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My mother and I went to the kitchen together. She’d decided to make a cake.
    ‘What’s a lucky colour?’ she said.
    ‘Orange.’
    A little smile, her eyes crinkling. ‘Really?’
    I figured orange was a good bet because it was two colours at once. One of them might be lucky. My mother dropped yellow food
     colouring from a tiny glass bottle into the icing while I stirred and it turned buttery and bright. Then it was a soft sunrise
     orange that deepened to a pumpkin shade as splashes of red fell.
    ‘I like it,’ Mom said.
    This was a special occasion, so we had supper in the dining room. Stanley’s ugly mood clung to everything like an extra layer
     of sooty air. When my mother left to get the cake, he turned and smiled at me, as if he thought I was funny.
    ‘Well, congratulations, buddy. You’re not a bastard anymore. How does it feel?’
    I said I was sorry. I wasn’t sure what else to do.
    My mother came back into the room, without the cake. Then she was standing behind Stanley’s chair and laying a hand on his
     shoulder.
    ‘Don’t,’ she said. Her voice was low and firm and quiet.
    My father sighed deeply. After a moment, he placed his hand over hers and leaned back, head against the pink flower pattern
     of her dress. He shut his eyes.
    ‘Maryna.’ Stanley’s thin mouth was lost in that bramble of beard. ‘Did we really need to do this?’
    ‘It’s done. Now don’t humiliate our son.’
    I put one foot on the floor. They didn’t seem to notice. Mom’s fingers grazed the soft dark hair just above his ear.
    ‘Let’s go for a drive,’ she said.
    ‘What’s the point?’
    ‘A walk, then.’
    He agreed to go for a walk. I thought it was funny, the three of us just leaving the house for no good reason – like we’d
     come back to find Goldilocks asleep in one of our beds. We zipped up our winter coats and shoved our feet into boots, walked
     in the dark until we were huddled on a bench in a long empty park that led to the river. A thin curve of moon hung over our
     heads. Stanley put his arms around us both. The surfaces of our coats shifted and slid against each other, made pockets of
     air between us. So bundled up it would take a long time to feel anything if we fell.
    When we got home, we ate square slabs of cake with orange icing. I hoped it really was a lucky colour.
    Stanley spent more and more time in his study. Then one day he left. It was April, a little more than a year after the wedding,
     and the snow was just starting to melt. I asked Mom where he’d gone and she told me she didn’t know.
    Every time I picked up our mail at the post office I got nervous, thinking I might see my name on an envelope in Stanley’s
     handwriting. But nothing like that ever appeared in the bundles of bills and magazines I brought home for Mom. After a couple
     of years, I stopped expecting it. Sometimes I wondered if he was dead.
    When I was twelve, everybody in my year moved up to the high school.
    The place was huge, bigger than a mall, and full of people who looked more like adults than children. Riverside didn’t have
     the populationfor a Junior High and a Senior High. Instead we had six years in the same building – a boundless vista of boredom with no
     end in sight but graduation. Graduation in 1987. I was sure the farm kids would be bussed to school in rocket ships by then.
    Such a strange time, those first few years at the high school. I was always hyper and buzzing with too much energy, or else
     I’d be exhausted, barely able to lift my head. And sometime in Grade Eight or Nine, it was like I woke up and I was taller
     than my mother. It felt crazy and sudden, like everything else that was going on then, scary, saddening and out of control.
    Poor Mom. Spending all day typing other people’s letters in an office two towns away, then back home for supper and TV with
     me. Very occasionally there’d be a night out with a
new friend
, but nobody she liked enough to introduce. I don’t