Risk Management

What the hell? The guy’s an absolute moron!

If her professional, highly technical, experienced guidance is as crucial to the program as they’re telling her, instructing her to no-fail appearances at scheduled high-echelon meetings extending into the next six months, and her contract runs out in two weeks, and she’s been informed no funding for extension exists, they’re all village idiots.

“No”, she responded stiffly, wondering how it might be even remotely possible she thought at one time that he was halfway intelligent.

Surprised heads were raised to gaze cryptically at her defiant, yet resigned tone. So unlike her usual brash confidence. “I will not be attending.”

Incompetent assholes, she fumed inwardly more than adequately belying her calm exterior. Can’t tell their own from a hole in the ground. And that hole in the ground was just where she found herself now, floundering without any immediate job prospects, despite her acknowledged professional skills and experience.

Really lucked into that great lottery of life for certain, she thought.

It wasn’t just this, this incident with a well-remunerated contract evaporating. There was more, much more going on in her life that wasn’t joy-inducing. Such is life. And such was her life. Choices, all about choices. And she’d made some really amazing ones. Always certain, at the time she made those choices that they were the right ones. And it’s possible they were the right ones, at that time.

They just didn’t turn out to be anything to celebrate, over time, when those choices more or less fell flat. Leaving her to pick up the sorry pieces, wondering what on Earth had ever compelled her to think that she knew what she was doing when making those choices at those decision-making times.

Who even knows where Jack is now? For that matter who gives a damn?

Well, Steven likely does. He speaks about his father occasionally, less so now than he used to when he was young. Funny thing, that; Jack left before Steven was old enough to understand what a father represented. Still, even as an infant, even when things started going awry, she clearly recalled the child clinging to the man. Resistant to being handed back to his mother by his impatient father who didn’t relish holding his son.

It was his restlessness that had attracted her to him to begin with. She thought it was so romantic, his curiosity about the world, about going places, talking about where he’d been. Turned out he hadn’t been anywhere other than in his fertile imagination. He just wanted to be there.

Where? Anywhere but where he was. He was possessed of a fierce longing to go, just go, leave behind whatever it was that kept him from seeing the world. She often wondered why he settled down to the conventional notions of companionship, marriage, a home and a child. She was glad that he had, but wondered about it. Casually, she wondered, never digging deep into the question that always hovered in her mind. It was as though she deliberately kept herself from delving a little deeper, in case she found an answer that would upset her neat little world that then represented their lives together.

He hadn’t left her to wonder too long. Becoming increasingly edgy and short-tempered, she understood without his spelling it out that she had become a burden to him. The love they thought they had for one another? A stupid illusion, nothing more. It was fun, it was sex, it was attractive for a while, and then it all waned and got stale and became burdensome and boring. Just in time to see the birth of their son.

He gave it a few more months, struggled with his incurable wanderlust, and left. Just left. No note. She understood, though what had occurred. She was left behind, abandoned by someone she persuaded herself to believe she knew. What she had known was a hollow shell with an attractive exterior. She resented his abandonment of her and their baby. But she knew too that she had never realistically considered who and what she was complicating her life with.

History now, but no more readily accepted. That burning, irritated feeling of having been left behind, of rejection was never forgotten. Especially with Steven around to keep it alive. He resembled his father in so many ways. So much for imprinting through observation and emulation - patterning didn't they call it? Well, he could not possibly have absorbed anything about his father in the brief time he knew him; it was his inherited DNA.

Sure, it was his age, that too, but there was an underlying recklessness, and restlessness that elbowed her awareness into recognition of his parentage on the lance side. He bore little resemblance to her side of the family physically, and certainly none that she could recognize in his personality. His character was that of his father’s.

She had no idea what his grandfather was like, Jack was close-mouthed other than to tell her early on in their relationship that his father been an abusively miserable sod of a man, and his mother a screeching hellion. He had nothing to add to that, and since she knew he never bothered about them, satisfied with complete estrangement, she'd let it lie. She did wonder, though, if her errant husband had worried about whether he would become an abusive father to their son, if he remained with them. Then dismissed the thought; he was just simply disinterested in being a father, a husband, being tied down.

Not that things were any cosier between her and her siblings. Parents gone, long buried. Sibling rivalry between them translated into distance and disinterest. Although they did get together at least once a year, a huge family get-together. It was like meeting with the neighbours who lived far down the street, the ones you knew to acknowledge by a dip of the head, a brief ‘hi’, and that was it. There was no depth to their familial relationship, handily reflecting the lack of curiosity, one about the other.

And here was her kid, her only child, an unruly boy - young man really - who threw her for a loop. She hardly knew what to do with him. He hated school and his school marks and the remarks on his report cards, validated that. She’d tried to encourage him, help with his homework, but he resisted her involvement in his schoolwork, and just curtly informed her to leave him alone, he’d manage on his own.

He did, actually, he struggled on, convinced all his teachers hated him, were out to get him, but he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction or the opportunity. He ran with a group of boys whose nonchalant attitude to school, to social mores and relationships reflected his own, more or less. She was familiar with the faces, with some of the names, and certainly with the attitude.

She'd had it out with him time and again. She was relentless, coming at him with determination, to try to get him to recognize that his association with those others whose circumstances were far less than his would only lead him into trouble. He, at least, she said, had been given some valuable instruction at home, he knew the difference between what could be done and what shouldn't be done. Vague, but he knew pretty well what she meant. Some of his friends had been brought in for petty theft, for reckless driving, for driving while under the influence.

He came right back at her, telling her she was deluded if she thought the way he was brought up was in any way superior to that of his friends. Most of them, he reminded her, had both a mother and a father. True, they didn't have the disposable income his mother managed to earn, but they did all right. They had their values to hand on their kids. They were just being young and carefree, into doing things that stretched the limits of society's acceptance. Most young men did just that, he said, furious with her. Angry because he had no intention of dropping his friends, telling her they were more genuine than the kind of guys she probably hung out with when she was young. His father, for example, he hissed at her, who couldn't stick around long enough to see his own kid grow up.

"So don't give me any more of that shit!" he called after her, as she left the room. Doing so, because she wanted to contain her emotions, wanted to make sure she exercised some decent restraint. Didn't act the fishwife with him the way her husband had described his mother doing to him.

Once he had his high school diploma, she thought he’d think twice about going on to post-secondary, but he thought three times, and the third time was the final one. He got himself a service job and just hung around with his friends, all of them locked into minimum-wage jobs. Spending whatever they made on booze and good times. She began to get on his case, and he said he’d had enough and prepared to move out, to share an apartment downtown with some of his friends.

Nothing she could do about it. And she needed a break from him anyway. The last time an OPP officer drove into their driveway, knocking at the door, asking to speak with Steven, she felt she just wasn’t up to taking it any more. Nothing serious, just checking. He’d been found in possession of more pot than any one person could use, in that Honda she gave him when she bought a new one. This cop had a habit of stopping him on the road sometimes, just checking… He’d earned a local reputation. Even in the little backwater where she’d had her dream house built, a half-hour drive out of the city.

She would shrink inside, in an agony of disquietude when she heard Steve and a few of his friends laughing about that law enforcement officer. They called him "Kamikaze" because of his appearance, wouldn't take him seriously, thought he was an absolute gas. The man was short, stocky, with an impassive face, though he made an effort to smile, apologetically, each time he knocked at the door and she would answer.

He had confided to her that it was his opinion that her son would come around, and so likely would the other boys. He was convinced that his constant presence would act as a reminder to them, and they'd outgrow their fascination with the illicit. He knew, he laughed once when speaking with her, how he was regarded by them, as though he represented an absurd caricature. He didn't mind that, he was used to it. He wanted to spare them, if his pop-up appearances did the trick, of thinking they could commit more serious infractions, unnoticed by the law.

She appreciated his frank explanations. She appreciated that he cared. She thought what a decent man he was, so different from so many of the others. And how difficult it must be for him, a Japanese-Canadian whose presence was anything but commanding, even in that official uniform, to lay down the law. That her son and his friends had no respect for him and what he represented pained her.

That was another contentious issue between them. Steve just couldn't believe she was angry about that. What was the cop to her? Did she care more about the tender feelings of some ridiculous-looking, hard-boiled law-enforcement officer than she did about him? What the hell?!

That had been the occasion of a really incendiary battle. This time she hadn't stalked out of the room, she stood there, reminding him that some decent man cared enough about the welfare of kids like him to put himself out on their behalf, even while knowing they despised him and held him in contempt for doing his job.

Their argument became so heated that at one point she shoved him backward, onto the sofa. He bounded back, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, painfully, until she thought her neck might snap. He was a full head and a half taller than her. That little episode sobered her.

So he moved out, and she got a pair of little dogs to keep her company. Two small Shih Tzu; hairy, yappy little dogs. But she grew to appreciate having them around. At least they were warm and alive, and liked her. Glad when she arrived back home, their fat little bums wriggling from side to side, yapping, endlessly yapping. See squirrels out of her big picture windows, and they’d go into a paroxysm of hysterical yapping. But they were company.

When Steven saw them on his occasional visits - mostly to ask her for money - he’d been intrigued at their presence. Next thing she knew, he told her over the telephone that he’d got a little dog himself, a boxer. It wouldn’t be little very long, she told him.

But while it was, Steve and his friends were having a good time with the dog. Good time? She discovered later, that they took turns slamming it against the concrete wall of the apartment garage just for laughs. When he told her that she was horrified, and told him he was an idiot, no one should abuse an animal like that.

“Hey, Mom, get a grip” he said, clearly amused. “We’re just showing the dog who the alphas are. See, he’s a stubborn little bugger, and when he doesn’t do as he’s told, that’s his punishment. He’ll get the picture, eventually.” He never did.

When Steven moved back in with her after a year ‘on his own’ - tossed out as bad tenants, him and his buddies - he brought Buddy home with him. Buddy walked in as though he owned the place; nothing insecure about that dog, she thought.

And then she screamed, as he lunged at one of her little dogs, closed his big mouth around the small animal, and shook it from side to side, her little dog yelping horribly. Steven kicked his dog, hard, and her little dog fell to the floor, stunned. That was their introduction.

She wanted him to leave, she was hysterical with anger and fear. “Got nowhere to go, right now, Mom”, he said, reasonably enough.

“Well, then just get rid of that monster! I can’t have it here, it’ll end up killing my dogs!”

“Hey, that’s all right, Mom”, he said, soothingly, holding the snarling boxer firmly around the studded collar on its thick neck, as it tried to strain itself toward her cowering dogs. “I’ll keep him outside, in the garage. He’ll get used to living in the garage. You won’t have to see him.”

The dog was clearly psychologically damaged, and little wonder. It had psychotic episodes, but for the most part it would appear mild tempered and playful and her heart went out to it.

She wondered, briefly, what was the matter with her. Investing her concern in animals, instead of worrying about her son. Then she acknowledged that worrying about her son, like wondering about her husband, accomplished nothing. Only time would, and she couldn’t guess what the outcome might be.

There were some things that just couldn’t be managed. Time would do the managing. She laughed bitterly to herself. That was, after all, her profession, risk management.