Page 82 of Canadian Boyfriend

“You should talk,” I said to Gretchen. She was always on me to take time off, but she definitely didn’t practice what she preached.

“I’m the boss,” she said. “It’s hard for me to take off. But it’s not hard for you.”

“But they’re leaving tomorrow!”

“I will cover your classes. When are you back?”

“September fourth!” Mike Martin called.

These people were crazy. “I can’t just—”

“We’re going camping,” Mike Martin interrupted. “It’s not unheard of to see the northern lights in late August and early September.”

“I don’t have the right gear for camping.” For some reason, I was still looking for an out, even though I really, really wanted to see the northern lights. “I would have needed time to buy some stuff, like… hiking boots.”

“We have stores in Canada. They’re in igloos, but they do sell a full range of items. Anything you need, we can buy there.”

I couldn’t think how to rebut. He was doing some kind of psychological trick on me. “Northern lights, you say?”

He could tell he’d hooked me. “Yes, really, but… it’s rare. I can’t promise it.”

I smiled. That was so him, to suddenly fret that he was luring me under false pretenses.

“Dad,” Olivia said. “You’re supposed to be convincing her.”

“It’s her birthday August twenty-ninth,” Gretchen said.

“Your thirtieth, right?” Mike Martin asked. “Now youhaveto come.”

“I was going to go out with Gretchen!” We both had late August birthdays, and we generally spent them together.

“And now you’re going to go to Canada for your birthday,” Gretchen said. “Upgrade!”

“Well…” I was going to give in. Because I wanted to. “OK.”

Everybody cheered, and the next day I was back in the Getaway Car, and we were headed north.

Mike Martin and Olivia were great road trip companions. We played I spy, and Olivia kept a running list of the different states and provinces we saw on license plates. At the border, Mike Martin rolled down the window, and the guard said, tersely, “Citizenship?”

“Two Americans and one Canadian.”

“How are you all related?” the agent asked as he paged through the passports.

“Olivia is my daughter. Aurora is my… friend.”

The pause was short. Not noticeable unless you were listening with careful attention to see how he would answer. How many ways had we jokingly defined our relationship? It was harder to do when it wasn’t a joke.

When the guard got to Mike Martin’s passport, his previous no-nonsense façade cracked, and he looked up and grinned. “Mike Martin! For real?”

“Yep,” he said, and I could feel him bristle as the guard started narrating the ending of a game from two years ago.

After we were waved through, Mike Martin shook his head as if he were literally shaking off the encounter and said, “Next stop, Dominion City and the world’s largest sturgeon.”

Mike Martin and Olivia had an affinity for cheesy roadside attractions. We had already seen the world’s largest catfish in North Dakota, a forty-foot fiberglass monstrosity. The sturgeon was much smaller than the catfish, clocking in at a measly fifteen feet, and when I asked Mike Martin if that scale was true to life, I was treated to a lecture on the topic. “We could have seen a fourteen-foot statue of a pink bra in Grand Forks, but I decided to skip that one.”

“Yeah, if I’m going to go out of my way, it had better be for oversize aquatic wildlife, not oversize lingerie,” I joked.

Two hours later, we turned into a neighborhood of modest, one-story homes that looked like they were from the 1950s. It was a world away from Lake Minnetonka. I eyed the street sign as he turned a corner. “You grew up on a street calledMaplewood? Could you be any more Canadian? Well, maybe if you’d grown up on Maple Syrup Lane.”

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