I Was There the Night He Died by Ray Robertson Read Free Book Online

believe. The tattoo parlour you were warned to stay away from. The post office and the laundromat and the library. The Legion Hall, the Bingo, the Dairy Queen. The water tower with the town’s—your town’s—name written across it. The grain mill that’s sat silent for years now. The same cemetery where everyone buries their dead. The hockey arena and the baseball fields and the parks. The hospital where your mother was pronounced dead; where you had your tonsils removed. The houses that are the homes that are the families that are the neighbourhoods that make a town a town, any town. And the river that runs through all of it, for as long as there’s been a town.
    It’s the people. The teacher who taught you how to read. The dentist who helped make your teeth grow straight. The coach who made you try harder. The old man who gave you your first job, cutting his lawn for three whole dollars. The woman whose kids you babysat. The doctor who made you feel better. The old lady next door whose driveway you shoveled. Your first best friend. Your first ever kiss. Your first broken heart. First lies, last goodbyes, endless summer holidays. The cats and dogs and birds and fish you named and loved and lost but never forgot. The brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents whose faces and even names you sometimes forget but who will always have your eyes, just like you’ll always have their cheekbones. Your mum and your dad.
    Whether you stay and raise a family and die here. Whether you grow up and leave and never come back. Whether you call it home or say it’s just where you were born or don’t say anything at all, not even to yourself. It’s where you’re from. It’s your hometown. It’s you. Even if you’re from Oakville. Even if you’re from Chatham.
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    No Frills is close enough to Buttercup Village that I can walk there, a rare indigenous pleasure. I need food and Mountain Dew, but also cardboard boxes. It’s time to decide what’s a cherished family memento and what’s garbage. Aside from seeing more of Dad, putting the house up for sale is the real reason I’m here. Which doesn’t make it feel any more real.
    Around the same time that Uncle Donny started bringing up nursing homes—him staying over at Dad’s place every night by this point, the nurse we’d hired to help out coming by virtually every day—Sara was killed. I was involved in the move to Thames View, I still came home to visit, but I wasn’t there. Not really. A change may be as good as a rest, but not when numbing bereavement is periodically interrupted for disheartening parental concern. I wasn’t the son I should have been, I know that, and for making Dad’s move to Thames View as smooth as it was and for taking care of him before it came to that, I owe Uncle Donny. He may talk too much sometimes and buy things he doesn’t need because a deal is simply too good to resist, but he’s family—except for several cousins I probably wouldn’t recognize if I passed them on the sidewalk, all the family I’ve got left.
    â€œSam?”
    I’m slouching at a traffic light and stoop to peer inside the driver’s side of the car that’s stopped beside me. A black BMW driven by an attractive blonde woman in big sunglasses: not anyone I would know in Toronto, forget about here. A dedicated reader? Unlikely in Toronto, out of the question here. I try to remember if there’s anyone in Chatham I owe money to that I’d forgotten about.
    The woman grins and takes off her sunglasses, appears to be enjoying my cluelessness. “It’s Rachel,” she says.
    I smile back, pretending to finally be in on the joke, but not any nearer to actually knowing who she is. I’m almost ready to admit defeat when she says, “Rachel Turnbal.”
    Impossible. Simply impossible. But then my brain