Chapter 3 - The Sanctuary on Danforth
My mother lived on the second floor of a brick duplex on a narrow street north of the Danforth. The porch stairs were steep, the railings were painted a slightly gaudy spruce green that peeled in the corners, and the front door had a brass knocker shaped like a sea turtle that rattled whenever the streetcar rumbled three blocks away.
When I pushed the door open, the hallway smelled of boiled potatoes, old paperbacks, and the vinegar-bright sting of pickled red cabbage. It wasn't the curated, museum-quality aroma of the Hendrick house; it smelled like living people trying to make a small space comfortable.
"Margo?" My mother appeared at the top of the stairs, wiping her hands on a worn terry-cloth apron that had lost its ties years ago and was held together with an oversized safety pin. Her gray hair was pinned up in a haphazard knot with a wooden knitting needle. "Sweetheart? What’s happened? Is Theo all right? Did the car break down?"
"The car is fine, Mom," I said, guiding Theo up the narrow wooden steps ahead of me. "Take Theo up. I need to go down to the hatch and bring up the bird."
My mother blinked, her spectacles slipping down the bridge of her nose. "The bird? Margo, you were supposed to be in Lawrence Park until nine tonight. Graham told me last week—"
"Graham is in Lawrence Park," I said, turning back toward the door. "The turkey is here."
It took two trips to carry the platter and Theo’s overnight bag up the stairs. When I set the heavy dish on my mother’s scarred laminate kitchen table, the noise brought Aunt Clara out of the parlor. Clara was seventy-two, walked with a cane made of ash wood, and had spent forty years teaching high school chemistry in Timmins before her knees gave out. Behind her stood two young women—Amina and Lin—first-year nursing students who rented the attic flat above my mother, both of them wearing oversized knitted sweaters and looking polite, bewildered, and slightly homesick.
On my mother’s counter sat a modest pyrex dish containing three roasted chicken breasts seasoned with paprika, a pot of boiled red potatoes that had not yet been mashed, and an unopened bag of frozen peas thawing in the sink.
"Good Lord in heaven," Aunt Clara murmured, adjusting her bifocals as she stared at the twenty-two-pound mountain of poultry sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. The skin was deep mahogany, crackled and taut, the herbs under the skin showing through like delicate green veins. "Did somebody win a raffle?"
"It's from the butcher on Danforth," I said, leaning against the edge of the refrigerator, suddenly so exhausted I felt my knees trembling beneath my jeans. "Heritage bronze. Brenda said it looked dry. Renee thought it wasn't worth carving. So I took it."
The kitchen fell completely silent. The only sound was the radiator clanking in the corner and Theo chattering to Barnaby the cat in the hallway, offering him a piece of lint from his pocket.
My mother looked from the platter to my face. She saw the redness around my eyes, the white tension around my knuckles, and the missing husband who had stayed behind to eat side dishes with his mother. She didn't ask three dozen analytical questions. She didn't tell me I was being overly sensitive, nor did she remind me that marriage required constant compromise.
She walked across the linoleum, put her calloused, flour-dusted hands around my face, and pulled my forehead down to her shoulder.
"You should have brought it here first," she whispered against my hair. "Sit down, Margo. Clara, find the big carving knife from the bottom drawer—the one with the bone handle. Lin, go fetch two more chairs from your place upstairs. We have work to do."
For the next forty-five minutes, my mother’s kitchen became an engine of quiet, purposeful restoration.
Aunt Clara, who approached carving with the geometric precision of a laboratory scientist, separated the breast meat into clean, steaming slices that fell away from the bone like ribbons of silk. When the first incision opened the pocket beneath the skin, a rich, fragrant steam billowed into the kitchen, carrying the scent of garlic, rosemary, and apple cider brine. The meat was so juicy that stock pooled on the wooden cutting board, running toward the juice groove before Clara caught it with a spoon and drizzled it back over the platter.
"Dry," Clara snorted, her sharp, northern Ontario voice cutting through the steam. "That girl wouldn't know a juicy bird if it flew down the chimney and landed in her soup. That woman’s daughter has spent too much time sniffing legal briefs; it’s dried out her brain."
Lin and Amina set the table, bringing down two mismatched floral plates and three extra glasses from the attic. Amina, whose family was in Kenya, brought down a jar of homemade cardamom-infused plum chutney her mother had shipped her in a parcel three weeks earlier. It sat beside my mother’s cranberry jelly—the cheap kind from the can that still had the ridges from the tin—and Clara’s pickled green tomatoes.
When we finally sat down, there were six of us squeezed around a table meant for four. Theo sat on two stacked telephone directories, his legs swinging happily, with Barnaby curled around his sneakers on the linoleum.
There were no linen place mats. There was no Noritake china with platinum rims that couldn't go in the dishwasher. We drank water from tumbler glasses with cartoon characters on the sides and red wine from chipped juice cups.
"To the bird that escaped," Aunt Clara said, raising her water glass with a dry, wicked grin.
"To the bird that escaped," Lin and Amina chorused, their faces glowing in the warm, yellow light of the kitchen fixture.
I picked up my fork. For seven years, every holiday meal had been a performance review where I was perpetually on probation. I had spent hours worrying whether my laughter was too loud, whether my opinions on the municipal transit referendum were too progressive for Brenda’s parlor, whether my clothes looked like they had been bought off the rack at the Eaton Centre rather than ordered from a boutique in Yorkville.
Here, Theo took a massive bite of turkey breast smothered in gravy, let out a loud, theatrical sigh of pleasure, and announced to the entire room, "Grandma, this turkey is juicy like an orange."
The table exploded into laughter. I covered my mouth with my napkin, feeling the hot, stinging tears finally spill over my eyelashes, not from grief, but from the sudden, violent relief of being somewhere where a meal was just food, and family was just people who were glad you were in the room.
Then, from the hallway table, my coat pocket began to buzz.
It was not a single notification. It was the frantic, persistent vibration of a phone receiving three calls in rapid succession, followed by the ping of incoming messages.
I left the table and walked into the dark hallway. The screen glowed against the floral wallpaper: Graham (4 missed calls).
Then a text message appeared, shifting the screen:
May you like
Graham: "My mother is in her room. She won't come down to eat. Renee is furious. Walter had to go to the grocery store to find cold cuts. You need to call me right now, Margo. This has gone completely out of hand."
I looked at the glowing screen for five seconds. Then I reached out, clicked the toggle on the side of the phone until it switched to silent, and laid it face down on the hall table beside my car keys.
