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Are you sure he’s warm?

You should see!

Thomas sleeps under an afternoon sky as dark as boiling
jam, the moon, school children running along the sidewalk with their hair flying out before them, spiralling leaves, the wind thrumming the hood of Thomas’s stroller.

Sara puts the azalea in the back seat of Bethany’s car. New leather and tweed. She puts Thomas in the car seat and stands back. Bethany catches Sara’s sleeve through her open window.

That plant is half dead.

The seatbelt locks around Bethany as she speaks, moving with an almost unnoticeable whir. The elegant motion of the automatic seatbelt stirs Sara with its prudent luxury. This is Bethany: maven steeliness. Six children, a consulting firm, St. John’s, winter visits to Florida. She keeps everything immaculate. Indecent to pay for something she’s able to do herself. She will always take care of her own house. She likes gadgets, a long-handled lint remover, a grill that drains fat, a silver toast holder. But there’s no clutter. She and Grant haven’t succumbed to greed or any kind of eccentric frugality. They’ve worked steadily, been generous and careful.

The seatbelt rolls into place.

Thomas behind the window. The reflections of clapboard, telephone pole, tree branches swipe sideways, Sara’s own face leaning in, obscuring him, then his hand on the glass. Little smack she hears. Pale palm. Bethany pulls away and then Sara runs to catch the phone.

She’s holding a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, listening.

She’s facing the kitchen window, the rain has begun. The mattress, the cat. If a black cat is bad luck, what about a white
cat? Where are Thomas and Bethany now? The stoplight near Don Cherry’s Sports Grill? The rain leaves long, thin marks like sewing needles on the window. Butter she made these cookies with, his little hand in the sliding branches. She holds the receiver.

Dave says, I got the job in Montreal.

What Sara knows: They aren’t as sophisticated as she thought. He is this; she is that. They are an invention of randomness. Relationship as lackadaisical conspiracy against. Against what? A situation not entirely without romance. But bracing, a hailstorm, a do-si-do on black ice.

The farmer’s market. Bethany always says about the carrots. Thomas loves them with table butter. A little table butter. Go to the farmer’s market, everything there is so sweet!

Bethany names the things that matter in life: a coddled egg, boiled wool, fresh sheets, doeskin gloves, ironed shirts, old-fashioned beans, table butter, the farmer’s market.

The woman behind the vegetable counter, her breath hanging in the air. She wears a South American cap that comes down over her ears, the strings untied, gloves without fingers. Sara takes carrots and potatoes, a bag of brussels sprouts. Dave doesn’t like them. He goes, But you buy it if you like them. Just because I don’t, doesn’t mean.

She never does. She never buys the things he doesn’t like. She does this time. She wants the crenellated density, the fierce bunchiness, the dank green of a brussels sprout. He doesn’t get to. He always. She has never. Bacon, liver, raw mushrooms, the stalks of romaine lettuce, these are the things she’s given up for him.

She wants the organs, things that root.

She wants a chicken dinner, raisins and garlic in the dressing. A pumpkin with an emergency candle. The smell of roasting yams.

Sunlight strikes the jars of bakeapples and she wants to buy them just for the colour.

James Anderson. She remembers too late, Jim. She had been calling him Jim for the last two years.

Mr. Anderson.

Sara.

The whites of his eyes are yellow, almost mustard, and his lashes are crusted with a medication, something leaking. A new, dramatic frailty.

They ate together in the summer room. She was teaching him to cook. They sat at a glass and chrome table. A giant window that looked onto his late wife’s rose garden. All the bushes were wrapped in burlap, wearing caps of snow. As the late afternoon turned into evening the window became black and reflected the two of them. Three floating candle flames. James’s white hair.

Are you still willing to move to Montreal, Dave asks.

A housefly caught between the kitchen windowpanes. The cat on the fence flicks its ear, the mattress. The fly hyper-vivid, rubbing its forelegs together, one on top of the other, then switching, so the alternate leg is on top. The fridge cuts in. Such steadfastness, the absorbing industry. She takes a bite of the cookie. Yesterday she had wanted to. What had it been? Jayne had invited Nancy but had left Sara out. She’d felt the supreme
effort that casual intimacy exacts. The strangling network of her social life, these inadvertent slights. She’d crushed the paper coffee cup. Dave was already home when she got there. Before she had taken off her coat, he told her he wanted to leave. Imagine a city, he’d said. She had said, Let’s do it. I want to go too.

Your eyes, she says.

I’m having an operation.

The bakeapples flare and flare and flare. The traffic. People turning on their lights. Dusk. Sara hasn’t seen Mr. Anderson since Thomas’s birth. He’d dropped off a sleeper, but Dave had got the door. She couldn’t get up. She’d hardly left the bed. The weepy hours. Watching old movies. Every Paul Newman. Snow falling over the street, the car roofs, the branches. Accumulating silently, with diligence, covering the black, wet branches, floating against the grey dusk, under the streetlights, and finally against the blue-black sky. Waiting to hear Dave on the front steps, his key, the door. Hardly getting up. Paul Newman. Holding out his broken thumbs. Weeping over Paul Newman’s. His eyes. His thumbs. They broke his thumbs in one movie. It had begun to snow in St. John’s, and her milk had come in. Her milk and the snow. Dave was working. Weeping because St. John’s, the Narrows, the snow. Someone brought a stew and she cried with gratitude.

She met with James’s daughter. They’d known each other at the university. Emily and her new lover. Left his wife. Though it was the first time Sara had met him, she had the impression the ordeal had changed his face overnight. The face of a man who had altered his course. Emily drinking. They had been to see a
play. About an affair. Wasn’t it about an affair, darling? A suffering wife. Didn’t you think? But you don’t.

The boyfriend rubs his eyes with his fists. A deliberate gesture, a sidewalk mime or caged ape indicating spiritual exhaustion.

It takes an incredible will to do the right thing, he says. Everybody must try. The courage you must summon.

It just didn’t have a very satisfying ending, says Emily, that’s my feeling. I wanted it one way or the other. Isn’t that what you ask of a play? One way or the other? If I’d wanted shiftless ambiguity I could have stayed home.

Sara tried to remember what the man did for a living. Was it anything that would equip him? Did they have a car nearby at least?

It’s very taxing being the world’s biggest bitch, Emily says. She giggles.

Then she touches Sara’s hand.

Stay away from my father, Sara, she says. Don’t let him become —

Become what?

A lech.

You’ve got it all wrong.

Just listen to me.

Rain hits the kitchen window and Sara sees the garden behind the housefly. The fly is lost forever; the garden is alive with rain and colour. An orange towel fell off the line a long time ago and no one has bothered to do anything. It’s half-covered with leaves. In the opposite garden there’s a statue of
the Buddha with the gold paint coming off, the white plaster visible beneath.

You go to Montreal, she says. I’ll decide later.

What are you talking about, Dave says.

He can go. She might stay on. It sends a ticklish flutter, just the thought. The cookie is so good. The table butter is Bethany’s influence.

The vegetables come right out of the ground, Bethany says, no sprays or pesticides, nothing like that. Mash them in a little bowl with table butter.

James is seventy. Sara cooked the most exotic things. Recipes off the Internet. She had never attempted these dishes before. He insisted on paying for the food and wine.

Once, to surprise her, he’d had a small jar of truffles imported from Italy. They took a truffle out of the little jar, there were five in all. It lay on the cutting board. James bowed, his hands clasped behind his back, almost touching it with his nose.

My God, he’d said. Smell it.

She’d leaned in and done the same. It was earthy, of course, but she imagined she was smelling something else. Whatever made the pigs dig for it. It went through her, a tingling in her belly, she felt it between her legs. Then she straightened up, blushing. She asked what he thought of Emily’s married lover. The question was too personal, she was slightly drunk, but there was no way to retract it.

I want my daughter to feel passion, at any cost. A terrible thing for a father.

He picked up the truffle and bit it. He held the other half out for Sara. She opened her mouth and he put it in, his thumb resting on her lip.

She read later that one truffle will flavour a whole meal.

Sara hadn’t returned either of James’s two phone messages after the baby. The summer. A waterfall. The beach, a bicycle. Crabapples, kerosene lamps, rainstorms, the whales. Her bare feet on the dash, a take-out coffee. Dave driving. Dave’s black curly hair, a dark tan. A ball of earwigs falling from the cupboard onto the shelf, a jar of rusted screws. Three Rottweilers swimming through the long grass like eels. She had just enough time to scoop up the baby and run inside. The hammock, smoothing massage oil on Dave’s shoulders, his stomach, his thighs. The oil smelled of cinnamon and orange rind, the bottle said castor, sweet almonds, coconut. It got in her hair and the smell gave her dreams of furtive sex in jungles and sand dunes, a hothouse. She made Dave wake up.

The woman behind the vegetable counter handed her change and she jammed it into her pocket. The wind blew from behind James, his white hair, his scarf.

My eyes are giving me trouble.

We wouldn’t have to eat.

You weren’t around for so long.

I was busy. I was tired.

You had the baby to think about.

Weeping all the time. I watched so much Paul Newman. There was so much snow.

Last winter.

After the baby

The cat springs into an overhanging branch. The branch wags violently. Two sparrows rise up, fly over the Buddha. The rain is harder now. The fly is inert. It may have died there. She sees the wings are dusty. It’s covered in a webbing. Had she imagined its legs rubbing together? It’s been dead for years.

You’d leave me, Dave asks.

Anything can happen, she says.

She’s late for Thomas, but only by a few minutes. Bethany is spinning a saucepan lid on the floor before him. Sara struggles to get him in his snowsuit. She kisses his face all over. She tastes banana in his hair.

Passes the living room on her way out. Bethany has just had it painted a dark gold. They’ve changed the wallpaper. Then Sara notices the azalea. The buds are closed tight.

Sara feels a glittery stomach-swirling foreknowledge.

How can that be?

Oh, I returned the one you gave me, Bethany says. This one hasn’t bloomed yet.

If You’re There

I
am waiting for Jeremy to show on his bike. I sit on the patio of Future Bakery waiting for him. Chilly, still. No leaves. But everybody, the bikes, a skirt flapping back off a thigh, the army boot touching down, a full stop. Red light, the bicycle. He’ll come around the corner. The cars are splats, blue, red, blooming and contracting in the big wall of glass beside me. Zoom. The girl on the bike, flicking through, gone. There he is, take him in. Take his measure.

A shirt, some snazzy thing he’s got on. We never hug; I hug him. Because I decided to. I’m starting to feel my age. A nostalgia for things that haven’t happened yet. Or they’ve happened at such a velocity that I’m left behind, still waiting for them. Anticipation so heightened it makes my funny bone ring. I’m going to hug Jeremy from now on, every time I see him. I’m never going to not hug. Not just him, everybody. A new me, a hugging me.

I came to Toronto because I hadn’t seen Lily and Marco for so long, because I had some money, to get away from the baby, drink coffee at Lily’s kitchen table, eat things. Fusion. Maybe get drunk. For a long time you couldn’t get shiitake mushrooms in St. John’s. Lemongrass we have. I wanted to see Jeremy. I haven’t seen him since he left Newfoundland two years ago. He’s come into some serious money and I think he might disappear with it.

Lily and I met at art school centuries ago. She’s got some new grey at the temples; other than that she’s exactly the same. They’re both the same, Lily and Marco, but why did I let five years go by? I need her. The way she knocks foreheads with the cat.

Lily says, I want to crack the new painting wide open. Her painting in the centre of the living room, some bare canvas still showing, the spotlight with a crush of tinfoil over the rim focussing the beam. The rest of the room is darkish, even in the morning. A quiet street, you can see the squirrels leaping, silhouettes, the branches thrashing briefly. The cavernous sofa that Lily’s recovered in velvet. A Graham Coughtry, two figures interlocked, just a few sure, dangerous lines of ink.

Often she sits for an hour or more in front of the painting, her back very straight, smoking. I’ve seen her drip gold from a tiny bottle. I stand behind her with my coffee. Blues, pinks, lemon, almost white in the centre, all of it in motion, sunlight on water.

It’s still representational, she says. One minute it’s brushstrokes and colour, the next minute —

She’s taking me to her Improv Contact class. I’m nervous.

Look, she says, it’ll be fine.

Walking there, the crocuses. Spring on Yonge, smart and awake, like toothpaste. We cross the bridge and into the subway station, warm uprush, vaguely feculent: feet, newsprint, grease. Lily drops two tokens. She’s wearing a jacket I’ve never seen before, unholy pink. Her glasses on a string. Glasses she didn’t have the last time I was here.