Daily Life

By Lesley Krueger

A woman finds herself called for jury duty in a murder trial. She feels she has to serve, but also has a fistful of family problems to juggle.

On her way to the courthouse, the woman stumbles across her half-brother Bob, back to panhandling in downtown Toronto. The woman takes him home to the newly-empty nest she shares with her husband.

The three of them are soon joined by her 22-year-old activist daughter, Raine, and Raine's boyfriend, Mac. Raine is pregnant, Mac newly-diagnosed with MS.

If that isn't enough, Bob's attempt to go off alcohol cold-turkey lands him in the emergency ward. And our narrator draws unwanted attention from the families of the accused murderers at the trial.

Daily Life is a post-modernist mash-up of author Lesley Krueger’s real-life journeys into the justice system and the struggles of a fictional family she created. It originally appeared as a popular story told serially on her blog, and is now published as an e-book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lesley Krueger
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310267826

Lesley Krueger

Lesley Krueger is an award-winning novelist and filmmaker. Her latest novel, Far Creek Road, will be published by ECW Press this coming October. Set in the early 1960s, the book follows Tink Parker, an adventurous, nosy and very funny nine-year-old living a happy suburban life. But the Cold War is slowly building toward the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world is in danger of ending -- and Tink's innocence comes under threat.According to Sheila Murray, author of Finding Edward, "With the charming and very funny nine-year-old Tink, Krueger has created an unforgettable character whose innocent curiosity busts through the societal conventions of early 1960s Canada. This is a masterful depiction of an atmosphere tense with fear and fuelled by grown-up transgressions, where adult morality is contaminated by politics that tear communities apart.”Lesley's previous novel, Time Squared, was published in 2021. Says critic Kerry Clare, "I’ll dive right in and tell you that the novel, Time Squared by Lesley Krueger, which I’ve loved more than I’ve loved than any book I’ve read in ages, could be billed as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, if we wanted to underline just how badly you really ought to read it. And oh, you really do."Lesley has written four other novels, two short story collections, a travel memoir and a children's book.She was born in Vancouver, Canada and after living in Boston, Mass., London, England, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, she makes her home in Toronto. There she writes fiction, works on films, and plays hockey in a couple of women's beer leagues, at least when her ankle isn't broken.

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Lesley Krueger

Daily Life

PRAISE FOR LESLEY KRUEGER

Krueger’s portrait of artists as young men and women is alive with wit and rebellion—an aesthetic vivisection of the young Victorian age.

—Globe and Mail on Mad Richard

Krueger’s research is evident in every paragraph: from the use of authentic slang to richly sketched portraits of the lives of the era’s rich and poor, the book confidently transports the reader to another time.

—Quill & Quire on Mad Richard

The knitting together of Charlotte Brontë’s and Richard Dadd’s different trajectories worked like a dream. I was enthralled.

—Terry Gilliam on Mad Richard

In this remarkable piece of historical fiction, Krueger (Drink the Sky) imaginatively delves into the life of Richard Dadd . . . The two story lines . . . effectively juxtapose Dadd and Brontë, two very different people who travelled in similar circles during the same era and, more importantly, who were both entirely invested in what it means to be an artist. This question anchors the novel, adding depth and dimension to a terrific read.

—Publishers Weekly on Mad Richard, starred review

Drink the Sky captures both the precise local colour of Rio de Janeiro (where the author lived from 1988 to 1991) and the first-time visitor’s wide-eyed wonder. Krueger renders the exotic beauty of Brazil’s landscape and wildlife with rhapsodic authenticity. . . . The hidden story emerges piece by piece, as these things do, in a series of coincidences and unsuspected interrelations that weave the book’s two parallel plots into a tense finale. As a cleverly plotted mystery, the book succeeds in hooking the reader.

—The Toronto Star on Drink the Sky

"Lesley Krueger adds another richly textured canvas to her gallery with her novel, Drink the Sky. Teeming with the layers of life of a Brazilian rain forest, Drink the Sky is sensual and literate, both microcosm and metaphor. Drink the Sky scrapes away the accretions of civilization to explore questions of social and moral responsibility, revealing human motivation to be at once squalid, beautiful, dangerous, enticing an, like the rain-forest canopy itself, ultimately impenetrable."

—Globe and Mail on Drink the Sky

In its satisfying breadth and its consideration of the potential of women's lives, Drink the Sky recalls the novels of 19th century British women....not once did I feel like putting this book down. Sometimes I had to, of course, but I was always eager to pick it back up again. Krueger's depiction of Holly's experience is wise and sincere...But best of all is Krueger's use of a 19th century women's literary tradition to structure a 20th century woman's exploration of marriage, morality and meaning.

—The National Post on Drink the Sky

Part carefully-wrought thriller, part eco-excursion into the heart of darkness . . . a young woman struggles with questions of identity against the backdrop of modern Brazil. Her elegant prose is a pleasure to read, and when Krueger ratchets up the tension, we go with her, hearts in mouth. She has intriguing and serious things to say about human nature and the planet.

—Quill & Quire on Drink the Sky

By engaging us in two very different lives in a state of transformation, we become engaged in the process of what it means to become an individual, moral human being. It’s a powerful story about human. strength, and frailty. It touches something deep inside.

—The Toronto Star on The Corner Garden

"Lesley Krueger . . . has perfectly captured the laconic tone of an intelligent teen who can still offer moments of bracing lucidity and keen observation. . . . The Corner Garden is an ambitious book. It starts innocently as a contemporary picaresque journey, then delves into a history less and the nature of evil."

—Globe and Mail on The Corner Garden

E-book copyright © Lesley Krueger, 2014, 2021

Krueger, Lesley, author

Daily Life/Lesley Krueger

Issued in electronic formats. 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Cover design by Janine Isabelle

ALSO BY LESLEY KRUEGER

FICTION

Hard Travel

Poor Player

The Corner Garden

Mad Richard

Time Squared (fall, 2021)

NON-FICTION

Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales

Contender: Triumph, Tragedy and Canadian Baseball Player Harry Fisher

CHILDREN’S

Johnny Bey and the Mizzenglass World

www.lesleykrueger.com

Daily Life

PART ONE

Diving into the Jury Pool

THIS IS WHAT it’s like being called for jury duty in a murder trial.

First, you get up far earlier than you have to. Washed and brushed, you stand at the kitchen window with a mug of tea absently watching a robin outside, a particular bird you recognize from the mutant orange feather on its back. You watch it skittle over the back lawn, running in bursts, cocking its head from side to side until it stops, pauses—jerks a worm out of the grass and pecks it to death. You try not to see this as symbolic. Fail.

Then, my God, the clock says you’re late. You slam down the tea and trip over the cat (Archie, indignant) before bashing out the door, not forgetting to lock it because you never know who’s out there, even in Toronto. Life is fraught. Life is complicated. And if you don’t make it to the courthouse on time, God knows what’s they’re going to do to you when you’ve got enough problems already.

I’d received my original notice of jury duty four or five months before. By then, I was already obsessed with the way we were living our lives in a time of enormous upset, what the newscasters called worldwide economic volatility coupled with worsening climate change. Layoffs. Hurricanes. Tsunamis. The Great Recession reverberated through our families in ways we didn’t understand, changing life in ways we couldn’t control, and changing it forever. We’re not like David Copperfield anymore, wondering if we’re the heroes of our own lives. These days most of us feel like collateral damage.

As I passed through the subway turnstile, I surprised myself with a decision. I would keep a record of all this, starting with my experience of reporting for jury duty. A record of daily life. I thought I could probably get out of serving on the jury, since most people did. But it was a particular moment in a particular time that was getting almost too interesting, what experts were calling a hinge time. A hinge that pinched hard, not only when you were called for jury duty, but as you went over your family finances, or when you considered the future of a novel you’d just shed blood to write.

The experts talked about disruption in the arts, about disruptions in every sector of the economy, what amounted to the world falling into pieces that everyone agreed would be put back together differently. I might as well fiddle while Rome burned. Scribble while the butter churned, and life changed forever.

THE FIRST NOTICE said only that I would be liable to serve on a jury sometime in the future, and asked me to fill out an enclosed form. I sent it back saying I was a writer, which I hoped they would recognize as code for Don’t Pick Me.

Long after I assumed I hadn’t been chosen, a summons fell through the mail slot. Four double-sided folded pages ordered me to report to the courthouse for possible jury duty in a second-degree murder trial. I stared at the summons, the thought of murder and juries and civic duty making a muscle twitch in my upper left arm; a long thin muscle I’d never particularly noticed before, although obviously something had to be in there.

Arriving at the courthouse, I found a long line of what I assumed to be fellow potential jurors waiting in the plaza outside. We shuffled through a revolving glass door to enter what the French sign marvellously called le palais de justice, where we turned out our pockets for a security check like the ones at the airport, our backpacks and cellphones and wallets riding plastic trays through an X-ray machine as we walked under the sensor archway one by one, and held our arms wide in surrender.

Jury pool, the sign said, Courtroom 6-1. The muscle in my left arm twitched as I headed upstairs.

THE COURTROOM IN question proved to be a big windowless room on the sixth floor covered in dark wood panelling. When my husband had been called for jury duty a few years before, no specific trial was named on his summons. The jury pool was kept in an ordinary room, a holding pen, and after a few days most of them were sent home.

Being called for a murder trial seemed to make things more solemn. We were checked in by two uniformed women and sent directly into the courtroom, a group of carefully, statistically, unimpeachably average citizens. Upright, impatient, business-looking people, humble, slow-moving people, many chubby, workaday types, fewer thin people than you used to see, and a decent number of retired people looking stoked by the chance to serve, including one old man who kept saying, "What’s that? I can hear just fine. I said I heard you. What?" We looked like passengers in a typical subway car: citizens of every conceivable age, race, class, eyes, nose, chin, hair and lack of same.

Overheard: people talking about getting out of it. Most of us had our summonses ready, and at the end of the Jury Questionnaire was a question shouted out in capitals:

12. THIS TRIAL WILL TAKE APPROXIMATELY 6 WEEKS TO COMPLETE. WOULD SERVING AS A JUROR FOR APPROXIMATELY 6 WEEKS CAUSE A SUBSTANTIAL HARDSHIP FOR YOU BY INTERFERING WITH YOUR BUSINESS, EMPLOYMENT, FINANCIAL, MEDICAL, FAMILY OR OTHER OBLIGATIONS?

My Yes and No boxes were blank, since I’d decided to leave the answer to Fate. Friends told me that judges usually let writers off, and I was counting on that. But in all honesty, I couldn’t claim substantial hardship, not that week.

With jury duty looming, I’d worked long hours to get ahead on the writing I had underway and the film projects I’d contracted for in my day job. My novel was out at a publisher for consideration and I was writing a kids’ book to no real deadline. Two short films I’d written were in the can, while the producers on my active feature film projects were looking for money, which these days is like corralling a herd of unicorns.

Of course, when you’re wearing your screenwriter’s cap, you always hope for the miraculous e-mail, the phone call from the famous director’s assistant ("I’d love to speak with Mr. Fincher"), for buckets of luck pouring from the sky.

But film was going through the same upheaval as everything else, the middle fallen out of the industry the way it’s falling out of society, so there are mega-million-dollar Hollywood films, a huge number of films shot for virtually no money, and very little in between. On balance, there was very little chance I would be pursued by a famous Hollywood director while the trial was underway. More likely I’d get asked to do slave labour on several movies with infinitesimal budgets, also known as working on deferred payment. It wasn’t a hardship to turn those ones down. In fact, the trial gave me a better excuse.

Murder? Cool.

Well, maybe not for the victim.

And in fact, I knew very well that I shouldn’t shuffle off jury duty without an ironclad reason. That’s the other part of it, civic duty. (Arm goes twitch, twitch.) How you owe a duty to the justice system, especially since you’ve lived places where it’s broken, in Mexico and Brazil, and the last thing you want is for that sort of corruption to happen here. You want a just society in every sense. For the family, for the future.

So my boxes were blank, in case it did rain Finchers. My phone was in my pocket, set on vibrate. But if it didn’t buzz?

NINE FORTY-FIVE. A uniformed woman appeared in the courtroom, saying that it wouldn’t be long before someone came in to tell us what it meant to be called for jury duty.

I heard that, called the retired man. What did she say?

At 10 o’clock, another woman came in, apologized for her hoarse voice and told us that anyone wanting to be dismissed from jury duty for medical reasons or because of imminent travel plans should come to the front of the room. She gave no explanation, just said that the rest of us were free to go, but had to report back at 9 a.m. the following Wednesday.

Relief. Such relief to leave, hoping there was a mistrial or a guilty plea that meant it would all go away. It was still beautiful, blue sky, exactly the right temperature for walking home, 6.7 kilometres of exercise; I checked online. Shaking off my anxiety, I headed northeast, passing the Diversity Garden, reaching busy Dundas Street, seeing a tall young man in an expensive-looking pinstripe suit throw down a skateboard with wheels the colour of green traffic lights and ride it across Bay Street toward the Eaton Centre…

Where my half-brother Bob sat panhandling.

No. Bob couldn’t be back on the street, not after all these years. I think it could be him, and pushed through the crowd to make sure. When I got close, the man was leaving, heading around a corner. I didn’t think Bob moved like that, not such an eel; it almost certainly wasn’t him. But my relief about the trial was gone, and all the way home, I wondered why the man had left so suddenly if he hadn’t been trying to avoid me.

ONLY A DAY into writing this, I’m already falling behind. There aren’t enough hours to live, work and write about living and working, especially when I’ve been staring out the window more a writer usually does, which is quite a bit, not because of the trial, but because I keep wondering if the man I’d seen panhandling might really have been my older half-brother.

I didn’t know I had a half-brother until I was ten years old, when Bob showed up at our door, the son of my father’s first marriage. My parents had never told me about the first marriage, either.

I can still picture the scene in the kitchen, in suburban North Vancouver. The cupboards were avocado-coloured, the appliances gold. I angled my head up at the gangly new arrival, who had a brown suitcase. Being a kid, I was always angling up, usually feeling like a fairy-tale girl lost in a forest of adult trunks, trying very hard to understand what was going on.

This is Robbie, Dad said, as my mother stood behind the sink worrying her rings.

Bob, the new guy said.

Bob. He’ll be your half brother. Yeah. He’s going to stay with us a while.

Years later, I learned that my parents had taken Bob in after his mother and stepfather had kicked him out. Dad wanted to get him through Grade 12 so at least he’d have a diploma. His mother lived over town, across the Second Narrows Bridge in the east end of Vancouver. North Vancouver was up Grouse Mountain in the West Coast rainforest, salal and huckleberries rioting through the trees at the end of the block, the hillside falling down to Mosquito Creek, which turned dangerous during spring melt-off. I wasn’t supposed to go down there, but of course I did all the time. All the kids went down there, digging for treasure, adventures, a little manageable danger. Now we had a new danger in the house, I knew that right away, but Bob was surrounded by so much mystery that he didn’t feel entirely manageable, and at first I wasn’t sure how to feel about him.

There was no hope of my parents explaining what was going on. It wouldn’t have occurred to either of them to be pals with their children, me and my younger brother. They weren’t the right generation for that, and they seldom answered direct questions.

How does the sperm get to the egg? I had asked my mother not long before, having paid a big girl a quarter to see a sex education pamphlet handed out to the Grade Sixes. My mother was ironing at the time, and ironed faster.

It will all come out in time, she said.

So there was no sense in asking about Bob, and why I’d never seen or heard of him before. That first evening, he disappeared into the basement bedroom, where he played muffled songs on a portable radio; I could hear it upstairs in my bedroom. Bob stayed downstairs for a couple of days, even taking a plate into his room at suppertime, and no one objected or even spoke about him much. I think they must have registered him for school though, since he came in the kitchen on Monday morning ready to go. He picked up a lunch bag from the counter and thanked my mother politely, calling her ma’am. I followed him outside, holding my Monkees lunchbox, walking up the driveway between two borders of peace roses that in autumn, still had a few flowers but no leaves. When we passed the hedge that blocked my mother’s view from the kitchen window, I expected Bob to speed up and lose me, but he continued walking along amiably.

You’re tall, I said.

What grade you in, anyhow?

Guess, I said.

He wore a black leather jacket, something I hadn’t seen before.

Grade Five? I asked.

As one rainy Vancouver day sopped into another, Bob kept walking partway to school with me, never joining the packs of teenagers filtering out of neighbouring streets, always heading off on his own when our paths to elementary and high school diverged. In this way he became my liege and prince and hero, whose few words I hung on. Well, she’s a dick, isn’t she? he said once, when I complained about my teacher. Even though he was quiet himself, Bob always listened to my chatter, he fixed my bike seat when it started wobbling, and was in general like a sports hero, one of the B.C. Lions running backs my father admired, bashful and charming and obliging right up to a point I learned to recognize, when his eyes turned to diamonds.

The first time I saw him like that, Bob had been with us for maybe a month. We were alone in the kitchen, and he signalled me to keep quiet as he pocketed the car keys off the windowsill. Bob was on curfew but our house was porous with windows, and a few minutes later, the family car squealed off.

What? I heard my father ask, from his recliner in the living room.

When the Mounties brought Bob home, I was still awake in bed and shivering with a mixture of elation, guilt and fright. Inching open my bedroom door, I heard about his joyride along the suicidal bends of the Upper Levels Highway. He could of killed himself, a grunt-voiced Mountie said. Could of totalled the car, my father agreed, although it was pretty clear that he hadn’t, and I soon understood that the Mounties and my father were scolding Bob by talking to each other about what might have happened. Taken out a guardrail. Destroyed public property. Fathers still talked like that when I was young, to other men, over your head, although it wouldn’t last much longer, once they decided to be pals.

I also heard that what they were saying was underpinned with boys will be boys. I didn’t know the world nostalgia, and could never have pictured my father doing anything like that himself, although I knew the Upper Levels would have been nearly empty at that time of night, and understood that this was another instance of manageable danger. One time, we’d had to drive back from Squamish past dark when we’d got a flat tire, and even though my mother fretted about logging trucks, the road had been deserted. Standing inside my bedroom door, I could put a lot of things together, picking up the fact that Bob’s joyride had posed little danger to anyone else, and knowing that, at the time, you were allowed a certain amount of leeway in playing havoc with yourself.

I couldn’t have explained this, of course, but I knew it, and knew that everything would be all right. Slipping into the hallway, I saw my liege standing in the kitchen with his head hanging down and a half smile on his lips, trying not to look too proud. My father and the Mountie didn’t look that much different. This was a negotiation in which everyone already knew the ending.

Bob grew up to be a longshoreman, a logger, working the sort of jobs you could get on the West Coast without a high school diploma, our father having kicked him out a few months later. Dad finally reached his limit not on the havoc Bob wrought but on the petty thefts that fuelled it, the bottles of Southern Comfort paid for with cash slipped out of my mother’s purse, since she was often a little absent-minded about leaving it lying around.

It occurs to me now that my mother wasn’t absent-minded at all, and I’d like to remember the look on her face when my father came home from work, and they called Bob into the kitchen. Everything important happened in the kitchen, with its wallpaper of orange and brown kettles. My mother had caught Bob with her open wallet in his hand after school—I had seen this—and now my father was going to deal with it. Some discretion was required, so I was spying from the top of the basement stairs.

At first it was a dumb show, my father standing with his arms crossed, Bob standing with his head down, not defiant at all. My mother’s face is blurred; I can’t tell what she was feeling, what she thought, what she had planned.

You could have asked, my father said. If you weren’t ashamed of why you needed it. But I suppose you were, and so am I.

I was, too. Petty theft upset me in ways that bigger things didn’t, because it was so small. It made Bob seem small, and this confused me badly. I wanted him to explain it, and instead he just stood with his head down while my father waited.

Finally Bob said, You never had any use for us anyhow.

What in hell does that mean? my father asked. When Bob very deliberately gave him the finger, my father said, Get out.

Bob left the room, passing me silently on the basement stairs, making a broken egg with his hand on the top of my head. By the time he reappeared with his brown suitcase, I was spying from my bedroom, and watched as he headed out the door with no more fuss than he’d made when arriving. I learned later that he went back to his mother and stepfather, who got him a union ticket.

Maybe my mother felt a little remorseful. She kept inviting Bob to dinner, ignoring my father’s silent objections. The fact he accepted her invitations: where does that come from? I didn’t understand most of what happened when I was a kid, and don’t understand half of it even now.

STARING OUT THE window, I decided that it could well have