"Are you sure you're okay, Jack?" Leslie asked.
"Sure I'm sure. I'm okay," he told her. Jack looked at his mom as if she were his audience of one, although he knew that she wasn't. "Nothing at all has happened," he told her. Miss Wurtz would have approved of the boy's enunciation. To Jack's surprise, the lie was as simple to say as any line he'd ever delivered; for the first time, lying to his mother was actually easy to do.
Jack could hear Mrs. Oastler going down the hall. He heard the door to Emma's room slam shut long before Leslie got there. He knew that his mom and Mrs. Oastler had made Emma madder than they made him, which was pretty mad--all things considered.
Jack smiled when his mother kissed him good night. He knew which of his smiles his mom liked best, and he gave it to her. He was tir
ed and upset, but somehow he knew he would have a good night's sleep. Mrs. Machado would meet her match in Emma Oastler--of that Jack had no doubt.
The following morning, Emma woke Jack before her mom was up. (Jack's mother was never up in the morning; Mrs. Oastler always drove him to the Bathurst Street gym.) The boy usually got up and fixed himself a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast, and he drank a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice--by which time Leslie had come downstairs and made herself some coffee.
Mrs. Oastler was friendly to Jack in the mornings, but she wasn't talkative. She smoothed the boy's hair or patted the back of his neck with her hand, and she made him a sandwich for his lunch, which also included an apple and some cookies--especially if Leslie wanted to keep the cookies away from Emma.
But on this mid-August morning, Jack woke up with the ceiling fan going full speed. He saw Emma stuffing a pair of her shorts and socks and a T-shirt into his gym bag, where he carried his wrestling gear. "We're getting to the gym early today, baby cakes. I'm your new workout partner, from now on. But I want to go over some moves with Wolf-Head before we start."
"With Chenko?" Jack asked her.
"Yeah, with Wolf-Head," Emma said.
"But why do we have to be early?" he asked.
"Because I'm a big girl, honey pie. Big girls gotta warm up."
"Oh."
There was already a note on the kitchen table when they padded downstairs in their bare feet--they were trying to be as quiet as they could. Emma must have written the note the night before. ("I'm taking Jack to the gym," or a message to that effect.)
Emma and Jack walked to Forest Hill Village and had breakfast in a coffee shop on Spadina. He had a scone with raisins in it, and his usual glass of milk and glass of orange juice. Emma just had coffee, and a big bite of Jack's scone.
They cut over to St. Clair and he pointed out the dirty, dark-brown apartment building where Mrs. Machado lived. He was a little afraid of how purposefully Emma kept walking; it wasn't like her to not say anything. She seemed so angry that Jack thought he should tell her a nice story about Mrs. Machado--something sympathetic. To his shame, he basically liked Mrs. Machado. (He would recognize only later that this was part of the problem.)
"Mrs. Machado has to keep changing the locks on her apartment door, because her ex-husband keeps breaking in," Jack told Emma.
"Did you see the new locks?" Emma asked.
Now that Jack thought about it, he hadn't. "I can't remember seeing any," he said.
"Maybe there aren't any new locks, baby cakes."
It wasn't the conversation he'd had in mind.
They were at the Bathurst Street gym so early that Krung hadn't yet arrived. A couple of pretty good kickboxers were going at each other. Chenko was sitting on the rolled-up wrestling mats, drinking his coffee. "Jackie boy!" he said, when he saw Emma. "Did you bring your girlfriend?"
"I'm Jack's new workout partner," Emma told him. "Jack's too young to have a girlfriend."
Chenko stood up to shake Emma's hand. The Ukrainian was in his early sixties--a little thick in the waist, but the muscles in his chest and arms were well-defined slabs, and he was very light on his feet for a man who weighed one-eighty or one-ninety and was only five feet ten.
"This is Emma," Jack said to Chenko, who bowed his head to her when he shook her hand. Emma regarded the snarling wolf on Chenko's bald pate as if it were a family pet. (Jack had told her all about it.)
"You must be five-eleven, Emma," Chenko said.
"Five-eleven-and-a-half," Emma told him. "But I'm still growing."
Emma and Jack helped Chenko roll out the mats before they went to their respective locker rooms to change into their workout gear. Emma didn't have any wrestling shoes, just socks. "I'll find you some wrestling shoes, Emma," Chenko said. "You'll slip on the mat in those socks."
"I don't slip a whole lot," Emma told him.
"What does she weigh, do you suppose?" Chenko whispered to Jack--the Ukrainian was finding Emma a pair of shoes--but Emma heard him.