The Smile

By Deborah Blenkhorn

It couldn’t be him. Could it?

Brenda stared at her old friend Cassie’s social media post, having stumbled upon it in her usual thumbscroll on the way to work. She was often bemused by the not-so-random selections that the algorithm selected for her delectation. These typically consisted of bizarre historical facts and photos, exotic architecture, and Far Side cartoons. Occasionally, she would get a blast from the past, a face she hadn’t seen since elementary school--like Cassie, her long-ago best friend from grade five, neither heard from nor seen since school days. Well, now, that was interesting. What was Cassie up to these days? Impossible for Brenda not to want to know. Pause. Hover. Click on the image to take a better look.

Beside Cassie, this friend of Brenda’s youth, on a Florida golf course, stood a tall, handsome older man with a chillingly familiar aspect. He was wearing tennis whites, a golf-style shirt and white shorts, which gleamed as bright as his smile. He had one of those man-perms Brenda found… interesting. What was it about him? Oh god.

It couldn’t be Brenda’s mom’s husband. His hair was the wrong colour, for one thing.

Brenda read the caption accompanying Cassie’s photograph: “Me & Tom/ blond bombshells.”

The name was (more or less) the same, and he looked about the right age, about fifteen years older than Cassie, the woman he stood beside so happily. They looked like such a loving, happy couple. Why was Brenda getting such a creepy vibe?

She quickly did the math. Tommy (he always went by Tommy until Brenda’s mom had starting calling him Thompson), if he were Cassie’s husband and the father of the grown-up daughter in Cassie’s photo gallery, would have had to have been released several years ago. Nope. That wouldn’t work. Brenda breathed a sigh of relief as she settled more comfortably (if comfort were possible) into her skytrain seat. She took a sip of her hot, sweet tea and a bite of her breakfast sandwich. Looking up from her phone, she glanced at the array of people sitting and standing in the skytrain car, each with their own story, their own history, their own particular day ahead. Each one of them staring at the tiny screen they held in their hand, as if attached biometrically to their device. Funny to think how people used to read books or even talk to each other face to face.

She and her friend Cassie had both grown up on a Lake Ontario island, she mused, thousands of miles away. They had come of age in a community so small that it seemed everyone really did know each other, going to school that boasted a total of only sixty students. Apart from the fact that they were two of only several girls in their grade, she and Cassie had been drawn together by a love of reading, music, anything funny, and being avid fans of old reruns of the Sonny and Cher show, not to mention Carol Burnett, and Donnie and Marie. Those were the days!

It was to that Island that Brenda’s mom, a notorious divorcee, had brought her new boyfriend, “Thompson.” They were an attractive couple: Lois, a vivacious brunette in her late forties who always seemed young for her age, and this fellow, a dozen or more years her junior, with (it was rumoured) a dark and mysterious past. Brenda was scarcely twenty at the time, no longer living on the Island. She met her mother’s lover on a few occasions and formed a distinct impression: a con man.

“Call me ‘Tommy,” he would insist. Indeed, “Tommy” was the name on his birth certificate, unusually enough. “What was his mother thinking?” Lois wondered aloud, to anyone who would listen.

It was love at first sight, culminating in his release into her custody and a summer wedding on the Island. Lois was a big believer in second chances, and she hoped the Island folk would be, too.

But the happy ending was not to be. Tommy got drunk, smashed up Lois’s truck and assaulted three women in the neighbourhood. Even if you could ever bounce back from that, he had sealed his fate by wandering into a local farmhouse with his fly still open, terrorizing the children of the family who were seated at the dining room table for lunch while their mother puttered in the kitchen. The police came as quickly as they could (pending a twenty-minute ferry ride) and Tommy was hauled off the island, never to return.

Lois had faith in his redemption and hoped (unreasonably as it turned out) that this incident was just a blip. Eventually, Lois moved on, eventually settling in BC to be closer to Brenda, her only child, although they’d never been close--especially since Tommy. They hadn’t mentioned him for many, many years, and Brenda couldn’t bring herself to ask her mother even the basic questions: were Lois and Tommy still married? Was he in jail? And as the years and decades flew by: was he still alive?

Now Lois had passed away, and these questions were still unanswered, and the photo that Brenda had just seen raised some new ones. Had Tommy hooked up with Cassie (who after all was closer to his age than Lois), and been her husband all these years? The math only worked if (and why hadn’t Brenda thought of this before?) he’d been together with Cassie while he was married to Lois, when he was Brenda’s step-father. Surely that would be an impossibility, especially in the small Island community where they lived? Well, stranger things had happened.

Brenda looked at the photo again and realized what it was about the man that had sparked her recognition: the teeth. They looked as if they had been filed to a blunt edge. Not points, of course. But the phrase came to her unbidden, a thought she’d had all those years ago when he was part of her life:

That crocodile smile.