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  Sometimes I have heard people say that Jacob is a handsome man. They haven’t had the time to observe him like I have.

  My bad feeling about him goes right back to earliest childhood. I remember a visit that our family paid to the Brookfields when I was about eight. I had been tormenting Laura all afternoon, and so the adults shooed us outdoors to let off some steam before dinnertime. Laura contented herself with throwing stones into the lake, then making a sort of tree house for her doll. I got bored of all this very quickly and quietly crept back to the house. There was an open window where I could spy on what the adults were up to in the living room.

  They were all sitting down except for Jacob Brookfield. He was walking around with a big burning cigarette in his hand. At least, I thought it was a cigarette at the time. He handed it to his wife, who breathed deeply, releasing a big cloud, and then he took it back. He approached my father.

  “No thank you,” my father said.

  “Come on, Leonard.”

  “No, really. I’ve got to drive.”

  Jacob approached my mother instead.

  “Mary, if he’s driving, then you have no excuse.”

  “No, I don’t want to,” my mother said.

  “Come on,” Jacob insisted, waving the cigarette in front of her face. “It’ll build an appetite for dinner.”

  “I’m already hungry for dinner.”

  “Just a puff.”

  “No, Jacob.”

  Jacob held the cigarette up high, then made it swoop and dive like a little child would with a toy airplane. He made a humming noise, like an engine, which went “Neeeeee—ooooahng!” and brought it down to Mary’s lips. He made the noise of bullets. “Resistance is futile!” Finally, she relented. He pushed the cigarette into her mouth; she puffed and then violently erupted into a fit of coughing. Jacob laughed. From the window, I wanted to cry out, but I remembered that I was not supposed to be there and that I would get into trouble.

  I would never forget that moment. That one, and over the years, all the countless others. Lascivious glances, smiles, and suggestive jokes had convinced me that Jacob had the worst of intentions towards my mother. The fact that the adults treated it as a laughing matter — even my father — bothered me. I wanted to shout at my parents, “Can’t you see what a disgusting man he is?” But the Brookfields remained their close friends, and as I got older and my parents governed less and less of my life, it ceased to matter to me. By the time of my parents’ funeral, all that was left of my deep-rooted suspicion of Jacob was simply a dislike of the man, and to a lesser extent, of his wife.

  But then there was that photo.

  Stephie called me the next morning.

  “I’m not used to waking up alone,” she said.

  “Nor am I,” I replied.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “I can’t say. I’ve agreed to take on the job of painting the old house.”

  I had phrased it this way deliberately, as if somebody had asked me to do the job, and to be helpful, I had agreed.

  “You what?”

  I explained to her that my parents’ old house needed some work to make it ready for sale. I quickly diverted the conversation to the subject of money. I told her how much wealthier I was about to become. This lightened the mood.

  “We can go away at Christmas,” I said. “We can go pretty much anywhere. I’m going to have a small fortune. Do you want to go to the British Virgin Islands?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  “Your friends went there, right? It’s classy.”

  “It’s classy. But I want you home, Luke.”

  “I’m coming home. I’ve just got to get stuff done here, first.”

  “How long will it be?”

  “A week, tops.”

  There was a long silence. She took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” she said in a firm but quieter voice, as if she was trying to be brave.

  All of a sudden, her need for my presence only irritated me.

  “I love you,” she said.

  9

  I asked Howard and Laura if I could move into the old house. I was going to be working there most days anyway, painting, fixing things, and sorting out the junk. They had no problem with it, although they were surprised. They thought I was going to get lonely there by myself.

  We packed up the Ford Windstar with food, bedding, and my suitcase of clothes. I arrived at ten in the morning. The sky was brilliant. Magpies squawked raucously. Little gusts of wind were kicking up eddies of fallen leaves. Larry was just coming out of his front door with a coffee and a smoke. He said hello to Laura and me.

  “You forgot the ladder yesterday,” he said.

  “Okay. I’ll get it in a minute,” I replied.

  We dragged my provisions for the week into the front hallway. Then Laura embraced and kissed me. Her cheek was like a peach.

  “I’ll be back tonight or tomorrow. I can’t leave you to do all this by yourself.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said.

  She left for work. I was jubilant. I was free at last. I was away from Stephie and my family. The morning was about as beautiful as you could have asked for, and I was going to spend it outdoors, getting my hands dirty. I set up the ladder with Larry — it was huge, that thing — then I climbed to the top and felt the aluminum bending under me.

  “You okay up there?” he called out.

  “Yeah, it’s great. I can see the whole neighbourhood.”

  I could see the cat wandering around in the backyard two houses down, an old lady packing up her lawn chairs and parasol for the season, an old man grinding his bike pedals and moving slowly up 99th Street, teetering a little because he had two full garbage bags of empty bottles balanced on each handlebar. I could see the sun inching over the tops of the tallest elms, and already I was receiving the very first gentle whispers of its warmth. I could see as far east as the distant edge of the ravine.

  “You’ll need a hook,” said Larry. “To hang a can of paint on.”

  “Good point,” I called out.

  I could see our backyard with the shed at the end of it. I could see the speckles of the yellow leaves on the grass. I could see the hot tub that Howard had covered up. I could see the pathway down the side of the lawn, leading to the back alley, its paving stones cracked and chipped. A wasp lazily circled my head, then moved on.

  “You coming down?”

  At that moment, I was struck with the sense that all of this was mine, that control of my own future had been restored to me, and when I came and went would be of my own choosing. Things were not going to be as they had been up until now. I wasn’t going to fade away in some peripheral part of Victoria or Vancouver, have a kid or two, and lose the rest of my life in a steady drizzle of anxieties and minor duties. I was going to accomplish something before I got too old to accomplish anything.

  “Great view from up there,” I said, as I stepped back on to the steady cement. Larry said nothing. He would not have been one for talking endlessly about a view.

  “I’d give you my brushes, but they’re all pretty beat up by now,” he said.

  Larry gave me a ride to Home Depot. It took a while for the paint to be mixed. During the wait, Larry did most of the talking. He was reciting a long list of things he had to work on at his own house now that he was retired. He said at one point, “I might need a hand from you for just a bit one of these days.” It was something related to getting rid of the tree in his yard. Then he added, “I would have asked Leonard, but…”

  He fell silent.

  You could tell he had genuine respect for Leonard. I think he admired that Leonard had worked with his hands, despite being an academic, and he admired Leonard’s overall work ethic. He came from that generation that finds nothing more admirable than a dependable work ethic.

  The pause in conversation wasn’t awkward. We simply went back to browsing the handy gadgets at Home Depot. But I wanted Larry to say more. I was hanging on
to every word about my parents. I considered his opinion of them better informed than mine. The discovery of that photo had thrown my idea of them on its head. Sure, I had always thought the worst of Jacob, but my mother? My own mother?

  But Larry wasn’t going to tell me anything about my parents. He had made it his business to keep out of their business. Just as I, for different reasons, had for many years made it my business to stay out of their business.

  I bought the paint and everything else I would need, and we drove home. It was still only noon. There was half a working day left. There was consolation in doing real work for a change. After Larry bid me farewell, the work was my only company for the rest of the day.

  10

  I was camping in my own house. I hardly ventured to the second floor where the bedrooms were. I pulled a spare mattress out of the basement and laid it on the living room floor. I ate my meals there. There was a bathroom next door, and that’s where I cleaned myself. There was no shower; I simply splashed water over myself and dried off again. I could have used the shower upstairs, but I felt weird about that.

  Laura came for an entire afternoon and sorted through old belongings, books, knick-knacks, silverware, cutlery, even furniture. She rearranged my living space. At one end was the furniture she was going to eventually take to her own house. At the other end was the furniture that would eventually be sold or trashed. That’s where she dragged my mattress.

  We didn’t get a chance to talk much that afternoon. She was inside and I was outside. When she was finished, she said she would be back again another day. There was so much more to do. She seemed very stressed. Her job was heating up. She should have taken more time off, but she hadn’t wanted to because she was a new employee. That evening, in her absence, the house felt even more mysterious to me. Because of her rearranging, the fall of the light and the shadows had become unfamiliar. I was trying to read a book — it was something Stephie had recommended to me — but I couldn’t concentrate.

  I knew what the tension was. I wanted to snoop again. I wanted to go upstairs and dig around in my parents’ bedroom and in my mom’s room. I was convinced that there were more secrets to be uncovered.

  But I convinced myself not to. I had no more business with the past.

  I remember the morning when the warmth started pouring from the sun at dawn, just like on a summer’s day, and instead of having to wait until noon to paint like I usually did, I was able to start at ten o’clock. I started painting the porch. It was awkward having to move the ladder around the front steps. Progress was slow.

  I saw a woman coming up the road, walking toward 99th Street. I had never seen her before. As she passed, she looked up at me. I had stopped to dab my paintbrush in the pail. Her gaze met mine and she smiled. I was unnerved. No girl had smiled at me in days. I had lived like a hermit. The moment lasted only a second. Her gaze returned to the street and she continued on her way. I guessed that she was a student because she wore a backpack. She had long brown hair that was fashionably disheveled. I didn’t get a full impression of her face. I knew only that it was healthy-looking and pretty. I judged her to be about twenty-five, or maybe a little older.

  I suddenly felt aware of being lonely. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  I stopped for a smoke break. I had only been working for twenty minutes, but I needed that cigarette. I didn’t like the thought of simply getting back to work. I decided to stroll across the road to the IGA. They had cheap coffee there. I poured some into a Styrofoam cup, paid for it, and headed outdoors, where I smoked another cigarette.

  I’d been working solidly for several days. I suddenly became aware that my body, which had become rather soft from the desk job, was tightening up again, just slightly. And when I noticed this, it was a pleasure to move my limbs. The muscles felt alive. I walked as far as the house, stopped a second, and then continued walking right on by. The road went on for another hundred metres or more. I suspected that the woman who had smiled at me lived in one of these houses.

  Where the houses stopped, the ravine started. I didn’t go into the ravine, although I wanted to. I remembered that I was delaying my return to Vancouver for the purpose of working. Working, not strolling about for the pleasure of it. I trudged back to the house.

  I worked all day and thought about that woman. Then, at about four o’clock, just as it was getting dark, I saw her coming back up the road. I froze. I had moved up to the highest extension of the ladder to work on the soffits. I was over twenty-five feet in the air. The woman’s sudden presence seemed a jolt to my balance. It occurred to me that a fall from this height would finish me.

  I climbed down from the ladder. To my amazement, the woman had stopped on the pavement in front of the house. She was studying the paint job.

  “It looks good from here,” she said. She was smiling.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. I like the colour.”

  I wanted to set down my brush and my paint and light up a cigarette. She was hovering. She would move on if not given sufficient reason to linger.

  “I should paint the whole road like this,” I said. “Your house need a lick of paint?”

  “I couldn’t afford to pay you,” she said. “I live on student loans.”

  She laughed. Another silence. It was still tenuous, my hold on her. I had to think up something else.

  “You’re not just massaging my ego about the paint job?” I said. “You really like it?”

  “Yes. I really do.”

  “I haven’t had an opinion on it yet. When my sister came, I’d only done a few feet. You can’t tell from that.”

  “It’s a big job,” she said.

  “You’re telling me. I still have to get round to the back and up to the dormer windows.”

  “You’d have to be a monkey to do them,” she said, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked up to the roof.

  “A monkey would be handy,” I said.

  We laughed. It had the rhythm of a conversation now. There was another lull, but it wasn’t awkward. It wasn’t a space that urgently needed filling. It was more like a natural breath.

  I set down my pail and my brush and I approached her.

  “I’m Luke,” I said. “Sorry, my hands are dirty.”

  “I’m Julianne,” she said.

  I offered her my forearm instead of my hand. She accepted it. She took it firmly. When I withdrew my arm, I instinctively reached for my cigarettes. I lit one up, and I noticed an envious look in her eyes.

  “You want one?”

  “I usually don’t, but—”

  “You want one.”

  “Yes.”

  11

  “You’re my neighbour,” she said. The smoke was curling around her lips like something alive.

  “You live right here?” I said, pointing next door.

  “No — three houses down.”

  “That’s a nice house.”

  It was, in fact, the shabbiest house on the block — the only house to not yet get the middle-class makeover.

  “It’s got potential,” she said, knowing, I think, that I was only trying to be flattering. “It’s a student house. My roommates and I live there. The rent’s cheap.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And you?” she asked. “Are you new here?”

  “No. I grew up here. This is my parents’ house.” I paused. “They died. I’m getting the house ready to be sold.”

  She smiled sympathetically.

  “So those were your parents that lived here. I used to see — I guess it would be your father — I’d see him jogging all the time. He ran past our house and into the ravine.”

  “Yeah, he was big into jogging.”

  “How did— They both died? Didn’t seem like they were old enough…” Her sentence faded to nothing. Now that I had studied her at length, I could see that she was definitely older than twenty-five. Possibly over thirty.

  “It was an accident. Their car hit a train.”


  “A train?”

  “A freight train. It was a freak thing. A crazy thing. You can’t— ” Abruptly, in front of her, I was approaching the actual rawness of what I felt about the whole thing. “You can’t believe the shit life’s going to throw at you.”

  She nodded her head. She had a beautiful smile, a gentle smile. You could trust it instantly.

  “It happened here, in town?”

  “No, out of town. In the country, at an uncontrolled crossing, late at night. I was in Vancouver when it happened. I came back for the funeral. Now I’m here.”

  “I see that.”

  The burning of the cigarettes measured out the conversation. There was no end in sight while the cherries still glowed. I didn’t want her to leave. We had about a minute of smoking time left.

  “That’s very sad,” she continued, as if she had only just absorbed the full meaning of what had happened to me. “I know it means less than nothing to say I’m sorry. I don’t know what you can say in a situation like that.”

  Silence.

  “It’s a weird first conversation to be having with a stranger,” she eventually added.

  “Yes, it is,” I replied. “Let’s not be strangers, then.”

  The momentous occasions in life, when you look back on them, often seem to have happened in the blink of an eye. One minute, you are alone, the next minute, you are in love. But the meaningless moments that constitute the majority of life seem to stretch on interminably.

  This — this happened in a heartbeat. She said, “See you again,” and to an outsider, it might merely have seemed like something you say, but it wasn’t. The turning point had already happened. We would see each other again. We both knew it. And the next day, she was coming up the road at exactly the same time, and naturally I’d planned to be up on the ladder at exactly the same time, even though the weather was a bit brisk for it. But what did I care? It wasn’t about working now. It was about waiting for her.