The Willies | Page 7

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 Fleur was right. He knew she'd seen
his moment of indecision from the stands.
~
They turned up the laneway and parked facing Simon's little blue
sportscar, its front like a silver ramjet and rear like an old bar of soap.
Its little round headlamps gave a wink as Fleur turned off the station
wagon's lights. The car was Simon's treat to himself last year when his
team won the playoffs. Unfortunately, the win didn't end up making
him much richer.
Fleur popped the hatch with a button on the dashboard. Simon got out,
took his bag from the back, and walked to the house. He leaned the
pocket with his housekey in it toward the front door to unlock it, and
headed in and down the split stairs to the basement. He heard Fleur go
upstairs and walk around the kitchen. She'd start supper, they'd eat,
they'd sit around, they'd go to bed.

Is this what I want?
He pushed his damp clothes into the washing machine. Soap. He'd
forgotten to put in the soap first. He'd get white clumps of soap on his
clothes if he put the it in now. He pulled the clothes back out, then
grabbed the box of detergent from its spot beside the dryer.
"New Formula!" it claimed. "Works Great on Stains!" He imagined an
ad with him in slow-motion, taking a shot on the net as he flew
sideways toward the ground, landing in a messy, stain-making swamp
of muddy grass -- even though he played "box" lacrosse: indoors in
arenas, so his uniform never met real grass. His imagination cut to a
shot of him pulling his now-clean jersey from the dryer and smelling it.
Except no one uses a lacrosse player to endorse their products, he
thought.
He poured a pile of the white stuff into the washer, then rammed his
clothes in and cranked the dial to the start position.
It's a good team, he thought. Maybe it's not much money, but sometimes
I can help with the mortgage payments. And if the franchise gets picked
up... And I love my wife. Yeah, sometimes she's hard to take, but she
just wants the best for us.
He remembered their trip to Greece, the picture he took of her, sitting
next to the chalky white wall of a restaurant that looked over the sea.
She had a glass of red wine in her hand and smiled a big vacation smile.
She wore big sunglasses and her hair was pulled back because she'd
been hot walking around earlier. Her round face shone in the dusk, pale
with sunburn spray-painted across her cheeks and nose. That was a
good time. So what if things were a little tough now? He loved her, and
that was that.
"Right?" he asked whomever he was trying to convince -- the other side
of his head, perhaps. The side that presented an image of him walking
out the front door and out into the night, going nowhere in particular.

He shook the thought from his mind and went upstairs to the kitchen.

Chapter 3
Connie looked around the wood-panelled room one last time. Or, rather,
a fifth last time. "I don't like the idea of leaving all our things here," she
said.
"Well, honey," said Roger -- he'd never called her 'honey' when they
were engaged, but now they were a married couple -- "we have to go
out sometime. The travel agency assured us that this was the safest
hotel on the coast."
"Okay," she said, biting a nail and looking at her dark green suitcase.
She leaned over and snapped the case closed, looked at it, then pulled
herself away. "Okay, let's go! And if they steal everything, well, at least
we'll still be here in paradise. We can always have the traveller's
cheques replaced. And -- oh, have you got the videocamera?"
Her husband held up a tiny, burnished silver cube with a blue glass lens
on it. She smiled at him and laughed at herself. She knew she was
making a big deal of this. It had taken her half