At her funeral I was thinking that would be a good thing to put on her tombstone: “If that was lunch, I’ve had it.” But things like that had already been worked out and it would never have happened. I couldn’t imagine my dad and me standing there weeping in front of a tombstone with those words written on it. At her funeral my dad, all two hundred and fifty pounds of him, leaned against me in the front row and cried. I wondered, what was he going to do without her? What was I going to do with him? I looked down at his hand holding mine. A very strange hand. He was shaking against my shoulder. He shook and he shook and then he let out a moan that terrified me. There were so many people in the church. Loudspeakers were set up outside in the parking lot so those who couldn’t get in could hear what was going on. Lots of half-tons with women in them crying and kids running around the parking lot laughing while the minister’s voice boomed out at them. “Let us celebrate, let us celebrate,” he kept saying. “Let us celebrate the life.” A kid outside must have been playing with a car horn and it got stuck. The horn blasted through the open windows of the church and the minister had to cut his speech short. Everybody else was looking around wondering what to do. My dad didn’t care about the speech or the horn. He sat there. He didn’t look up. He leaned against me and cried.
six
Of course, I didn’t have to read the letter Lish received to know what it was all about: the busker missed her and wanted to see her again. Lish was acting like a little kid. Her face shone and she bounced around her apartment. She still killed mosquitoes but she called them dear and honey before she squished the life out of them. She took her girls and me and Dill out for curry in a cab. She paid for it all with her laundry quarters. Forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents’ worth. Hope and Maya were concerned. They needed clean clothes for school.
“Darlings, there are more important things in life than clean clothes.”
“Curry?” replied Maya.
“Oh, Maya, lighten up, have some fun. I’ll wash your precious school clothes by hand if I have to.”
“Well, you will.”
We did have fun. Lish was being extravagant all because of this stupid letter. I offered to pay for my and Dill’s share, but she refused. Lish and I drank red wine and I listened to her retell the story of the blissful week she and the busker spent together almost five years ago. The kids started to run around the restaurant. Dill was crawling up to other people’s tables and pulling himself up and grinning at them. A few found him amusing.
Alba and Letitia were performing a drama for some others. From what I remember the plot revolved around two women getting drunk. The dialogue was very repetitive. The girls teetered around the restaurant, pretending that their apple juice was beer. They tried to get Dill to join them, but he was busy playing peekaboo with a young couple at another table. Maya read her book and Hope listened to our conversation and drew on her napkin. Some people stared at Lish. She was wearing her black hat with the spider on it and a gauzy skirt with ripped tights underneath. She had taken off her sandals and was resting her big bare feet on one of the twins’ empty chairs. A couple of times she burped. Once she imitated the waiter’s expression and both of us laughed too loud. I noticed a few words being exchanged between the waiter and a guy who looked like the manager. The manager came over to us and very politely said that some of the other patrons might be bothered by the children and the noise they were making. Whoops. This guy didn’t know Lish. First, she recrossed her feet on the chair and then she pushed back her black hat a bit and stared up at him. She had another sip of wine and asked, “This is a public restaurant, isn’t it?”
“Well yes, of course—”
“My kids are people, right, at least for the most part?” She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. I was getting embarrassed.
“Yes, but I—”
“Right. If they’re people, then they’re part of the public. This isn’t an adults’ restaurant. This is a public restaurant. Like a public washroom or a public library?”
“All I’m saying—”
All you’re saying is that your establishment discriminates against the young. You’d rather put them on a spit and sprinkle them with curry, wouldn’t you?”
Oh god, I thought and put my hand over my eyes
“No I really wouldn’t—”
“It’s a joke, Chuckles.” She crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Now everyone was staring at us. Alba and Letitia were still getting drunk and Dill had wandered away and was sitting on some woman’s lap. Maya sighed and kept reading and Letitia made faces at the manager. Lish was getting worked up.
“Lish,” I whispered, “don’t worry about it. He’s right, you know, the kids should sit down.”
But Lish just kept on going. “You know, you people remind me of those other people who put up signs in their store windows that say ‘No Strollers.’ Basically they’re saying No women and children. Especially no poor women who have to cart their kids and everything else around in strollers. I’d like to see a sign in a window that said ‘No Suits’ or ‘No Toupees’ or ‘No Body Odour’ for a change, you know? Eh, Luce?” she said, “wouldn’t you?”
I smiled at the manager, and shrugged my shoulders. “Don’t worry,” I said to him, “she’s not violent.” And then I muttered into my glass, “I think she’s having an allergic reaction to the wine, or something, I don’t know …”
The manager nodded. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave,” he said.
“You know what really makes me mad, Luce?” Lish said.
“C’mon Lish, let’s go,” I said and smiled at the manager, who was staring at Lish incredulously.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to him, “we’re going.”
“The people that make curbs at a ninety-degree angle so you have to break your back to lift the stroller over them or wreck your stroller or wake up your kid getting up them. There are no smooth curbs anywhere in this WHOLE GADDAMN CITY.”
Lish was standing up now. Her black hair was all over the place, a strand of it was caught in her mouth, and her hat was crooked. The spider was almost covering her right eye. She was gathering up the leftover food in napkins and ramming it into her plastic Safeway bag. I got Dill away from the couple. He screamed. He was having a good time. The twins came over to where we were and said, “We’re so drunk. Ooh oooh, let’s drink more beer.” Maya and Hope were giggling with each other now. A middle-aged man next to us was smiling at Lish with what looked like admiration. His wife glared at him and when he noticed her scowling at him he went back to his goat dish. I tried to get Dill into his pink rain jacket, but I gave up and stuffed it into my Safeway bag and tried to hold him the way he was.
“Call us a cab, we are leaving!” Lish barked at nobody in particular. Part of her was just play-acting, having a tantrum. Like I said, Lish could have been an actress. It’s too bad she had to create her own scenes. Had the cops shown up and the manager broken into song or something, she would have been thrilled. As it was, everyone just thought she was crazy. The manager muttered something logical about wanting to be paid for the food. Lish heard him and said, “Oh sure, you want to get paid for ruining our evening. Well, fine.” She took out a little bread bag from her Safeway bag. She had a big grin on her face. Her hat was back in place. She dumped all the quarters, forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents’ worth, onto the red carpet. The next morning, when she was sober, she told me it had been an accident, but I didn’t believe her. It was actually quite a beautiful thing to see. All that silver mixed with the red. Dill convulsed with excitement and I almost dropped him. A bunch of the quarters rolled under the table of the old couple with the goat dishes.