Read Happiness of Fish for Free Online Page B

me,” Vivian would complain. “Support me a little, can’t you?”
    However, she’d threaten dire punishments when Gerry got home if he wasn’t there when things went wrong.
    â€œYou blow me up into some kind of monster,” he complained. Then Tanya and a friend got picked up for stealing lipsticks at K-Mart and Vivian thought he over-reacted.
    â€œThere’s nothing worse than a sneak,” he’d grated. “It’s not like you needed the stuff. You’ve got pocket money, you could have bought it. One of these days you’re going to be living with other people at university or somewhere. Are you going to steal from them?”
    Tanya said nothing. She just looked down, hot and red. She wasn’t much of an arguer-back, not with Gerry anyway.
    â€œKids steal,” Vivian had said, shoes off, relaxing with a beer in front of the late news after the cops had left and Tanya had been sent to bed. “She’s just acting out.”
    Gerry wondered if he was just a property-worshipping, middle-class wimp. Was his homily on sneaks hypocrisy and a wimpy cop-out? Maybe he should have congratulated Tanya on taking on the system, becoming a lip-gloss commando, a make-up martyr.
    Gerry supposes the ripples of the incident are still expanding off into outer space somewhere, gone to reverberate in some elk pasture in Alberta. He thinks of the times he’s been startled when he opens his mouth only to hear a ventriloquist’s rendition of his genuine, born-in-1898,Victorian father. Maybe some wayward elk or back-sliding bear is in for the lecture of its life when Tanya starts channelling him from some buried memory.
    Gerry takes charge at the baggage carousels, positioning people where they can spot their bags easily and give warning so the rest of the tribe can snatch them from the circling current of Samsonite, duffel bags and Canadian Tire tool boxes with locks and rope and duct tape. It’s a small family myth that Gerry is a practical traveller, familiar with airports and all their mysteries. They load a cart and head out past the triage of cab companies and rent-a-car reps sorting the incoming passengers.
    Outside the pinball-machine brightness of the terminal, it’s gone drizzly. The tall lights in the parking lot are haloed in drifting sodium-yellow haze. Duane and Gerry pack suitcases into the boot of Gerry’s mud-and-salt-stained Honda wagon and crowd five into the back seat, kids on laps.
    â€œIt’s only a minute to home.”
    â€œCan you breathe back there?”
    â€œYeah, we’re fine, we’re good...”
    The third of Vivian’s kids is waiting for them at home. Melanie is the middle child. She lives across town with her husband Darren, who isn’t with her tonight. He runs Darren’s Donair and Pizza and he’s working. Gerry privately calls him “My Other Brother Darren,” a reference to Brother Darrel on the
Bob Newhart
TV show.
    Melanie has brought her daughter Diana with her tonight. Diana’s eight and has been told she can stay up to greet her cousins. She’s dozed off on Vivian’s basement couch in front of the cartoon channel and Melanie has made corned beef, tuna, and peanut butter sandwiches and put on a pot of coffee.
    Melanie is a slim, tallish woman with a bit of last year’s purple-red to her hair. She moved out, not long after Duane, and spent half a dozen years waiting tables and partying. In the course of the partying she met Darren, who was in the process of setting up Darren’s D&P, as the family called it. Vivian contended that Melanie married Darren because he was such a hapless goof, a stray.
    â€œHe’s just like Jack,” Vivian would complain.
    Jack was her ex, who had gone bust running a gas bar in Grand Falls and taken it out on her and the kids until she loaded them on the bus and came to town. Darren is often in debt, behind on his payroll or broke because he