Montreal, 1996
GRACE DEBATED FOR DAYS whether to even make the trip. What did she expect? She turned it over in her mind, picturing the bestand worst-case scenarios. Eventually she decided to go, because at least she would stop thinking about it and be reckoning with something real.
Tug had never talked much about his hometown or his life there. When Grace spoke of her childhood, which came up naturally every now and again, he’d nod and listen but only rarely reciprocated with stories of his own. Looking back, she understood that this elusiveness had been part of his appeal; he withheld himself, and kept her wanting more.
Knowing this didn’t mean she had stopped feeling that way.
At the funeral, she had stayed in the back and watched his parents — well-dressed, quiet-looking people, his mother in glasses, his father balding, slightly stooped — navigate the service. They didn’t know who she was, or even that she existed, and she wasn’t about to introduce herself then. Perhaps this wasn’t an appropriate time either, but she couldn’t help wanting to go.
The drive to Brantford wound through farm country, with silver silos and red barns and cows here and there. The day was gray and drizzly. Grace felt a tightening in her chest, her heart seized by the dreary prettiness of the landscape. She crossed from Quebec into Ontario, the farms neat and well tended, the fruit trees black in the rain. Things Tug would never see again.
Feeling sick, she stopped at a gas station and let her stomach empty itself out, as if some interior part of her wanted to escape. Afterward, she sat in the car with the wipers on, their rhythmic sweep soothing her. It was Saturday. There was nowhere she had to be.
Tug’s parents were listed in the phone book, and she pulled up in front of a two-story house, red brick with black shutters, as well kept as the farms she’d passed. His father was a retired chemist; his mother had never worked outside the home. In the years Tug had been abroad, they had always stayed in Brantford, rarely traveling. “They never wanted to see the world,” Tug once said, and the disapproval in his voice rang clear. Now that she’d arrived, Grace was tempted to turn around and drive back to Montreal. Maybe all she’d wanted was to see the childhood home of a man she’d loved, to know that it still existed, some remnant of him in the world.
A woman in a yellow rain slicker walked her dog past the car, frowning in the few seconds she looked at Grace. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you could just sit in a car without attracting notice. Everybody here must know everybody else, and which cars they drove. Still, she didn’t move. In the warmth of her car, an exhaustion came over her that was strangely close to contentment. Was this enough? Had she already gotten what she’d come for? She turned on the radio, leaned back in her seat, and closed her eyes. The CBC was playing opera, and a woman’s voice tripped light and high through an aria Grace didn’t recognize.
She could sleep here a few minutes, she thought, before going home.
The sound of a door closing made her open her eyes. And there was Tug’s mother, a little old lady stepping down the cobbled pathway that led from the house to the street. Wearing a dark red raincoat, her head bent against the rain, she was clutching her purse to her stomach as if she, too, felt sick. She was heading for the maroon Honda that Grace had parked behind, but with her head down and the rain starting to fall harder, she wasn’t likely to notice her sitting there. Then the front door opened again and another woman came out — this one blond, pretty, and much younger — and Grace’s stomach bucked again. She had seen Marcie at the funeral service too.
As if she could hear Grace’s thoughts, Marcie glanced down the street at her car. Barely seeming to register the rain, she looked right at Grace, her expression indecipherable. All Grace could think was how pretty she was.
When the wipers swished, clearing the windshield, Marcie’s eyes met Grace’s, and she stepped off the path, walked over to the car, and knocked on the driver’s-side window. And Grace — feeling as though this were a dream — rolled it down.
“I recognize you,” Marcie said. “You were at the service.”
Grace nodded, her tongue gummy and thick. Marcie was waiting for her to say something, her eyebrows knitted.
Swallowing, Grace said, “I was a friend of Tug’s.”
Marcie grimaced. “I’ll bet,” she said.
It wasn’t what Grace was expecting. “Excuse me?” she said.
The other woman glanced at Tug’s mother’s car; the engine was on, the taillights glowing red in the rain. When she looked back at Grace, she shrugged in a strangely airy way. “You know,” she said, “my husband had a lot of friends.”
Grace didn’t know what this meant, and didn’t want to, either. “I see,” she said softly.
“Oh, do you?” Marcie was still standing there bent over, her head down at Grace’s level, a position that couldn’t possibly have been comfortable. Her cheeks were flushed. Rain was dripping into the car. “That’s good,” she went on. “I’m so glad you see.”
Grace flushed now herself. In her grief over Tug, in her need to see where he came from and trace his roots in the world, she had forgotten that those roots were, of course, planted in other people. “I’m sorry to have troubled you,” she said.
“Right,” Marcie said.
Grace wondered what she was doing here, and where she was going with Tug’s mother. Tug had told her that when the marriage had fallen apart she’d gone to live with her parents in Hudson.
“I’ll be going,” Grace said.
“So soon?” said Marcie. “We just met.”
“What?” Grace said.
“Did you come from Montreal?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Grace had no idea how to answer. All she felt was embarrassment and regret. The woman’s voice was taut with anger, and her eyes burned feverishly. She kept staring at some spot just to the right of Grace. It was as if she knew that Tug had once sat in the passenger seat, slumped against the door.
“I think I’d better go,” Grace said, waiting for Marcie to step back so she could roll up the window and back away. But instead, Marcie moved her head even closer, and Grace could see that her eyes were ringed with dark circles or maybe smeared mascara. In front of them, the taillights on the other car faded, and Tug’s mother got out and walked over.
Marcie straightened up. “Joy,” she said with a bright, false smile, “this woman is a friend of Tug’s.”
Grace was mortified. She hadn’t really planned what she might say to Tug’s parents — if anything — but whatever fantasy existed in her head, this wasn’t it. A sick feeling washed over her like the sudden onset of flu, and she clenched her abdominal muscles and prayed to be delivered from this moment. As the older woman bent down, her face next to Marcie’s, Grace turned her head and retched onto the passenger seat.
“Oh, dear,” said Tug’s mother. “You’d better come in.”
Fifteen minutes later she was sitting on the sofa in Tug’s childhood home, cradling a cup of tea in her hands while three strangers sat around her in postures of fake repose. It was pouring outside, the rain loudly lashing the windows, and Grace was nauseous and hot. No one spoke. Tug’s father, a tall, rangy man with short-cropped white hair, kept glancing longingly toward the den, where an afternoon hockey game was playing on TV, the sound of the crowd rising and ebbing in the background.
Grace looked around the room. She couldn’t imagine Tug sitting on this furniture or running through this room as a child. The couches were dark pink and flowered, and white vases sprouting plastic flowers sat on doilies on the side tables. Everything smelled of Lysol.