Your Lint

Your Lint by Sherry Cassells

Right at the top I'm going to tell you I never found him, he didn't know about me, Max became my dad, I hope I'm not spoiling the story.

 I thought my father might have been one of the men who barged into town every fall for the Salmon Derby, I never asked my mother if he were a fisherman, some things you don’t need to be told: my father was a fisherman.

They flew in on Bearskin Airlines, each time I heard a plane that week I looked up and tried to get a feeling, a genetic twizzle, I convinced myself an ordinary shiver was a sign, a stomach rumble a sure thing, my father was on that plane. I’d watch it descend behind the trees. We were surrounded by forests, their rapid decline from summer to fall was theatrical, if you closed your eyes and counted to ten, when you opened them again the colours were different.

No kidding.

Things are a bit of a struggle for us. That’s all. My mother is a seamstress and I tie flies that are irresistible to fish and fishermen alike, they don’t get how I do it but there’s nothing to get, I just do it. I am always on the lookout for materials, I reach into the boughs of cedar and pull, I search the shoreline when I can get to it and the sidewalk when I can’t, I comb through the gardens of our neighbourhood, the birds stand by while I get all the good stuff, I rifle through the waste baskets in the art room at school, and I pluck, without shame, little treasures from the janitor’s broom. My mother leaves her leftovers brimming for me in the old goldfish bowl, bits of brocade, fur fluff lace, sequins now and then, and Mr. Dyson across the hall gives me the crinkly coloured cellophane from the Quality Street he’s not supposed to eat, his hands go into his pockets and there’s sometimes bonus stuff comes along in the clutch, always the green triangle chocolate for me, he only likes the ones with toffee.

I used to think he was talking to himself until I got to know him; he was chewing.

Lots of people retire here, most of the clothes my mother makes are dresses for the ladies who spend their lives, she said, playing second fiddle to a fish. She sometimes said how happy she was that it was just the two of us, I mean so was I most of the time, she’d grown up without a father, she and her mother left him when she was twelve and that was it. They followed the rumours and moved back when he went to the city for work.

When I say it was a struggle it was the best of struggles, we loved our work and we worked hard, we had everything we needed, she made my clothes, and if you think I walked around like Orphan Annie or one of the von Trapp curtain-clad kids I did not, she made me overalls I loved, whatever fabric I wanted, with pockets for my bits and pieces, a long one specifically for pussywillows, a plastic lined zippered one at the side of the leg for seaweeds – no pipe cleaners or Christmas tinsel for me – I Frankensteined feathers in a vice at the kitchen table at night while the sewing machine whirred at my side.

My mother once wore three of my flies together, in descending shades of turquoise, she hung them from a common safety pin as a brooch to a Saturday night dance and she told me nobody could take her eyes off of them, or her, that's the night she met Max.

I went a bit overboard on the feathers I admit, got a bit showoffy, I’d like to see the birds that would offer such treasures.

I am also a pickpocket, your lint please sir.

The fishermen would get taxis from the airport to town, they arrived with a roar, we lived above the Main Street Diner and they would come up our stairs and knock on the door, some of them I remembered and some were new to me, I invited them in, I tried for the twizzle, my mother rarely looked up. I made a killing those two weeks, they almost always gave me a tip, once I got a fifty dollar bill, they staggered out the door holding their flies up like they were angels or something.

Are you ready for the bit about when I did get the twizzle?

He was by himself. When I answered the door I noticed right away his blue eyes but he was too old, he said I hear you’ve some terrific flies for sale and that was it, there was the twizzle, my mother looked up from her sewing machine with only her eyes at first, he plunked his heavy hand on my shoulder, he said her name like it was just a word, he said Stella straight across the room, she lifted her whole face, and then they weren’t just words anymore, he cast them across the room Stella? Stella? Stella?

She stood up, I was confused, happy but disappointed, all the dreams I had of my handsome father in none of them did he look like this, but it wasn’t my day after all, he was not my father, he was hers.