10Fool for Love || Lord Huron
JP
“I can’t believethey’re sending you to fuckingThailand,” I say to my brother in French.
Alain is in the middle of stuffing fries in his mouth and tries to talk around them.
“You and me both,mon gars.” He pauses to swallow. “For the whole winter, too! No fucking snow for me this year. Just beaches and coconuts.”
“Are there beaches in Bangkok?” I ask.
“Uh, no,” he admits, “but they’re not far. I’ll be sun tanning every weekend.”
Alain works for a big pharmaceutical company doing who the fuck knows what. Whatever it is, it gets him a big office, a big paycheque, and bunch of big perks like getting shipped off to warm countries for a few months every year. It also gets him the respect and admiration of our parents.
I mean, my job also sends me off to faraway places, and my paycheques are nothing to laugh at these days, but I guess your accomplishments don’t actually count unless you have to wear a suit to get them.
“Oh, by the way,Papais probably going to ask you to show your face at the Christmas gala this year, you know, since I won’t be there. He was already talking about it.”
I drop my empty poutine container into a garbage can. We’re walking around downtown, killing time before Alain’s flight leaves this evening. He came down from Trois-Rivières yesterday and crashed at my place last night.
“So he’s calling the back-up son in, huh?”
Alain shakes his head and frowns. “Aw, come on,Poisson, you know it’s not like that.”
“You know it is,” I reply, “and knock it off with thepoisson rougething. You know I get enough of that fromGene-vache.”
He laughs. “To be fair, you do call herGene-vache. How is she these days?”
I shrug. “Oh, you know, we chat whenever she calls me up needing a light bulb changed or a picture frame hung. I don’t think herorher fiancée even own a screwdriver.”
“I doubt she’s ever actually going to marry that guy,” Alain muses.
It’s been three years since he proposed, so I’m betting with Alain on that one.
“What about you?” he asks me. “Anypetites amiesI should know about, or are you still”—he pauses and makes a fish face—“when it comes to girls?”
I glare at him and then glance away. “Comme d’hab. Same old, same old.”
He stops in the middle of the sidewalk. When I turn around to ask what he’s doing, I find him smirking at me.
“What’s her name?” he asks coyly.
“Va t’en,” I huff.
“‘Screw off’ is a weird name for a girl. She must be really Québécois.”
“She’s English.”
Alain punches the air. “Ha! I knew there was a girl.”
I scowl at him and grab his poutine box from out of his hands.
“Hey! Give it back,connard. You don’t come between a Frenchman and his poutine.”
I just start licking all of the fries so he can’t steal them back.
“You’re as disgusting as ever,” he tells me, “and you owe me poutine. So, who’s this English girl?”
