Chapter Four #2
choices,” she said, standing up and pulling a protein bar from the Kate Spade crossbody purse she still hadn’t taken off.
She looked out the window at the pool, unwrapping the bar while we ate our pancakes. Now everyone was uncomfortable. Classic
Arlene.
“Should I show her the itinerary?” Hazel whispered to me, desperate to keep the weekend on track. But when she didn’t get
her way, this is what she did, wandered off into her own universe. Best ignored, in my opinion, but Katie always fell for
it.
“Leave her,” I said, “she’s just having her little nervous arrival ritual.”
“I’ll fix it,” Katie said, pushing away her plate and pulling Mom aside for a little chat on the couch. Katie sat cross-legged
toward my mother, who sat at the edge of the couch as though afraid to really sit down. And I did what I usually do since
we all stopped being forced to live together by law—escaped by any means. Which meant putting my plate in the sink and going
out the front door. There was a beautiful blue-green bike with a front wicker basket, oddly realistic pink roses affixed to
the front, leaning against the shed with a sign on it that said Free for Visitor Use.
Inside the basket was a laminated illustrated map of a trail that went through most of the county.
The star next to You Are Here and a little café near Picton didn’t seem that far at all.
I peered in the window and saw that my mother looked defensive and my sister was holding back tears, and I heard Hazel repeating the mantra sternly, “No Drama, it’s Katie’s weekend!
” Marlon opened the door and saw me straddling the bike.
“Go for a little ride. It’ll get messy if you come back in. We’ve got it.”
I pedalled awkwardly, my body adjusting to the fact that the bike was made for a much taller person. When I got to the road,
I saw the spot where the trail began near a farmer’s field. I paused to adjust my sandal just as a pickup truck sped by so
fast the dust coated my tongue and face. I considered turning around. I am not some kind of country explorer. But the path
was smooth enough that eventually I remembered how it felt to ride a bike and feel a childlike sense of freedom. I pulled
over and put a country music mix on my phone, playing it face-up in the bike’s basket. The trail went through the county in
a way that allowed you a glimpse into the backyards of farmhouses, with cats sitting on fence posts and dogs asleep on the
grass, kids jumping on trampolines. This was the setting for A Crush for Christmas, the places I’d imagined characters sitting at outdoor tables snapping peas and talking about their dreams. When I wrote
my first holiday movie, I’d received notes from producers that I was too cynical about the villages I’d written about, that
they had to be ideal, you had to imagine women in tiny apartments longing to live there.
Take out the joke about the meth lab, they’d say, and Put in a mechanic shop run by a grey-haired sweetheart.
I picked it up quick. I took out the scenes that were too realistic and filed them away in my rough draft file for future
projects that did allow for more risk and verisimilitude.
I was very sweaty by the time I narrowly avoided death by collision with a twelve-year-old on an ATV, but then I noticed an oasis up ahead—a clearing into a parking lot and the little café and bakery called the Agrarian.
It was a big, converted house with a wraparound front porch.
I leaned my bike against the porch and hoped for the best, security-wise.
It smelled like fresh bread inside, and the clerk was a friendly, middle-aged woman who convinced me to buy a baggie of fresh cheese curd and a little carton of local raspberries.
Even the berries looked like they were designed to be photographed.
In the corner was a display of local teas and honey.
I knew my mother and sister would like them.
This was something I used to do all the time when I took space from my mother, pick up something I thought she would like, a peace offering.
I put the tiny jar of lavender honey down and decided not to reward her bizarre, childish behaviour.
Instead I ordered a latte and a strawberry sweetgrass soda for the beach later.
The posters on the bulletin board promoted a soap box derby, a local radio fundraiser, a quartet that played by the river, a free yoga class in the park on Sunday.
Even a local rep theatre advertising a Todd Solondz movie night.
What was this strange little town? I sat on the porch, next to a table of senior citizens discussing the wind in lime green Lycra bike outfits.
The coffee was so good—the last time I’d been up north of Toronto in cottage country, I’d had to drink swill from a coffee machine at a corner store. Take that, Muskoka.
I watched a golden retriever sitting in the cab of a pickup truck, his head out the half-opened window. A man with scraggly
black hair just beyond his ears was lifting lumber into the back. He took off his red-and-black plaid shirt and finished the
job in just a T-shirt, a real gun show, as Marlon would say. I realized I was staring when he nodded at me and smiled. Man, small-town people are so friendly. I looked away, embarrassed and blushing. When I looked up again, he was staring right at me, unmistakably. He went over to
pet the dog sitting in the passenger seat, and then smiled at me in a curious way.
His face said, Do we know each other? I nodded and smiled back.
It wasn’t until he pulled out of the parking lot that I realized who he might be.
He’d grown broader, his hair was different, but that was definitely Buckeye, the man I don’t think I’d ever really gotten over.
I knew he’d grown up near Prince Edward County.
I think the one letter I sent him after camp had been to Napanee, which was definitely close.
I stood up quickly, jostling my latte, and leaned over the porch rail, hoping he would look back as he drove away.
I briefly considered running after the truck. My heart was pounding.
But then I remembered what he’d done, and I got my head right. Sit down, Elise. Have some fucking respect for yourself. I pushed the spilled drink off the table with my hand and drank the rest of it, still feeling how red my face was. My hands
shook the mug. It had been more than ten years. My inner strong-woman monologue went hard: You are over it, and he’s probably some meathead idiot now. How well can you judge a man when you’re a nineteen-year-old virgin
who would believe anything he said? You’ve been on Tinder for years, you’re not naive about most straight men.
In high school, before I went to camp, Katie, Marlon, and I had felt like a team of outliers; we were aloof with boys despite
being otherwise social and well-adjusted. Katie and I were only two years apart, with Marlon in between, and we wore skateboarding
clothes and took the subway into the city to watch art house movies. Though Katie didn’t really know whether she was gay until
a few years later, she wasn’t interested in boys. So she and Marlon fake dated in ninth grade to get kids off their backs.
Marlon and I were both very protective of Katie. Marlon’s mom, Susan, maybe the best mother on earth, also looked out for
us. We lived on the same cul-de-sac in a suburb that was once a village but was by then basically part of greater Toronto.
Katie didn’t realize she was queer until she met a girl at soccer camp the summer before first-year university.
Then it all made sense. I was so happy when she came out.
It was impossible not to be because she’d transformed into the happiest person I’d ever met.
But I also felt a strange childlike feeling.
It said, But what about me? I thought that Marlon, Katie, and I were this eccentric team of people who were above the romantic entanglements that seemed
to ruin a lot of our friends’ lives. I couldn’t make sense of why I was feeling happy for Katie but also left behind. Everyone
assumed I was gay because Katie and Marlon were. I thought briefly that maybe I was, but then I listened to how Katie spoke
about the first time a girl put a hand on her leg in the back of the team bus on the way home from a game, and how she’d made
her a mix of songs, and that one song in particular made Katie feel as though she were flying, just listening to the song.
It all felt like a kind of euphoria I just couldn’t access. My father and I rarely ever spoke about anything personal, especially
back then. But one night, after we sent Katie off on a weekend camping trip with her girlfriend, he said, “You know, it will
happen to you as well, someday. Some of us just don’t get a lot of crushes in our lifetime.” When he said that, I’d realized,
oh, this was probably also why he was so shocked by Mom’s departure. He thought she was the only one. And it’s possible she
might be. I started to be less hard on my dad after that, for moping around, for being less than eager to date or move on
with his life. Everywhere we went, women tried to date him—a single father is hot property apparently. But he would barely
notice their advances.