Excerpt: Memories of a White Girl

As soon as Steven left the hotel room, he made his way straight to the liquor store. It was the one that he usually went to, only about four or five blocks from the big fancy hotel Deirdre was staying in. It wasn’t a government liquor store, but rather one of those twenty-four hour bottle shops. It served a lot of the street people.

Steven went in and picked up three bottles of Bright’s 74, the cheap, sweet sherry that he usually drank. It was twenty percent alcohol, so it did its work fast. And it was affordable. The fat bald guy who talked to Steven like he was actually human was at the cash register tonight.

“Hey, Stevie, yer lookin’ good. Ya come into the money tonight?”

The fat guy took his twenty-five bucks and gave him some change, a twoonie and some other coins. Steven put the other coins into the little plastic donation box for the Children’s Help Fund but he kept the two dollar coin, the twoonie. The fat guy put each of the bottles into a paper bag first so they wouldn’t clink together, then put them all into a plastic bag and double-bagged it so it wouldn’t burst when he was carrying it.

“Ya take care, eh, Stevie. Don’t drink it all at once, now.”

Steven walked quickly, keeping to the shadows. He didn’t want any of the street people to notice him carrying this much booze, or they’d be all around him like flies, suddenly his best buddies. He knew it; he’d do the same himself. He cut down south of Jasper Avenue into the heavily treed area above the riverbank.

He had a secret drinking place there that he liked to go to. It was under a huge evergreen tree with big branches that came right down to the ground. When he crawled under there, under the big branches and with bushes all around, he was invisible to people walking by on the trails to their bush camps, or to city folk who came there to hike or jog. The ground was soft under the big tree because of fallen needles, and in wet weather, the branches kept the rain off. He had a can of sterno *** and a couple of lighters, bits of twine, and some ass-wipe in a plastic bag hidden there under a tree root. When it was really cold, he lit it to warm his hands. Right now, his hands were shaking so bad he could barely unscrew the cap from the sherry bottle, but not from the cold.

Steven downed the bottle pretty quickly so that it could do its work, although not so fast that he wouldn’t be able to function. Now that he was alone, he could finally think about the awful news Deirdre had told him at Ritchie’s office. It seemed unreal, impossible, that Mom could have died. He said the word “dead” in a quiet voice to himself. “Dead” – he just couldn’t apply it to his mental picture of Mom. It seemed that she must be there still, in the perfect Mossbank of his childhood memories.

It had been a long time since he had been back to Mossbank and seen Mom, maybe four years. The last time he had been there, it had been as depressing as hell, Sam showing off his fancy car and expensive stuff, rubbing it in about how successful he was compared to Steven. There had been the smiling studio photos of him, Monica, and the kids, from back when they were still together as a family, sitting up there on Mom and Dad’s mantle piece. It tore him apart dealing with Dad’s disappointed looks and Mom’s concerned questions.

Then there was the matter of the five hundred bucks she had given him to help him out when he left on the bus. There had been quite a few times she’d given him two hundred bucks or five hundred bucks, mailing it to him when he still had a regular address, and he’d never paid her back any of it. For quite a while, he used to phone on Christmas and her birthday. He remembered her saying one time, “Steven, you’re breaking my heart.”

Tears welled up in his eyes at that memory. He had broken his mother’s heart. And now she was dead. She would never be there to see him get himself turned around, back on the straight and narrow.