Our whole booth was shaking. Even with Beth’s weight to steady it.
He’s here now, Gordon. You think he hasn’t been but he’s always been. All you had to do was lift your gaze.
She closed her eyes and leaned her full mass toward my hands, the knuckles of which she kissed.
Part Three
23
08/10/09, 10:58 p.m.
RANK NO LONGER answered the phone in his dorm — even when called to it, even when it was specifically for him — because whenever he came to the phone it was always his father, and ever since he quit the hockey team, Rank and his father did not so much converse as rail at each other. And because the phone was in the hallway (Rank’s school was old-school — it would be another year until phones were installed in individual student rooms), his dorm-mates would often congregate when these calls took place in the shared anticipation of seeing Rank completely lose his shit.
It wasn’t that Gordon Sr. was angry at Rank for having quit the hockey team. Indeed, he lauded his son’s decision. He thought it was the finest thing a boy could do.
“Just like your old man!” he’d crowed at the news. “Don’t take any crap from no one! You march to your own drummer, Gordie, and that’s a fine thing.”
“Yeah well I probably marched myself right out of an education if I can’t pay tuition next semester.”
Rank had said this a) because it was true but, also b) out of a vague, fantastical hope that somewhere Gord might have a cache of money tucked aside for precisely such a rainy day as this.
Gord, however, had other ideas altogether. “Forget it, son,” he said. “And come on home.”
“Come on home?” repeated Rank. “That’s what you want me to do?”
“Come on home, live rent-free for a year, earn some money. You can always go back to school after a year.”
“What am I gonna do?” demanded Rank. “You want me to work at SeaFare?” He could feel his grip on the receiver tightening and gaining heat in anticipation of what his father was about to suggest.
“Come on back to the ID! I’ll make you assistant manager. Nice pay bump for ya. Shelly’s not working out anyhow, keeps having to run home to her consumptive crew a kids. One of them down with the flu every other day.”
Even when Rank returned home for summer vacation after his first year, he hadn’t gone back to the Dream. He opted for a government grant requiring him to mow the lawns of every municipal building in town and, when all the lawns were mowed, walk up one side of the highway and down the other picking garbage.
“You want me to work at the Icy Dream. This is what you’re suggesting to me.”
“Oh for the love of Jesus, Gordie, it’s a job. What’s past is past. When are you gonna put all that shit behind you?”
“All that shit,” repeated Rank.
“Well I can see where this is going. I can see there’s no talking to you about this, as per usual.”
At which point Rank began to shout into the phone, and the phone immediately began to shout back. Which sounds bad, but actually was good, because it attracted enough of a crowd that when Rank commenced his eventual attempt to wrestle the unit from the wall, enough guys were present to dissuade him.
End-of-term exams were looming in the distance, radiating menace, like Dracula’s castle. Rank had no idea what to do about them. Why write exams when he was about to get kicked out on his ass? Wouldn’t it just be adding insult to injury? Then there was the question of Christmas break. Gord had kept asking, between bellows, sometimes via bellows, when the Jesus was Rank coming home for Christmas? Ivor, meanwhile, wanted to know if Rank would be around throughout the holidays. Lorna, he said, had kids and was looking to take some time off from behind the bar. If he could come a couple of extra nights over the next two weeks, she would train him, and he’d get a percentage of her tips.
Having embarrassed himself in the dorm, Rank started pinballing in earnest back and forth between the Temple and Goldfinger’s. Often at two in the morning after his shift he’d head straight to the unlaundered squalor of Wade and Kyle’s crash pad as opposed to going home. Still, undergrads gossiped worse than bridge-playing grannies, and