Apology Accepted

I met Cecilia at Raspberry House, in Hamilton, the summer I spent working off my community service on the Bruce Trail. She was a surprisingly small woman with spiky black hair, which to my amazement turned red over the course of the summer. I don't know anything about why women colour their hair and it was only one of the surprises she force fed me on those long days wandering up and down the trail, fixing signs and mending retaining walls. I couldn't say how she ended up there and I never did tell her my own reasons; that being a secret between me and the judicial system that put me there, in the line of fire, so to speak.

I was staying at a residence in town, hitch-hiking to work every morning and catching a lift home every night when, one day, Cecilia begged a lift with me and Pete, my supervisor. Pete was a funny guy. He didn't ever really say all that much but he gave you the distinct feeling that he was laughing at you all the time. Cecilia jumped up beside me in the cab of Pete's truck and by the time we got out I was fucked. Even though it was against the house rules I invited her in and after sneaking her past my den mother, Ricky, we stayed up most of the night smoking cigarettes and telling lies to each other about how great we were. I must have fallen asleep at one point and when I woke up she was gone. So were my cigarettes. Pete laughed, in his quiet way, and warned me not to get too worked up about it. Cecilia shrugged off my attempts to talk to her for nearly a week, which drove me nuts, and so I was a little surprised that Friday afternoon when she appeared out of nowhere and told me we were going swimming. I didn't say no.

We hiked through the trees to a little lake, remote by Ontario standards, where she peeled off her clothes and dove in, while I stood there wondering how I was going to get into the water without embarrassing myself. It's funny, to me, that I can take on two guys and a cop in a bar brawl but be scared witless by a tiny little girl, barely old enough to vote. Take heed ladies. It was all fun and games until I got out of the water and saw a gun pointed at my head. I have no idea where she'd been keeping it as I had spent most the hike up there staring at her through her clothes. Nonetheless she was waving a gun at me and going through my jeans and helping herself to the money I had been paid not two hours ago. If this seems farfetched to you let me detail another mystery. I was working off a reduced assault charge and was only getting paid about two bucks an hour for the hard labour. Do the math. I was being robbed by a girl I knew, who I worked with, for about a hundred and fifty bucks. It was surreal. To make matters worse she was taking my clothes with her.

There are any number of things a man will do to win the heart of a pretty girl but I'd had enough and even though she'd told me stay put for at least a half an hour, I decided there was only one thing to do. Catch her and get my money back. I was pretty sure she wouldn't actually shoot me for a hundred and fifty bucks. Still, I gave her a bit of a head start.

The climb up the embankment was not something I would happily repeat naked. The brushes and tree branches scraped and poked me in those places usually protected and, needless to say, I wasn't making great time. As I neared the top of the hill I heard a truck start up and wondered if she had an accomplice. I thought that, maybe, the shock of seeing me, stark naked and exploding from the trees would surprise her and give me an advantage. I can only imagine what I must have looked like to the six or seven people in the back of Pete's truck, all my co-workers, as I tripped and stumbled, going too fast for my battered body to stop, into the middle of the road. They were howling with laughter, Pete the hardest of all, and all I could do was stand there with my hands on my knees trying to catch my breath.

In the middle of them, standing on the bed of the truck was Cecilia, waving her pistol at me, with a big grin on her face. Then she let me have it. She pulled the trigger and a stream of water barely dribbled out the end of her gun. She turned it around and, giving the barrel a hurt look, said, "Now that was disappointing." I wasn't exactly sure what she was talking about and so decided not to ask. I had to laugh. What else could I do.

That was twelve years ago and I still wander up and down the Bruce Trail and sometimes I think about her. Maybe it was the way she laughed or the way she commandeered Pete and his truck and the rest of the crew to pull a practical joke on the new guy or maybe it was just the way she apologized. I have never, before or since, gotten an apology quite like that, I can tell you.