The girl was sheltering in the laneway when he came down it to open the bar at five o’clock. A small girl, maybe eighteen years old, looking cold and scared in the black rags the hard-core kids wear. By that time of day, in February, the lane was in deep shadow. She’d built a nest for herself with cardboard under an exhaust vent from the taco place next door. It looked dry there, and warm in the greasy downdraft.
She wasn’t the first street kid to make camp there. Last fall, a group of them spent a week in the same spot when the cops kicked them out of the square. Tim asked if she was all right, and she said she was. It wasn’t his laneway, and it wasn’t his vent.
He kept thinking about her as he pulled pints behind the bar. Or made small talk with the two regulars watching the Leafs game. No dog, and no boyfriend. Not that she had to have either. It was odd for a homeless kid to be alone. And why was she there in winter, when most kids returned to what passed for homes or endured the shelters?
The Leafs lost, and his customers left. Tim sat behind the bar for a while with a book of crosswords, held at a distance because he’d misplaced his reading glasses again. He closed up at eleven. It was a sad new normal for a Saturday night, as was his fourteen dollars in tips. A decade ago, the Garage was packed most nights, for rock shows and fringe theatre. Tim had done a steady business too, selling weed behind the bar. In the days before people with money began moving into the Market and smokers got their weed home delivered by cheerful young men driving BMWs.
The girl wasn’t there the next afternoon, although she’d left a bulky knapsack half hidden by cardboard. He thought about taking it inside the bar for safekeeping until he realized she would think it was stolen. So, did he leave a note? He stood in the laneway trying to figure it out.
When he checked again, early in the evening, she was under the shelter. He couldn’t say why he felt relieved by her return. It wasn’t right that a young girl should be out there all alone. That anyone should be out there all alone. It had snowed that morning, and more was coming.
A few hours later, when someone ordered food, he made extra fries and little microwave pizzas. The girl’s name was Sabine, and she had a French accent. She popped a few fries into her mouth right away but hesitated over the pizzas.
“Oh, thanks, but I’m veg,” she said, looking unhappily at the little slices of pepperoni.
“My daughter’s a veg too,” Tim said. “I’m sorry. It’s the only kind we’ve got.”
“No, no. Don’t be. They’re good. I can just pick it off. Thank you.”
She held a black sketchbook. He might have asked if she were an artist if that didn’t seem so obvious and dumb.
“Do you want something to drink?” he said.
“I’ve got some water here, thanks. But would you mind if I used your washroom?”
The owner of the Garage hated street kids, but he never came by so late in the evening.
“Yeah, no problem.”
When she stood she barely reached his rib cage. He also offered to charge her phone behind the bar and later brought it out to her. She’d draped a blanket over her shelter and within it was wrapped in a sleeping bag. She smiled her thanks, and that eased his concern somewhat.
That night on television there were warnings of an approaching storm. Tim thought about Sabine’s solitude. And his own, which he couldn’t deny. He hadn’t thought twice when the other kids crashed in the lane last fall. That’s when he remembered having seen Sabine and a young man among them. And then seeing her and the same boy together at Christmas begging in an empty storefront, on Spadina Avenue. Their tattered cardboard sign—“life is a playground. let’s enjoy it together.”—hadn’t looked so cheerful in the slush and rain. Yet they’d seemed happy with each other.
So where did the boyfriend go? Did they break up, or was she hiding from him?
When he opened the bar the next afternoon, Tim found his boss, Dmitry Bendel, deep in conversation with two other men. A large, imposing Russian in his fifties, Bendel had a headful of black hair and favoured pinstriped suits. With him was a red-headed young man named Armand that Bendel called his cousin, despite a lack of family resemblance, and a Market guy named Hector, who used to play in punk bands. Tim hadn’t seen either of those two in months. They sat at a table near the stage and lowered their voices when Tim began turning on lights.
Bendel didn’t visit the Garage much, and it had been years since he’d used it for business or as an unofficial clubhouse. The boss lectured his stone-faced associates with muted agitation. Tim obliged them by popping in his earbuds for music from his phone while he filled buckets of ice and checked the beer tanks and lines. He didn’t want to hear anything Bendel said. Ever.
Soon only Bendel and Armand remained. Tim knew, without hearing, that they’d switched to Russian. When he looked up again, Bendel stood alone at the bar, watching him. Tim removed his ear buds and Bendel asked why the police had visited the bar earlier that week. How Bendel knew that, Tim wasn’t sure. Only a fool would try to keep something from him.
“They were looking for some guy,” Tim said. “Martin something. I didn’t know him, and I know everyone who comes in here.”
Bendel considered this.
“Did you think that I might know him? Or that I should know if the police come to my bar looking for someone?”
“For sure. It just seemed like a random check.”
“We don’t know that. We need to find out why things are happening so they don’t get into our business, right? No secrets.”
Tim nodded his understanding. Bendel had many secrets, and they concerned gambling, an escort service, and stronger drugs than the marijuana he allowed Tim to peddle in the bar. Or used to peddle, when there were customers. None of these secrets, so far as Tim could tell, concerned the tired and all-but-forgotten Garage. Business might be better if they did.
“There’s filthy cardboard in the alley. Have there been more kids camping out there?”
Tim chose his words carefully. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I don’t want them there. I don’t want them near my buildings.”
A point Tim would never raise is that the Garage wasn’t Bendel’s property. It belonged to his wife, the heir to an established Forest Hill family who’d been landlords in the neighbourhood for generations. If Bendel shared anything about himself, it was his rage for the historical preservation groups and city bureaucrats who’d been preventing him from transforming the family’s west-end properties into condos.
Bendel left Tim with a problem. Should he tell Sabine to leave her shelter or risk that Bendel wouldn’t check up on him. Imagine him discovering not only cardboard in the lane but a girl underneath it. With the storm coming, maybe she should get to a shelter, even if they were filthy, dangerous places. She couldn’t stay in the lane indefinitely.
By eight o’clock it was snowing lightly. Hopefully that was the worst of it: too often the media overhyped bad weather. Yet by ten, as he was closing, he could hear the wind raging outside. Nearly six inches of snow had quickly fallen. Sabine’s shelter was already half collapsed. Despite the wind, he could smell cigarette smoke emanating from within it.
There wasn’t much debate. Unfortunately, he couldn’t insist. He wished there was a woman he could call to act as a chaperone. Or at whose place he could park Sabine until she sorted some things out. But if there had been a woman in his life, he’d have called her long ago.
He collapsed his six-foot frame and lifted the flap of the blanket covering the shelter. The flaring orange point of her cigarette lit her pale face beautifully.
“Sabine, you can’t stay here. Not tonight. Is there anywhere else you can go?”
Her eyes answered for her.
“Then I think you should stay at my place. There’s an extra bedroom my daughter uses when she visits. Just for tonight. Or until you get something else figured out.”
“Where do you live?”
“Not far. Over in Chinatown.”
Her uncertainty was painfully evident. The snow in the little time he’d stood there had covered the side of his peacoat. “I know this is weird,” he said. “It’ll be O.K. Unless you’ve got somewhere else to go. I can take you wherever. But you can’t be out in this shit.”
Sabine surprised him by filling her knapsack with a few things and hauling it and herself out of the shelter. The wind as they turned from the lane onto Augusta Avenue nearly knocked her over. Tim took the knapsack from her. The snow on the street was already a foot deep in places. With their heads down against it, Sabine followed in his footsteps. He led them up to College Street, where he hailed a taxi. There were no other people and few cars along the street.
Once they were in the back seat Sabine took the driver, an old man in earmuffs, by the shoulder. “Could you please take our picture?” she said to him. “So people will know I’m with this man.”
The driver gaped at Tim then took his phone down from its navigation mount on the dashboard.
Sabine’s accent was thicker for her agitation. She turned to Tim.
“Where are we going? What is your address?”
In that moment he glimpsed perhaps a tiny fraction of how terrifying this must be for her. How vulnerable she felt in a way he’d never experience. He thought of his own daughter, Maeve, presumably safe from the storm in her suburban bed. The taxi slid sideways through a red light at Spadina before the driver regained control. Tim and Sabine shared a glance. They were lucky no cars were crossing on the green light against them.
The storm churned beyond the car windows, nearly a total whiteout. Sabine’s anxiety was like an extra person in the car. But she was understanding, he sensed, that she couldn’t have spent the night on the street.
“My place is pretty messy, so don’t mind that,” he said, hoping to reassure her. “Actually my daughter’s a clean freak so her room is the tidiest in the place.”
He neglected to mention it had been over a month since Maeve last visited, because her stepfather increasingly disapproved of Tim or anything urban. He missed her. And if he wanted to see her he had to drive an hour west of the city to where she lived, with his ex-wife and her stepbrothers.
“And I’ve got tons of records,” he said. “If you like music. I think you do.”
He told Sabine about his cat, too, an old tabby named Greg, and he babbled about his neighbours until he realized Sabine wasn’t listening. He’d simply have to accept that she wasn’t comfortable with the situation. How could she be? He was a stranger.
He’d lived on the upper floor of an Edwardian on D’Arcy Street for fifteen years. Bendel kept rent low in exchange for Tim keeping an eye on a few of the boss’s houses in Chinatown.
Greg smoothed the path for him, waiting, as usual, just within the apartment door. Sabine was delighted to meet him. When the introductions were over he showed her the kitchen, the washroom, and his bedroom. She lingered over the photos of him and Maeve scattered throughout, and the solid wall of his record collection, more than three thousand of them, in the living room. He knew she’d like them.
“We’ll get into them tomorrow,” he said.
And finally, Maeve’s bedroom, which overlooked the backyard. Sabine dropped her bags and got her phone charging in the first outlet she could find.
“Is there Wi-Fi?” she said.
“For sure. I’ve got the password written down somewhere. I’ll get it for you.”
Sabine sat on the edge of Maeve’s bed.
“Thanks. It would be great if you could.”
“My daughter has shampoo and other stuff in the shower. And if you’re hungry there’s food in the fridge. Probably not much, but you’re welcome to it.”
“Thank you. I’m O.K. for now.”
“Cool. I like to have a smoke after work. You’re welcome to join me. And if it’s not your thing, don’t mind me.”
“O.K. I’m gonna shower, if that’s O.K., and then go to bed. I’m pretty tired.”
“I don’t doubt it. Well, there you have it. If you need anything, I’ll be in the living room.”
Tim, in fact, liked a smoke at numerous points throughout the day. When he got up around noon, before he left to open the bar, mid-evening in the lane, when he got home from work, and whenever any of the Garage regulars invited him to join them, which was generally at least once every day.
Lately, with the government taking over marijuana sales, he’d been rethinking his habit. His lack of customers had left him with far more weed than he could ever possibly smoke. Yet he worried that he might just smoke it all. And his plummeting income had him behind on support payments for Maeve. His ex-wife told him to not to worry about it, she and her husband were doing well. But what kind of father would let that go? And what would Maeve think if she found out?
Tim got comfortable on the couch and filled his bong with a mild indica he preferred at nighttime. The sound of the shower running down the hall startled him. So far, the girl had been so quiet he’d forgotten about her. Which was another reason he should smoke less: he couldn’t remember anything anymore.
He liked two bong hits at night, sometimes three. The smoke hung suspended over the couch. Once he’d settled into its expansive measure he dimmed the lights and moved to the bay windows. The houses across the street came in and out of view in the whorl of the storm. It was a night to be grateful for his many blessings. Like his home. His daughter. Or his ability to help others, despite the many poor life decisions he’d made.
Or maybe because of them.
The spell was broken by Greg leaping off the couch. He was in a hurry, for a cat his age, to greet his new friend Sabine in the hallway. Her hair was wet and she was wearing, if he wasn’t mistaken, a pair of Maeve’s pyjamas.
“Thank you, Tim Franklin. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He read her distance, and the line she was marking. He needed to say, as loudly as possible, that he’d respect it.
“For sure. There’s a lock on that door, if you want. We’ll do some laundry in the morning, and spin some records. Have a good sleep.”
Tim returned to his couch. He’d been enjoying a show on Netflix about a love cult in the eighties that he sort of remembered hearing about in his childhood. The indica kept him sharp enough to let the film reverberate within him but chill enough to fully relax. Greg pawed Maeve’s bedroom door for a while, then gave up and rejoined him.
In a quiet moment in the show he could hear Sabine speaking emphatically down the hall in what sounded like French. Or Québécois French, he realized. Neither of which he understood. To the boyfriend or maybe a parent. She sounded upset, and why not? She was homeless and alone. Still, it cheered him to think there was someone out there who cared about her.
The indica brought a deeper mellowness, and the old house creaked and moaned through the storm. He’d have to shovel the sidewalk out front before work and should probably set his alarm. He caught himself again listening to the stranger in Maeve’s bedroom and turned up the volume of the television.