Mouthing the Words by Camilla Gibb Read Free Book Online

parent now?” was my mother’s new refrain. I was to pick up Willy on my way home from school and mind him in the hours before Mum got home from work. Quite often this seemed to involve Binbecka and Vellaine paying Willy twenty-five cents to pull down his pants or smoking one of the Player’s Lights my father had left behind. I ignored the others, took out the casserole from the fridge at five o’clock and set the oven to 350 degrees, laid the table, and pulled in the washing from the line.
    Sometimes Daddy called. He’d say, “Are you being a good girl, Thelma, and helping your mother?”
    “Yes, Daddy,” I’d say. “Where are you?” I’d ask, and he’d tell me, “Winnipeg” or “Saskatoon,” where he was “trying to get his business off the ground.”
    “But when are you coming home?” I’d ask him. “I miss going swimming with you.”
    “I don’t think I’ve ever taken you swimming, Thelma,” he said, slightly confused.
    “Oh.” Maybe he took Janawee. Or maybe Claudio took Binbecka.

I
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    IT IS CHRISTMAS mid-1970 something. We are in a motel room in Buffalo, waiting. We have crouched low through the border, Willy and me sitting in the back of a van on milk crates, looking at the red balding back of the head of the man in the driver’s seat. He has told us to imagine we are as tiny and quiet as insects. We are inhaling cardboard and pretending to be potato bugs rolled into balls, sucking in our feathery, numerous feet. We don’t know this man. His name is Bernie and he is taking us to Buffalo. We are nervous and excited—having an adventure we are not sure we are meant to enjoy.
    Mum has packed Marmite sandwiches, chocolate milk and Wrigley’s gum into a Smurf lunch box and I keep telling Willy that we can’t eat yet because we don’t know when the next time will be. We chew gum and blow bubbles which we try to smack flat onto each other’s faces, and then the balding, red-haired man glances over his shoulder because we are making too much noise.
    We have had other hesitant adventures before this one. The last couple of years have included journeys on planes and trains, escorted by strangers and occasionally alone. This is how we get to Daddy. Waiting in lounges and motel rooms for white-shirted, coffee-breathing men to come and drive us further. Willy clutches the lunch box like a plastic talisman in his small hands.
    The first trip was to Calgary, where we went to visit Dad on his business trip. Mum was with us then, saying, “Douglas, this really is lovely furniture,” but I didn’t understand why he needed all this new furniture when it was only a business trip.
    This is Buffalo—hours and hours staring out a motel window watching trucks hurtle by. We don’t know this place and Bald Red has left us with two cans of Coke and a wave over his shoulder. We are sharing one can, keeping the other for later.
    Daddy comes with nightfall, sometime after we have stopped counting passing trucks. He pushes the door open abruptly. He is tense and wired and his energy fills the room and wakes Willy, whose head snaps from my lap. I am overwhelmed and nervous in the presence of this foreigner who takes ownership of us on random weekends and every other school holiday now. I move perfunctorily to try to kiss him hello but he pushes me away . Willy gets a handshake because men, my father tells him, do not hug each other.
    This night is for driving. Blink blink of oncoming headlights, cigarette smoke and a drive-through truck stop where Dad orders four large styrofoam cups of milk. For later. He must have read somewhere that kids need a lot of milk. It is my job to make sure the milk doesn’t spill, but I am nodding off, with my cheek stuck to the window and the door handle in my ribs, and he keeps waking me. “Steady the cups and keep me company,” he says. “I don’t want to feel like a chauffeur.” He talks to me in order to keep himself from drowsing. He talk talk talks to me, big words