He realized as soon as he pulled it away that this had been a mistake; the envelope was a sodden mass. He waved it in the air to cool it and then tried the flap. The glue had been steamed away, sure enough. But the paper was drenched.
He tried again with the phone bill. This time he passed the envelope quickly through the steam, a little farther from the spout. He managed not to damage the paper, but the glue was still firm. After a second pass he was able to pry up an edge without tearing anything. A third pass and the envelope peeled open in his hand; it was damp but would probably dry to its original condition.
He practiced again on the sweepstakes flyer and did a little better this time. He figured he had the hang of it.
Now the letter from Montreal.
He carried it carefully into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He dried the tongs and then grasped the envelope. The kettle was still screaming. He turned to center it on the burner and then—disaster!—the Montreal letter slipped through the pincer-end of the tongs toward a sink full of dirty dishwater. “Shit!” Roch screamed. He clenched the tongs convulsively and managed to catch a corner of the envelope; it dangled over the water until he could snatch it away with his free hand.
His heart was beating a mile a minute. He forced himself to stand still, calm down.
The kettle continued to shriek, inches from his ear.
He took a deep breath and started again.
The second time was lucky. It worked like a charm. He worried out the letter from the envelope, unfolded it, and sat down to read.
The kettle dried up and fell silent. Roch stood up to turn the heat off, but too late: the cheap aluminum was red hot and brittle. He threw the kettle in the sink, where it hissed and generated a white, astringent-smelling cloud. The kitchen was already tropical; the whole apartment was as humid as a hothouse. He imagined spores taking root in the old wallpaper, fungus breaking out in the dark comers of these narrow rooms. He was troubled by this thought, but only briefly. He sat down and concentrated on the letter. He had important things to do.
The letter was typewritten, pecked out on an ancient, faded ribbon. Roch had a hard time reconciling the text with his memories of his mother. Mama was a big woman who had often been drunk and sometimes aggressive. One time he’d seen her get into a fight with a shoe clerk at Ogilvy’s—she tore a flap of skin off the guy’s cheek. Whereas this letter was a whining, pathetic document, mainly about the lousy neighborhood she was forced to live in and how long it had been since Amelie wrote back.
Screw the old bitch, Roch thought. She never wrote tome.
But the bulk of his plan was already beginning to take its final shape. It was a grand, glowing edifice, and he was its architect. A brace here, a capstone there. He smiled and set the letter aside.
In the afternoon he rode a bus down to the Salvation Army thrift shop and spent ten dollars on a clapped-out Underwood Noiseless typewriter. He took it home and discovered that the ribbon wouldn’t advance, but that he could produce legible copy if he cranked the spool by hand every line or two. He typed The quick brown fox and compared this with the letter from Mama.
The specimen was similar but far from identical. Still, Roch thought, who notices these things? He doubted that Amelie would have an older letter to compare it with or that she would bother if she did, as long as the counterfeit seemed authentic.
He inserted a piece of plain white bond into the Underwood and sat before it, sweating. He could not think of a way to begin … then realized that he could copy Mama’s letter as written, with a few critical amendments of his own. He smiled at the ingenuity of this and began pecking.
The cap came off the “e” key before he was finished, but he managed to wangle it back on without too much mess. He typed the penultimate paragraph from the original, then dropped the “you never write” complaints and added:
Because I want to see you I have bought bus tickets to Toronto and will be arriving Saturday Feb 10. Hope you can meet me at the Bus Station as I do not know how to find your Apartment exactly. I would call you but unfortunately the Phone has been take out again by those Bastards at the Phone Co.
Roch sat back and smiled at this, especially the bit about the telephone, which not only solved a potential problem but sounded a lot like Mama. He typed, Your Loving Mother, and duplicated her signature with a blue Bic pen.
Masterpiece.
The only remaining problem was re-sealing the envelope. Amelie had left a jar of mucilage in the kitchen drawer, and Roch discovered that a very thin layer of this would pass for the original glue. He sealed the envelope and set it aside. Good enough for today. He turned on the TV and watched Wheel of Fortune, content with the state of the world.
On his way back to the Goodtime Grill the next morning, a troubling thought occurred to him:
What if Amelie didn’t take the bait?
There was no love lost between those two, after all. Roch did not hate either of his parents—except his father, sporadically; hating them was a waste of time. But he knew that Amelie harbored deeper feelings, mostly negative. Amelie sometimes talked about Mama sympathetically, but with her fists clenched and her nails digging into her palms. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at the bus depot.
Or maybe—another new thought—she was too far away. Maybe she’d left the city. She might be in fucking Timbuktu, although Roch suspected not; it wasn’t her style. But who knew? Anything was possible.
No, he thought, better not to borrow trouble. If the letter arrangement fell through, he’d try something else. He had the connection through Tracy; that was secure and that was enough for now.
Tracy recognized him when he sat down at the table by the window. He saw her say something to the manager, who looked impatient and sent her scooting over with a glass of water and the order pad. Roch smiled his biggest smile and ordered lunch. When she came back with the food he reached into his jacket pocket, very casually, and brought out a wad of mail including the spiked envelope.
“I remembered to bring these,” he said. “Thought maybe you’d want to pass ’em on.”
Tracy took the envelopes but held them at a distance, as if they might be radioactive. “Oh,” she said. “Well, okay, I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“If it’s convenient,” Roch said.
“Oh,” Tracy said.
One more thing, one more small item to take care of, and then he’d be ready. Everything would be in place.
That night he walked down Wellesley to the corner where Tony Morriseau, the drug dealer, was hanging out.
Roch didn’t know Tony too well. Roch didn’t believe in doing drugs; drugs fucked up your mind. He had, admittedly, sometimes scored a little of this or that from Tony, when the inclination took him or he wanted to impress somebody. But he was not a regular customer.
Tony stood on the snowy streetcorner done up in a khaki green parka with a big hood, his breath steaming out in clouds. He regarded Roch from this sheltered space with an expression Roch could not decipher. Tony seemed more paranoid these days, Roch had observed.
Tony rubbed his hands together and said, “It’s fucking cold, so tell me what you want.”
“Something serious,” Roch said.
“Speak English,” Tony said.
Roch mimed the act of holding a hypodermic needle against his arm and pressing the plunger.
Tony looked ill. “Christ,” he said, “don’t do that, all right? You don’t know who’s looking.” He seemed to withdraw into the depths of the parka. “I don’t deal with that.”