Toby by Todd Babiak

furniture had never been a priority. The lampshades had gone faintly yellow from a combination of nicotine and sun bleaching. Toby had been in elementary school the last time the walls had been painted. Yet when he had neared graduation, and had veered toward the prep-school aesthetic, Edward and Karen had found room in the budget to keep him in the West Island uniform of Polo and Lacoste shirts, Sperry Top-Siders, white pants by Yves Saint Laurent, pastel Givenchy shaker knit sweaters, and Ray-Ban sunglasses.
    “There’s no tuna, it turns out,” said Karen.
    Edward’s forearms were on the table. He stared down at them.
    Toby hunted in the fridge and cupboards and found little but pasta, canned beans, condiments, and discount beer. “Is everything all right? Financially, I mean?”
    Karen looked in the pantry, where they traditionally kept large and bulk items purchased at the discount megastores. “Well,” said Karen.
    “The Chien Chaud?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Answer him, Karen.”
    “He just walked in the door. He lost his job.”
    Toby regretted the initial question and nearly suggested a game of Boggle, to divert the energy in the room. “You don’t have to talk about it, Mom.”
    “It’s never been good, as you know, in the ‘making money and getting ahead in life’ sense of good. We’ve been beavering away, good little entrepreneurs, sure it would turn around, a time would come when we wouldn’t have to work so pissing hard, when we could take vacations, when some half-assed reward would come. Then it never did. And now it won’t.”
    Shortly after moving out of the city, his parents had quit their government jobs and opened a hot dog shop called Le Chien Chaud. It did well enough in Dollard to support two more shops on the West Island. Toby had worked at the Chien Chaud until he moved into an apartment in the McGill ghetto when he was nineteen, where the contents of his refrigerator were eerily similar to his parents’ fridge today—five years from their planned retirement.
    “But they’re making money?”
    “Well,” said Karen.
    “No.” Edward had not yet looked up from his hairless forearms, glistening even in the flat light of early dusk. “Not even close.”
    “Couldn’t we have waited till he sits down?”
    “It’s getting late.” Toby had intended to stay in Dollard for the night, for a week, to help with his father’s recuperation and to stew noiselessly in his shame. But now that he was here, really here, it appeared quite impossible. “I think I’ll head back to the condo.”
    Karen shoved a kitchen chair into the table, pulled it out, and shoved it in again. “You get yourself fired, you do hell knows what with Alicia to push her away, and now you can’t even talk to your parents for five minutes?”
    Out of habit, Toby looked down at Edward. It was father-son eyebrow-raising time, a well-honoured tradition in the Mushinsky household. He might have reminded Karen that, less than thirty seconds ago, she had not wanted to talk about the Chien Chaud. But that would have inspired a dangerous escalation. A slammed door, at least. This time Edward did not look up for the eyebrow raise.
    “Poetry,” Edward said. “I think Toby might feel a heck of a lot better if he had a hobby like poetry.”
    “Let’s stop talking about me.”
    Karen said, “Ha! You see. Here’s the heart of it.”
    With a series of surprising grunts, Edward pushed himself up from the kitchen table, a solid maple gift from Toby’s paternal grandparents—both dead now, drowned. He stood before Toby and said, “Son. Listen to me. I know your pain.”
    Toby turned to his mother. “Aren’t we here, together, for his pain?”
    “We all have our pain,” she said.
    “Life as I know it has been destroyed, in two days. ” As his parents watched, Toby slowly drew and drank two glasses of water, to prevent himself from making an untoward emotional display. He wanted desperately to shout at his