Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

want to marry her. I said it was a kindness, anyway, because she would have been supporting him for the rest of his life.
    Though it might have eased things up a bit on the rest of us.
    But that was then and now is now and as we all know times have changed. Cam is finding it easier. He lives at home, off and on, has for a year and a half. His hair is thin in front, not surprising in a man thirty-four years of age, but shoulder-length behind, straggly, graying. He wears a sort of rough brown robe that looks as if it might be made out of a sack (is that what sackcloth is supposed to be, I said to Haro, I wouldn’t mind supplying the ashes), and hanging down on his chest he has all sorts of chains, medallions, crosses, elk’s teeth or whatnot. Rope sandals on his feet. Some friend of his makes them. He collects welfare. Nobody asks him to work. Who could be so crude? If he has to write down his occupation he writes priest.
    It’s true. There is a whole school of them, calling themselves priests, and they have a house over in Kitsilano, Cam stays there too sometimes. They’re in competition with the Hare Krishna bunch, only these ones don’t chant, they just walk around smiling. He has developed this voice I can’t stand, a very thin, sweet voice, all on one level. It makes me want to stand in front of him and say, “There’s an earthquake in Chile, two hundred thousand people just died, they’ve burned up another village in Vietnam, famine as usual in India.” Just to see if he’d keep saying, “Ve-ery ni-ice, ve-ery ni-ice,” that sweet way. He won’t eat meat, of course, he eats whole-grain cereals and leafy vegetables. He came into the kitchen where I was slicing beets—beets being forbidden, a root vegetable—and, “I hope you understand that you’re committing murder,” he said.
    “No,” I said, “but I’ll give you sixty seconds to get out of here or I may be.”
    So as I say he’s home part of the time now and he was there on the Monday night when Mother got sick. She was vomiting. A couple of days before this he had started her on a vegetarian diet—she was always promising him she’d try it—and he told her she was vomiting up all the old poisons stored up in her body from eating meat and sugar and so on. He said it was a good sign, and when she had it all vomited out she’d feel better. She kept vomiting, and she didn’t feel better, but he had to go out. Monday nights is when they have the weekly meeting at the priests’ house, where they chant and burn incense or celebrate the black mass, for all I know. He stayed out most of the night, and when he got home he found Mother unconscious on the bathroom floor. He got on the phone and phoned me .
    “I think you better come over here and see if you can help Mom, Val.”
    “What’s the matter with her?”
    “She’s not feeling very well.”
    “What’s the matter with her? Put her on the phone.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why can’t you?”
    I swear he tittered. “Well I’m afraid she’s passed out.”
    I called the ambulance and sent them for her, that was how she got to the hospital, five o’clock in the morning. I called her family doctor, he got over there, and he got Dr. Ellis Bell, one of the best-known heart men in the city, because that was what they had decided it was, her heart. I got dressed and woke Haro and told him and then I drove myself over to the Lions Gate Hospital. They wouldn’t let me in till ten o’clock. They had her in Intensive Care. I sat outside Intensive Care in their slick little awful waiting room. They had red slippery chairs, cheap covering, and a stand full of pebbles with green plastic leaves growing up. I sat there hour after hour and read The Reader’s Digest . The jokes. Thinking this is how it is, this is it, really, she’s dying. Now, this moment, behind those doors, dying. Nothing stops or holds off for it the way you somehow and against all your sense believe it will. I thought about Mother’s life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway—new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at the Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption