Page 13 of Canadian Boyfriend

I knew what she meant by “gross way.” That was the usual way people were interested in me, at least since Sarah’s death. There was a luridness to their inquiries that made me bristle. But if Aurora was curious about Liv and me, I knew it wasn’t in that way.

“I was thinking next week we could go to our place after class,” I said. “We can have dinner and get you oriented.”

“Sure.”

“The short version is that—” We both must have sensed Olivia’s impending return, because we turned at the same time, and sure enough, there was my girl, on her way back looking sulky. I truncated what I’d been going to say, distilling the truth to its essence. “Olivia ismine.”

Liv slid into the booth next to me a few seconds later, so I didn’t have time to be sheepish about my little outburst. Iwanted to sling my arm around her shoulders, but she would probably shrug it off, and I was already feeling a bit raw from the whole asking-for-help thing. I wasn’t up for adding public humiliation at the hands of a tween to the mix.

Dinner was uneventful, and while the server was clearing the table, I asked, “Who wants dessert?” I turned to Olivia. “Well, I know you do. What about you, Aurora?”

She looked at me kind of intently and answered my question with one of her own. “Did you have a missing tooth when I first met you?”

“Yes!” I laughed and realized that answering a question with another, unrelated question was another quirk of Aurora’s.

“Hockey players knock their teeth out a lot, right?”

“Well, I don’t know about a lot, but it is an occupational hazard. That one wasn’t hockey related, though. Leave it to me to knock a tooth out chopping wood.”

“You knocked your tooth out chopping wood? How does that work?”

“I lost my balance as I was swinging the ax back and fell on my face on the chopping block. Anyway, I’m used to it. I lost the tooth next to it years ago, so now I’ve got two fake ones”—I shot her a wide-lipped smile and pointed at the veneers.

She pressed her hands down flat on the table as if steadying herself.

“There was so much blood,” Olivia said matter-of-factly.

“It’s OK, though,” I assured Aurora, who had gone pale—which made me notice she had a faint sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Got it fixed. Good as new.”

If only everything were that easy.

On the way home, Olivia and I did the loop around the lake even though it was late. Soon we’d have to put the convertible away for the winter. Hell, soon I wouldn’t even be here a good chunk of the time. Lauren wasn’t going to do loops around the lake. I mean, she would if I asked her to, but I’d asked for so much already. Anyway, loops around the lake were a Liv-and-me thing.

Olivia seemed to like me a whole lot better in the car than at home. Probably because in the car, with its loud engine, I couldn’t ask things like:You have homework?I cut the engine in front of the house and spoke quietly, as if the volume of my question would have an impact on the tone of her answer. “Reading responses?”

“Yeah, I have to finish today’s.” The happiness drained from Olivia’s face. As much as I didn’t want her to be sad, I would take it. Sad was better than angry.

“The reading or the response?”

“Both.”

“You want to shower, then I’ll sit with you while you do it?” Would my luck hold? More often than not, at the end of a long day, Olivia lashed out, and it had gotten worse since school had started. Dr. Mursal said it was because there was a lot happening. She said Liv was yelling at me because I was safe, and that that was a good thing. I tried to remember that.

“Iknowhow to read,Mike.”

Nope, my luck was not gonna hold.

“I know you do,” I said, ignoring theMike. Olivia had been a year old when I met her. Later, after she and Sarah moved in with me, she’d started calling me Dud, which was how her toddler self had pronounced it. Nothing before or since had made me that giddy. Dud had become Dad, and that had endureduntil after the crash. Dr. Mursal said we weren’t going to care about Olivia’s calling me Mike. She said it exactly like that:We’re not going to care.“It makes her feel like she has some control, and it doesn’t do any harm.” I wanted to say it did do harm, to me, but I got what she meant, so I kept my mouth shut. I’m known for my coachability, right?

“I thought some company might make the task less painful,” I said as I followed Olivia into the house. The task was to read—whatever she wanted—for twenty minutes and write a one-to-two-paragraph response. Olivia’s school had a no-homework policy through grade six unless you didn’t finish your reading response during reading time at school, which Olivia never did. Which punted it to home, where it had been a nightly battle. I didn’t remember this being a problem in past years, but as I was learning, I didn’t know everything about how my own household operated. I’d tried buying her magazines, books about dance, you name it, but it was like pulling teeth. “Or I can leave you alone with it, but you’re going to have to do it one way or another.”

“Fine,” she huffed. The dog vroomed over to greet her, but she ignored him. Wow, she wasreallymad. He was usually exempt from her crustiness. She stomped off.

I shook off her disdain more easily than usual, because I had a mission. I waited until I heard the shower come on to contemplate the shoes.

One of the startling things about Sarah, early in our dating relationship, had been her love of shoes. In the initial months of my acquaintance with her, she’d been working, so she’d worn runners—I’d spent a lot of time watching her as she paced the diner in pink Skechers, taking orders and shuttling plates to and from the kitchen. I went on to learn that she loved andcollected all kinds of shoes—fancy pumps, boots that went over her knees, fashion runners in crazy candy colors.

We had a shoe shelf in the mudroom off the garage. When the shoes would get out of control and end up strewn about willy-nilly, someone, usually me, would get fed up and put them back. I still did that, but now it was only Olivia’s and my shoes. The pairs Sarah had in rotation when she died occupied the bottom of the three-row shelf, but they never moved: lavender-and-white checkerboard Vans, canary-yellow Keds, Birkenstocks, and the New Balance runners she wore for actual running. Shoes were such a signature Sarah thing, it had been hard to face getting rid of these remnants of her. So I hadn’t.

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