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Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
Mere days before my brother-in-law Richie was shipped off to southern Afghanistan, and seven months before the LAV III he and two fellow light infantrymen were commanding tripped an IED along a roadside west of Kandahar City, instantly consuming all three plus vehicle in flames and thus delivering them from this earth, our family gathered for an early dinner at Jack Astor’s out in Bayers Lake Industrial Park. This dinner marked the first occasion at which both of my parents, my sisters, their respective spouses, and I had all dined together in over two years.
It was a gloomy November evening. Our booth sat adjacent to the window and the parking lot stretching uphill, wind-whipped and sheened with hard rain. Billboards hung in view: Alliant, Clancy’s, Oldies 96.
The table quickly became crowded with starters: Calamari Fritti Al Diavolo, the Cheesy Artichoke Dip, Uncle Vito's Spicy Bruschetta, tankards of ice water. My father had in not so many words implied it was all going on his corporate AmEx, so we felt unbridled in ordering.
‘I love how he’s always the same, yet his films all have their own . . . thing,’ my mother was saying. Her favourite actor had for years been Tim Allen, best known for the sitcom Home Improvement and holiday-themed comedies. Her Sunday brunch club had that afternoon journeyed downtown to watch Wild Hogs, starring Allen, John Travolta, William H. Macy, and Martin Lawrence. She was impressed.
‘Finally
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one that doesn’t resort to toilet humour,’ she said, lips touching her glass.
‘It was cute,’ my older sister Deb, then tectonically pregnant, said. ‘But hardly worth twelve dollars.’
My father huffed. ‘And then you sit through twenty-plus minutes of Toyota ads.’
I happened to be back East in order to clear up some matters with Agatha, some paperwork that needed to be resolved, securing a few shoeboxes of things before she and I could forever part ways, never to speak again. Holed up in my parents’ basement, it had been a difficult week; most of my evenings had been spent at the Copper Penny, drinking fountain Cokes and feeding quarters into the video poker terminals: Triple Butterfly Sevens. Southern Belle Bettor Chance. Royal Spins. Hexbreaker. The machines were relegated to the bar’s glass-sectioned smoking area, so afterward my clothes stank heavily of smoke, raising my mother’s suspicions that I’d begun smoking again despite my physicians’ admonitions, given my condition. Despite my assurances that I’d not smoked since the nineties, she remained unconvinced, and kept raising the subject to my father, who frowned disapproval. It was hugely irritating.
At dinner Richie, my younger sister Mercy’s husband of then five months, was uncharacteristically silent. Usually when he spoke his voice macheted through any surrounding din with a stridency verging on the supernatural. Never one to be muted, he was that sort of individual who considered himself an authority on everything, anything—municipal politics, the NHL, entire historical strata—but in actuality wielded no expertise on anything, and usually only backed up his provocative statements with info explicitly culled from internet message boards. To my knowledge, his only genuine areas of authority were Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the Insane Clown Posse, and berating credit card tech support operators.
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