How to Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa Page 0,30

having to rely on public transit. Now she smelled of cigars. Frank’s cigars. The scent was a bit metallic and dusty. Frank probably smoked in the car. That’s how the smell got all over her like that.

THE FIRST TIME it happened was on a Saturday afternoon. Frank came over. He rode up in his dark-green Jaguar and parked it in their driveway as if he lived there now. The school bus driver thought it was odd for Frank to stop by on a weekend, when his wife didn’t have to be at work. She greeted him at the door, invited him in. The school bus driver was watching television in the living room, but they did not join him.

His wife said they had to talk about work. “Very boring,” she said.

They went into the bedroom.

The lock clicked into place.

He wondered what they were doing, if they were naked together. If so, how they kept it all so quiet. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it.

“WHY DON’T YOU want me to have any friends!” his wife said when he asked her about what happened in the bedroom with Frank. He hated arguments. He would do anything to avoid them. He had thought of forgetting this whole thing, but he didn’t want to be seen as spineless or, worse, not caring. Other times, when he tried to protest, to confront them, Frank would step in, his face red and sweaty, the white patches of his hair damp and rumpled, and say, “Be cool about this.”

Sometimes he was certain Frank was mocking him, but it was just too awful to think about. How could he be sure, and to whom could he bring this up? His wife would just say he was jealous of their friendship, and accuse him again of not letting her have any friends. He didn’t want to seem like a possessive, jealous husband, even if that’s how he was feeling.

“Jay. People form this kind of friendship in this country,” she said.

He thought for a few seconds that she was talking about someone else, or to someone else. But then he realized, that’s what his name was now. Jay. Like blue jay, a small blue bird, a little dot in the sky. He wanted to remind his wife that his name was Jai. It means heart in Lao! he wanted to yell. But then she would just remind him how men in this country do not raise their voices at women. Or tell him to practise his English. “No one here knows jai means heart,” she would say. So what if that’s what it means? It doesn’t mean anything in English. And English is the only language that matters here.

“That is just the way things are here,” she said.

And if he was going to live here, he had to learn to adapt and fit in and not be so uptight.

“Be cool,” she said in her perfect English, sounding just like Frank.

ON MONDAY MORNING, the school bus driver went to the parking lot to dig his bus out of the snow. He took the shovel he had bought from Canadian Tire and started shovelling around the wheels. It had snowed five inches overnight, but the snow was light and fluffy; it hadn’t had time to harden or turn into ice yet. The shovelling was easy. In less than ten minutes he moved the snow out of the way as easily as if he were dusting. He did not really have to shovel the bus out—the tires could have handled it—but out of habit, he did.

He thought about clearing off the snow from the top of the bus. He didn’t want the snow to fall off in chunks and land on a car driving behind him. But even with the shovel he couldn’t reach the top of the bus on his own and he hadn’t brought a ladder. For now, this would just have to do. When the school bus driver was done shovelling around the wheels, he threw the shovel on the floor of the front seat and turned on the engine to warm up the inside of the bus. From the driver’s seat, he noticed a yellow slip of paper tucked underneath the windshield wiper.

Another one.

He went outside again, grabbed the parking ticket, and folded it until it became a tiny square. He tucked it into his wallet, underneath a picture of his wife. It was an old photo of her, in black and white, taken when