Lisa Moore - February

FEBRUARY

ALSO BY LISA MOORE

FICTION

Degrees of Nakedness

Open

Alligator

The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Womens Short Stories (Selected and Introduced)

Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth (Co-edited, with Dede Crane)

FEBRUARY

LISA MOORE

Copyright 2009 by Lisa Moore

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.

First published in Canada in 2009 by House of Anansi Press Inc., Toronto, Ontario

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9790-0 (e-book)

Black Cat
a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com

For my parents, Elizabeth and Leo Moore.

EARLY MORNING

Sunrise or Sunset, November 2008

HELEN WATCHES AS the man touches the skate blade to the sharpener. There is a stainless steel cone to catch the spray of orange sparks that fly up. A deep grinding noise grows shrill and she thinks: Johnny is coming home.

The sharpener vibrates the counter beneath her fingers; John had phoned last night from the Singapore airport. The roar of a plane landing in the background. Shed sat up on one elbow, grabbed the receiver.

Her grandson Timmy stands before the bubblegum dispenser, transfixed. There is a cardboard sign written in pen promising a free skate sharpening if you get a black jawbreaker.

Ive got a quarter in here somewhere, Helen says. Unzipping the beaded coin purse. She is the mother of one son and three girls and there are two grandchildren.

My daughters complied, she thinks, digging for the quarter. She thinks of a slap, stinging and loud; she slapped Cathys cheek once, the white print of her hand flooding redthis was years ago, a lifetime ago. Helen demanded of the girls that they give in, do what she said; but Johnny had been ungovernable.

A boy just like Cal, is what she thought when she discovered she was pregnant with Johnny. The nurse didnt tell her the sex of the fetus that first time but shed known it was a boy. The ultrasound was at five in the morning and she rode her bike. Lime Street covered in an early October frost. There were still stars at that hour. Her hands cold on the handlebars. Having to walk the bike up Carters Hill.

How desperately her son had wanted everything when he was a kid. He had wanted that puppy hed found behind the supermarket sitting on a scrap of cardboard. She had said about the cost and fleas and the exercise a dog needs. But Johnny wanted the dog.

The grinding wheel revs and squeals when the blade touches it, and Helen pulls out a handful of change and lets Timmy take a quarter. His mother will be furious. Timmy doesnt eat his vegetables, lives on macaroni and cheese. They have rules; Helens daughters all have bitter rules. The fate of the world can hang on a jawbreaker. If you say no, you mean it.

All profits, Helen reads, go to the Canadian Mental Health Association. She watches the boy slide the quarter into the notch and turn the stiff handle and the jawbreakers slump against each other behind the glass. Timmy lifts the little gate with his finger. Black. A black jawbreaker rolls out into his hand. He turns to show it to Helen. His pale freckled skin, lit up. The blue vein in his temple. Orange hair. The spit of his mother. The very spit out of her mouth. It is joy, the colourless eyelashes, green eyes flecked with hazel. The sharpener on the second skate blade. The smell of burning metal. And the fan of orange sparks. Timmy holds up the black jawbreaker and the man behind the sharpener stops the machine and lifts his goggles and lets them rest on his forehead.

A free one, he says. He frowns, running a thumb down the blade.

Johnny called last night to say the sun was rising over Singapore. Rising or setting, he did not know.

I dont know what day it is, he said. He was coming from Tasmania and hed slept on the plane, lost track of time. His cellphone kept cutting out, or there was a zooming in and out of his voice. Hed woken her up. A telephone at night scares the hell out of her.

It might be Monday, he said. Or it might be Sunday. A big red ball hanging over the palm trees at the edge of a landing strip.

Have you ever tried to figure out the difference between what you are, he said, and what you have to become? He said it softly and Helen sat up straighter. Sometimes his voice was perfectly clear.

Johnny was capable of grandiose philosophizing while encountering a sunset; that was all. Maybe there was nothing wrong, shed thought. He was thirty-five. He was somewhere in Singapore.

She thought of him: a day at the beach when he was seven years old, his tanned chest, his shins caked with sand. Some bigger boys had been whipping him with strips of seaweed, forcing him farther out into the waves. Shed looked up from her book. Helen had been lost in a novel one minute, and the next she was knee deep in the water, striding, screaming her lungs out. The boys couldnt hear her because of the wind.

Bullies, she screamed. You big bullies. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Then she was upon them and they froze.

He started it, Missus.

Look at the size of you. Just look. Pick on someone your own size. And the boys took off, plowing through the waves, glancing back, half saucy but scared.

Where had the girls been on that day? Cal must have given her a break. A day at the beach long ago, three decades or more, and now here was the dresser, her perfume bottle pierced by a street light, the brown liquid full of a still fire, the fringe of the rug, her housecoat on a hook; Johnny was a grown man. She was clutching the receiver. She was fifty-five; no, fifty-six.

What you have to become, shed said.

Johnny was the kind of guy who phoned his mother infrequently, but when he did he was by turns pithy and incoherent and, inevitably, he had a bad connection. Or else something was wrong. He wanted to share the sunset with her; that was all, shed thought. The sun was going down. Or the sun was coming up. But no, it was more than a sunset. This time he had something to say.

The proprietor hooks bright red skate guards over the blades and knots the long laces so the skates can hang over Timmys shoulder.

There you are, youre all set, he says. He gives Timmy a soft cuff on the ear. Timmy ducks shyly. Helen sees the jawbreaker move from one cheek to the other.

Going skating, are you, the man says.

Were going to give it a whirl, Helen says.

The ponds will be good soon, the man says. Weve had a nice stretch of weather.

They all turn to look out the window. The street has been sanded away in a blast of wind and snow.