The Willies | Page 6

contestant going to war.
"Hey there, how are you keeping?" asked Rosalynd.
Fleur wondered what she meant by that. She wasn't "keeping" her son.
"Is your little decorating business taking off yet?" asked Rosalynd.
"It's going really well," said Fleur.
"But you've still got the day job to take care of you, driving the streetcar, right?"
She wanted to scream, but stifled herself. "Yes, I still work for the transit commission, but I'll be able to give that up sometime this year if things keep going the way they are."
"Oh, that's great!" said Rosalynd, genuinely pleased.
Now Fleur was confused. Maybe she was just making it all up, this thing between her and Simon's mom.
"I'm going to go get the car," said Fleur, taking a ring of keys from her pocket, mostly radio-chip tabs, hanging with a few old-fashioned metal keys from her transit job. "Nice to see you, Rosalynd."
When Fleur was out of earshot, Simon smiled and squeezed his mother's shoulder. "Thanks for making an effort there with Fleur. It means a lot to me that you two get along."
"I know. But she doesn't make it easy. Every time I see her, the air fills up with these nice-cicles." She made air-quotes around the word. "It's hard to know what to say. I don't think she likes me. She's sweet, but sweet like a Twinkie -- you know somehow it's going to wind up being bad for you."
"Naw, she's just -- I dunno -- this is a difficult time for us."
"It's okay. Don't worry about it. You don't have to make excuses for her. You love her. That's enough for me." She tipped her head and smiled, then touched her son's cheek. "I'm really proud of you," she said, "you turned out okay." Then her independent-single-mother reflexes jumped in and she turned practical on him; he'd seen it a thousand times. "Gotta go," she said. "How about dinner next Sunday. You don't have a game, right?"
"Nope. I'll call you."
"Okay. But I'm out on Thursday night: poker game," she said, and turned to walk to her car. Already somewhere else, she fished through her overstuffed white leather bag for her key as she walked away.
Simon went to face his doom.
Fleur was angry, he already knew. He hoisted his big kit bag full of dirty equipment into the back of Fleur's station wagon. The car was a long, flat, cream-coloured box, shapeless except for a slightly aerodynamic ridge along either side, tapering off where it met the chrome harmonica bumpers. The tabletop roof sat over an expanse of windows. It was the perfect car for the family they planned to have but didn't. Couldn't, it seemed.
Fleur started the engine as soon as she heard Simon slam the back hatch. He opened the passenger side door and sat without looking at her.
They headed out from the downtown core toward the suburb where they lived. Fleur flicked on the windshield wipers, which slicked away the rain but did nothing about the fog inside. Simon sensed that the fog bothered her, so he rolled down his window. He stuck his arm out and leaned into the rain, letting it spray his face.
"Good game," said Fleur, speaking first into the dense air between them, as she usually did in times like this.
"Yeah, it was a good match. They were a good team, but our guys really came together."
"You helped," said Fleur.
"Yeah, I guess I did."
"Maybe you helped too much."
"I play on a team. That's how a good team member plays. I've got to be fair." He stopped, and laughed at a thought. "I'd love it if people thought of me as the Wayne Gretzky of lacrosse."
Fleur, already driving close to the car ahead, dodged around it. Simon clutched his door-armrest. With the other car behind them, Fleur looked at him square-on before looking back to the road. "Okay, two things," she said, counting with fingers on the steering wheel. "One, Gretzky played hockey. Hockey -- you know, one of those sports that people watch! Two, Gretzky's been retired longer than you've been alive. An old man can't make money at sports. But that's okay because he's rich. Which you, my love, are not. And why is he rich? Because he knew how to be a star when he had the chance."
Simon pulled his arm back from the window and stared at the road ahead. His hair swept back from his face in waves and crests of black curls, still matted down from his helmet. His chin pulled up as his face tightened. He drummed his fingers on his sore knee. If he said anything, he knew it would just make things worse.
"That shot was yours," she said.
He looked at her. Maybe his mother was right, maybe she was just a bitter pill that was making him sick.
Or maybe he was angry because