Lisa Owens - Not Working

“She’s old, Dad,” I persist.

“Mrs. Claus?” He roots around again in the apron pocket, and produces a folded square of gold tissue paper.

“You know who I mean. Hazelnut. They might think she’s been run over. They’ll be worried.”

He opens the paper out into a crown, dandles it over me, as though distracting a cranky infant. I grab it.

“Well, she hasn’t,” he says. “So they needn’t be. Your grandma told me a good one.” He chuckles. “Did you hear it?”

I hold up a hand. “I don’t really share Grandma’s sense of humor.”

“You haven’t heard it yet.”

“I speak from experience.”

“Why don’t you let me tell you and then you can judge?”

“I will if you tell me en route to the Thompsons’ with the dog.”

“Claire, it’s under control.” His palms press the air for emphasis. “Please. Let me handle this. I’m waiting until your mother gets home.” At the mention of my mother, everything falls into place: the dog, the cake, the mess. In the midst of all this orchestrated chaos, he’s hoping the job thing might seem like just another crazy detail. It makes a kind of desperate sense.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll let it go.”

“Well. I think I’ll have a beer! Will you join me?”

My hangover has receded to the point where a drink seems to be not just the best but the only course of action.

“I wouldn’t say no to some wine,” I say, sliding on the paper crown.

“Buggeration,” says Dad, waving an oven-mitted arm through the smoke and slamming the cake pan on the counter. We stand over it. The top is very dark brown, the raisins blistered and burst.

“Oh no!”

“Don’t worry! It’s fine. We’ll just”—he puts his mitts on his hips—“isolate and eradicate the locally affected areas.”

“Cut off the burnt bits.”

“It isn’t burnt.”

While Dad removes the top layer, I mix up some water icing. I keep getting the consistency wrong — too thick, too thin, too thick, too thin — and end up with way too much.

“Did you wash your hands?”

“I’ve been cooking for myself for over a decade. You don’t need to ask that sort of question anymore.”

“We don’t know where that animal’s been.” He sets a bowl of burnt cake pieces down next to the tomato.

“Hey, remember when we used to frost cookies on Sundays?” It was our weekend “baking” tradition: cookies coated with messy white goo and decorated with sprinkles and colored icing. I’d present them proudly on a tray with a cup of tea to my mum when she returned from wherever the short reprieve from mothering took her.

“Did we?” Dad says.

“Yes! Every Sunday.”

“I don’t think every Sunday. Maybe once or twice.”

“No, it was every Sunday!” I don’t know why this is so important. “Mum would go out and you and I would put icing on the cookies.”

“Oh yes, Sunday cookies; now I remember,” he says in the robotic tone he uses when my mother corrects him about something.

I drain my glass; fill it back up again.

—

“Looks…nice?” The surface is lumpy owing to Dad’s limited carving skills. Because I was too impatient to wait for it to cool, the icing has melted and run into ghoulish drips. “Considering.”

“I’ve had an idea,” Dad proclaims, grabbing a tub of glacé cherries from the baking Tupperware. He places one in the middle. It looks a bit lonely.

“What about a face?” I suggest. We add two eyes and a smiling mouth.

“That’s better,” says Dad.

“Much,” I say. Hazelnut pads over to Dad’s side. There are charred bits caught in her fur. “Wow, she really went for that crust.”

“Told you it wasn’t burnt.” The smoke alarm starts to shriek. “GOOD TO KNOW IT WORKS,” Dad booms.

“If you’d call that working,” I say.

“Do you think you should talk to an employment lawyer, find out what your rights are?”

“I don’t know.” Dad clasps his hands behind his head. I once read in a magazine that soccer players do this when they miss a goal because it mimics the support of their mothers’ hands cradling them as babies.

“Maybe I’ll get someone to recommend one. I have a few friends who are lawyers.”

“I always said you’d make a good lawyer.” Hazelnut stirs at his feet, places her chin on his knees and looks up at him.

“Never once heard you say that.”

“To your mother I have. Very fond of a loophole,” says Dad, scruffling under the dog’s ears.

I think about it. “It involves too much information for me. I’d probably get distracted by all the incidental stuff.”

He nods. “Maybe.” Takes another swig of beer. “You made a good decision, Claire.”

“ I did?”

“Getting out of that job if you weren’t happy. Took guts.”

“I thought you thought I was a bit of a dropout.”

“Well.” He jiggles his head, seeing my point. “In my day, if you went into a job, that’s where you stayed for forty years. If you didn’t like it? Too bad.”

“But you did like your job. Do like it, I mean.”

“I might have preferred to be an architect.” He says this so frankly it breaks my heart a little.

“Oh. I never knew that.”

“Ah, yes, but you see, Claire, you never asked.”

It’s true. I’d always assumed he was happy where he was, that he didn’t have the imagination to question it — when in fact, all these years, I was the one who lacked the imagination to find out. I draw a “C” in the sugar dusting the table, then scrub it out.

“You’re right: I never did. I’m sorry.” He waves my apology away. I prop my chin on my palm. “I wish I wanted to be an architect.”

“Ach. It’s not the most secure profession nowadays.”

“I mean, I wish I knew what I wanted.”

“Maybe…” Dad lifts his can, puts the opening to one eye and peers in, as though seeing the future inside, “there isn’t going to be a magic job that will solve all your problems. There’s a whole world between any old thing and the thing. What does Luke think? About your situation.”

My mouth droops and the fog of self-pity closes in. “I think Luke’s had enough of me.”

Dad’s mobile thrums in his pocket; he lowers the beer, takes the phone out and freezes. “It’s your mother,” he whispers. His eyes dart to the window in a move I recognize at a near-genetic level: wild paranoia that she’s out there watching him. “What’ll I do? Will I answer? What shall I say?”

“Take it,” I say, “but I’m not here.”

“Well, hello!” he warbles in the same too-bright voice he used when he answered me earlier. “I’m terrific!” He snaps his fingers at me in this urgent, dictatorial way, then at the dog. Though it would be easier for him to leave the room, I take Hazelnut by the collar and guide her into the hallway. When I get back into the kitchen, he’s saying, “Everything’s fine. No-no, nothing, no-no, nothing, nothing urgent. See you soon, then. Cheerio!” He drops his phone on the table and massages his forehead. I hand him another beer from the fridge.

“When is she coming back? Let me help you clean up some of this before I go.”

“Aren’t you going to stay?” he says.

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

“I thought you two had sorted things out.”

“She’s talking to me again, which is something, I suppose, but…” I sigh. “She’s cooked up this theory, and even though I know going along with it’s the path of least resistance, I just…I can’t. It feels like a betrayal to myself. To child-me. I don’t know.” I run a finger around the mixing bowl, decide I’m drunk enough to ask: “What do you make of it all? This stuff with Mum about…whatever. Gum and the war wounds and his, you know, with me in the bathroom and everything.” The batter is delicious: sweet, silky and rich.