‘Where the fu—… flip am I going to get a little mouse bicycle?’
‘I think it’s called a micycle, Dad,’ Clary says, standing behind him.
The woman laughs. ‘I don’t know. Maybe a skateboard? Or a skiing mouse then?’
Clary pictures another trip to the doll store, a mouse in her father’s pocket, everything held close for size. He puts his hands in his flannel pockets and walks to the door without looking back. The woman watches him go, stroking her ponytail like a pet. Outside, two teenage girls approach the store saying, ‘We got to go in here! This store has some cool weird crap.’
‘That’s a weird fucking store,’ Clary says. ‘Who spends all their money on candles that look like cakes? They all melt the same.’
‘Damned if I know what people spend their money on, pumpkin,’ Cale says. ‘Damn, pumpkin, what have I told you about cussing?’
Clary grins, pretty sure she’ll be a pumpkin her whole fucking life.
The mice on the table are no longer carollers. One sniffs a flower, two hold paws. Clary fiddles with a mouse with nothing in its paws. Ideally, it would clutch a box of chocolates, or be proffering a teensy jewellery box, but there aren’t any small enough in the doll’s house store. Cale opens the letter and runs his hand over his head to wipe the crease off his brow.
‘The landowners either side of us sold,’ he says.
Clary reads the letter, then studies his face, unable to determine what it means.
‘If they wanted, they could build around us,’ she says. ‘Smaller stores, or something.’
The shirt guy reminded them of this when he stopped by again. His jacket was fastened, no handshake was offered, slices of paper left his hand.
‘Obviously, that wouldn’t be the most advantageous solution,’ he said, ‘but…’
Advantageous, Clary thought. She wasn’t sure how to spell it. It sounded like outrageous with advantages tagged on.
Cale straps the last box into the pick-up. Clary winds down the window, lets the cold air hit her all the way out of town. There are hearts in the store window, shiny foil-covered chocolate hearts, heart-shaped cushions, a speckling of cuddly toys with I Love You stitched to their chests like tattoos.
‘Hey!’ The woman behind the counter grins as if she’s bumped into an old friend, but it’s just Cale delivering more mice. His daughter trails behind him, looking at everything on the shelves. He hands over the box of new mice. The woman says ‘awww’, opens the till and counts notes into his hand one at a time, her finger like a fortune-teller’s on his palm.
‘The last mice sold out in a week,’ she says. ‘Can you mount anything else? Nothing too big. Something sweet. I’d love something for Easter.’
She looks at Cale with something in her voice bigger than a mouse. Cale looks at her bare finger stroking a tail and looks away.
‘Dunno,’ he says.
Clary is behind him, right there, like his manager, like all her looking at the weird stuff nearby was a ruse and she was waiting to jump in and do what she had to do.
‘Of course he can do something else,’ she says. ‘He can do anything.’
‘Great, swing by some time and show me what you’ve got,’ the woman says.
They are silent all the drive home, Clary and Cale. She knows he is still thinking about the letter. They look out the windows at the low sun, pools of snow preserved in the shadows of buildings the sunlight can’t touch. They don’t speak until they’re back at the trailer, eating a pizza they bought on the way home.
‘Maybe we should sell,’ Clary says. She does not want to say it, she thought she never would, but she does. She says it like a curse word something won’t let her censor. Her father chews pizza, staring at the letter on the table, a string of cheese connecting the slice to his lips.
‘That’s no way to think, pumpkin, giving up. It’s our land. Besides, where will the jackalopes live?’
He grins best he can, his lips not connected to his eyes.
‘There aren’t any jackalopes, Dad,’ says Clary. ‘Mom only ever hunted dickalope.’
She looks at him, waiting to be corrected for her language, unsure if she’ll ever be a pumpkin again. Cale puts down his slice. The silence stretches between them like cheese on that pizza, thinning, fit to snap.
‘If we aren’t here, how can she come back?’ he says.
Clary looks around the trailer, thinking about her mother. Their life seemed to fit her like the skin of a rabbit on a hare. She was bigger than it. Clary opens her mouth, unable to make her voice low enough for her not to be able to hear it. It’s just words, laid out like red-hot sauce, or thread, on the counter.
‘She’s never coming back,’ she says.
Clary chooses the antlers for the jackalope. Cale lets her watch him work on the rabbit. She squishes the clay that holds in the eyes and watches it transform into something beyond itself. Finally, it’s ready. The rabbit’s antlers rut the spring air like hooks, ready to hang someone’s keys on. Clary puts it in the box and they drive. Together, they stand at the counter of the store. Cale sets the box down. The woman at the till peers inside the box, removing a mist of tissue paper snared on an antler.
‘I made this. I can do as many as you like,’ Cale says. ‘If you wanna give it a go?’
Catwoman Had Something
My mother’s sister was almost Catwoman. Once, she showed me her kitty ears and a pointy little mask she wore for a Spandex audition in the sixties. It was down to her and one other woman, she said. She was floating off to Key West with some guy she met at the store and missed their call. Since then, she’d had eight lives — whiskers of them included us. She didn’t need more. She had something, she had it, a wow no one could put their finger on.
Strictly, Judy wasn’t my aunt, more of a fraction of an aunt, a slither. She was Mom’s half-sister, the bad half or the good, depending on how you feel. They didn’t meet until Mom was nineteen. Mom stood with a red carnation in her hat. Judy stepped off the train in crocodile shoes, a waft of perfume and a dizzying laugh. Later, Mom had to tell me it all in slow motion. The man in the raincoat propping up a weepy girlfriend looked over her shoulder. The conductor loosened his grip on a ticket-dodging kid and watched Judy slink past. She only had eyes for red carnations.
The women stared at each other like a before and after on a makeover show. Mom looked at Judy and saw her future, if she was a different sort of girl. And Judy saw what she could have been like when she was young, if she’d never learned to walk in heels. Walking right is something ‘a girl shouldn’t learn till she’s twenty-one’, Judy said. Mom never got the hang of it, so she married a surveyor.
I was nothing like either of them. I wanted to be Catwoman, but my posture sucked. I didn’t think I’d ever be someone who always wears heels — what happens when you have to run?
Every Christmas I sent Judy cards of snowmen and nativity scenes with kitty ears and masks drawn on in magic marker. She sent us postcards of red buses and monkeys in temples. She was part of our family like a cat who comes and goes, but mostly goes. We left a hole in the door all the same.
When my grandfather died, Judy returned from what Mom called ‘swanning about’. Her pale hands fluttered over her black dress with white ribbon on the trim. The inside of her purse winked at me, a glint of satin, pink as a kitten’s mouth. Cosmetics sparkled like foil-wrapped candies.
‘Do you want some?’ she said, offering lipstick.
I took off the cap, stared at the bullet of the tip.
‘Judy, what are you thinking? She’s only seven,’ Mom said. She glared as if red was tattooed to my mouth. ‘Lana, go scrub your face!’