think she’s—”
“Peggy said you had a number for Freddy. I tried calling him and his number’s not workin.’ ”
“No.”
“How come you told Peggy you did?”
“I don’t have it with me.”
“Why didn’t you just give it to Peggy when you called. Your mother talks to Freddy still, don’t she? I got to get something from him.”
“She’s—” I was trying to figure how to put it. I didn’t want to knock my mother to Sam. Benedict Arnold.
As far as he’s concerned, the fact that a person would start drinking the way Marlene did in the first place is proof of weakness. If I told him that she was doing AA now, he’d make out like she was the most weak-kneed jerk on the planet. Sam figures if a person’s got backbone, he doesn’t need a crutch like AA.
I don’t like AA either, the way they pour their guts out to one another. But you have to give Marlene credit for making an effort.
“She threw out all her pills and she quit drinking,” I say. Then, so he understands it’s a real medical condition, I add, “That’s how she ended up in the hospital in the first place: grand mal seizure.”
Sam looks at me like I’m an idiot. Like, What’s her health got to do with my Freddy shit?
“I mean she’s—” I lean my elbow on the window frame. Sam doesn’t need every goddamn detail. “She doesn’t talk to Freddy any more. We live in Burnaby.”
He mutters something out the window. Then, for a full minute the only noise is the truck’s rumble and the swish of trees passing us on either side.
Finally, I ask, “Did you ever actually sell houses? I mean in Toronto. Were you into real estate?”
“Sure,” he says. “Cars too. Freddy and I used to fix up these old heaps just enough so’s they’d make it around the block.” He laughs.
Trilogy of Terror floats through my head. Cross-eyed Karen Black chased around her living room by the Zuni doll. Just four more houses to sell. Three more. I blink at the road ahead.
“You got a lot of games lined up while you’re out here?”
“Got a game this afternoon,” he says.
“You do?”
He shoots me a look. “Have you got Freddy’s number where you’re stayin’? Can’t you call those people you live with and—”
“Those people don’t know anything!”
Hard to say if that came out as loud as it did in my head. I swallow and put a hand out the window, let the breeze cool my fingers.
Out of the side of my eye I can see Sam’s mouth purse. He’s staring hard out the windshield as if the way ahead might look like a sun-dappled park road to the untrained eye but he knows something different.
When he speaks again, he says, “Things would’ve been different if I hadn’t’ve gone to jail. I only should’ve got a few months but they made an example out of me. In the end I did nearly two years.”
I watch the road, waiting for him to say something else. My thumbs rub hard on the grooves of Lou’s steering wheel. “Mom said if you’d had a decent lawyer you probably wouldn’t have done any time at all.”
Sam’s face sours as if his ex-wife’s lame ideas continue to disgust him. “They catch you, you do a little time.”
I wonder if he’s thinking of me, falling down John Reynolds’ front steps, not being where I was supposed to be. “I think about that day and I, I just wish I did things better than—”
“You never shoulda been there,” Sam says, and then he starts rambling about Freddy and the truck and I can’t follow the story, all the dodging and weaving. He says he tried to offer John Reynolds a few bucks if he would keep the cops out of it. Sam doesn’t say what Reynolds’ answer was. I guess it’s obvious.
“So I told Freddy,” he fires on, “ ‘make him a better offer.’ What’s he do? He offers him some jewellery. Stuff from his basement.”
“You and Freddy still work together?”
“I know people everywhere I go. There’s practically no city in the country where I don’t know someone. In the States too.”
“But Freddy’s not your … Don’t you have a regular partner any more?” I glance at him. “Don’t you need—?”
He doesn’t look at me. Just the road. “I was working with a guy for a while. We played the Granny Game in Los Angeles mostly. A little in Florida. I don’t see him no more. He’s—” Sam