What is Going to Happen Next

Karen Hofmann

Description

Karen Hofmann’s empathetic and cathartic novel, What is Going to Happen Next, pieces together the lives of five members of the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalization of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire. It also skillfully exposes a Vancouver class system from the perspectives of diverse socio-economic conditions and lifestyles.

What is Going to Happen Next is character-driven and well-wrought, with a tenderness that propels the reader forward alongside the Lunds who are learning to fuse together as a chosen family.

Praise for What is Going to Happen Next

"It’s a novel that’s as original as it is ambitious, and it works, resulting in an all-engrossing visceral reading experience, and I’m recommending it to everyone."
~ Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

"The characters as so unique from one another, each with a distinct voice and personality.... I would highly recommend this wonderful piece of Canadian fiction."
~ Jaaron Collins, Worn Pages and Ink

"As a family saga, the novel is empathetic, compassionate, and expertly paced."
~ Brenda Johnston, Canadian Literature

Informations

• Publié par: NeWest Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781988732077
• Langue: English

Extrait

COPYRIGHT Karen Hofmann 2017
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication - reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system - without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hofmann, Karen Marie, 1961-, author
What is going to happen next / Karen Hofmann.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-988732-06-0 (softcover).
ISBN 978-1-988732-07-7 (Epub).
ISBN 978-1-988732-08-4 (Kindle)
I . Title.
PS 8615. O 365 W 53 2017 C 813'.6 C 2017-901285-1 C 2017-901286- X
Editor: Anne Nothof Book design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design Author photo: Julia Tomkins

NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada. # 201, 8540 - 109 Street Edmonton, AB T 6 G 1 E 6 780.432.9427 www.newestpress.com
No bison were harmed in the making of this book.
Printed and bound in Canada
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17
For stragglers and strugglers: late bloomers everywhere. For the ones who are bridges.
Contents
Before 1979
1. It Could Always be Worse
2. Aloft
3. Acquisition
4. Nature
5. Climbing
6. The Prodigals
7. The Golden Gates
8. Merger
9. An Education
10. Letdown
11. Afloat
12. Jam
13. Falling for You
14. Wreck
15. Black Ops
16. The Knuckleheads
17. Caught
18. Salmon Returning
19. Deal
20. No Deal
21. Latitude
After
Acknowledgements
Before
1979
THE SAME COPS THIS TIME as the ones who came in June, which is a bad thing, she thinks. She imagines them saying to each other, Not those people again . But a good thing, too, because everything doesn t have to be explained all over again. They don t ask, Where s your mom ?
She s been trying to say what happened, but Che and Cliff talk at the same time, interrupting, so nothing can be heard. The older cop says, Get those two out of here, okay?
So then it s just her, Cleo, talking. She s holding Bodhi, and they re sitting on some short logs, there for the purpose, in front of the house. It s early; the sun hasn t quite crested the cedars, and the clearing around the house is chill.
The younger, guy cop says, But don t you need a. . . .
Take them away, says the older cop. His uniform is of thick, shiny material, green-grey-blue. Not organic looking. His hair greying like Dadda s but cut short, bristles at the temple and nape.
He doesn t want any of them in the house while the ambulance guys - the paramedics - are working.
Cleo didn t know that when you called an ambulance for this, the police came too. Will Mandalay be mad? Maybe she should have waited for Mandalay to get home from school.
But it s Mandalay s fault this happened. So she can t be mad at Cleo.
Anyway, if she, Cleo, had waited until Mandalay got home to call, she might have got into trouble with the police. When she goes to Myrna Pollard s to collect Bodhi, the television is on and it s often a detective show and people get into a lot of trouble if they don t disclose information right away. A police car has been sent to get Mandalay. A squad car, on TV . Dispatched. Cleo wonders if it has arrived yet, if Mandalay is being told, if she is shocked, crying. How long for the squad car to get to the high school, in Port Seymour? She sees Mandalay getting off the bus, the police officer waiting there, saying her name, the other kids turning to look at her. Mandalay pausing, foot still on the lowest stair. But no: Mandalay must have arrived before the call, logically. She changes the picture: The knock on the classroom door, Mandalay called out into the hallway, the rows of orange-painted lockers, the scuffed beige linoleum. Mandalay in the back of the police car, weeping.
She looks over to the squad car parked in their front yard, Che and Cliff wrestling over the steering wheel, the younger cop s face.
The older cop says, Now, walk me through it all again.
Cleo is afraid she will contradict herself. She knows from the detective shows that you can get into trouble for that, too. I went to get Dadda up, she says. It was eight forty-five and we needed to leave for school so I went to wake him up to drive us. She keeps the image in her head now firmly glued to the clock beside her bed - her clock that she had asked for and got for her birthday, the only clock in the house - and the boys sitting in a row on the bed, all dressed properly and clean, forbidden to move.
That was the deal. Some mornings Daddy just needed to sleep in. Had a bad night, his back was killing him. Give me ten minutes warning, he said. So Mandalay would leave, running down the driveway to catch the high school bus for Port Seymour and Cleo would get herself and everyone else ready, the boys into their jeans and T-shirts and jackets, and herself into whatever was in the basket, which might not be much if she hasn t done some laundry the day before and if Mandalay has beaten her to it. Mandalay doesn t remember to do laundry and she wears what Cleo was planning to wear. Dadda says, Don t do all of the laundry, let your sister learn the natural consequences of her actions. But he also says, No personal property in the form of clothing. So there isn t much choice.
Get herself dressed in whatever is semi-clean and mended and then wake up Dadda and he would put on his pants and find his glasses and the truck keys. And if Dadda was going to be working that day, Bodhi needed to be dropped off at Myrna s. So all of them climbing into the cab, and Bodhi on Cleo s lap.
But this morning.
A great tiredness washes over her, like sand-warmed waves at the beach. The tide coming in. That feeling, the whole ocean seeping into to the bay, the water warmed and lulling.
So you tried to wake your dad up, the cop prompts. What happened then?
Bodhi wriggles away from Cleo and goes after the cop. She should get those diapers washed out. Dadda does his own and the boy s laundry. Even Bodhi s diapers, usually. He takes the wet clothes out to the line, his height meaning he doesn t have to stand on a stump like Cleo does, and pins them up. He says, hanging out clothes is an art, Cleo. You want to put your attention into it. You want to find the Zen of it.
Come on, Cleo, says the cop, plucking Bodhi up at arm s length, sort of like he s lifting up a muddy dog. I know this isn t fun. But just run through it for me one more time, and we ll be done.
I m twelve , Cleo says, meaning, don t talk to me like I m a baby. She sees the cop s face sag, lose some of its resolution.
Twelve. That means Dadda was forty-two when she was born. And Mam twenty. And Mandalay is almost fourteen now, which is four years away from eighteen, what Mam was when Mandalay was born. How much older Dadda is than the rest of them! If you add up Mam s age now and Cleo s and Che s, you get Dadda s age. Or instead of Cleo s and Che s ages you could put in Mandalay s and Cliff s.
Her mind running along on two tasks, then: One playing with the numbers of their ages, like beads on an abacus, and the other replaying, for the cop, what had happened that morning. It is the wrong thing, she knows: She s not paying enough attention. Dadda always reminds them to be mindful. Cleo is getting better at it. But she can t do it now - her mind skitters around the edge of things, won t look at them, won t let them in.
She says again what she said before, on the phone and to the cops and the ambulance guys when they first arrived, coming in the door and then the younger guy cop bolting out quite quickly to throw up under the red-osier dogwood. The smell, he said, coming back in, but she guessed it wasn t just that, the open bucket of Bodhi s cloth diapers, which were getting a bit rank, but also the bucket of chicken guts and heads, which they hadn t put outside because of the bears, and which she should probably bury pretty quickly.
He didn t wake up. I tried shaking his shoulder and talking real loud. Then Che did. But he didn t open his eyes. So I felt his chest, but nothing.
And then finally she is done and now her mind is quiet and she can ask some questions, which are: Is someone going to tell Mandalay? And, what will happen next? Though not the questions burrowing away inside her, burrowing away at some internal organ like her liver: Did we kill Dadda? Did we?
Mandalay s fault because she didn t wash out Bodhi s diapers like she was supposed to and Dadda pretty near bust a gut when he saw the bucket still in the kitchen, reeking, haloed with flies. Him yelling, his face like bricks except for the birthmark patch on his left cheek that looked like the map of Poland and now pulsed purple. Mandalay was supposed to do it when she got home from school, was supposed to wash out the diapers and hang them on the clothesline. Only the clothesline was gone because Che had taken it down again to tie some branches together for a tepee, so Mandalay had said she wouldn t do it, wouldn t wash the diapers, though she, Cleo, had pointed out reasonably that they could be hung on the fence.
No, Mandalay had said. They won t dry fast enough. Which was dumb because they d dry faster than not washing them at all, and they were nearly out of clean diapers.
Mandalay s fault for being stubborn. And Che s fault for taking the clothesline again.
And then, no dinner till very late because there was nothing in the freezer to cook and Dadda had to kill a chicken and then he did a few more because it was coming fall and better to get the mess over with. Feathers and guts all over the kitchen, and the dog going crazy. Dadda with the axe and sweat darkening the