The Sweetest One Read online

  “No,” I say.

  A period piece on the giant Magnavox. Guys with long hair, royal headpieces, and Fu Manchu moustaches. tv in the morning, tv in the afternoon, tv in the evenings. Dishes crash together under the water. It sounds like hollow thumping to me. I throw dishes against the inside of the sink, just so I can hear more thumping.

  THURSDAY AFTER SCHOOL, Nancy invites me to her house to make soup, but I tell her I have to work. You never know how it’s going to be. The store ends up being dead, so my mom pays bills at the front while I put up Christmas decorations. Pure busywork. I guess it’s fine. But it’d be better if Trina were here. We’d do it together, she’d think of fun and creative ways to arrange the tinsel and Santa cut-outs, then we’d go on a treat run, she’d go look for dead stock, maybe try some of it on, or get me to. Slacking was her specialty. But work she was good at, too. She might have been our best employee. She definitely was our best salesperson.

  I liked to watch her work, serving three customers at the same time, which we have to do when it’s busy — running a pair of boots to cash then whirling around, trailing scent and personality behind her on her way to get someone into the fitting room with jeans so she could help someone else with a jacket. I’d see her work and think, how are we related? and sometimes if she saw me looking she’d smile. Some smiles have energy, don’t you think, or power? When she smiled at me I felt a connection. Was it something I did?

  Trina has a better understanding of people than anyone I know. My mom asked her one time how she sold so much and Trina said, “Most people have too many clothes already. You have to think of what else they might want from you.” I thought about that and started to see things differently. She was fond of suggesting people try things, not just things they came in to try, but a pair of red or yellow pants, or a weird skirt, or a shirt in a different cut from the one the person was wearing. When she did she’d usually make a sale. She sold an oilskin to Mr. Andrechuk, this suit and tie accountant guy, guessing he’d want to feel rugged on weekends. She sold the same red silky dress to two different conservative dressers. The lessons here? Some want to be seen as rebels, most want to wear something soft every now and then.

  Some of my favourite clothes are the dead stock items she helped me find — these houndstooth pants, these old sneakers from the eighties — and stuff she stole from my parents’ closets just to see how they’d look with accessories. I guess she made me look a little weird, I’m the butt of school jokes sometimes, but I’m proud to look the way I do.

  Anyway, we need more tinsel. I’m about to go downstairs to grab another box of decorations when my dad comes up and asks my mom what a certain word in English means. In the middle of their conversation, he lets out a fart, one of those that really drag out, and he just keeps talking, acts like nothing happened, even though the fart is as loud as his voice and Mrs. Lawrence is five feet away looking at belts. I bust a gut, he does too, and my mom just sighs, probably thinking, What is it with this family and fart jokes?

  This is what our life is now.

  MY DAD HAS all kinds of good qualities. He knows about animals, he’s a really good cook, he’s got good business sense, strong emotions, and he works really hard. Plus, you should be there sometime when he busts out a poem, a bit of philosophy, or when he’s cooking and thinks he’s by himself and lets loose a song that’s sadder, more beautiful, than anything I’ve ever heard. The other thing about my dad, he knows who he is. Where my mom talks and talks about reading Shakespeare or Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle when she was a kid, my dad willingly admits to never having read a book in his life. He thinks he’s dumb. It’s far from the truth. You can’t build a store like this from nothing if you’re dumb, and reading books doesn’t always make you a smart or worthwhile person.

  Probably the thing I like best about my dad is his stories. First thing I’m gonna do if I become a writer is publish them.

  The last time I asked him for one, I said: “Tell me about that time you got lost.” He looked at me. “You know, that time with the guy in the chicken suit?” It’s one of my favourite stories.

  “Wah, I follow him,” he said.

  “How old were you?”

  “Long about six, seven year old. I went to next town.”

  “Like, you walked there?”

  “Yah.”

  I pictured a caravan of children, or just my little boy dad, following an oversized chicken across a field and down a dirt road. The moment curiosity and glee turned to fear and dread, or the way those feelings mixed, then faded in and out.

  “How did you get home?”

  “Wah, I cry and somebody bring me home.”

  Another time I said, “You caught a fish with your bare hands.”

  “Yah,” he said and laughed at the audacity of it, the memory like a light bulb, his face a lampshade. “Eider me or Gnee Ba.” His favourite brother.

  “Were you standing in a river?” I pictured them without shoes, feet gripping a shallow rock bottom, hands poised for a stealth move.

  “No. You know, my village yau goa pond.” He made a circle with his hands.

  “What, your family owned it?”

  “No. Everybody, that whole village owned that pond. Every-body have share. You know, that big,” he touched his thumb almost to the tip of his finger, “the fish put in the pond. Later on, you know how big? That big!” He held his hands more than a foot apart.

  “Wow! That’s huge!”

  “It was so good,” he said slowly, emphatically. “We so hungry, we eat the head, eat the eye, eat the bone. You know, lo mai ne jip heng ga faan.”

  I knew. He taught us that. Whatever meat you’re eating, put the juice on your rice. It tastes good.

  “How’d you cook it?” I said. “Muy choy? Geung chong?”

  “Muy choy, geung chong, haa deng.” He told me more — I wanted to picture the kitchen, the pots, the stove, what kind of floor, maybe it was made of dirt — and then he said, “You know, before, no meat. Just some fish, just some rice, wegetable.” The rhythm of his voice. I tried to capture it. Everyone’s voice has a rhythm.

  I said, “No chicken?”

  “Couple time.”

  I knew. They tried raising them from chicks but they wouldn’t take. “Tell me about the pig.”

  “The pick?”

  “Yeah, you know, umm … every year there was a pig?”

  “Not every year.”

  “Okay, but when there was one, every family took a turn to raise it, right? Like, every week the pig would go to a different family?” I imagined the pig bumping around inside their house against the furniture. “And then, you know, the Japanese came?” I was careful with how I put it. Maybe not careful enough. He didn’t say anything for a while, just looked down to the centre of the table. Then I saw his face change. I wanted to know and thought I had a chance.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Gegai mun kut oo yeh?” he said. He was angry, quietly angry, and maybe he looked older. Both were rare.

  The first and only time he told the story, he said there was a scout. I picture him running down a hill as fast as he could to tell everyone the Japanese were coming. The villagers left, maybe to hide in forests or ditches, and they came back hours later to find the place ransacked, everything on fire or already burned. There was garbage everywhere, and the pig lay dead in a field with a hole in its side. My dad said that one time he told the story that he thought the Japanese were about to eat the pig when they got called away by their general. The villagers had nothing left, not even dignity. Or, well, they did have one thing: that dead pig. They ate it, probably thinking of how much more food there would have been in a few more months, how angry they were, and what they’d do if they happened on the Japanese again.

  Another time I asked, “How old were you when your dad died?”

  “Long about ten, eleven year old.” I wrote it down in my notebook. “You know,” he said, “he never have energy. Always have to —” and then he sai
d something in Cantonese.

  “What does that mean?” I say.

  He said, “Wah, you know,” and raked the fingers of his left hand over his right arm. “To get blood mooing.”

  “What, all over his body?”

  “Yah.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Wah, he diabetic people.”

  “I thought he died because he drank too much.”

  “Wah, coulda be that, too. You know, before, no test tape, no needle, no nothing. You know how people find diabetic? They look at the nil—”

  I had learned a few months before in Biology. “Your pee has flies if you have diabetes,” I said.

  “Yah,” he said, glad to be understood.

  “So he probably had it. How about your mom? How old were you when she died?”

  “Three, four year before my fadder die.”

  “How did she die?” I said.

  He used a Cantonese word I didn’t understand.

  “You always said she had cholera.”

  “Coulda be,” he said, nodding. Then he got sheepish. “You know, coulda be you think I’m crazy, but,” then he said more things in Cantonese. It took a while to figure out what he meant. My mom helped a bit, but it was mostly my dad talking and me guessing what he was trying to say. Turns out he and his mom had just gotten home from planting rice in their village plot when she sat down on the curb, exhausted — it was sunny and hot — and said, Look at all those dogs.

  “What’s wrong with that?” I said. He told me, again in Cantonese, and I figured it out soon enough. “Oh, there weren’t actually any dogs there,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay. No, I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  “She so tired. She lie down in sleep. Nex few day, she sweating and sleep, dilehla, gnau.”

  “Sounds like cholera,” I said. I went to the reading room and came back with my encyclopedia. It’s not great, just a single volume, but it confirmed hallucinations are a symptom. I told him that. I also told him how it’s transmitted.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yah. Three, four day later, she die.”

  “So fast,” I said. “That’s really sad.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said in the dismissive way he does when a fact is self-evident. He didn’t make a big deal of it, which I guess made sense, since it happened so long ago.

  I’ve known a lot of my dad’s stories for years, but it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the things he’s lost. He tells me things and I don’t know what to say, don’t know what he’d want me to say. We don’t talk about feelings. I ask him about his life, he tells me stories, but what can you say in response to that pain? I’m sorry? I can’t imagine what it was like for you? What was it besides sad? How exactly did you feel that loss? These aren’t questions I know how to ask him and not questions he’d be able to answer, I’m sure.

  The last time I asked my dad for a village story, my mom sulked. “Gnoa m jongee gum sad,” she said glumly.

  “But all good literature is sad stories,” I said. “Dickens, lots of Shakespeare.”

  “Goagoa hai story,” she said. “Neegoa hai real.”

  “Yeah, but that’s life. You can’t just pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “What’s passed is past.”

  “Yeah, but it shapes who you are now, don’t you think?”

  “Still,” she said.

  One time we were watching tv. The show was a romantic comedy set in modern day Mongkok. When commercials came on, I asked my mom, “So, uhh, before in Hong Kong, did you have a lot of boyfriends?”

  She looked up and to the side, as if she was trying to figure out how much she should tell me. That sweet smile of reminiscence. Look at her. Of course she had boyfriends. “Yah. Kind of,” she said.

  “How did you meet Dad?”

  She shrugged.

  “Come on,” I said. “You had to have met somewhere.” I used to joke with Stef and Trina that it was in a Chinese tearoom. They met eyes from across the room, shyly started talking, and soon realized they couldn’t live without each other.

  This secret smile on her face. She liked having information someone else wanted and the knowledge that she didn’t have to share it.

  “Well?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “It’s not a big deal. Why won’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t have to tell you,” she said. Her accent — a lot of China and a little bit of England there — and the way she overemphasized her words, the defiance, made it funny.

  “But like, when you die, no one will know the story.”

  “Baa la,” she said. Too bad. “I don’t need anyone to know.”

  My mom lords it over my dad sometimes, how she thinks she’s so much more rational. She thinks she’s smarter because she knows more words and went to university and doesn’t believe in ancestor worship. She can’t go a single week without bringing up Shakespeare or Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle. She’ll correct his poems, his bits of philosophy. It’s three grains of rice, not three bushels, she’ll say in Chinese.

  I’ve asked her why she married him if she thinks she’s so much better. I wanted to see what she’d say, wondered how my mom, with her priorities and love of book smarts, ever looked at my dad — this semi-literate rube from rural Canada and a Chinese peasant village before that — and thought yes, him, when there had to have been more educated local candidates.

  She told me it was because she saw he worked hard.

  “What else?” I said.

  She shrugged.

  “Well, did you love him? Did you think he was handsome? Was he nice to you?”

  “Work hard is important,” she said. But imagine leaving your parents, your friends, your favourite place in the world, your whole charmed life of sock hops and warmth and Great Works of Literature and little glass bottles of Coke and Chinese desserts for cold and snow and racism and some uneducated guy you barely know. Just because he works hard. Seriously, is she some kind of martyr?

  6

  *

  THE NEXT DAY, Friday, I have Band. I sit in the back of the music room with Luke Carcadian. When we started Band, we took a test to see what we would play, and Luke got a bad mark so he plays tuba. I play baritone because Gene and Trina did, though I’ve often thought I’d like the trumpet better — high and sad the way Chet Baker played it or bwah bwah goofy cheerful like Armstrong and Beiderbecke. Luke and I barely know how to read music, so we spend class goofing around. He gropes his tuba like it’s a girl, then tries to empty his spit valve on me. He thinks he’s badass, but who are we kidding? We’re in Band. Ty Rodriguez would never take Band — not Band or Calculus or Chemistry or Biology or anything else I’m in this semester. He’s nineteen, probably in the slow stream. Guys like him don’t belong in towns like this.

  After school I call the cops to see if there’s any news on Trina. As usual, Mike Brown’s dad is the one who picks up.

  “What file is this for?” he says, even though he knows my voice.

  It’s for my sister, you creepy fuck. The one you and your son used to circle jerk about, remember? “Trina Wong,” I say and give him the file number. I try to sound nice. I hate faking it, but they won’t help you if you’re rude.

  “Nope. Nothing new.” He says it right away because he hasn’t looked it up.

  “Okay, well, you have our phone number? Eight four five —”

  “It’s the store?” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Got it,” he says, then hangs up on me. The prick. Gary Brown is as much of an asshole as Mike. He stopped me one night on my way home — swooped up parallel across the angle parking spots in front of our side door, cherries on — even though he’s seen me, like, five hundred times. He also blew the whistle on the Meers, said he got food poisoning from their restaurant. People stopped eating at Perry’s even after the Meers checked out. Aabidah Meer goes to my school. You should see her wash her hands. It takes a whole five minutes. Been tha
t way since grade school. I bet her parents are clean, too.

  As soon as I get off the phone, it rings again. It’s Kay, asking me if I wanna go to Kat Mitchum’s party. I say sure, even though parties are not my thing, and after dinner, I tell my mom I’m going out to a friend’s, even though I’m not friends with Kat Mitchum. My mom doesn’t have the balls to ask more than that, and my dad won’t check to see if I’m around as long as he doesn’t need me. I kind of wish he did. Stef and Trina were his favourites. Me, I’m just what’s left.

  Kay comes by in her car around eight-thirty, her hair like coiled-up pasta. Took her hours to do. We drive to the Voyageur Motel on the south service road and ask people going in if they’ll buy us alcohol, and we hang around freezing our asses off until someone does, this guy with a mesh cap, brown nylon coat, and tobacco-stained moustache. He gives us a bag, heavy with wine coolers, then shorts us ten bucks on our change and asks us where the party is and can he come. I wanna punch him in the face, kick him in the balls, kick him while he’s down till I break something.

  We drive off east down the highway, to the Red Mart. My body clenches as we pull in. Josh McMurtry is there behind the counter. His eyes follow me as I walk in. He was friends with my sister Stef, and if there’s anyone in my family I look like, it’s her. I wait behind a woman with four bags of chips and a thing of dip. She pays with quarters and pennies, and he’s looking at me — smiling — like what can you do. Beige coat with the Red Mart logo.

  “Hey,” I say when she leaves, and his eyes shift to the pile of change in front of him. It’s cold even in here, despite the fried chicken and wedge fry heat lamp. I see cigarettes I know on the wall behind him — Camels, Marlboros, Gauloises, Lucky Strikes — while he puts the change away. He says they’re all American.

  “Except for Gauloises,” I say, thinking of Picasso and Camus, George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London, Asterix the Gaul. I’ve never smoked before, but now I’m going to a party, why not have some fun? I ask him to close his eyes and run his hand along the cigarettes, and though he’s in his twenties, close to getting his degree, he does it with a smile and a little kid nod. I close my eyes, too, then count to five and tell him to stop — Belmont Mills — then I hand him ten and change for the pack, some matches, a medium slush, and a one-piece meal. He gives me an extra piece, extra fries, doesn’t id me.