I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Read Online Free PDF

my mother the cold shoulder because we were “from away,” and unless your grandparents had been born in Kingston, you would always be “from away.” And wasn’t it a little suspicious that the wife still went by her maiden name and that the dad was never around? And they had that teenager, Chinese or whatever, who barely spoke English and wasn’t in school, and then the little girl with the hearing aids, who was also some kind of colored person?
    Tatyana was heartbroken for her teenage love. Chuong missed his unsupervised, chaotic life among the other Vietnamese immigrants in the city. Tashina missed her friends and, young as she was, understood she didn’t fit in here as she had in New Mexico with her black, Asian, and Native American friends. I didn’t miss New Mexico or anyone there. I had been wretched there. But this? We were bored, we were lonely, we were uncomfortable. We suffered. We complained. We turned on my father for once again dragging us across the continent. He retreated—into his work, into his travel, into his workshop and a six-pack of Budweiser.

    My father had always been a cypher. Our mother made sure we were well versed in his folklore: the drunken antics of his college rugby team, his beloved MG convertible that had been stolen out of their driveway, how he had been building his own remote-controlled airplanes since he was a boy. As little kids, we laughed at his foibles: He had thought that he didn’t want kids! He was so absent-minded that our mother had been the one to propose! But who was he? We knew we adored him. Tatyana and I were allowed to crawl into bed with him one Easter morning, and I had been thrilled to be allowed to be that close to him. His feelings toward us were less clear. We weren’t allowed to jump on him—remember, his bad back from the rugby injury. We weren’t to pester him when he was working in his shop at night or on the weekends. He was Dad; he was inside the very core of who we were, but somehow he remained a stranger. I remember trying to make sense of it, even before we left Canada. Kids, for my father, were like sugar—too much, and he got cranky. No, that wasn’t quite right, because we never got sick of sugar.
    Resentful as I was about the move, I was still desperate to impress him. One night, I lugged his Seagull acoustic guitar downstairs to play for him some new song I’d learned, “Stairway to Heaven” or maybe “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” Dad sat down at thedining room table, a simple but flawless pine affair he’d designed and built by hand. He listened patiently while I hacked my way through the song. Then he took off his glasses, rubbed his face hard with both hands, and fixed me with a sad stare.
    â€œMishka,” he said, looking deep into my eyes, “if I had it all to do over again . . . I would be the lead guitar player in a hard rock band.”
    His reaction baffled me. If he wanted to be a guitar player, why had he never learned to play the guitar he’d bought, the guitar that had sat in the closet so many years, the guitar that I had learned to play on? If he knew what he really wanted to do, why hadn’t he taken one single step to purse that dream? I turned it over and over in my mind, and over and over I came to the same conclusion: my father was pathetic.

    One day Chuong and I were kicking around in the front yard. Lon, an older kid with shiny black hair and a sharp, maniacal laugh, came by in his tiny beat-up pickup. Lon had graduated the year before but hadn’t gone to college. He and Chuong had become friends.
    â€œHey,” he said, grinning, not getting out of the truck, “what are you two homos doing?”
    â€œWhat it look like, man?” Chuong said. “No-thing.”
    â€œGrab your bikinis and get in the truck.”
    Chuong hopped in the back.
    â€œWhere are we going?” I said.
    â€œJust grab some towels and get