This Cake is for the Party by Sarah Selecky

Author:Sarah Selecky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC029000, book
ISBN: 9780887625251
Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
Published: 2010-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

Where Are You Coming From,

Sweetheart?

On the night her father died, Christine was in the dark of a Greyhound bus on the way from the Big Smoke to the Big Nickel, in one of the rear seats beside the washroom stall, letting a man named Bruce Corbiere put his smoky, apple-sticky tongue in her mouth. It felt like a living thing, burrowing. This was Christine’s first kiss. She was fourteen years old.

Christine’s father had allowed her to spend the weekend with her cousin Sonia and her aunt Juicy in Mississauga. The Greyhound bus was headed back north on Highway 69, the same stretch of road that had taken her own mother ten years earlier. Christine had been four years old, pencilling lumpy butterflies on the back of a phone bill envelope, when a police officer knocked at the door to report the accident. Christine’s mother was driving the silver Valiant home from her sister’s house when a transport truck swerved into oncoming traffic. It crushed the Ford and trapped her mother inside. This happened so long ago, it’s more story than memory. She knew the detail about the butterflies on the envelope because her father still used this piece of paper as a bookmark in the black leather bible next to his bed.

Before she left for the weekend, Christine had had to finish all of her household chores—her father used the word chores, as if they lived on a farm. She was in the basement on Wednesday after school, cramming her father’s brown pants into the washing machine, when she found the note. She had dipped into his pockets looking for money. The pocket lining was dotted with pimples of pilled cotton. She pulled out a crusty handkerchief and a fat beige crumb of—what? It was heavy as a pebble, disgusting. But in the other pocket there was a scrap of paper, folded twice. 42:1–11 My tears have been my food day and night. Why are you downcast, O my soul? Put your hope in God. The handwriting was dark and loopy. She threw it away, into the can of dryer lint with the dead house centipedes. Not even a quarter.

While her father boiled sausages with onions in the kitchen—Christine wouldn’t eat this anymore because she was a vegetarian—Christine vacuumed his bedroom. He had been home from work all week because of a bad headache. She used the corner attachment to suck up the flakes of cigarette ash along the baseboards, picked up the empty soup bowls and pop cans that had rolled under the bed. She wiped the dandruff off the top of the headboard with a damp cloth and emptied her father’s ashtray where it sat beside his bible.

Because she went into his bedroom every week, she knew: her father’s closet was still full of her mother’s old clothes. And he moved them around. He touched them. One day she found a peach polyester nightie crumpled in the bed. The whole scene was too revolting to contemplate— her father’s

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