A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews Page B

way they say I gotta get home for my show. Like it’s theirs. Like the way my dad owns Hymn Sing. I was always envious of people who had a show, something to do at the same time every day. Like my friend who got heck. Having a show, getting heck. What punctuation things like TV and punishment could bring to a disorderly life. That’s what my Sweet Caps do for me. They’re my commas and my periods, and they’ll probably be the end of me as well. I’ll try to quit when I’m forty. Who wants to smoke after that. Really, who wants to live after that? At forty, I’ll have worked for approximately twenty-three years chopping heads off chickens. It’ll be time.

 
    eleven
    I t’s easy to revere you in absentia. To think of you as having a master plan. Did I just say that?
    I stayed on top of the hill for a long time. I told myself when it cooled down I would go home but it took a long time to cool down. I spelled Travis’s name in the dirt. I practised my new signature, which Travis had helped to design. It was basically a capital N and then a straight line similar to the one on a dead person’s heart machine. That part of it bugged me but Travis said it was enigmatic. I tried out a few fancier signatures. They didn’t work. Tash had warned me about trying too hard. There had been an a in my name a long time ago. Naomi. But when I was born Tash couldn’t say it. We were Natasha and Naomi.
    We were going to live together in Prague because Tash said it was the place to be. We were sitting in my grandma’s tree and she told me that there were tiny colonies of Mennonites in a place called Kazakhstan. Stalin put them there during the war, to help with the hard labour. They have twenty kids to a family. Say it, she said. Say Kazakhstan. I said it and she said no, really say it. Like a knife, slicing. It’s my favourite word now. It’s so conducive, she said. Conducive was another one of her favourite words, although she never said something was conducive tosomething else, just that it was conducive. I practised saying Kazakhstan until I got it just right.
    Someday we’ll go there, Nomi, she said. We’ll liberate those kids and take them with us to Prague so they can sit at outdoor cafés with their cute Czech lovers and laugh and drink. I had wanted to laugh and drink, only not with hordes of liberated Mennonite children, but I nodded anyway and said okay.
     
    It did finally cool down—with a northerly breeze that can be so refreshing if it’s not also carrying with it the odour of deceased poultry—so I went home.
    I saw Mr. Quiring on the boulevard, with his little son, but he was busy tying his shoe and didn’t notice me. I thought it was a little late for the son to be up but I guess Mr. Quiring knew what he was doing. Maybe he was on a night walk. Trudie used to take me on night walks when I was really little and we’d talk about the moon and the stars and what we’d have for our “night lunch” before going to bed.
    I had an imaginary friend then who hated me and was trying to kill me. The night walks with Trudie helped me to forget my problems.
    When I got home I found my dad in his yellow lawn chair. Practising your sitting? I asked. He shrugged like a Mafia don with his eyes closed like he had to do what he had to do. I hated to admit it, but Travis was right. I could imagine my dad standing forever with his finger in a dike saving a town that only mocked him in return. And not knowing it. Or knowing it but not caring. Or knowing it but not knowing what else to do.
     
    I went to my room and put on Keith Jarrett quietly and lay on my bed. I got up and walked to the kitchen for a drink of waterand saw that my dad had come inside to have a staring contest with the kitchen table. I got my water and said good night to him and he said good night to me but in a way that made me think he wouldn’t actually make it through the night. I thought: He’s going to go to Minnesota for a coffee. I can tell. He’ll