himself, staring at his own shoes. Waiting for the right family.
When Danny looked again, the little girl was drinking from a nearby water fountain and her parents were sitting on a log, staring out at the water, their hands hooked together, each finger woven with the next. Danny pressed the shutter release one more time before walking off the beach to the corner of Denman and Davie. He took three buses to get home and when he arrived, his parents were both waiting for him in the living room.
“Am I late?” Danny asked, checking his watch.
Betty, sitting in the far corner of the couch, looked at Doug, who held a beer can on his lap. “Not this time,” he said.
His mother scratched her nose before speaking. “Your father wants to talk to you about your plans.”
“Plans? For what?”
Doug sat up straighter in his armchair and stared at Danny until Danny looked down at his sand-covered shoes. “When the Exhibition is over, I want you to work at the shop full time. You’re old enough now to learn how to run things. We don’t have the money to send you to school anyway.” He ran his hand over his face. “Not that you or your sister could even get in.”
Danny didn’t say anything. He turned his head toward his mother, who nodded at him gently. For a moment, he wanted to shake her, bounce her head off the wall behind her and yell, You should know better. You should know that working at the shop will be the end of me. You should know this is nothing close to what I want. But her eyes were so blank, so blandly accepting and quiet that he knew it wouldn’t be any use.
After a minute and a half of silence, Betty stood up and took one of Danny’s hands. “Auntie Mona’s friend has a daughter about your age. Maybe we could invite them over for dinner.”
Danny looked from his father to his mother and back again, and saw that they both had set jaws and unshaking hands. He patted his mother’s shoulder and stepped around her toward the hall.
“Well?” Doug said. “Is it a plan, or what?”
Danny paused. “Sure. Whatever you want.” When he reached his bedroom, he closed the door as quietly as he could before shaking the sand out of his socks and shoes onto an old newspaper. The itch would have bothered him all night.
Two weeks later, Danny lay awake in the middle of the night. When he was sure everyone else had fallen asleep, he got up and changed out of his pyjamas and into a sweater and jeans. He stuffed his final paycheque from the Exhibition, which he had collected that morning, into his wallet. As quietly as possible, he opened his dresser drawers and pulled out socks, underwear and T-shirts. He listened, unmoving, for the sounds of his parents walking through the hallway to investigate the noise. But all he heard was the wind blowing through the unruly patch of bamboo in the backyard. He pulled out four pairs of pants and his winter coat.
He filled up his mother’s old suitcase, the one she brought with her to Vancouver twenty-five years ago. He was careful not to overstuff it, for fear that the tattered corners would not hold. He stood in the middle of his room and looked at the single bed, the blue floral curtains with the hole near the hem that could be from moths or maybe even mice. He wondered if he should feel nostalgia for the years spent here or if relief was acceptable too.
He pushed down the thought that he was running away. If he allowed them, those words would burrow into his head and remain forever. His parents’ friends would whisper, “That Danny, he’s a runaway,” and they would shake their heads and cast their eyes skyward. He scurried around his bedroom, moving from closet to bed to dresser, not daring to stop in case he imagined his mother crying into her apron, her face buried in the grease and pork juice and rice flour embedded there. And beside her, sitting in one of the hard kitchen chairs, his father, hands in fists on the table, his usually slicked-back hair hanging over his forehead in one damp, drooping lock.
Leaving was one of two choices. He could stay, and work in the curio shop for the rest of his life. He would marry a girl he barely knew or barely tolerated, and