From Call It in the Air
I Can Explain
By: Gregory Light - Sep 16, 2026
(Toronto 1972)
Call it whatever you like; fluke, fate; quirk; but there she was, less than twenty-four hours later, casually going about her business in broad daylight. Crossing the street. As if nothing could be more natural.
'Joanna!' Joey called out. But there was no response. Had she not heard him? If she had, she hadn't reacted. He called again. She kept on walking. Was she deliberately ignoring him? Maybe just shopping, or in deep thought. Gary wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt.
'Traitor!' Joey said, catching up to her. He tried to be sensible, but his voice sounded more vexed.
'Oh, hi Joey?' She looked genuinely surprised.
'How could you have left me like that?' His vexation won the moment.
'Now Joey, relax for a moment.'
'Relax! How can I relax?' Joey's repetitive temper began to flash, on the verge of emitting a flurry of nonsense dead centre of Yonge Street. She tried to get him to move, but he would not budge. 'You shouldn’t leave me!' he blurted, raising his voice to be heard over the honking of the traffic trying to get past him. Then he blinked. What had he just said?
'For goodness’s sake, Joey, I can explain.'
'The lady said she'd explain, bud. Now move your ass or I'll run it over.' The words shot out of an angry bald head sticking out the driver's window of a Ford Transit.
'I heard what she said!' Joey belted back, standing his ground. He could feel the bumper nuzzling the back of his legs.
'Then get off the road knucklehead!'
He bit his tongue. He actually bit it. Hard. But said nothing.
'Come on, Joey. Let him by.' Joanna pulled at his arm.
Out of the corner of his eye, Joey saw the orange light across the intersection flash. He delayed a moment, then yielded to the Ford. The driver gestured towards Joey, but he and Joanna had been swallowed up by the pedestrian shoppers crossing the street. They disappeared into the shopping concourse beneath the Hudson's Bay Company store.
'Why do you have to be so, so different?' Joanna asked. They were sitting in the Bay cafeteria having a coffee. 'It's lucky we weren't arrested.'
'Better … different than … ‘ he struggled for the word, ‘… fickle.' Even Joey was surprised by the word that came out. Joanna held Joey's gaze a moment, then backed away, her eyes dropping towards her coffee. 'I just don't see why you abandoned me in the bookstore,' he said quietly. 'You could see I was in trouble.'
'I wasn't in a position to?'
'I called out to you. I shouted.'
'That's just it,' Joanna said. 'You made a scene, like now on the street. It's the first thing you do when anything happens.' She paused. 'Yes, I saw you in the bookstore, and I would have said something, but ... well, with you shouting like that ... I couldn't.
'Why not?'
'I waited for you outside,' she said, a tinge of emotion in her voice. 'But I had a class. I had to go.'
'This Goliath is twisting my arm, forcing me into a back room where I?, I could have been killed.'
Joanna brought her hand to her mouth to cover a broad unprompted grin. 'It was a bookstore,’ she said
'It's not funny, Joanna. He scared the shit out of me. I didn't know what it was about. He?' Joey stopped. It was Joanna's grin. Lord, she was beautiful. Suddenly he was there, in the moment with her. She was right. Why all the commotion?
'He what?'
‘It doesn't matter?'
'Yes, it does,' she said, her grin tapering off into a smile. He hesitated. She reached out and touched his hand. 'Yes, it does,' She repeated.
So, he told her.
The moment John and his security man flung Joey through the back-room door, he threatened to sue them. 'I mean it. One hair on my head displaced and I'll have you both up in court for thousands. Hundreds of thousands.' He scrambled desperately to convey the enormous gravity of the situation to them. It was as enormous as his mounting terror. His fear of mutilation urged his voice on. 'You even breathe on me, and you'll be looking down the wrong end of a lawsuit.' He knew they were idle threats. But his mouth still shouted, 'I swear, I'll see you both in prison.' Cold metal gripped his shoulders. He had backed up against a row of metal shelves holding a consignment of linear algebra textbooks. His words began to dry. 'Listen we make a deal of some sort? I mean be reasonable what have I done?' He tried to straighten up but his thighs and knees were trapped in a thick, sludge-like panic.
But then, as his jury of linear algebra matrices and eigenvalues looked on, Joey found the anticipated assault was in bona fide, rational sentences explaining that they had no intention of hurting him. They merely wished to look in his bag for books that might not belong to him. The sludge around Joey's legs evaporated, and he found himself sinking to the floor.
'You just want to look in my bag,' he said, an idiotic grin of relief across his mouth. 'That's all?'
'Yes.'
Joey stood up. 'Why didn't you say so?' Then he remembered Joanna. 'Do you guys know you wrecked my relationship with a beautiful woman? Days I've been looking for her, and it ends because you want to? Wait!' As the security guy reached to pick up his bag, Joey indignantly snatched it out of his reach. 'Are you implying I'm a shoplifter?'
'We just?'
'A criminal?' He dusted off the seat of his pants, 'Because if you are, I want you to know that I resent it.'
'No one is implying anything. We simply want to look in your bag.'
'Impossible! It's a breach of privacy.' Furthermore, Joey expanded, he could take them to court for ‘illegal detention’. But he was willing to drop the whole matter if they let him go.
When the assistant manager balked, more convinced of Joey's guilt, Joey consented to the search if they signed a statement agreeing to pay "damages" if no stolen items were found. Again, the assistant balked. They bartered warily for twenty minutes, finally agreeing that "damages" would be a book. Joey had held out for his choice but finally agreed to theirs, if it was new. They chose This Way for The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz. Joey had never heard of him but agreed because the title meant, at the very least, a new addition to his "junk" book collection. The assistant manager agreed to the deal because it was "affordable". The philosophy professor who had ordered twenty-five copies of Borowski's book for an advanced tutorial on "radical evil", had been forced to cancel the course for lack of interest.
Three months after it had been ordered, and to the chagrin of Joey's accusers, whose eyes had darkened miserably at the sight of nothing out of the ordinary in the bag, Joey was the only person to get a copy of Borowski's book.
Joanna laughed when he finished the story. 'How ironic,' she said.
‘Ironic?' Joey’s eyebrow raised.
‘Yes, I would have helped you, but I was- well I guess you'd say I was shoplifting,’ She paused and looked at him sheepishly. ‘I'd paid for five books, but I ran out of money. I slipped the last one into my bag.'
'You let me take the rap for your crime.’ Joey was ecstatic to hear Joanna's confession. She hadn't been trying to dodge him, and she was in his debt. She owed him. Well sort of. 'You steal the book and I get the punishment.'
'Don't look so offended. You got a free book.'
'I earned mine. That's the difference.'
'They bribed you to shut you up.'
'Damages. They put me through hell because of their suspicions: which I now see were justified. You owe me.'
'I owe you? I owe the store. And I will pay them back.'
'Yeah?’ Joey smiled.
‘I will,’ she insisted.
‘The road to hell is paved with good? '
‘Is that so?’ she responded. ‘So, why haven't you phoned then?'
'I tried?' Joey started, but he was caught off guard in the middle of a sip of coffee. It went down the wrong way. He erupted into a paroxysm of coughs, coffee bubbling out between his lips. Joanna hesitated, then began mopping up the coffee with a napkin. It was a minute before Joey could finish his sentence. 'I tried, but I lost your number,' he finally said.
Joanna hesitated again.
'I checked out all the libraries’ Joey declared sincerely, ‘and every college cafeteria and all the pubs. Everywhere, but you disappeared.'
Joanna hesitated a third time. 'I was away,' she said finally.
The word snapped Joey to a halt. 'Away? What?' He pronounced it as if it were foreign. 'You mean even if I had your number, even if I had called you, you ... you were away?'
Joanna’s fourth hesitation was longer than the first three.'
'Where were you?' Joey asked gently, sensing a problem.
'Okay. With Dave.'
'Dave?’ That did surprise him. ‘Do I know a Dave? I don't know a Dave. I've never known a Dave. Not any Dave that I liked.' Joey could feel his vexation building.
'My ex-boyfriend. That Dave!'
'Oh, that Dave. Your ex-boyfriend, Dave.'
'Would you stop repeating his name? I was telling him it was over.'
'It takes a week to tell him. Is he deaf or just persuasive?'
'You're not being fair.'
'I'm not being fair?' He paused and took a deep breath. He knew he was being unfair but continued anyway. 'I just learned that you refuse to help me so you could steal a book … '
'Borrow.'
'... and now you tell me you were away on a romantic week with ...'
'Nothing romantic about it.'
'... with Dave!!' He stopped and grimaced. With sorrow. It looked mostly feigned to Joanna. 'Well?' he asked quietly. 'How is that fair?' Joanna grinned. 'It's not funny, Joanna.'
'You have coffee on your chin. And blood on your tongue.'
Joey caught his hand as it started towards his face. 'You're only saying that to change the subject.'
'I mean it. Three splatters … here.' She pointed to her chin.
'I'm not going to fall for it, Joanna.'
'There's nothing to fall for. It's true.' To prove it, she stopped a passing waitress. 'Does or does not this man have coffee on his chin?'
'Joanna!' Joey shouted. ‘That’s not what this is about!’ Three customers two tables over raised their heads.
The waitress looked at Joey. 'Yes, you do.'
'See?'
‘And blood on your tongue.’ The waitress added.
Joey rubbed his tongue inside his mouth and wiped his chin quickly. The waitress looked at Joanna, her eyes speculating.
‘He’s fine. He does this sometime.’ Joanna meant to be helpful. The waitress left.
Joey suddenly felt deeply uneasy. 'I've got to go,'
The entire episode, from bumping into Joanna on the street to wiping his chin, was playing back in his head from another viewpoint. More critical. Maybe Gary. Maybe the waitress. Whatever, it wasn’t a good look. Who was he, anyway? Had he no control? He could see Joanna's eyes were asking the same question. He stood up.
‘Call me,’ Joanna said, jotting down her number again. But this time, Joey thought, with less enthusiasm.
‘I will,’ Joey said. But this time with less hope she would answer.