Read Online One in Every Crowd by Ivan E. Coyote - Free Book Online Page B

yearly; it depended largely on my economic status come shopping time, but that was all okay by him. I knew in my leaner years that he could just pawn the cheaper stuff off on his visitors. I’ve caught him guiltlessly pouring an Oban for himself, back turned, while simultaneously serving his houseguests Johnnie Walker Red. I once caught him trying to pull this stunt on me, red-faced with a bottle of Canadian Club in his hand, as if he thought I wouldn’t know the difference.
    I reminded him I had been trained by a professional.
    A couple of Christmases ago, my Uncle Rob trapped me coming out of the washroom to have words with me about this. “Why buy booze for a guy who drinks too much?” he asked me with rum and eggnog on his breath. “Why not get him socks or something, like everybody else does now?”
    Rob had a point, to be sure, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it all. But my dad already owns every tool known to mankind, never wears ties, hates sports of any stripe, and only wears work shirts. The contents of his closet reveal a repeating pattern: GWG boot cut jeans, thirty three-inch waist, thirty three-inch leg. White Stanfield T-shirts, size medium. Blue BVDs, also medium. Tan work boots, size nine men’s. Grey and white work socks, the kind with the red stripe. He reckons if you own all the same socks, you don’t have to throw both away when you get a hole in one. Easier to sort that way, too. A couple of summers ago he got himself a pair of sandals, and the whole family almost fell over in collective shock. Buying him clothes as a gift would be like going out for supplies.
    My dad throws stuff away when he knows he won’t use it, even gifts. After a couple of Boxing Day heartbreaks when taking out his garbage, I settled myself into buying him something I was sure he would love, something I knew would never go to waste. Scotch it was.
    Last spring my dad called me out of the blue, which should have been my first clue that something big was up. The second alarm bell went off when he asked me how my girlfriend was. Sure, he didn’t know her name, but that was as much my fault as it was his: I had stopped telling him years ago. But still, he asked.
    Then the bottom fell out of all things predictable. My father interrupted me, stopped himself, and went on to say the following: “I’m sorry, I interrupted you. What was that you were saying?”
    I immediately called my grandmother to find out if he was okay. “Is my father dying of cancer or something? He’s acting very weird. First of all, he called me up just to talk. Then, he apologized for interrupting me. Is everything alright?”
    “Of course,” she said, laughing her little laugh, letting air out through her nose like she does. “The new Don takes a little getting used to. Yesterday, he called to let me know he was going to be late for lunch. Very unusual, indeed. Usually he just wouldn’t show up and then avoid me until he thought I’d forgotten. But everything is different since he quit drinking.”
    My mind reeled through the rest of our conversation. The details rolled around my head and only stuck later, because I had yet to fathom the first line. I heard her say he just got up and poured it all down the sink, that it had been over a month now, but I was still stuck on imagining my father without a drink in his hand and wondering what his voice might sound like, thin-tongued and without a tinkling soundscape of ice cubes behind it?
    When I visited in July, he was clear-eyed and full of wisdom; simple, yet sublime. “I realized,” he said to me, swirling black tea with one sugar and tinned milk, “that it looks like I’m probably going to have the same wife, the same job, the same house, and work on this same little piece of ground for the rest of my life.” He paused to light a smoke with steady hands. “And that the only thing I could change was my attitude.”
    We drove around town, going to pick up sheets of aluminium,