was my money!

  “La musique. Tu te souviens pas? Est-ce que t’as pas dit, Mom, je te paierai après?”

  Daniel wilted, she must have had him dead to rights. But their private language was a slap. They wouldn’t do it in front of Dad. I took an angry step toward the door.

  “Well, I got
him home,” I said.

  Mom threw her arms around my shoulders, a hug that held me back.

  “Jens, I’m so glad to see you. Can you stay for supper?”

  My mom tries, I know she does. But Daniel was a baby with ear infections. He was a toddler who didn’t speak. I’m always her second thought, I know that. I’ve forgiven her.

  “Of course he can stay,” Daniel said, shrugging off his jacket. ”He’s on holidays.”

  I gave him a sharp look. I was supposed to do the talking.

  “Already? You haven’t been there a year,” Mom said.

  There was the crunch of gravel, and a sound I’d have known in my sleep – the squeak of my father’s brakes. My stomach pulled into a tight ball.

  “There he is.” Mom let me go. ”I’ll tell him Daniel’s home. He was so worried.” She went into the living room to the front door. I stepped in front of my brother, backing him against the counter.

  “Just shut up. Don’t say anything about me, or you’re in this on your own, I swear.”

  Daniel’s eyes widened. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong. I heard my name in the conversation and turned.

  My father was in his work clothes, padded overalls of gunmetal blue. The color looked too bright next to his face, creased by lines I couldn’t remember seeing at Christmas. His hair seemed paler, not turning silver or gray but just fading. The heart attack had been over a year ago but somehow the last few months had compressed him, flattened him. It worried me.

  Dad put his hand on Daniel’s head as if to ruffle his hair, but instead he pushed, short and sharp. He was mad.

  Daniel staggered back a step, shaken.

  ”Scheisskopf! Your mother was worried sick.”

  “I’m sorry! I went to see Jens,” Daniel blurted.

  “So? He doesn’t have a phone?”

  Actually, I didn’t. It had been disconnected two weeks ago.

  “We got talking,” “I said quickly. ”He just forgot.”

  Dad looked at me for the first time, and almost smiled. ”Hello, stranger,” he said. His hand moved, as if to reach for me, but instead he gestured at my clothes.

  “You wearing that jacket to the table?”

  We got down to business. In the Friesen house, meals are business. We’re not bean sprout people, no fancy sauces looped on the plates.

  “I just lay it out and stand back,” my mom likes to say, and that’s exactly what she did. Daniel’s never had much of an appetite and when he’s upset, he loses it completely. Nothing slows me down. I love food. Thank God I’ve always had the metabolism and the frame for it, that peasant’s body. I was so hungry and the spread of it, the smell of home that rose up from dish after dish, was like a hug.

  “It’s good to see somebody eat around here,” my father said, plunking the gravy down next to me, something he wasn’t allowed to have anymore. I knew it cheered him up just to watch me. ”How’s work?”

  My heart was in my throat.

  “Good,” I managed.

  “Think you might have some time?”

  “Jens is on holidays right now,” Mom cut in.

  “Holidays,” my father repeated. It was a foreign concept in our house.

  “It…it’s so busy in the summer. Everybody wants a new car because they’re going out on the highway. And then the new models come out in the fall. They told us to take our holidays now.” I felt pinned by his clear blue eyes. ”Why? What do you need, Dad?”

  “I thought maybe we’d tear down that shack of an outhouse and build a real garage,” Dad said.

  “Karl! You are not hauling lumber, you are not laying cement…”

  My father waved her objections away. ”I’m not going to lift a finger, except maybe to point. This One and That One, they’ll do the heavy work.”

  The words were like a warm hand on my shoulder. He used to call us that when we were kids, pet names full of pride. This One and That One. I had always been This One.

  Daniel looked faintly sick – the guitar man hated heavy work. But I suddenly knew I didn’t need him. I could build this thing by myself if Dad just told me what to do. He’d been talking about that garage for years and I wanted to finally make it happen.

  Something occurred to me.

  “How much is it going to cost?”

  “Between four and five thousand,” Dad said through a mouthful.

  “Do you have it?” I said without thinking.

  He smiled and kept chewing. In the Friesen household, kids didn’t ask adults what they could afford. He surprised me when he spoke again.

  “I will soon. That seniors’ complex that’s going up in St. Andrew’s? I got the contract. It’s a big bejesus job but I think I can swing it.”

  “You should hire someone to help you,” my mother said. ”Get Don Shibote.”

  Dad didn’t seem to hear. He was talking to me, his eyes lit up. ”If all I have to pay for is materials, and we do the work on weekends, we could get the walls and roof up before I get busy in the summer. Hell, we might even get it insulated.”

  “Dad, that’s great!” I said, and I meant it. After what we’d gone through in the last year, this moment seemed like a miracle.

  Except he’d have to give the money to Mogen Kruse.

  I looked at Daniel. His eyes were fixed on his plate, avoiding me. He’d known about this. He’d known it when he’d thumbed into the city to aggravate the hell out of Kruse.

  In that instant I almost hated him, the self-centered little prick. He pushed and pushed for what he wanted, and he didn’t care who had to pay for it.

  “How’s school, Daniel?” I said evenly.

  He looked up. ”It’s…okay.”

  My father pushed his plate away. ”That’s right. Report cards.” He held his hand out, all business. ”Where is it?”

  My mother leapt to her feet. ”Oh, you can see it after, Karl. Let’s have dessert.”

  She set out another one of my favorites, a coffee slice with caramel icing. My father bit into his low-fat cookie, resigned.

  Daniel was glaring at me.

  “You know, they’re already selling tickets to your grad, to the ceremony,” my brother said. ”I heard Chris Butler had to buy six because his whole family is going. His grandma is going to fly in from Vancouver, it’s such a big deal.”

  Beside me, my father’s breath ran out in a sigh, as if someone had thrust a knife into a tire.

  I went to my room after dinner. My old room. I remembered how it had been when Daniel and I both slept there, the beds against connecting walls, ends almost touching. I remembered us sitting up on our elbows, whispering in the dark, in the days when I was the only one he would talk to. Even after he could talk, he didn’t much, except at night. Then his whole day seemed to pour out of him, like he was a full glass that finally overflowed.

  My brother had never done really well in school. He was smart but he just wasn’t interested; he daydreamed a lot. Because he was so quiet, the rumor persisted that he was at least partially deaf, and maybe half retarded. Sometimes kids called him things just to see if he’d react. But if I was there, they kept their mouths shut. I tried to be there.

  Then, at the end of my grade nine year, I got into the second fight of my life, with Chris Butler. It wasn’t about Daniel, but it changed everything. My brother moved into the basement with his guitars. Late at night he’d still be playing, his noise vibrating the floor under my feet. I’d yell down the heating vent at him, tell him to shut the hell up.

  Now my room was exactly as I’d left it — school binders dumped on the desk, sports bag open against the wall, lacrosse stick leaning against the dresser that was piled with books. I pawed through the clutter as if I could find the money hidden somewhere.

  If only we could sell the tapes. But how? Who would buy them? Busking didn’t work. Fifteen tapes in three months, Kruse had said. But that was Daniel, not the Chocolate King.

  I hesitated, my hands on a drawer, an idea flickering.

&n
bsp; Dad’s voice rumbled through the wall, the rising pitch of anger. Shit! Daniel must have told him. I pushed off the dresser and hurried to the kitchen.

  My father’s fading hair had tumbled over his forehead, shaken out by the force of his stride, up and down the room. He had papers in his hand. Oh, God – the contract. I froze in the doorway.

  Daniel was slumped in a chair at the table, staring at his locked fingers. Mom was behind him, lips pursed as she tried to watch them both at the same time, a referee or guardian or both. But I knew she wouldn’t interfere.

  “Do you think I’m a fool, is that it? Do you think you can make a deal — a promise — and then ignore it? I’m such a fool I’m going to forget?”

  Daniel shook his head, a bare quiver.

  “Talk, dammit! I want you to talk to me.”

  “No!” It took effort for him to get the word out.

  “No, what?”

  “No, I don’t think you’re a fool.”

  “Then why would you do this? Let it go on and on and not even try?”

  Daniel looked up for the first time, his eyes a dark blaze. ”I did try.”

  “Bullshit. Trying is studying. Trying is getting help – asking for help. It’s not sitting in the basement playing the goddamn guitar. Well, they’re in lock-up now, mister…”

  “You can’t –”

  “Not only that,” Dad continued, ”I am phoning this Kruse guy tomorrow and I’m telling him it’s off. Whatever he’s doing, he’s going to stop right now…”

  “Dad!” My voice rang across the room and all three turned to look at me. My father straightened, pulled up the waistband of his pants. He gestured at me.

  “This is your doing,” he said.

  The words were a blow.

  “What? How?”

  He thrust the sheets out at me. I strode over and caught them up. It wasn’t the contract, it was Daniel’s second term report card. Fragments of sentences leapt out at me: ”…assignments incomplete…does not attend regularly…” I read them in disbelief. He was failing.

  “This is your example,” Dad said. ”He looks to you. When you gave up, he gave up.”

  The heat was in my face, the fire I’d been avoiding — we’d both been avoiding – for seven months.