Valentine's Fall by Cary Fagan

Author:Cary Fagan [Fagan, Cary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cormorant Books

32

Red Cavalry

THE DAY HAD TURNED WARM and I sweated as I walked up Bayview Avenue. A mandolin case is small, but on a hot day, with your hand sweating, it still gets to be a pain. There was a sidewalk along Bayview, running beside the long green lawns, and I was the only pedestrian, with the traffic pulling past and spewing fumes into my face.

I was heading for the Bayview Village Shopping Centre. My last visit to a mall had been two years ago in Fort Lauderdale, where I’d taken the girls to meet my mother and Uncle Norman and Aunt Min for a holiday. Maggie and Birdy had been wide-eyed and giddy with the excitement of American goods. My mother kept taking out her wallet to buy them anything they pointed at; I practically had to restrain her. She kept giving me a look: You see how they’d be happier over here? And the sorry truth was, it made my heart glad to see them, back at the hotel, looking angelic in their sweet new clothes and playing co-operatively, at least for a while, with all their new toys.

My mother had told me there was a liquor store in the mall and I was going to buy a couple of bottles of wine for me and Annie. She was coming over tonight, after Norman and Min picked up my mother for some touring musical at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. It was a little humiliating to have to ask my mother if I might have Annie over, but it was her house after all, and I decided that I’d been a lousy enough son as it was. She said it was fine as long as we didn’t leave a mess in the kitchen.

In my day, the mall had been a modest strip plaza, with an ice cream parlour where I’d eaten my first banana split, wishing that I had been sharing it with Annie. Larry and I had gone together a few times to race miniature cars on a figure-eight track at the model car shop. I doubted whether kids raced cars anymore, or learned Morse code, or built balsa-wood airplanes that could fly. Now it was just computers and video games. When I finally crossed under the 401 overpass and reached the mall, I saw that it was surrounded by an enormous concrete moat of a parking lot. It had been expanded, roofed over, and glitzed up inside too, with polished granite floors, sparkling lights, and palm trees in planters, wooden benches and café tables, all very pretty and soothing.

On the way to the LCBO, I passed a toy shop and looked in the window. There was a Barbie display — a Barbie horse that walked, a Barbie camper van, a Barbie rock-’n’-roll stage with music and flashing lights. There was a beautiful stuffed bear with dark velvety fur, and an equally cuddly tiger, both large enough to need two arms to hold, and I knew instantly which one Maggie would fall in love with and which one Birdy would.

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