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at one of the helicopters up in the sky.
Take me away,
I think.
Come get me out of here! Rescue me! Send down a ladder! Shut him up! I’m being talked to death! I don’t want to hear one more thing about Suck.
    But the helicopter passes us by, in pursuit of lesser crimes.
    “I can’t believe how good the timing is that you’ll get to see Suck’s first show in years. Is that kismet or what?”
    “I want to see fireworks,” I say. But I don’t really.
    “Well, someone’s bound to have some that they’ll shoot off, though it’s probably not going to be some big spectacular show. OK?”
    “It’ll have to do,” I say, sighing. Besides, nothing would beat the International Fireworks Festival Competition they have in Montréal. I wish I were there.
    The Rat gets a funny look in his eyes.
    “What?” I ask.
    “We had a picnic at this fireworks thing in Montréal. Me, you, and your mom. I went with you guys once. The sound scared you, so you stuck your head under my shirt the whole night.”
    “I don’t remember that.” I really don’t. I’m not lying.
    “Oh, yeah. You were like two years old,” The Rat says, kind of trying to hide the disappointment in his voice. “It was the first time I came to Montréal, so I could meet you.”
    You were never there. Mom and I go to the fireworks every year. Me and Mom. Me and Mom are a team. A team you are not on.
    We’re quiet for a while. I am trying to remember all the times I have hung out with The Rat, and they don’t amount to much. Just a bunch of lunches at St-Hubert Chicken, a few trips to the Insectarium, some kiddie movies. It was all when I was really little, and Mom would never be there when he would pick me up. He’d come to Grand-maman’s house, and she wouldn’t let him in. He’d have to wait for me in the hall.
    And then, when I was seven, he stopped coming.
    “Is he ever going to come back?” I finally asked. I didn’t really care. He wasn’t that big a deal. I hardly knew him. But I was curious.
    “No,” Mom said.
    “Don’t you care?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “But you don’t want to see him again.”
    “No. But I’m sad for you, Katy.”
    “Why isn’t he coming?”
    “He tried to bring drugs into Canada, and they caught him and they told him he could never come back,” Mom said.
    “Never?”
    “Never.”
    “That’s a long time,” I said.
    “Yes, never is a long time.”
    “Why would he do that?” I asked. “Why would he try to bring drugs here?”
    “Because he’s an addict,” Mom said. “Just like me.”
    “But you don’t do drugs,” I said.
    “No. I don’t. Not anymore. But I still have the disease.”
    And that is the deepest she ever went into it with me. She changes the subject whenever the word
drugs
or
addiction
comes up. She makes some tea. Or bakes a cake. Or goes to her room and calls Grand-maman. She has to talk to someone about it. It’s just not to me.
    So I stopped bringing it up.
    The Rat didn’t really mean that much to me anyway.
    After his big long apology letter, he never really mentioned not being able to come into Canada to see me. Not once in all the postcards sent from the road and stuff. He’d just say that he was on “adventure time.” That road trips were fun. That he wished I could see rock tours the way he sees them. He never mentioned that I never really wrote him back. Maybe it makes him uncomfortable, too.
    The Rat starts tapping away on the steering wheel. He goes back to his favorite subject. Suck.
    I’m beginning to see how this works. When in doubt, bring up Suck. Awkward silence? Talk about Suck.
    “You’ll get to meet Sam Suck, my best friend. We’ve known each other since junior high school.”
    Hidden in my mom’s bedroom, inside a shoebox in the back of her closet, there’s a photo of her, The Rat, and Sam Suck. Whenever I am curious about The Rat, I go to the shoebox and dig through it. I examine the trinkets from my mom’s past. There’s that