Missing Steps

Paul Cavanagh

Description

Dean Lajeunesse doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps. He's not yet fifty, but his memory is starting to fail him. He vividly recalls how dementia whittled away at his dad and doesn't want his own teenaged son, Aidan, to see him suffer the same fate. Of course, he could just be overreacting. Maybe it's the stress of his on-again-off-again relationship with Valerie, his long-time live-in girlfriend, or the feeling that he's not measuring up as a father that's making him absent-minded. But before he can understand what's happening to him, he's dragged home to the sickbed of his estranged mother. There, he butts heads with his older brother, Perry, who's remained loyal to their mother and has succeeded in almost every way that Dean hasn't. As old family tensions bubble to the surface, Dean must try to hold on to Aidan's respect as he relives his difficult relationship with his own father.

Sujets

• Family Life
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780993809330
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Missing Steps

Paul Cavanagh

Missing Steps Copyright © 2015 Paul Cavanagh. All rights reserved.

Published by Not That London Publisher.

Lyrics from “The Log’s Driver’s Waltz” by Wade Hemsworth are reprinted with kind permission.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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 author, except by reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for supporting the completion of this novel through a Writers' Works in Progress Grant.

www.NotThatLondon.com

Published in eBook format by Not That London Publisher Converted byhttp://www.eBookIt.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cavanagh, Paul, 1962–, author Missing steps / Paul Cavanagh

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9938-0933-0

I. Title. PS8605.A918M58 2015 C813'.6 C2015-900160-9 C2015-900331-8

Cover image from iStock/Aldo Murillo Cover and text design by Tania Craan

For Amy

and

those wonderful, crazy people behind the 2004 London Book Fair

Part I Years Ago 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Part II Months Ago 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 AUTHOR’S NOTE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Also by PAUL CAVANAGH

Contents

Part I

Years Ago

1

I  promised myself that I wouldn’t start out by apologizing to you. I know I’ve been prickly the past few months since your grandma died, but there are reasons for that. Reasons beyond my grief over losing her. Maybe you’ve already figured out what some of them are. You’ve always been perceptive, even more so now that you’re seventeen and the world isn’t quite the mystery to you that it once was. Seventeen. It’s hard for me to believe you’re that old. That’s not a sign my memory is failing me, by the way. It’s simply a feeling a father gets when he looks at his son and sees a little boy instead of the young man standing in front of him. Maybe you’ll feel it yourself one day. This account of events isn’t just for you. At least, that’s what I’m realizing now, as I launch into it. I guess I’m hoping that by trying to explain things to you on paper, they’ll begin to make sense to me. That could just be wishful thinking on my part, and what I’m writing will turn out to be a lot of drivel. In which case, there’s always the delete button on my keyboard. Sometimes I think there should be a delete button we could press during live conversations, so that we could take back things we regretted saying. I can recall several times in my life when something like that would have come in handy. Who knows? Maybe there will be an app for that one day. If so, whoever designs it will make a fortune. There’s a lot of territory for me to cover. To explain my actions during the last few months, I need to take you back a ways. It starts with my father, your grandfather. There’s a reason I’ve avoided telling you about him all this time, even during your grandma’s funeral when I saw you studying him in the old family photos on display. He may have died forty years ago, but he’s never really left me. Sometimes it feels as if he’s lurking inside my head, a memory who refuses to be erased. Ironic, considering how his own memory deserted him so completely. You may be surprised to hear that he wasn’t an intimidating man, not in the conventional sense. The Dad I remember was frail, apathetic, and withdrawn. He wasn’t always that way — not until he got sick. I used to feel guilty about not being able to remember the Dad he’d once been, but the best I could do was conjure up tiny fragments. Him charming a waitress at a roadside diner into giving me an extra scoop of ice cream for dessert at no extra charge one time when he took me on a sales call. His whiskers scratching my cheek when he carried me up to bed. Even now, it’s hard for me to sort out what I remember about him and what I’m just imagining. The fact that he was an encyclopedia salesman only makes him seem more made-up, the butt of a joke that no one gets anymore. Maybe what unsettles me most is the possibility that one day Iwill remember the man he used to be, and he’ll turn out to be no different than the man I am now. After that, it wouldn’t be hard to resign myself to the belief that I’ll lose

my mind just like he did. And so I’ve spent most of my life trying not to think about it. It was only during these last few months that I finally got it through my thick head that it’s impossible to outrun my own memories. That’s why I’ve decided to come clean with you, even if it means recounting parts of my life I’m not particularly proud of. The last years of my dad’s life fall into that category. I was just a kid at the time. The changes in him were subtle at first — memory lapses that he managed to laugh off, cribbage games that he increasingly “let” me win. Even after he started having trouble remembering the names of our neighbours, none of us really suspected that anything was wrong. After a while, though, I could tell that Mom was getting impatient with him, especially after he drove a new three-speed 1971 Mustang convertible home unannounced a few days after my tenth birthday. He’d bought it from a buddy of his, another salesman, at what he claimed was a bargain price. Your Uncle Perry and I were ecstatic. We took turns sitting up front as we cruised the Queensway with the top down, but Dad couldn’t persuade Mom to come along. Two weeks later, the cops ticketed Dad for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. By the end of the summer, a man with heavy black eyebrows came to our townhouse in the east end of Ottawa to repossess the car. Being without a car would have been a real problem for my dad, given his work as a door-to-door salesman, if it weren’t for the fact that he’d lost his job four months before and hadn’t told anyone, not even Mom. Without wheels, Dad spent a lot more time at home, doing fix-it jobs, while Mom was forced to beg neighbours for rides to the grocery store. “Mom thinks he has a couple of forty-ouncers stashed in the house somewhere,” Perry told me one night as we were lying awake in our shared bedroom, listening to our parents arguing downstairs. Because Perry had already reached the advanced age of thirteen, he was always trying to shock me with information about the adult world that I was too young to understand. Not that he necessarily had a firm grasp on it himself. I said nothing, not quite understanding the full implications of what he might be hinting at. It seemed to me that if Dad’s wonky behaviour was because of a drinking problem, I’d smell booze on his breath. But then, what did I know about such things? I was only ten. As much as I wanted to defend my father, I decided it was best to keep my mouth shut so as not to risk showing my ignorance. Of course, the other thing bothering me about this news was that it seemed to suggest Mom had chosen to confide in Perry, but not in me. I stayed loyal to Dad those first few weeks when he was stuck at home, and played gofer to his handyman. We installed a dimmer switch in the dining room, replaced the kitchen faucet, and repaired the screens on the two bedroom windows. With the exception of the screen repair, all these jobs ended in a call to a tradesman to fix the mess my father had made. After that, Mom put the kibosh on all do-it-yourself repairs in our house because of how much they were costing us. While this cut short my career as a handyman’s apprentice, I’d already

established, in all my poking around under the guise of searching for misplaced widgets, that Dad wasn’t stashing booze anywhere in the house. With his use of tools officially restricted, Dad decided to make me his next project. One evening, he noticed me leafing through the abridged encyclopedia set that he’d used as a sales sample. When my eyes strayed from the page, I saw him staring at me with the curiosity that a biologist might show an exotic bug. “What’s that you’re reading about?” he asked me. “Camels,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush. I was glad that it wasn’t an entry for one of those places in Africa where women walked around topless. He held out his hand, and I gave him the encyclopedia. “Tell me what you remember about them,” he said with a lopsided grin, holding the volume open at the pages I’d just read. Back then, I had visions of becoming a famous explorer, not appreciating that there weren’t really any blank spaces left on the map to name after myself. Details about exotic places naturally stuck with me. So the fact that I could tell Dad, after one reading, that camels stored fat in their humps, not water, didn’t seem that unusual to me. Or that they could go three weeks between drinks. Or that they generally lived up to fifty years. Or that they could be found in North Africa and Asia, with the exception of a few thousand running wild in Australia that had been brought there in the last half of the nineteenth century. Dad’s grin slipped ever so slightly with each additional fact I rhymed off. For a moment, I worried that he might think I was trying to show him up, given how unreliable his memory had been lately. In the end, he simply dipped his chin to show how impressed he was. “Not bad,” he said. I would have stayed out of his encyclopedia after that if he hadn’t suggested I begin reading passages to him before I went to bed each night. Mostly about faraway places. Sometimes, he’d pick the topic for the evening. Other times, he’d leave it up to me. Always, he’d ask me oddball questions about what I’d just read out loud, usually in an effort to get me to imagine what it would have been like to travel to Tahiti with Captain Cook, or to enter the court of Kublai Khan in the company of Marco Polo, or some such thing. As far as I knew, he’d never been further than a two-day drive from Ottawa. A big family vacation for us was a trip to Vermont, pulling a tent trailer and eating hot dogs we boiled on a Coleman stove at roadside picnic tables. As small as Dad’s world had been, it was even smaller now that he didn’t have a job to give him places to go. I never would take another road trip with him, as it turned out. These imaginary living room expeditions were our last journeys anywhere together. During those first few months when Dad was off work, I would sometimes stumble across Mom crying. There she’d be with tears streaming down her cheeks as she tried to wash the dishes, or fold the laundry, or scrub the toilet. When she realized she wasn’t alone, she’d immediately wipe away her tears with her forearm. She knew that seeing her cry made me nervous, but the real reason I think she stopped was because she felt that letting me catch her blubbering was just plain careless, like having a stack of unwashed dishes sitting in the sink when

company calls. I knew that she was at the end of her rope with Dad; I guess I didn’t want to know just how bad things were for her. Maybe that was selfish of me. Then again, I was only ten. The idea that my parents didn’t have things under control, that they couldn’t somehow make everything right in the end, was just too scary to contemplate. Mom did her best to put up a brave front. She explained that Dad was having a nervous breakdown. It wouldn’t last forever. We just needed to be patient a little while longer. He’d shake himself out of it soon enough. Despite Mom’s reassurances, it wasn’t long before Dad began to lose interest in our encyclopedia excursions. I noticed that he was starting to get things that I was reading to him mixed up. Sometimes, he’d pick a topic, forgetting that we’d covered it only the night before. Other times, he’d repeat stories he’d already told me as if they were brand-new, but he’d have trouble finding words that he’d had no trouble finding the last time he’d told the story. When I tried to set him straight, he’d get cranky. He began avoiding me, retreating to the rec room to watch Andy Williams or Dean Martin. From then on, the TV became his preferred companion. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d wander downstairs and find my father sitting by himself in front of the snow-filled screen, quietly singing a tune that he’d likely heard one of his favourite crooners perform that night, as if to ward off the darkness. Mom was obliged to get a job selling ladies’ wear at Eaton’s shortly after Dad stopped working so that there’d be some money coming into the house. “You can’t feed two growing boys on promises and pixie dust,” she said. She expected Perry and me to start making our own lunches for school. After listening to our griping for several months, she told us, “It’s time you boys took a little more responsibility for yourselves.” Her gaze lingered on Dad across the dining room table as she said this. He just kept on eating his dinner. By then, he’d pretty much lost the knack of reading when my mother was frustrated with him, even when it was pretty obvious to me. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with him. I’d already ruled out booze. I was beginning to doubt Mom’s conviction that it was a nervous breakdown. It felt like he was getting worse, not better. I consulted the encyclopedia for an explanation, but nothing really seemed to fit. I came across “dementia” but ruled it out almost immediately. Dad was in his mid-fifties. He wasn’t old enough to be senile. I lost my appetite for digging further when I came across a grotesque illustration of a lunatic shackled in an eighteenth-century asylum. The following year I entered sixth grade, and I began to dread coming home to my father after school. Perry had been smart enough to realize early on that if he joined enough clubs and sports teams at school, his time alone with Dad would be kept to a minimum. So, when Mom had to work late, that left me to be the one to find the bathroom flooded (more than once) because Dad had walked away from the tub with the water running and never come back. When he wasn’t flooding us out, he was turning the house upside down looking for things — his