Miriam Toews - Summer of My Amazing Luck

My mother was killed in a botched robbery attempt. My dad and I told her over and over again she was crazy to pick up hitchhikers. Didn’t she read the papers? But she’d say, “Why would anyone want to kill a little old lady like me?” So it was her policy to pick up any hitchhiker with a bag or a suitcase. If they had a bag they were serious. Sometimes she scared the hitchhikers: why would a single lone female be so eager to pick them up? Didn’t she read the newspapers? She’d slow down and stop beside them, a big grin on her face. They’d back away and wave her off and shake their heads. She’d laugh. Suit yourself. Sorry for you if you’re afraid of a little old lady. And she’d spin out in her big old Ford with her window wide open, her elbow sticking out and her hand tapping on the roof of the car, always in a hurry to get where she was going. I guess she liked the company and the potential risk of picking up strangers. When you think about it, we had both been affected for life by picking up strangers. She had lost her life and I got Dill.

The day she was killed she was on her way to a farm just outside the city. She was a family therapist. Her office used to be my playroom. There was a lot of talking and yelling and crying going on in that room. It bothered my dad that my mom had all these unstable people streaming in and out of our house, so whenever he was at home and she had clients he would mow the lawn — or shovel the driveway in the winter. He’d mow the lawn tight outside the window to the playroom/office, bumping up against the house and going over the same patch of grass many times. Our lawn had never looked trimmer. Actually it was bald in patches. I think this was his way of telling my mom’s clients to get a life, get busy like him and leave his wife alone. Or he’d start crashing around in the kitchen, washing dishes and slamming cupboards. The only time he washed the dishes was when my mom was trying to work. My friends said, “Oh wow, your dad washes dishes. That’s nice.” But I knew it wasn’t. My mom did her best to ignore him, When it got to be too much she’d wake me in the middle of the night and off we’d go on the train to my cousins in Vancouver for a week or two. If that was impossible she’d run to the piano and play songs like “Moon River” and “Alfie” and “Five Foot Two” as loud as she could over and over until my dad left the house. Then she’d walk away from the piano, beaming, red in the face, swish over to the counter and make herself a pot of coffee. Once she spit into every pot and dish and cup he had washed and then threw them out the back door into the yard for all to see. My dad stood by saying, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

The day she was killed she was driving off to some little town to counsel abused farm women. I think she was trying to tell them, “Get the hell off that farm. Take your kids and leave. Move to the city and go on welfare if need be. Start a new life. Just get away.” Like Naomi at Half-a-Life. But she had to get the women to come to that conclusion themselves by repeating a lot of what they said. My mom said she acted as a kind of mirror. That was her job, as far as I could tell.

So on her way she had picked up a hitchhiker, a drifter with a bag. Only the bag had knives and guns in it. Right beside a billboard advertising fresh honey on the number 75 highway, he asked her to stop and get out of the car. She said, fine, she would, but not without her briefcase, which contained all sorts of confidential files and tapes of women and my mom talking. The guy was nervous and said No. So she said something like, “Look, you can have the car, you can have my money, just give me my bag.” Then she reached over into the back seat to get it and he freaked.

He didn’t shoot her, he just smashed her over the head with his gun. This is how he told the story after he was caught a couple of days later. She wasn’t dead then. He dragged her out to the ditch, threw her briefcase on top of her and took off. A while later she died in the ditch. My mom had always done what she had wanted to do, more or less. She’d done it quickly, too. Even at home, cleaning up or whatever, she’d almost run to get it over with. Swish, swish across the linoleum, in her red down-filled slippers. Sometimes she’d have power naps. She could hold a spoon in her hand, she said, and fall asleep. At the moment it dropped she would have had enough rest to feel completely refreshed. Then boom , she’d be up. Swish, swish. She could make herself a tuna salad sandwich in three minutes and a pot of coffee in one. “If that was lunch, I’ve had it,” she’d say and then coerce me into playing a quick game of Dutch Blitz before she had to go back to work. She always lost because her fingers were shorter and fatter than mine and she’d have to take sips of her coffee.

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.

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?”