Best Before

There are two rules for celebrating your birthday. One. Stop celebrating your birthday when your mom stops throwing the party. Two. Stop your mom from throwing the party as soon as humanly possible.

I made the mistake of letting my own birthday parties continue long after I had stopped feeling special—that day, or any day. If you don't believe you're special most days of your life, then gathering people on one more or less arbitrary day and having them act as if you're suddenly special will just make you feel like a big fraud. Or rather, it did me.

The day I turned 38, I hid in the kitchen. Not just when the party started, but every 15 minutes. My wife Catharine had to catapult me into the living room every single time.

I tried to reason with her. "Cath," I asked, "who is this party for?"

"It's for you, Charlie," she answered briskly as she checked the finger-food in the oven, "to celebrate your birthday."

"Why—?"

"Do not ask why you'd want to celebrate it."

"I'm asking why a living-room full of people that I never see except on my birthday is a celebration."

Cath checked her reflection in the black glass of the oven door, and tucked back a wisp of hair. I sighed and shuffled back into the living-room.

My nextdoor neighbour Roger greeted me immediately. "Look at what your sister brought."

"A pony?" I said.

"A photo album. From twenty years ago," my sister Dana said.

If Dana said that the album contained photographs from 1972, you could bet your whole bankroll that not a single snapshot was from 1971 nor 1973.

"Get this one," Roger said, flipping pages until he found the one he wanted.

There I stood. Off-centre and, judging by the horizon, seemingly on an shallow incline. Grinning weakly. Lips closed. Shading my eyes with my left hand. Wearing pants with appallingly bright stripes, and sporting hair that looked as though someone had glued a frightened hedgehog to my head.

The album was taken away from me by unseen hands, and I did not turn my head to see who was braying with laughter. Dana, unblinking, looked puzzled.

"Is it really that funny?"

I smiled weakly.

"Charlie Carter, you look like a sick child trying to be brave when he knows he's about to vomit."

"Dana, I can tolerate that you recognize my facial expressions. Do you have to catalogue them?"

She frowned.

"What's wrong?" I asked her.

"I had an experience on the bus yesterday." Dana frequently had "experiences" on the bus. She always took the bus to work—rain, snow, or shine. She knew it to be her civic duty to use mass transit. "There was a young man on the bus who had your 'worried-guilt' expression."

"Probably didn't buy a ticket."

"No, I saw him buy a ticket. It took him a long time to find the exact change."

I nodded. "There's nothing unusual about a bus passenger with a worried expression, is there?"

"Charlie, it wasn't a worried expression. It was your worried expression." Dana grabbed the photo album back from the mean kids, and flipped a few pages. "There."

It was a photograph of me with five or six other kids swimming at the lake. Everybody else had cheesy grins. I didn't. I looked like I had just spotted a bear coming toward us. A hungry bear, standing on its hind legs. My expression suggested that it was I who had forgotten to feed the bear.

Dana looked at the photograph, then looked up at me. "You know, Charlie," she said, "It wasn't just his expression. He actually looked a lot like you did at eighteen."

"He has my sympathies," I said. Dana opened her mouth to speak, snapped the photo album shut, and walked away.

Later that evening, after the guests had been banished for another year, I went out to the backyard to corral party debris. I heard the neighbour's dog's tags jingle, and when I looked through the fence, he licked his chops at me. I picked up a hamburger with two bites missing. I looked to be sure no one was around, then fed the patty to the dog. I brought everything else to the kitchen. Cath wiped down the counter some more. Cath didn't look 37. Not to me. Not to anybody. No one was ever going to say she didn't keep herself in trim.

"I'm going to bed," I told her.

"I'll be up when I'm done cleaning the kitchen," Cath said.

There had been a time when I would have offered to share that chore. I had learned that such a move was not necessarily wise.

I read for some time but I fell asleep before Cath came to bed.

On Monday morning, I dropped my son Paul a block away from his school so he could avoid the mortification of having visible parents. I steered past several other teens, then made a U-turn back into the gridlock. While waiting at a red light, I saw a young girl sitting on a bench. Her posture, her whole attitude jolted me awake. Her head was bowed, her shoulders slumped, and the gangly legs she had clearly acquired in a growth spurt were being held together at the knees but far apart at the ankles. She wasn't carrying anything. She was wearing jeans, a short-sleeve shirt, and scuffed tennis shoes. I was staring at her. Usually when I stare, I get caught. Not this time. The poor young thing didn't move and didn't look up the whole time I was stuck in traffic. When I got into work, I dropped twenty bucks in the charity jar on the receptionist's desk.

I made a fresh pot of coffee, then took my mug back to my cubicle. The next time I tasted it, it was cold.

At work or home, I'm always the last to hear anything—rumours, staff announcements, jokes about co-workers, fire alarms, and most of all, people telling me things. I take a lot of kidding about what people assume is a hearing problem or attention deficit. It is in fact a carefully cultivated skill. It's hard to write good ad copy when people insist on telling you things.

Actually, it's always hard for me to write copy—good, bad, or cringe-inducing. Being persuasive in print is a nightmare. I know there are people with a genuine flair for it, but I have to mine the stuff out. I get there in the end, but I have no aptitude. If I had aptitude, I'd be at an advertising agency. In the high-tech world where I am, I don't need aptitude, skill, or even competence. No one qualified to judge my work ever reads it. And certainly customers don't. Our marketing material isn't designed to be read. We have to have it, because people expect it, and so we have it. It looks good piled in stacks at trade show booths. It keeps the company's name in front of people's eyes when we mail it out. But if anyone had ever read it, they would have spotted the fine print that offers a $5 bill to anyone who writes me and asks for it.

I sensed someone hovering behind me, and turned. My neighbour Roger. Our head salesman.

"Good morning, buddy. Got a moment?"

"Of course."

Roger sat on the edge of my desk. "Who usually gets in before you do?"

"Usually? Ally at reception, Hai in IT, and that coder who doesn't seem to speak any living language."

"Anyone in management?"

"Not that I've noticed."

"Do me a favour, Charlie. For the next little while, notice. Let me know what you see."

I nodded. "Sure thing."

"Thanks. I'll see you later." Roger patted my shoulder briefly on his way out of my cubicle.

Every now and again, Roger would ask for a bit of minor and harmless information. As long as it was ethical, I'd tell him what he wanted to know. I wouldn't have been given my job if my Roger hadn't lobbied hard and pretty much made them give it to me. I had no idea why Roger had done it. Some days, I felt I had better find out why Roger had done it, or—once it was too late—I'd never forget it.

Why I had kept the job was no mystery at all. Where I work, once you're in a job, you don't get fired unless people notice you and realize your presence is actually a drag on the company. I made sure that the quantity of my output was solid, if not impressive.

When I looked up from my work again, my cold coffee has changed its shade from doubtful to threatening. I threw it into the sink, cleaned my cup, noticed the office was deserted, and checked my watch. Time to go home already. I hadn't even realized I'd skipped lunch. On the way out, I noticed that the twenty bucks had disappeared from the charity jar. I dropped in another twenty, then locked the door behind me.

That night, someone ran over one of Dana's cats. Not fatally. Dana phoned from the veterinary clinic to ask me to stay at her place for a couple of hours. "I don't have time to lock down the other animals," she said.

A thunderstorm had cut loose by the time I got to her place. I got soaked just letting myself in. There didn't seem to be any other life forms in the house. The other cats probably hid the moment they caught my scent, but where was the dog? I made a cursory inspection of the ground-floor rooms, but couldn't find any of her pets. I went upstairs.

As I walked past a mirror in the upstairs hall, I caught a glimpse of my face. Was that the "worried-guilt" expression Dana had mentioned the night of my birthday party? I stood there in front of the mirror for a moment in case it came back, then I went into Dana's library. Against one wall were IKEA bookcases with the labelled binders for photographs. I pulled down a few from 1972, and eventually found the photo Dana had showed me. There was that same expression on my face.

I tried to identify the other people in the photo. I took the photo out from behind its protective plastic and squinted. Me, of course. My brother Simon, back before he wore a toupee. Cath in a white one-piece swimsuit. Dana with her arm around her best friend—dementiaphobia prodded me immediately: what was her name?—Lib. Her name was Lib. Now relax. And finally …

I knew who she was. Oh, did I ever. I forced my eyes open. She was wearing an electric blue bikini I hadn't forgotten, and the sun had brought out the freckles on her nose, freckles that seemed to disappear when viewed up close.

I put the albums back on the shelf and stared at them for a bit. Then I went downstairs to the basement and found the two cats crouching in a basketful of clean laundry. I shooed them out, and washed it all again while I waited for Dana to get back from the vet.

I found the dog lying on the floor near the furnace. He looked up at me when I entered, but didn't move. There was a thunderclap, and the dog tried to make itself flatter. I sat down next to the dog, and stroked his back.

"It's all right, boy," I said softly. We sat there awhile, me trying to remember the name of the freckled girl. Eventually, in the next room, the washer shuddered to a halt and I got up to transfer the clothes to the dryer. I knocked the plastic laundry basket to the floor, and it clattered her name at me.

Katie. Katie Baird. Katie.

When I got home early from work Friday afternoon, I took one look at the lawn, and decided to tackle it before supper. When I went to change into shorts and a golf shirt, I spotted a note Cath had left on my pillow: "Mow the lawn as soon as you get the chance."

After a quarter hour's mowing, I looked up to see the very definition of a listless youth—a teenage girl with nowhere in particular to be. From a distance, her gait reminded me of someone I had gone to school with. Then I heard the phone ringing faintly inside the house, and went inside to be asked if I wanted to subscribe to the Citizen. I did not. They had engaged me to write a weekly column, then backed out before running the first one. I have a long memory. It's not flawless maybe, but it has capacity.

The next Sunday, I got up early to bike downtown. Our house, not too far from Hog's Back Falls, was just the right distance to bike to the Byward Market. Ottawa is the perfect place to ride a bike, and the best biking is along the canal.

I have never been a serious cyclist. I owned pretty much the least expensive bike that a real bike shop carries. I also owned a helmet and water bottle. My bike owns a couple of water-resistant panniers. That's it. No special shirts or shorts, no gloves, no speedometer, no tools. Especially no tools.

One of the basic truths about getting up early in our house on a weekend is that there's never anyone else around. Yet Paul was in the kitchen, watching his portable TV and chowing down on some cold cereal that was turning the milk mauve.

"Good morning," I said, reaching into the freezer for my water bottle.

"Hey." Paul flipped off his TV. "You're biking downtown, right?"

I looked at him.

"It's not a trick question, Dad," Paul said. Sixteen-year-olds.

"Sure, I'm biking down to the Market." I poured myself a glass of apple juice, and used it to wash down a multi-vitamin.

"Mom says I should join you."

"Uh-huh. And how does your psyche react to this suggestion?"

"Mom said I should do it, Dad."

So I helped Paul lift down his bike, then inflated the tires and lubricated the chain. I checked my own tire pressure, and off we went.

One of the reasons I'm not more serious about cycling is that, unless I'm in one, I'm afraid of cars. Even if I were a serious cyclist, that still wouldn't make me brave. So it's a dream in the summer when the city shuts down Colonel By Drive to cars on Sunday mornings. All along the canal, the road looks like a sparsely-attended bicycle marathon in which nobody cares about winning. Not only are most people taking it easy, but at least half of them are headed away from the finish line. My mom came to visit us once, and she rented a bike so she could cycle downtown with me. I've never been happier about my mom being happy. There wasn't any wind. Just green grass and the glimmer of the water in the canal and lots of smiles on relaxed faces, all the way to the Byward Market.

After I locked our bikes, I asked Paul, "Was there anything you wanted to do?" I asked Paul.

"Dunno."

"Let me rephrase that. What do you want to do?"

"Dunno."

I sighed, and he caught me at it. His eyes darted up and to the left. Clearly the boy was thinking. "Could we get some gelato?"

I happen to love a good gelato. Eleven-thirty in the morning doesn't happen to be my ideal time for it.

"Absolutely," I said.

Morning or not, I considered joining Paul in some gelato when I saw they actually had some chocolate-orange left. It would be nice to pretend this flavour is my private secret, but the tub was always nearly empty or wholly absent. Paul ordered the big waffle cone. He constantly ate whatever whenever, but still looked as lean as a marathon runner, minus the muscular definition.

Paul sat on a park bench in a courtyard to eat his gelato. "I'll be right here," Paul said without looking up.

I headed toward the market stalls. Near one of the maple syrup stands which seem to be there all through the calendar, I saw a gorgeous young woman with a stricken look, pale skin, and liquid eyes. Really more a girl than a young woman, and the walking image of one of my first-year English classmates. I opened my mouth to ask if she was lost, and she wandered away, looking up at the rooftops, and still looking as though she had just been hurt almost unbearably. I said nothing. I had been unable to speak to her doppelganger years before. Now that she was half my age, my suspicion that my conversation would bother her had become a certainty.

I spent half an hour dutifully buying locally. When I had scored some genuine croissants, raspberries from Quebec, half a dozen ears of fresh corn, and miscellaneous root crops, I came back to the courtyard to find Paul talking with a kid in throwback seventies gear. The kid was sitting on the ground, propped up against the fountain. He looked familiar.

When Paul saw me, he said, "Here's my dad. I have to go now."

"Okay," the kid said. Then, to me, "Hi." He got up, shouldered an enormous hiker's backpack, and loped off.

Paul and I headed off to collect our bikes. "What was his name?" I asked, expecting to be told that he'd been to our house at least a zillion times.

Paul shrugged. "Didn't say."

The next day, I arrived at work at seven-thirty, an hour earlier than most of the rest of the office. Mr Campbell, the office manager, was in the coffee room when I boiled the kettle for some tea. When Roger rolled in an hour and a half afterwards, he seemed interested in the occurrence. "Was Campbell here early?"

"Yeah. Why do you ask me to collect information you already have?"

Roger frowned. "Let me know if you hear anything," he said as he left.

Not much of an answer. I think I've mentioned—I never hear anything.

I had seen other people grow uneasy about how little they were accomplishing, sure that their lack of achievement would get them fired. So they tried to compensate with a magnificent accomplishment, usually organizing a new initiative to replace an organic procedure. That is, designing something that had been arrived at unofficially, through a consensus. When they failed, everybody noticed the failure, and they got fired.

Most of the copy I wrote was for campaigns that were cancelled. Nobody else felt guilty about the colossal waste of time, so I didn't feel guilty about not producing much that saw the light of day.

After lunch, Roger came back and sat on my desk. He actually lowered his voice. "The CEO is coming up from San Mateo on Friday."

"Okay, that's not good," I said.

About a year after I had joined the firm, we had been acquired by this American firm called Orbinet. No one except other people in the business had ever heard of them. Orbinet had been interested in our patents, and not at all interested in our customers. Roger had worked like a dog to secure several lucrative contracts with various departments of the federal government. Orbinet defaulted on all of them. Normally they concentrated on selling to American firms. In Canada, they started selling aggressively to American firms who had Canadian head offices.

When we had been acquired, the CEO had come up from San Mateo to welcome us to the Orbinet family. He didn't bother to hide his distaste for our ad hoc working conditions, and when he returned to California, he didn't bother to do anything to improve them. Most of us hadn't seen him since, although Campbell and even Roger had been summoned to San Mateo occasionally. Their descriptions of the luxuries at the San Mateo head office caused morale to slide.

If the CEO was leaving the comfort of his executive suite and coming up to our backwater country, it was major news. Before I left for work for the day, I saw five different employees updating their resumes.

Something went wonky in my brain on the drive back from work. I headed home right enough, but I was instead getting out of the car in front of Dana's house before I knew I had taken a wrong turn. I started to climb back in the car, but Dana hailed me from her bus stop, farther up the street. I waved weakly and I smiled just in case she could see my expression from that distance.

Dana had her house key in her hand—probably from the time she got off the bus. "What's up?" she said as she let us in. "You want to stay for supper?"

I shook my head. I stopped in mid-shake. "Actually, yeah. Please." I phoned Cath and said I wouldn't be home for supper. Cath said "Uh-huh" and hung up.

Dana turned on some music. I listened hard, trying to make out the words. I couldn't. "What is that?" I asked.

"Gaelic," she said, and tossed the CD case to me. The name of the album was Adopted Country. The name of the singer was Katie Baird. I almost dropped the case.

"Katie Baird?" I must have said it out loud, because Dana answered.

"You didn't know she had a new album out?"

"I didn't know she had an album, full stop. This is the one I know?"

"The one we went to school with, yeah."

I listened to the music. I listened to her tone of voice. She sounded like she was about to burst with happiness. Not out of control. A real, sound, founded happiness. One that wouldn't disappoint. Rejoice. Be proud. Be glad.

All of a sudden it was silent. The CD had stopped playing. I looked around, but Dana wasn't there. She was in the kitchen. She tasted something, then carefully added an extremely level one-eighth of a teaspoon of salt and stirred vigorously. Dana held out a wooden spoon. "Tell me what you think of this."

The next day, when I arrived at work, Roger was sitting on my desk, waiting for me to arrive. "This may be the first time I ever made it in before you did, Charlie."

"Start talking, Roger."

"Head office is going to close out any products that don't bring in at least half a million dollars revenue a quarter."

I sat down hard.

"Does anything in the Ottawa office qualify as worth keeping?"

"Just the IntraScape project. We've got pre-booked sales of just over half a mill. As soon it ships, IntraScape is in the clear."

"That's not great news."

"Spilt milk, buddy."

I immediately gather up huge stacks of paper and dumped everything in my wastepaper basket. "We need a clear shot. I need a clear head."

"It's really our only shot, Charlie." I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me. Weren't we already past that?

"How long have we got?" I said, switching on my computer.

"Until the end of the month."

I swallowed hard. "And R&D can meet that?"

"Matt isn't in yet. He'll say what he always says. We can have something to ship, but we'll need to release 1.0.1 the very same week. It'll be enough."

I stared him hard in the eye. "How sure are you of those sales?"

"I've got to have another hundred thousand in place, just in case. The sooner I can get working that, the better. It'll be hell trying to book sales once this rumour leaks."

"Go," I said. But I yelled after Roger, "It's not technically a rumour!"

I saw people arrive at their desks only to have their bosses "need a word" with them. Other people, who I joked with every day, never made it past the receptionist's desks. Some people on my floor were allowed to keep their jobs, but only for another two weeks.

One of those was Elizabeth, a customer diplomat and trouble-shooter. Elizabeth was in the officelette next to me. Elizabeth was so tall that if she'd been brittle-thin, she would have been a model, but she was only athlete-thin. She played a heck of a game of basketball. She stuck her head around my doorway. "I want to stay and fight, Charlie. But they won't let me."

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth."

"Thanks," Elizabeth smiled but barely paused. "I appreciate it, but what I want is meaningful work. They're keeping me on for two weeks so I can move Reveal-It customers over to IntraScape. That's total crap. Even if the data were compatible, the two systems are intended for two different things. I can't help our revenue like that. If they weren't idiots, they'd already know that and already have fired me. I am not going out like this."

I didn't say anything.

"Want any help with the release notes and ad copy?"

I smiled at her. "I thought you'd never ask."

Around nine o'clock that evening, Elizabeth rubbed her eyes and said, "We should go home. Let's not burn out the first last day."

"Do you want to get some Thai food around the corner?" I suggested.

Elizabeth shook her head. "I need to get home." She gathered up her things and left.

Now that I had mentioned Thai food, my stomach was clamouring for it. The street was dark, and I didn't see the guy sitting on the sidewalk until I tripped over him and went down hard.

I got up, my palms stinging. I looked at them ruefully. The guy picked himself up from the sidewalk. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"Uh-huh," he said. "Sorry, sir, you were walking so fast I didn't have time to get out of your way."

"My fault—I didn't see you in the shadows. You're sure you're okay?" I was trying not to stare. It was the same guy Paul had been talking to in the courtyard on the weekend before. I might not have recognized him but for two things. He was still wearing loud throwback clothes, and he looked so familiar. I could not make myself remember who he was.

"Not a scratch, sir," he told me.

"Okay," I said. "Take care of yourself." I changed my mind about Thai food. I needed to tend to my hands. My palms were hurting a lot more than when I had last fallen into a sidewalk, which must have been when I was ten. I headed home.

Cath expressed no surprise about my absence, nor did she question my presence. She looked up from her romance novel. "Did you eat?"

"Not yet," I said. "I'll fix myself something."

"Would you put the kettle on for me?"

I head to the kitchen sink and washed my hands, grimacing a little as the water hit. I used the first-aid kit to sterilize where the skin had broken and bled, then started to make some pasta alfredo. I laid out the cream for the sauce, then pulled out the spice drawer.

Cath came in when the kettle boiled and put the Earl Grey in the single-cup pot. She picked up the cream, sniffed it, wrinkled her nose, and poured it down the drain.

"Cath!" I cried. "I needed that for my sauce."

She was already getting milk for her tea from the fridge. "Charlie, it was off."

I dug the cream carton out of the trash. "Its best-before date isn't for two weeks!" I sniffed. "It doesn't smell off."

"It smelled off to me." Cath turned to look at me.

I didn't say anything.

"Charlie, I didn't realize you wanted it. I thought you had put it out for my tea, and I would rather have fresh milk than cream that's gone off."

"Yes, but …" Cath was looking at me, waiting for me to continue. "Never mind. I'll have a tomato sauce instead."

"There's a fresh jar of my mother's Bolognese sauce in the pantry," Cath said and took her cup of tea back to the living room.

I was the first one at work the next morning, but I had to get in at five-thirty to achieve that distinction, because Elizabeth showed up at five-forty-five. Roger showed up at nine-thirty, having had two breakfast meetings. He'd booked another $50,000 in sales, and eaten heartily at each breakfast despite having had an appetite for neither.

When I hauled myself home, Cath was still up, reading a different romance novel, her feet tucked up under her, and her shoes on the floor in front of her. "How many more long days and nights?" she asked.

"It can't last past the end of the month," I said wearily. She knew. Somehow she knew, although I hadn't told her.

"You get so caught up in the moment, Charlie," Cath said.

I snapped my head around to look her in the eyes. "What do you mean?" Cath didn't look up. "Cath, you've told me half a dozen times I think too much. That I won't leap until I've looked, surveyed, and analysed."

"You do that too," Cath said. "But you've committed to what might be this company's last project."

"Cath, if I don't commit to it, it's sure to be the last project."

"I know. I'm just asking, have you got your priorities straight? Maybe you have. I'm just asking you. I'd like you to ask yourself."

The next day, Roger booked another $50,000 in sales. "That puts us at $679,000, buddy."

My head was aching. The morning had been endless. Something was nagging at me.

"Roger, you've somehow gotten us $100,000 in two days. What the hell? You told me that sales put together quickly often fall apart even more quickly."

"I told you, buddy, I have to get the sales before the news spreads."

Elizabeth and I agreed to abandon all the ad copy except the press release. In addition to the release, I focused on the release notes, written largely for existing customers. Elizabeth started in on a user manual good enough to get new customers started. There wouldn't be time for anything more.

Cath wouldn't let up. "Charlie, maybe you should be trying to get another job."

"I have a job to finish," I said.

"I know, but it'll be a lot harder to move to another firm once the other firm knows your future is dicey."

"If we come out of this okay, then I'll try to find a home in some other company. I'll be able to tell them I pulled off a miracle at my last firm, but now it's time to move on."

"That only works in that one scenario. There are lots of scenarios more likely. Come on, you don't owe the firm anything!"

I sat down and looked at her. "No, Cath. I don't. I don't owe the firm anything. I don't owe the people I work for much at all. But I owe the people I work with quite a lot. At the very minimum, I owe them my loyalty."

"You should just do the work that only you can do, and leave, like Roger."

"What about Roger?"

She looked startled. "I was talking to Roger today …"

I strode over to Roger's. When his teenage daughter opened the front door to me, she looked surprised to see me. I don't usually call on him. Roger wanted to be welcoming when he appeared, but he couldn't bury his sense that it was unusual.

"I hear you're leaving." It must have sounded like an accusation.

"Charlie, I—"

"Are you leaving?"

The smile left his face. "Yes," he said, meeting my eye. "On Monday, I start with …"

"Where's your loyalty to the rest of us?"

"I could have been out of there in a shot. I had already busted my butt to book pre-sales that put us on the good side of half a million, which is exactly what we needed. Then I busted my butt until we had an extra hundred thousand, for safety's sake!"

"Some of those customers are expecting you to deliver. If you aren't there, the sales go away."

"The contracts are signed, Charlie."

"They'll break the damn contracts, Roger! They won't care!"

"Every sales person has had to take over for someone else who has gone, it's part of the job. All those sales can be salvaged even when I leave. We'll only lose them if the clients get ignored. They won't be. The other sales people have to do their job now, and reassure the clients. I had my job to do, and I've done it."

"I don't understand how you can do this, Roger."

"Then we're two different people, Charlie. That's all. That doesn't make you right and me wrong."

By lunchtime the next day, everyone knew about Roger leaving. The only ones with anything sensible to say were the other sales reps. "Excuse me," said the first. "I have some calls to make," said the second.

We kept at it. Elizabeth did her own writing and I mine. One night, we got up to clear our heads at the same time.

"I need a smoke," she said.

"I need some air."

We went outside. It was kind of a cool night. Neither of us had anything to say to the other. I broke the silence.

"Aren't you going to light up?" I asked Elizabeth.

"I just said I need a smoke," Elizabeth said, looking up at the stars. "Not that I was going to have one. I quit smoking fifteen years ago."

"And you still want one?" I said.

Elizabeth looked back at me and smiled. "Every day so far. You never smoked, right?"

"I never tried anything. Smoking, drinking, drugs. I was too scared to do anything, even if it wasn't bad for me."

"I'm surprised you eat," Elizabeth said.

I took my turn looking up at the stars.

"Elizabeth," I said at last. "How long had you been working here when the takeover happened?"

"Four years," she said quietly. "And you—a year, right?"

"A year and a half. It hasn't been the same since, has it?"

"No."

"I don't know what it is that went wrong."

"It was a takeover by an American firm, Charlie. Down there at head office, they still think Canada is the fifty-first state. One of the poorer ones."

"I thought we'd explained that to them."

"We have. I did it myself last month. I've done it every month since the takeover. And every single time, it comes to them as a complete and utter surprise."

I sighed. "Did you know my wife's brother Sid is a customs officer?"

She shook her head "no".

"Every week of his life, he has to deal with an American tourist who insists that he has the constitutional right to bear arms. And Sid has to explain that the constitution only holds as long as they're in the U.S.A. An American does not have the right to be judged by U.S. laws anywhere in the world, and too many of its citizens are not capable of grasping that. These people are not idiots. They're not morons. They're just out of practice at being citizens of the world. They've spent too many years specializing in being Americans."

I hadn't change my tone or volume, but Elizabeth looked at me as though my voice was too loud for an empty parking lot. "I haven't got the time to be angry," she said. "Or the energy either."

"Plus," I said, "we're Canadian."

We headed back inside.

A week before the end of the month, Matt came down to see me at ten o'clock. "I feel like celebrating," he said.

"I feel like collapsing. I may in fact already have begun the process," I said.

"Charlie … we're going to make it. I finished the build. It's running."

"It's running?"

"It's running. We can fix whatever bugs we find between then and now, but if we had to ship right now, it would stand up to our customers. Come have Thai food with me." The magic words.

"I'll meet you there," I said. "Two minutes."

"If you're not at the table in fifteen minutes, I'm eating your food and charging both meals to you," Matt grinned.

I finished my paragraph, and headed on down to the ground floor. The wind was whipping in from the Ottawa river, and the night was unusually cold. I got to the restaurant, and looked in. There was no sign of Matt. In fact, there was only one couple occupying one table. I opened the door and went in anyway.

"Mr Carter! Your usual?"

I smiled. "Not just yet, Supanna. Mr Bliss was supposed to have grabbed a table for us. Is he—?" I tilted my head toward the washrooms.

Supanna shook her head. "No one come in for a little while."

"I'll wait outside."

"You sure? Cold night."

"The sooner I see him, the quicker I'll be reassured I didn't get my wires crossed."

I'm not sure Supanna understood the expression, but she smiled anyway. "I keep a good table for you."

I ducked outside and looked both up and down the street. No sign of Matt. I walked up to the corner to see if I could see him coming. No one. As I walked back to the restaurant, I saw a shadow in the doorway of a closed shop.

"Could you spare any change, mister?" The voice was hoarse and husky.

I felt in my pockets. Just keys.

"I guess I haven't got any."

"That's okay." The voice was weaker—and more familiar. He coughed hard, at least three times.

I moved so that my shadow wasn't falling across him. It was the guy Paul had been talking to. "Are you—?" I didn't know what to ask. "All you—all right?"

"I have a cold," he said. "But I'm fine."

"Make up your mind," I said. He looked at me like someone who had been teased his entire childhood about something he couldn't help. "I'm sorry, that wasn't funny."

My cellular phone rang. Matt. "Look, I've got to bail. The repository server died, and I can't bring it back up."

"Hell!" I said. "Are we still all right?"

"If nothing else goes wrong." He hung up.

I looked back down at the guy sitting on the sidewalk. I reached into my wallet and took out a five. "Look, if I give you money …"

His eyes were locked on the wallet. "What?"

"Nothing," I said, handing him the bill. "None of my business."

"Thanks," he said, looking at the money oddly for a moment, then putting it in his shorts pocket. "But what were you going to ask?"

"Look, it's none of my business how you spend the money," I said.

He stared at me. "I'm not going to use to buy booze," he said indignantly. "If you want to know, I'm going to spend it on a hot meal."

I looked down the street at the illuminated burger sign, then focused on the Thai restaurant sign, much closer. "You like Thai food?" I said.

Supanna's smiled welcomed me back.

"Table for two please, Supanna. Not too near the air conditioner."

"Menu?" Supanna asked.

"Not for me," I said. "But one for the boy."

"Would you like drinks now?"

"I'll have a ginger ale," I said.

He sat down hard in his chair. "Could I have an orange juice?"

I nodded at Supanna, and she said, "I will bring your menu, then drinks." She smiled particularly brightly. Happy to see a new face, maybe.

The menu was brought, and he pored over it.

I sat in awkward silence. "I'm sorry, but have we already met?"

He paused before speaking. "I saw you twice before. Is that what you mean?"

I shook my head. I reached across the table. "I'm Charlie."

A look of panic came into his eyes. I felt awkward. "It's okay, you don't have to tell me your name." He didn't relax. He continued to look troubled.

"But would you tell me this?" I said. "When did you last eat?"

"Maybe yesterday. No, it was the day before."

"Then, son, I have two pieces of advice for you. The first is to as order as much as you want to. The second is to eat it as slowly as you can."

"I don't know how to thank you enough, sir," the boy said as we left. His voice already sounded better.

"You don't have to thank me any more than you have. And you don't have to call me 'sir', either. Do you have a place to sleep tonight, son?"

He smiled at me. "I do if your bank uses those all-night teller machines."

We walked several blocks south, away from the river, to a bank branch a little off the beaten path. It was a busy street in the daytime, but after six o'clock, almost nobody went there. I let him in to the lobby for the ATMs.

"Heated all night," he said. "It won't go to waste. Thanks."

Ottawa's a pretty conservative town. I thought it reasonably likely that if anyone turned up to use the bank machines, they'd turf him out with a feeling of pride in doing their civic duty. I didn't see how I could help that, so I wished the boy luck and left.

A little way down the block, I looked back. He was unscrewing as many light bulbs as he could reach. It already looked as though the machine's lobby was closed for the night.

Under my breath, I said, "May choirs of angels sing you to your rest." My grandmother used to tell us that as children. My brother Si, in particular, had loved it. It had been comforting then. I think its active ingredient must have expired.

The next morning, Matt had put a temporary server in place to host the code repository and let everyone know about his contingency plan. Elizabeth and I started finalizing documents. We had lots of visits from programmers asking if we could add a last-minute change to the release notes. Elizabeth and I got very good at saying no.

We finally made it. I don't know how. I know how I made my deadline. Lots of late nights and fast food. Weekends spent working instead of biking or relaxing. I guess development did the same thing. Maybe they worked harder. Maybe they were in a better place to start with.

But we shipped. That was what was important. Not everything worked all the time, not everything was explained well, but we shipped, and we lost a few pre-booked sales that eroded the safety margin, but we were still on the right side of the goal line.

Elizabeth celebrated with everyone else that night. She didn't turn up the next morning, and I personally never heard from her again. I turned to writing ad copy for the new release, to try to make sure we met our quota for the next quarter as well. That's when everything turned to crap.

I looked up, and Matt was standing at my desk. "I don't believe this. I do not believe this."

Were they firing him now that they'd worked him hard?

"You haven't heard," Matt said. He'd read my face. "They're shutting us down."

"Who are shutting who down?"

"San Mateo is shutting down the Ottawa office."

"They can't!" is what I said. But of course, they could. They could do whatever they damn well wanted to the company.

"They say we messed up," Matt said. "We don't have the revenue."

"We lost some big customer?"

"No," Matt said. "They say we need half a million in sales a quarter."

"We have over half a million. We don't have the full 680,000, but we still have—"

"They say half a million American."

I'm old enough that I can remember when the assumption was that the Canadian and American dollars traded at par. But that was a long time ago. No one thought of the two currencies then. Sure, it happened later, but it was such an anomaly that it was an event.

Half a million American. We were doomed.

Here's something that I did not think of until months afterwards: There were just over twenty of us left working in the Ottawa office. If we had been able to come up with $4,000 apiece in cash, we could have banded together to buy $75,000 worth of product. Almost nobody had that much. Or maybe we didn't have that much just to buy ourselves three more months of employment.

Anyway, that thought came far too late. They had already closed us down.

Cath took it pretty hard. "We don't have a big enough cash cushion for this."

"We've got enough for at least three months," I said.

"And you think you can find another job in that amount of time." It sounded like a question, but seemed to be a statement. I didn't say anything. Cath whirled around and walked out of the room.

So I spent weeks on a job search that kept me busy but almost never offered an appointment for which I had to be somewhere at a specific time, so I usually rode my bike whenever there were bike paths and bike lanes between me and my destination. One afternoon, a trip to Carleton University for a job search seminar allowed me to travel side streets to the west bank of the canal.

The semester had been underway for a few weeks, so most of the youngest faces had lost that look of sheer panic. Instead, everybody seemed really happy. And loud about it. I was walking quietly on a paved pathway when one young fellow roared "HEY JEREMY!" His tone sounded harsh and murderous. But he grinned wildly and frantically waved at Jeremy, who was maybe a hundred metres away. Jeremy waved back. The young fellow bawled "I asked her and she said yes!" The conversation continued, but since neither of them moved any closer to the other, the volume level persuaded me to quicken my pace.

I was walking past the library when I heard more yelling. I sighed and sped up again in an effort to get past. Two guys and a girl were standing together and, to judge from his hostile tone, one of the guys might have been a disciple of Jeremy's school of vocalizing. When I was almost next to the trio, I heard the follower-of-Jeremy say, "Then what were you staring at her for?"

I looked at them. A tall, gangly guy—whose red hair curled into an enormous, bushy "natural" hairstyle—had a look on his face like he had come face to face with a customs official who spoke no English. The resemblance was stronger because the redhead had a large backpack on his shoulders, like a student tourist at a border crossing. He looked familiar.

"Rob, leave him alone," the girl said.

Rob was a scruffy-looking specimen in tight jeans and black hair with purple tips. "You stay out of this, Daphne. Or maybe you like this pickup-stick, huh? What's your name, pickup-stick? Huh? Huh?"

Rob started to push on the redhead's chest every time he emphasized a word.

"I wasn't doing anything," the redhead guy said.

"Now you lying, pickup-stick. You were scoping out my girl. I saw you doin' it. I was there. You thinking trying to steal my girl is nothing, stick-man? Huh? Huh? Huh?"

Rob pushed hard on the final "huh", and the redhead guy toppled backward, and crashed down on his backpack. Rob moved forward to kick the redhead, and the girl took one step back and said, "Rob, no!" and I took one step forward and tripped Rob.

Rob was on his feet again in a second. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Alastair MacDougall, head of junior studies," I said firmly, "and I want your student number right now, young man."

"Christ," said Rob, and ran like hell. The girl saw that the red-headed fellow was having trouble getting up with the heavy load on his back, and grabbed both his arms so that he could heave himself up. "I'm awfully sorry," she told him. Then the girl turned to me. "Carleton doesn't have a head of junior studies," she said, and walked off.

"Are you okay?" I asked the red-headed guy. He nodded, and his hair bobbed up and down. This was a sight I recognized. I felt like I was being transported back twenty years. He looked exactly like my university buddy, Gord White. I didn't think it was likely to be Gord's son, since Gord had been comfortably out of the closet for decades, but the resemblance was eerily strong. I shook my head to clear a dizzy feeling and asked him, "What seemed to be the problem?"

"I was just standing there, staring off into space, and this Rob guy says I'm, like, making eyes at his chick," he said, looking around his all the time.

"You're really into the seventies, aren't you?" I smiled.

He looked at me oddly. "I guess."

"I haven't heard anyone use the word 'chick' in a while," I explained.

He looked puzzled. "It just means young girl."

"I wouldn't use it in front of a young girl, or the girl will shove you to the ground before her boyfriend has the chance," I advised. "Why were you staring off into space?"

He looked all around him again, then back at me. "Something funny is going on."

"Like what?"

"I'm not really sure where I am," he said.

"That's the university library over there," I said, and pointed. He looked blank. "The library." He looked blank. "Carleton library." He looked blank. "Carleton University. Ottawa, Ontario. Canada?" He chewed his lip. He whimpered, and ran away. As he did, I saw a peace symbol patch had been sewed on to his backpack, and the initials "GBW" written in pen, in very blocky letters next to that.

That night, I asked Dana for Gord's phone number in Toronto. Dana could tell you the current address, phone number, relationship status, and names and ages of progeny of everyone she had ever met. I phoned Gord.

"Charlie Carter!" Gord said. "My God, I haven't heard from you for a dozen years. How are you?"

"I'm fine, Gord. And you?"

"Still alive," he assured me. "You called, and you have a reason for it. What is it? Let's not waste precious minutes."

"I want to know a couple of things."

"A man of modest wants and desires. Thing one?"

"Do you have any nephews?"

Gord chuckled, waited, then spoke up, sounding puzzled. "A little difficult, without any siblings!"

I was already embarrassed, and the next question wasn't going to ease that any. "No offspring you know about?"

This time Gord laughed loudly. "It has been too long, Charlie. No, no offspring. I never experimented with the other side."

"Is there anyone in your family who resembles you an awful lot?"

"Charlie, what's this about?"

"I saw a young fellow today on Carleton campus. He could have been your double, except that he was the right age to be on campus."

"I don't see how it could be one of our brood. The person I resemble most was my grandmother Clara White. She had the same red hair, and was a wiry old bird."

"This was no grandmother, Gord."

"Well, if he was a relation, he was a distant one. Did he have the accent?"

"He did, actually."

"What was your second desire?"

"What's your middle name?"

"Ooh. That's a nasty one. Basil, I'm afraid. A name utterly without panache."

"You don't think it has at least a touch of spice?"

Gord groaned. "Bitch."

I said nothing. Apparently, I took my time about it.

"Charlie, are you there?"

"Still here, Gord. But I do have to hang up pretty soon."

"Charlie, you couldn't possibly be any more hung up. I've always loved you for it. Do keep in touch, please. Call me back when you're not so under the gun."

I hung up, and looked at the note pad by the telephone, where I'd written GBW.

The next afternoon, I went back to the Carleton library to see if I could find this GBW. I wandered the campus, hoping to see an enormous bushy red head bobbing along. When I stopped to pull out a campus map, someone approached me slowly, tilting her head to try to detect whether I had observed her presence. "Excuse me, sir…?" she said.

I looked up. "Charlie Carter!" the voice said. "It's Alice Osbourne. You'd remember me as Alice Badcock."

"Alice!" I said. "It's good to see you."

"Oh, it's good to see you, Charlie. Particularly now."

"What's the problem?"

"I'm up here on a job interview, Charlie, and I'm lost. You're practically native to Ottawa by now. Do you know where the building with the student counselling is?"

I laughed. "Alice, you are lost. It's in the Unicentre Building. Are you late?"

"No, b'y," Alice answered, looking at her watch. "I got 45 minutes. I like to be early enough for a job interview to get lost at least twice."

"Come on, then, I'll walk you down there." We set off. "What are you interviewing for?"

"They need a counsellor," Alice said. "Do you work at Carleton these days, then, Charlie?"

I shook my head. "I'm looking for someone. The other day, I saw a young fella looked like he belonged to Gord White's family. Same bushy red hair and everything."

"I think those foolish old hairstyles must be coming back, Charlie. We were out looking for work in Winnipeg—you know, staying with my brother and his family—and I saw a girl with the Farrah-Fawcett hair, just like my kid sister used to have. You remember my sister Dar, right?"

I nodded. "Sure."

"Well, this girl with the Farrah-Fawcett hair was the living spit of Dar. I thought at first it might be Dar's oldest, Jennifer, run away again."

"But it wasn't her, then."

"No," Alice said. "I called home that night to ask Dar where Jennifer was, and Dar must have thought I was cracked. 'She's down in the basement, listening to her CDs,' Dar said, 'because she's grounded again.'"

"But the girl you saw—she looked exactly like Dar?" I asked.

"Just like her for this world," Alice said.

"I don't suppose she was dressed in seventies gear," I said.

Alice eyed me. "She was dressed like the bottom of a clothes barrel from the Salvation Army. What made you think of that, Charlie Carter?"

"We're here," I said, pointing out the building.

Alice didn't move. "I still got twenty minutes before my interview," she said, and looked at me with her eyebrows raised inquisitively.

"Oh, it's nothing," I said. "This young fellow I saw was dressed twenty years out of style, too. I hate to think of those styles coming back. Speaking of Dar, how is she?"

"Not so good, really. I know Jennifer got her drove half cracked, but she seemed to have something else bothering her. Started crying, but wouldn't tell me why."

"That doesn't sound like her."

"No," Alice admitted. She shook herself briskly, like a small terrier. "Well, wish me luck on the job, then."

"Good luck, Alice," I scribbled my home phone number on the back of one of my defunct business cards still lurking in my wallet. "Give me a ring at home when you find out how it went, good or bad. And here's Dana's home number, too. Give her a call and let her know you're in town."

Alice waved as she disappeared into the building, and I pulled out my map again, and headed back up the road, on the lookout for a washroom. After I turned away from the urinal, one of the stall doors opened, and out walked the familiar-looking boy who had I had last seen bedding down by an ATM.

"Do you manage to shake that cold?" I said.

He constructed a very small smile. "Yessir," he said.

His clothes seemed more rumpled than when I had last seem him, and he looked much more tired.

"My name's Charlie," I reminded him. "You can call me 'sir' if you'd rather, but I prefer 'Charlie'. This can't be a great place to panhandle," I said, preparing to listen to his voice with some care.

"It's not," he said. "But nobody hassles me here, either."

"Who hassled you downtown?" I asked in concern.

"Practically everybody. Cops. People I asked for money. The asshole who stole my backpack."

I suddenly realized he hadn't had his backpack with him the night I bought the Thai food. "How long ago did you get robbed?"

"It's got to be at least a week," he said, but not sounding sure.

I had made up my mind about his voice. "You're from Newfoundland too, aren't you?"

He looked at me, a little worried. "I'm not sure what you mean," he said.

Perhaps I was wrong. "I was born in St. John's, Newfoundland. I thought by your accent you were from Newfoundland too. Are you from Cape Breton, then?"

"I'm not sure where I'm from," he said.

"Well, your parents, then—either of them from the east coast?"

"I don't know," he said, now starting to tremble.

"Son," I said, "what's wrong?" He wouldn't speak. "I can see something's wrong. You don't have to tell me what it is. But I'd like to help, if I can."

"You can't," he whispered. Then he looked at me, as if he were remembering that when he had asked for change, I had given him five dollars. "I don't know where I'm from, but it's not here. I don't know this city. I don't know how I got here. I don't remember when I got here. I don't know who I am."

"You're sure you won't let me take you to the hospital," I said as the taxi pulled away from the curb. I had temporarily abandoned my bicycle and my search for GBW.

He shook his head. If he was telling the truth, and his memory loss wasn't caused by doing drugs, then I really couldn't blame him. If he just had amnesia, the hospital wasn't going to offer much immediate help. We rode for a while in silence.

Quickly I said, "Don't stop to think—quick, show me how you'd yaffle splits."

The boy crooked his left forearm upward at the elbow to make his arm form two sides of a triangle.

"You're left-handed," I said. Being a leftie myself, I always notice.

He looked down at his left hand, straightening his arm. "Yeah," he said slowly.

"And you know how to yaffle wood," I added carelessly.

"Sure," he replied, then looked at me sharply. The cab had pulled up in front of my house, and I busied myself paying off the cabby.

Cath didn't seem to be around, but I could hear Paul's music playing upstairs. I hustled my charge into the room we use as a library, and closed the door. I took an index card and a ball-point pen from a table, and sat on the table's edge, and waved him into a chair.

"In a moment," I said as I scrawled a couple of words on one of the index, "I'm going to show you three rooms—a bathroom, a bedroom, and the kitchen—and invite you to make use of them in any order that makes sense to you."

"It sure is nice of you, sir," he mumbled.

I cleared my throat then. "Before we do that, I just want you to read what's on that card." And I passed him the index card.

He looked at it as if it were a trap. "It says 'Pouch Cove,'" he said.

"Yes, it does," I agreed.

"So what?"

"You pronounced it correctly … Pooch Cove, not Powch Cove like it's spelled."

"Uh-huh," he said, and waited.

"You know what a yaffle is, and you know how to pronounce Pouch Cove. You've been to Newfoundland at least. There's a lot more to find out, but we have a place to start."

I showed him the kitchen and encouraged him to fix himself whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, provided Cath wasn't in the kitchen. When he asked if he could use the shower, I gave him clean towels and my spare bathrobe, and left him in the guest bedroom.

Cath looked stunned. "You invited a stranger to stay with us."

"Yes."

She waited, then spoke up again when I didn't. "You could have called first."

"I did. You weren't home."

"I don't want him here overnight," Cath said.

"He has nowhere else to sleep," I explained.

"He can sleep wherever he slept last night," she said firmly. "What's his name?"

That was a sticky one. "I don't know. He's lost his memory."

"He claims he lost his memory?"

"He doesn't claim he's lost his memory; he doesn't remember his name or where he's from."

"And you're perfectly happy to have this mental patient in the same house with your wife and child," Cath fumed.

"He's from back home, and he needs help. And, Cath, his face is so familiar. It's like I know him, or his family back home, but I can't put my finger on it."

"Maybe I should go now," the boy said. I hadn't heard him enter, but he had joined us in the kitchen.

I expected Cath to accept that offer immediately, but she just stared and stared.

It was very quiet in the car as I drove him over to Dana's. Dana was waiting outside on her front walk.

"Welcome," Dana said, holding out her hand. "I've got the pull-out in the basement all made up." We moved inside. Dana didn't shut the front door.

"No luggage?" Dana asked. She was looking at the boy under the bright light in the hall.

I handed the boy a small bag. "It's one of my old pairs of jeans and a T-shirt," I said. "And some underwear. It'll be a bit big, but at least it's something you can wear while you're laundering what you've got on."

"Okay, Charlie, we'll take it from here," Dana said, grabbing me by my shoulders and turning me to face the door. As I walked away, I heard her say, "I'm Dana, Charlie's sister. You know, I think I saw you on the bus a few weeks back …"

I hesitated, drove right past our own driveway, then changed my mind, and backed up and put the car in the garage. Cath was sitting in the living room, her hand covering her mouth and chin, and staring at a point on the carpet six feet away. As soon as she heard me, she said, "I can't believe you had the nerve to say his face was familiar!"

"Well, it is."

"Of course it's familiar. Did you really think I wasn't going to spot it? This boy is your son, isn't he, Charlie?"

I felt like the slowest, least observant person on the planet. Yes, that was it. The boy reminded me of myself at that age. I hadn't recognized myself. Every time I've told this story, the person listening always guesses that before I get to this point in the story. Long before. But see how fast you are when it happens to you.

I started to sit down slowly.

"Hold it!" Cath barked. "Don't think you're parking your butt anywhere around here."

I knocked on Dana's door. She pulled it open briskly and said, "He's asleep, and I don't think you should wake him."

I held up my overnight case. "Cath threw me out. Can I sleep on your couch?"

I sat on the floor while Dana gathered sheets, then didn't even offer to help as Dana made the couch.

"What did Cath say?" Dana asked, whipping the sheet straight.

"She thinks he's my son," I said.

Dana shook a pillow into a pillowcase.

Dana sat on the couch-bed. "How many others were there before Cath?" she asked.

I felt my face growing hot. "Three," I said. "And I always used protection."

"You've heard condoms aren't a hundred percent effective, right?"

"Obviously they're not. I can't believe nobody told me I had a son." I winced as I thought about telling Paul he had a half-brother. "Another son."

"Maybe only one other person knows," Dana said.

"I only needed one person to tell me," I said.

The next morning, Dana started right in the moment I walked into the kitchen. "Do I know the mother?" she asked.

I thought about the three possibilities. "I think so," I said, not looking her in the face.

Dana nodded, then went to fetch her laptop computer. She was plugging it in when the boy walked tentatively into the kitchen.

I looked at him, seeing so much of myself in him. I must have been staring, because Dana called out "Good morning!" in a voice so clear that I knew there had been an awkward silence.

"Good morning," the boy said to Dana.

"What would you like for breakfast?" Dana asked him.

"Could I have a glass of apple juice?"

"Of course," Dana nodded, and proceeded to get it for him.

"Could I drink my juice on your back deck?" the boy asked. Dana slid the patio door open. He went out, and shut the door behind him.

"This is silly," I said to Dana. "I have to tell him."

"Not yet," she said.

"Don't you get it? I will never want to have to tell him. So I'd better get it over with, right now."

"You're thinking about the best time for you to tell him," said Dana, sitting down at her laptop again. "I'm thinking about the best time for him to hear it."

"When would that be?" I sneered.

"Well, for sure it'd be after you know who his mom is," Dana said, clicking keys. "I guarantee you, he'll have questions about why you—I mean, about you and her."

She turned the laptop around so that I could use it. Dana had told her address book program to display all our mutual acquaintances who were female. At the top of the list were girls that Dana knew I had dated before going off to university. "You know how to use this, right?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, and she left to join the boy in the sunshine on the back deck.

I looked around furtively, and opened the record of Laurie, the second girl I had ever slept with. She hadn't married, as far as Dana knew. If she'd had children, Dana didn't know about them. I moved on to Janice's record—the third girl I had slept with. After her, I hadn't slept with anyone until I met Cath. Janice had married a man I didn't know, and they had one daughter, who was now 12.

Dana had no record for the first girl I had ever slept with. That was because my first lover had been a one-night stand with whom Dana was not friends and who I had barely known even then.

They say you never forget your first time. Unfortunately true. Joan had practically pulled me into bed, and I found her so frightening the next morning that after she ushered me out, I never got in contact with her again, and was relieved when she didn't come looking for me.

I wanted to believe I hadn't sired a child with Joan. I tried to tell myself that Joan knew exactly where I lived, and that Joan hadn't been the type to be shy about demanding child support. It was true, but it didn't seem to calm me anyway.

I couldn't make myself believe that I had been Joan's only time that month. I knew it certainly hadn't been her first time ever. She had opened a box of a dozen condoms, and had dumped out the remaining four.

It had to have been either Janice or Laurie. I couldn't bring myself to hope it had been Laurie. I could only bring myself to hope that it was all some kind of mistake.

Janice or Laurie. Both still lived in St. John's. I closed the database, picked up my cellular phone, and went outside to Dana's front lawn. I called Marine Atlantic, and booked passage on the ferry from North Sydney to Argentia, so as to make landfall as close to St. John's as possible. Traffic on the ferry was light. I could have a wide choice of sailings. I choose a night crossing, two weeks away.

I walked around back, and the boy was just going back inside. I sat down next to Dana. "I'm going back home," I said. "Two weeks."

Dana nodded. "When you're lost, try to get home. Going to ask about the boy?"

"I'm going to have to ask if any of my ex-lovers ever put up a kid for adoption, or anything like that."

"There are worse places to start."

I started envisioning them.

A little later in the morning, I parked outside our house until I saw Cath drive away. Then I left myself in and packed a suitcase in one heck of a hurry. I threw clothes in willy-nilly, not bothering to fold them. I added an old address book that listed most of the people I knew back home.

Back at the car, I opened the trunk to throw in my suitcase and, when I closed it, Paul was standing next to me.

"Mom's really pissed," he told me.

"Yeah," I said.

"She's even more pissed than that time I—" Paul began.

"Paul," I said sharply.

He changed the subject. "Are you living with Aunt Dana?"

"I'm staying with her for the time being, yes."

"I guess that's okay," he allowed.

"You know about the young fellow, right?" I asked.

"Mom said you brought a derelict or something into the house."

"Yes," I said. "I did." I didn't care for the word "derelict," but it didn't seem to be the time to say so.

Paul looked like he wanted to ask a question. Minimum. His face twisted up, and the question came shooting out of him. "Are you coming back?"

"I hope so," I told him. "But it might not happen overnight."

Paul looked relieved. He shuffled his feet. "Anyway," he said.

"Call me at your aunt Dana's if you want," I offered, and he nodded and walked into the house. I pulled away from the curb before Cath came back.

When I arrived back at Dana's, I let myself in and called out, "I'm back!" No answer. I unloaded a couple of bags of groceries, tripped over one of the cats, then headed upstairs to scrub Dana's bathroom for her, and passed right by the library. There hadn't been a sound or a movement, but something made me go back for a second look.

The boy was sitting in the middle of the floor, his gaze transfixed on the photo album in his hands. He had pulled down dozens of the photo albums and left them open on the floor. As I got nearer, I could see that there were tears in his eyes, and he didn't look up.

I sat on the floor a few feet away.

"What is it?" I asked.

"It's my mom," he said. "A picture of my mom."

I felt the blood draining from my face, from my arms, and from my legs. I didn't have a clue where all the blood could be going, but my heart was beating so fast, the blood had to be headed somewhere in a hurry.

"You're sure it's your mom?" I said. I was having trouble speaking.

He nodded, and bit his lip. I had too many ideas why he might be crying, but no solid information as to what the real reason was. I didn't know how to ask for further information.

"Can I see?"

He took the picture from the album, looked at it for a moment longer, and handed it to me. I took it, but didn't look down.

I shut my eyes, lowered my head, and opened my eyes.

It was a picture of my mother.

And no, I had never done the deed with my own mother. Something else was going on.

"Tell me what you recognize," I said.

He looked at me as though I had a dozen heads, all suddenly speaking Farsi. "It's my mom," he said. "I recognize her face."

"Anything else?"

"Well, she's sitting on the front step at Grandma's place."

Right. Except Grandma was long dead, and it wasn't her place any more. It was brother Si's place now. And that wasn't the worst news I had to give him.

"Good," I said, trying to be encouraging.

"And she's wearing that jade necklace she lost."

"At Easter-time."

"No, Christmas. We tore the vacuum cleaner to pieces in case it had been sucked up into it, and it never had good suction after that. She had to call up a lot of friends and ask if their Christmas bags had had her necklace in it. It finally turned up when we took down the tree, hanging from a branch at the back."

I waited to see if there was more, but he didn't seem to know the end of the story. The necklace had never turned up. But my dad had gone out and bought as near a duplicate as he could find on Boxing Day, and planted the replacement for my mother to find when the tree came down on Old Christmas Day. And that story my father had refused to share with anyone, as long as my mother was alive.

I handed the picture to Dana.

"I don't understand," she said.

"This is his mother," I repeated.

"This is our mother," she said, as if I were mistranslating a especially difficult passage of a particularly obscure language.

"It's his mother," I said. "He told me about the whole damn story about the necklace."

"How can this be possible?" Dana asked.

I sat down heavily in the recliner and swung it back fiercely. I just looked at Dana.

"Mom would not have cheated on Dad," Dana said.

I said nothing, belligerently.

Dana looked at me for a while, also saying nothing. "I'll see you in the morning." Dana stood up, rinsed her coffee cup in the sink, and strode upstairs to bed. I stayed up for five minutes longer, just to show her what I thought of her, then turned off all the lights and curled up on the couch.

I woke up the next morning feeling insanely cheerful. I was just pouring pancake batter into the skillet when Dana returned from her morning run.

"What happened to you?" she said.

"The first thought I had this morning was the sudden realization that I didn't accidentally get anyone pregnant."

We both heard creaking as the boy came upstairs. "I smelled the pancakes," he said.

"Another who looks pretty happy this morning," Dana said.

"I know who my mom is," he said simply. "She can tell me who I am and what I'm doing in Ottawa."

Dana and I looked at each other.

"How are you going to find her?" Dana asked him.

The boy looked stricken. "I figured one of you would know where to find her."

"She—" Dana began. "I—"

"Son, I'm afraid she's dead," I interrupted.

"No. She can't be," the boy whispered. "I was just talking to her last week about coming home for her birthday."

"Son, you're confused," I said gently. "Last week you were looking for a place to sleep downtown, remember?"

Dana jumped in quickly. "What date exactly is her birthday?"

He looked at her suspiciously, as though she had laid a clumsy and obvious trap for him. "March 1 most years. February 29 officially."

"Then you it couldn't have been last week you were talking to her about coming home for her birthday," Dana pointed out. "It's September."

The boy looked frightened. "I was sure it was just last week. It feels like last week."

"It wasn't even last year," Dana said. "She's been dead for three years now."

He whimpered. "Mom," he said, and tears started rolling down his cheeks again.

I swallowed. "How old was your mother going to be on her birthday?" I asked.

"Fifty," he seemed to be pleading with us. "She said her younger brother, Uncle Reuben, was teasing her about the being over the hill, and she said she was exactly the same age as that magazine lady, what's-her-name. Helen Gurley Brown."

I was now totally lost, and the look I took at Dana made it plain she was at sea as well. Our mother had turned fifty at least twenty years before, and our Uncle Reuben had been killed in an accident seven months after that birthday, the same day Henderson scored his goal to win against Russia. Uncle Reuben had died before the boy sitting in Dana's kitchen had been born, probably.

We got the boy calmed down eventually, and he and I went for a walk around the neighbourhood. A lot of the walk was silent except for our footsteps.

"How did you get here?"

"I told you. I can't remember."

"What's the first thing you do remember seeing in Ottawa?"

The boy wrinkled his brow upward. He took a long time to answer. "A plume of white smoke from a factory."

"Was the factory on a river?"

"Yeah, it was on the other side of the river. Hang on—" His voice sounded excited. "Okay. Before I saw the factory, I remember feeling cold. There was fog all around me, whichever way I turned my head. Then the fog cleared a little, and I saw a lot of water, and I thought it was a harbour, but I didn't recognize it. On the other side of the harbour—"

"The river," I put in.

"Well, on the other side was this white smoke from a factory. Then I stood up to get a better look. I didn't know where I was. So I turned around, and I was staring smack into this jesus-big cliff of really dark rock. I craned my neck all the way back, and couldn't really see what was on top. It made me think of the trail down below Signal Hill a little, except the rock was too dark and sharp."

"What'd you do then?"

"I saw this guy jogging down the path from my left. After he ran by, I figured I'd go in the same direction he had. I followed the path. On my left, I saw some locks and this big, impressive-looking grey building. I got to some steps, and climbed them to see what was on top of the cliff. It was the houses of Parliament."

"Did you know where you were?" I asked.

"I was really scared," Chuck said, avoiding the question.

"We still don't know how you got there," I mused.

"What's it to you how I got there, anyway?" he snapped.

"Maybe if we can figure out how it happened, we can figure out why it happened."

"Man, you're really stuck on why, aren't you? Who cares why it happened?"

I didn't say anything. I listened to our footsteps again.

"Is your mom still alive?" the boy asked me.

I shook my head.

"How about your dad?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

"When did you last see him?"

"Six months ago."

He nodded, and we walked back to Dana's in silence.

A taxi pulled into Dana's driveway as we approached it, and Dana and a strange woman got out. The woman was carrying a package under her arm. Dana held up her arm, and jerked it back over her shoulder, telling us to come on. The taxi sat in the driveway, and the driver looked impatient.

Once the four of us were in the kitchen, Dana told us the strange woman was here to do us a favour. The woman sat at the table, then opened her package and took out a large stamp pad and several pieces of card. Dana motioned the boy into another chair. He sat.

The strange woman flipped open the stamp pad, selected a card, and said "Just relax your hand" to the boy.

The boy drew his hand back. "I don't want to be fingerprinted."

Dana laid her hands on the boy's shoulders very gently. "Yeah you do," she said. The boy closed his eyes, opened them, and held out his left hand. The woman grasped it, then inked and rolled each of the boy's fingers in turn, and repeated the process with the boy's right hand.

Dana handed the boy a damp cloth, and sat in the chair herself. "My turn," she said. After she was done, she turned to me and said, "Now you." So I got fingerprinted too.

The strange woman slid each card into its own envelope, said "I'll let you know" to Dana, and let herself out. I heard the taxi pull away.

"Who was that?" I asked, wiping my fingers.

"A friend," she said.

"I didn't get her name," I explained.

"No," Dana agreed. "And she didn't get yours." And she refused to say anything more.

I looked at the boy, who had an uncertain expression on his face. "I wonder which of us did it." I tried to smile.

"I wonder what it was we did," the boy said.

That Saturday, when Dana came home from the market, she brought me upstairs to the library and closed the door behind us. "I heard from my friend today."

"The fingerprint lady?"

"Uh-huh. You know how people like her match fingerprints?"

"Not really."

"They look for similarities between two fingerprints—say, a print of an index finger found at a crime scene, and the index-finger print of a criminal. I asked her how many similarities there could be in a single fingerprint. She said anywhere between 75 and 175."

I whistled and looked at my left index finger. "I didn't realize so many."

"Do you know how many similarities they have to find for a court to accept that they have a match?"

Now I felt like a straight-man. "Thirty-five?"

"Nope. Twelve."

I frowned. "That's not very many."

"Would you feel better if they had fifty matches?" Dana asked.

"Well, wouldn't you?" I asked.

"My friend found fifty matches for every single finger and both thumbs."

"Wait a minute. She matched the boy's fingerprints to some criminal investigation?"

"No, she matched the boy's fingerprints to yours, Charlie."

I smiled, waiting for the punch line.

Dana didn't smile. "She said she might have found more matches, but she gave up after fifty because it was a waste of her time. You and the boy have identical fingerprints."

"Is your friend going to share this information with anyone?" I asked Dana.

She lit a fire in the wood stove, let it catch, then tossed in the fingerprint cards. I watched the flames turned them black.

"No," Dana replied. "Provided neither of you ever share with anyone the information that you met her, either at my house or anywhere else, at any time."

"What are we going to do with this information?"

Dana smiled. "We're going to play Family Feud."

Dana sat at the kitchen table, looking for all the world like a TV quiz master. Her back mostly straight, but leaning forward a little into the camera so that the folks at home would feel involved. "The important thing is that you write the answers without thinking any more than you have to. Write the first thing that pops into your head."

The boy and I looked as grim as any TV contestants as we gripped our pens and index cards.

"What's your favourite song?" Dana asked.

The boy and I scribbled furiously, then handed our cards to Dana. She held up the boy's card. "Here Comes the Sun," she announced. Then she held up my card. "Let Me Fish Off Cape St. Mary's," Dana told us.

I relaxed a little and smiled at the boy. The boy smiled back, then made a face at me. "Ewww," he said.

Dana pretended to clip his ear. "Next," she said.

Again we poised over our index cards. "What movie star would you most like to date?" Dana called out. Again we handed our cards to her.

"Katharine Ross," Dana read from the boy's card. She looked puzzled, and glanced at me. I was chewing on my lip, so Dana proceeded to read out my card. "Uma Thurman," she read, and threw the card at me. "Honestly, Charlie, at your age!"

"Shut up," I urged pleasantly. "Do it now."

The boy looked puzzled. "Oo-ma which?"

"You two should swap heart-throbs," Dana suggested. "Be closer to your ages. All right, now. Time for the lightning round. Four questions. As soon as you're finished writing, drop your card in the box."

Dana reached under the table and brought out four empty cube tissue boxes, each numbered consecutively, 1 to 4.

"Question one: What's your favourite soft drink?" she asked. We both scribbled.

Once the cards were in the first box, she continued. "Question two: What's your favourite book?" More scribbling.

"Question three: What country would you most like to visit?"

"Question four: Where did you lose your virginity?"

I thought I had dodged that bullet. I scrawled the answer with an uneasy hand. I put my card in the fourth box and played with my pen as Dana drew a pair of cards from each box in turn, and placed each pair face down on the table.

"Charlie, come here by these cards," Dana directed. "Left hand on the fourth pair, right hand on the third pair." She herself slid her right thumb under the first pair, and her left thumb on the second pair. "On the count of three, we'll flip 'em all over. Ready?"

The boy nodded, and I said, "Guess so."

Dana counted it off as quickly as she could without losing me. "One, two, three." We flipped our pairs of cards.

The first pair of cards read, "Root beer."

The second pair of cards, "Stranger in a Strange Land."

The third, "New Zealand."

The fourth pair of cards read "In Joan's apartment, on the couch." and "On the sofa in J's apartment."

We had practically identical answers. Written in practically identical handwriting.

Dana had stopped looking triumphant. At first, she had been skimming the cards, nodding vigorously at the confirmation she was receiving, but now she wasn't looking at any of the cards or their handwriting. She was looking into her lap with her mouth open slightly, and wouldn't look me in the eye when I asked her if she wanted something to drink.

I looked at the boy. "Are you okay?"

"I feel a little sick," said the boy. He kept looking at my face, then looking away.

"How long have you known?"

He shrugged. "How long have you known?"

"Since our fingerprints came back identical," I said.

"Right," he said. "That lady suckered me by taking Dana's prints."

"Me too," I admitted.

"It's called misdirection," Dana said.

"I saw Cath and Roger together in the supermarket today," Dana said.

I wrinkled my brow. "You mean, shopping together?"

Dana put down her own bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. "Oh Charlie," she said, and then she didn't say anything for a time I have no idea how to measure.

We both jumped when we heard someone rapping loudly on the door. I looked at Dana. Was she expecting visitors? She shook her head "no". "You hide out in the back yard!" Dana told the boy. I headed for front door.

Standing on Dana's front step was a middle-aged woman in a suit. "Can I help you?" I said.

She showed me identification with a trillium logo on it. "Child welfare services, sir. May I come in?"

"Child welfare?" I said. "What's this all about?"

"We have a report that there's an underage runaway here."

"Who reported that?" I asked.

"Charlie," Dana said, "it doesn't matter who."

"Ma'am, I'm Barbara Zimmermann from child welfare services." She still had her ID in her hand, and showed it to Dana. "We got to do this here on the porch?"

"No," said Dana. "Come on in."

Ms Zimmermann looked around the living room, but didn't sit down. "Where's the boy right now?" Her face was dark, as though she had spent a lifetime in the sun and wind, and lined, as if that lifetime had been rough. Her hair was a coarse blond and, where it parted, snow-white.

"He's hardly a boy," Dana said.

"That's right," I put in. "He's over 18." I stopped to consider. Was he?

"How old is he, exactly?" Ms Zimmermann asked.

I thought fast. "He's 21."

"Our report says he's a lot younger than that. Boy or not, where is he right now?"

"Well, sure, he looks young for his age," Dana said. "That's no reason for people to be telling lies about his having run away."

"You're sure they're lies?" Ms Zimmermann asked. "Just who exactly is the boy, anyway?"

"The young man," I amended, "is our nephew Chuck."

Ms Zimmermann stared at me. I couldn't read her look. "You know, I asked twice already where he is right now. If I have to ask a third time, I might not be so polite about it."

"Probably down at Dow's Lake, hitting on high school girls," Dana said. "He'll be back for supper."

Ms Zimmerman glanced at her watch. So did I, almost reflexively. It was three o'clock. Dana had chosen an excellent time. I couldn't imagine a child welfare lady wanting to hang around for a couple of hours at least.

"And you say this boy is 21?" said Ms Zimmermann. It sounded like a surrender to me. "Okay. But I'll need to see some ID for him." No, maybe not a complete surrender.

"Like what?" Dana frowned.

"His passport," Ms Zimmermann suggested.

Dana laughed. "He's up here visiting us from Newfoundland. Would you bring your passport to visit another province?"

"How about his birth certificate? Driver's licence?"

Dana shrugged. "I don't know. Probably not the birth certificate. Maybe he brought his driver's licence."

"Looks like I'll have to make a second visit," Ms Zimmermann said. "Damn."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "He hasn't run away, and anyway he's over 18. He's none of child welfare's business."

"You don't understand how this works," Ms Zimmermann said stiffly. "A report has been made. I can't close it unless I verify that the boy is over 18."

"What if he doesn't have the ID with him? What if it's back home with his folks, in Newfoundland?" I asked.

"If it is, you better have them courier it up to you," Ms Zimmermann said. "If I can't verify that he's of age, I'll have to take him into official custody of the province." She sighed, sounding tired. "I'll be back here tomorrow morning at nine to talk to the boy." She got up to go.

"I'll see that he's here, Ms Zimmermann," I said.

"Great," she said. She sounded very tired. She looked awkward. "I mean, thank you." She walked slowly to her car, then turned. "I could look for him at Dow's Lake before I head back to the office. I don't suppose you remember what he's wearing?"

"Jeans and a T-shirt," I said.

Ms Zimmermann shifted her gaze to Dana. Dana said, "Red T-shirt with a big white maple leaf on the back and front. Birkenstock sandals, dark brown. Faded Levi's—I mean naturally faded, not pre-washed or anything like that. He might be wearing aviator sunglasses."

Ms Zimmermann made a few notes rapidly. "Thanks," she told Dana. "It's worth a try anyway." She opened her car door. "If not, see you tomorrow morning." She got in and drove off.

"What was all that?" I asked Dana as we headed back in the house.

"Improvisation," Dana said, heading for the kitchen. "She'll be a long time looking for a kid in a shirt like that." She opened the door. "Kid! Kid, get it in gear!"

The boy wasn't immediately visible in the yard. And there weren't many places he could conceal himself. Dana disappeared outside, then returned.

"Jesus, he is a runaway," Dana said. "Where would he go? We have to find him," she said, taking her car keys off the hook in the hall, and her cell phone from the closet.

"I don't get it," I said.

"Charlie, if we can't prove he's over 18, he's going to end up caught in the system. Once the system takes notice of him, they're going to wonder a lot of things. Like why there's no record of him anywhere. If they could figure out where to send him, they'd deport him."

We both ran to our cars. "I'll go east, you go west," Dana said. "Stick to the main streets. He will."

I ignored Dana to start with. I drove up and down the side streets nearest her place, expecting to find the boy mooching around the block. When he didn't turn up, I concentrated on the thoroughfares. Dana phoned me once to report no progress, and I returned the favour. After about an hour, I was ready to give up and head back home. I had gotten myself wedged into the westbound traffic on Carling when I saw a figure thumbing a ride. I squinted. It was the boy, all right. I pulled over and leaned over to open the passenger door. I had to stretch.

When I straightened up, I saw the boy running down the street. The light ahead of me turned red. I cursed, got out of the car, and started running. Immediately people started to say it with horns.

I guess my wind is reasonably good on account of the biking, but the boy was better. At first I managed to close the distance between us slightly, but soon I realized couldn't close it any more, and eventually he began to pull away. After a while, he looked back. And collided with a kid on a skateboard.

The skateboard kid was hopping around with his fists raised, waiting for my boy to get to his feet. But my younger self couldn't get up off the sidewalk. Disgusted, the skateboard kid picked up his skateboard and jaywalked across Carling, causing one car to screech to a halt.

"Take my hand," I told the boy.

He suggested a compromise: "Screw you."

I turned around, ran back to my car, and drove it back to where the boy still lay, not making a lot of noise, but grimacing. I picked him up and dumped him in the back seat of the car. Then I turned onto the 417 and headed back east. Toward Montreal and points east. Like home. When in trouble, head home. It'll give you time to figure out your next move.

After a while, the boy spoke up. "You're taking an awfully long time to get to the hospital."

"You can't go to a hospital," I said. I explained about the visit from child welfare. "The system has taken notice of you. You can't afford that. Your only chance is for you to be somebody else's problem. If you're over 18, you're not their problem. If I take you to a hospital, you are very definitely a problem. You don't have a health card, you don't have a social security number, you don't have a birth date. If I take you to the hospital, you better believe you are in the system."

"So where are we going?"

"Hang on a minute," I told him. I took my cell phone from my shirt pocket, and dialled Dana. When she answered, I said, "Package retrieved."

"Thank Christ," she said. "Where are you?"

"I just got on to the Queensway, heading east. Don't wait up." I hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. I rolled down the window and threw the phone out.

"What's going on?" He sounded incredibly irritated, but it might have been the pain.

"To prove you're at least 18, we need documentation. We're headed back to Newfoundland to get some. We're going to steal my nephew's—our nephew's—birth certificate."

"There must be documentation closer than Newfoundland, for God's sake."

"Ah, but Dana told the child welfare lady that you were visiting from Newfoundland, so it has to be from there. We're going to claim my nephew's birth certificate."

"Won't he need it?"

"Not since he drowned five years back."

The boy thought about that for a moment. "Christ. Christ." Then: "Where does he keep it?"

"His dad—dammit, our brother—Si will have stored it in the attic of the house in Bakeapple Cove."

"If we're going all the way back to Newfoundland, wouldn't it be quicker to fly?"

"Not the way I drive," I said, changing lanes. "We are not going to fly for several reasons. First, speed is not always a virtue. I need time to think about the second step."

"Hang on," he interrupted. "Back up. I must have missed the first step."

"Get you out of the line of fire. Or rather, out of the reach of the child welfare lady. With any luck, her jurisdiction is provincial…." I suddenly realized. "Crap. I should have crossed into Gatineau immediately." I corrected course. "It'll take us longer to get to Montreal, but it's worth it."

"Okay. What's the second reason we're not flying?"

"I can't afford it. I've lost my job. I have no income, and limited funds. Those are all reason number two. Third, I have already booked passage on the ferry and don't want to lose my deposit."

"Cheap bastard," I heard him shift, and he gave a little bark of pain. "No kidding, my leg hurts. I think it's broken."

"Then I won't ask you to take a shift at the wheel. Let's just give it some time. With luck, the muscle will stiffen, making every moment agony."

"What kind of luck is that?"

"The kind of luck where you've injured a muscle, despite a lot of whinging about broken bones."

We drove along in silence for a long time. Then the boy spoke up.

"So who am I supposed to be?"

"Christ, you know who you are."

"No, I don't, and neither do you. But what I asked was, who I am meant to be? I'm going to be my cousin Chuck, right? But who I am until then?"

"Right now, you're my nephew Chuck, just in case we run into someone who knows you're not my son."

"Give me a minute to catch up. A fictional son?"

"I have a son. Paul."

"Heavy." Chuck paused. "Okay, right now I'm Chuck."

"Exactly, and I'm your uncle. Once we get to Newfoundland, you can't pass as Chuck when we're among people who know he's dead. So you're Paul."

"I'm already confused, and I'm in on it. This is never going to work. Never."

"Why not?"

"About a zillion reasons. What if we're with people who know Chuck died and know Paul?"

"Paul hasn't been to Newfoundland since he looked like an armload of uncooked bread dough. You look enough like me to be my son." I started to laugh pretty hard, but got it under control.

"Chuck-Paul, son of Charlie. Great. Okay, if you're the father and I'm the son, then there's something I have to ask you."

I tensed slightly. "What's that?"

"Are we there yet?"

It's a long drive from Ottawa to North Sydney where you catch the ferry to Newfoundland. I'm not sure it's possible to make the trip in fewer than eighteen hours. It's even longer if you don't have anyone to spell you off and have to keep behind the wheel. We were into Quebec, pretty far along Autoroute 20, by the time hunger insisted that we stop.

I got us a burger and fries each at some fast-food restaurant. I wolfed mine down, eager to be back on the road. Somehow, Chuck had finished his food before I had.

"Another one for the road?" I asked.

"I have to go to the washroom," he said.

So I helped him hobble into the fast-food's toilet. He said he couldn't walk back to the car again. His jeans had a huge splotch of dried blood on the knee. I carried him to the back seat, then drove to the gas station and bought a huge bag of ice.

"Keep that on your leg," I told him, then slid into the driver's seat. As I turned the key in the ignition, I remember thinking, "I should really gas up while we've stopped." And then I looked at the gas gauge. Below empty. It was the first time I had thought to check.

Do you know Pinkerton's old motto? "We never sleep." It turns out that's not just private eyes. It's public ones as well. Maybe half an hour after we gassed up, I got pulled over by a police offer operating a speed trap. Chuck woke up, and blinked sleepily at the flashing red light.

I glanced into my side-view mirror and saw the officer approach. Young. Big. I rolled down my window. As he drew level, I said, "Good evening, officer."

A concerned look crossed his face. "You speak French?"

"No," I said.

The look grew more pronounced, but he swallowed whatever was on his mind. Probably no more in the mood for language practice than I was.

"May I see your licence and registration, please?"

I handed them over. He shone his flashlight on them, then on me.

"Do you know why I pulled you over?"

"No." When the law is involved, suspicions never equal knowledge.

"You were driving 118 kilometres per hour in a 100 kilometre zone."

Chuck chose this moment to try to sit up, and made a yelp that startled me. The police officer looked less happy, and shone the light on Chuck.

"Are you okay, son?" the officer asked.

"My leg hurts," Chuck said. "I want to go to the hospital."

"We're not going to the hospital," I snapped at him, then closed my eyes briefly. Bad move. Officer Speedtrap asked me to get out of the car, so I did. Chuck rolled down his window.

"Do you have some identification, son?" Officer Speedtrap asked.

"No," said Chuck.

"What's your name?"

"His name is Chuck Carter. He's my son," I said. I started quickly, then ended wearily in an effort to hide the quick start.

"Sir, please keep silent," Officer Speedtrap told me. He turned back to Chuck. "What happened to your leg?"

"I fell," Chuck said.

"And you want to go to hospital?" the officer asked him.

"Yes."

"I'll see you get there."

"No," I said.

Officer Speedtrap turned all of his attention back to me. "Sir, this boy is injured and needs medical attention."

"He's my son, and he's not going to hospital."

"Why not?" the officer said.

Good question.

"He's—we're Christian Scientists."

Police are not stupid. If it had been true, it would have sounded true.

"We don't believe in going to doctors or hospitals," I added. "If you force my son to go to one, I'm going to sue the Sûreté du Québec. And also you."

Officer Speedtrap looked at me. "We will discuss this at the station."

The three of us walked into the police station, Chuck supported by the officer, who helped him to a bench first thing. The desk sergeant, who had looked halfway to Nod, suddenly became fully alert without changing his facial expression much.

"Good evening, sir," I said. The sergeant didn't look intimidated by having to speak in English.

"Report, Savard," the sergeant said. You can't beat the police or the military for succinct conversation in front of civilians.

"The man was speeding. The boy is injured. The man will not let the boy go to hospital." You see?

"We're Christian Scientists. It is against our belief," I said.

Savard looked at me briefly, then back at his sergeant. "He said he would sue us."

"I will," I said. I hadn't wanted to be the one to raise that question, not in front of the superior officer.

The sergeant asked for my identification, and held onto it. He frowned at me when Chuck had no identification. He came out from behind his desk and sat next to Chuck.

"How do you know this man?" the sergeant asked.

"I'm his father," I said.

Savard bristled. "Sergeant, that is the second time he had not let the boy answer on his own."

"Because I think anyone looking at us would find it obvious," I said wearily. I sold the weary pretty hard.

The sergeant raised his eyebrows at me. He spoke to Chuck again: "How do you know this man?"

"He's—I'm his … son."

"Where's your mother?" Officer Savard asked him.

"I—I dunno," Chuck said.

Savard and the sergeant exchanged a glance. "Son," the sergeant asked Chuck, "is everything all right?"

"My leg hurts," Chuck said.

The sergeant walked back over to me. "Sir, I'd like to speak to this boy alone."

"Certainly not," I said. "He's underage. If you're going to question him, I'm going to be in the room. Or you can count on at least two lawsuits."

Savard weighed in. "Son," he asked Chuck, "would you feel more comfortable talking to us without this man present?"

"No," said Chuck. "Why?" He sounded puzzled.

"What do you think is going on here?" I asked the sergeant.

"I think," said the sergeant, "that some things are odd. It is odd that you say you are Christian Scientists, yet the boy asks to go to hospital. It is odd that this boy does not know where his mother is."

"Once my son is of age, he can make his own decisions about hospitals. Until he is, he follows the beliefs he was brought up in. I won't debate that, with him or with you, unless it is in front of an impartial judge with a very good lawyer by my side." I was careful to keep my tone even. Lose your temper with the police, and you're done. "He doesn't know where his mother is because I was given sole custody after the divorce. Which tells you something about what kind of a mother she was."

Savard smiled like I'd been caught in the second trap of the evening. "The boy's mother should verify the custody question, I think."

The sergeant shot a dirty look at his underling, which could only work to my benefit. To say nothing of how we had leapfrogged past the issue of me proving Chuck was my son.

"Savard," said the sergeant. "Check whether we have a missing children or kidnap on Chuck or Charles or Charlie Carter."

We all waited quite a little while while Savard researched that dead end. It might have gone faster if it hadn't been the dead of night.

"Where does your wife live, Mister—?" The sergeant looked at my driver's licence. "Mister Carter?"

"In Ottawa." I could be as laconic as they.

"Her street address, please."

I stuck my jaw out a little, and paused. "Fifty-six Edgecliffe Avenue."

"Does she use her married name?"

"Yes," I said.

The sergeant pressed a speed-dial button on his phone, then spoke. "Listing for Ottawa. Carter. Five-six Edgecliffe Avenue."

"I'm glad it's not me waking Dana up at this hour," I said.

"Hello? This is Sergeant Gagnon of the Sûreté du Québec. The Québec police. Am I speaking to Dana Carter?"

Dana must have said yes.

"Do you have any custody rights for a Chuck Carter?"

I strained to hear. Eventually, Dana said no.

"Damn right you don't, bitch!" I shrieked at her. Good old Dana. She could have been a top-drawer con artist. Savard, of course, told me to shut up.

"Mrs Carter," the sergeant said, then stopped. "My apologies. Ms Carter—is Chuck Carter your son?"

No hesitation this time. I heard Dana's "yes" immediately, but faintly.

"He has been injured. It is not too serious, but we are being denied permission to take him to hospital. Can you give us that permission?" The sergeant listened. "No, I assure you he will be all right, but I would feel safer if he had a doctor look at him." The sergeant listened some more, then held the phone received in Chuck's direction. "She would like to speak with you."

"No!" I said. Savard insisted I sit down. Once firmly seated, I spoke with undiminished firmness: "The judge gave me the right to keep him from his mother. That'll be three lawsuits. I don't think your captain is going to be very happy with you, sergeant."

The sergeant bit down hard. "Mr Carter is adamant that you not speak to the boy, I am afraid, madame." Five bars rest. "I will ask."

"She would like to speak with you then, sir."

I hesitated. There was nothing I would have liked better than to assure Dana she had done brilliantly. Still, it was safer not to risk it and safer to be out of police custody as soon as humanly possible.

"No."

"He—yes, I understand. I am sorry to have troubled you, madame. No, I assure you the boy will be fine. Good night." The sergeant hung up. "Savard, you no doubt have copied down Mr Carter's particulars?"

Savard nodded.

"Including his licence plate number?"

"Yes sir."

"Then return Mr Carter and his son to their car."

I made a note to steal someone's licence plates at the first opportunity that wouldn't get me caught.

An hour later, when Chuck started griping about his leg, I got the cheap, near-worthless first-aid kit from the trunk. I pulled over, got the kit, raced back into the car, and threw the kit at him. I hurried back on the road.

Ten minutes after that, Chuck said, "I can't put this bandage on all by myself."

"Christ!" I screamed, pulled over, and fastened the tensor bandage around his leg rapidly, then got back on the highway.

Chuck didn't say a word for a long time after that.

Just before midnight, Chuck woke up.

"Where are we?" he said sleepily.

"In Quebec."

"Still?"

"There's a lot of Quebec. We're actually bypassing most of it, and the province still goes on for damn ever."

"'Time's it?"

"Maybe five minutes to twelve."

"Jesus, why didn't you stop at some motel? Are we going to miss the ferry or something?"

"Our reservation isn't for another two days and a bit," I said. "We'll stop in Edmundston."

"Why Edmundston?"

"It isn't in Quebec."

"You've got something against Quebec?"

"Just the motels," I said.

"Like what?"

"The ones I pick tend to skimp on the little amenities. Like heat in the rooms."

"Pick better motels."

"When someone else is paying, I will."

Chuck yawned. "How much longer?"

"Maybe another hour or more. How's your leg feel?"

"It hurts. I think the ice helped a little."

"You fell asleep."

"So?" Chuck said defensively.

"So I'm not that worried about your leg."

By the time we got to Edmundston, I was ready to collapse. The desk clerk cheerily told me we had gotten the last room available, cheerily told me where the ice machine was, and cheerily wished me a good night's sleep.

None of which helped shut up the drunken idiots in the next room, who acted as though they were the only people in the world. Chuck rolled his eyes, then turned out his light. I tried to sleep for fifteen minutes, then called the front desk. The clerk told me cheerily that she'd take care of it. Nothing happened. Someone started singing "Barrett's Privateers", and at least half a dozen others joined in. "Jesus," Chuck said.

After another fifteen minutes, I called the desk again. The clerk told me cheerily that she'd take care of it personally. As soon as I hung up the phone, I heard the phone ring in the next room.

"WHAT?" someone bellowed into the phone. "I CAN'T HEAR YOU." A pause. "LOOK, EVERYONE SHUT UP FOR A SECOND." There was relative silence. I could hear a voice, but couldn't make out what it was saying. Then the singing started again, with a few less voices.

"WHO WAS THAT, ALF?" one voice demanded.

"SOME ASSHOLE COMPLAINING ABOUT THE NOISE," Alf said.

I turned on my lamp, got up, went in the corridor, and pounded on the door. After fully a minute of pounding, someone opened the door abruptly. It had to be Alf. He was a large man with a soiled, too-small T-shirt that made his enormous beer gut seem frighteningly close to me. He had a beer in his hand.

"'The hell you want?" he asked, taking a pull at the beer.

"Could you keep the noise down?"

"'You the little jerk who complained about the noise?" he growled.

"I'm complaining about it now," I said.

"Shag off out of it," he said, and started to close the door. I moved forward and leaned hard against the door to stop it.

"Look," I said, "my son is trying to sleep …"

Alf threw his beer over his shoulder and grabbed my wrist. "I told you to shag off." He pushed me hard, and I fell backward against the compartment for the fire hose. The glass cracked against my back and broke. I looked down at the shards of glass on the carpet. When I heard soft footsteps, I looked up to see the desk clerk and a scared-looking teenage boy in a vest marked TRAINEE marching purposefully toward me. They came to a sudden halt when they saw the glass.

"If you're trying to reason with the partygoers, I hope you brought artillery," I said. "I just tried talking to them and failed."

The desk clerk knelt and started picking up the glass. "Gilles," she told the teenager. "Go tell Marie to call the police."

Gilles took off. I got the wastebasket from our room and gave it to the clerk to use for the glass, then headed for the front desk. I waited until Marie got off the phone with the police, then asked her, "Is there a twenty-four-hour drug store? I need a bottle of extra-strength analgesic and another tensor bandage for the boy's leg."

"I cannot help you with the bandage, but we keep extra-strength pain-killer behind the desk. It's strictly over-the-counter."

"It'll do," I said gratefully.

I got lost on the way back to our room. When I finally let myself in, I heard Chuck breathing deeply. He was asleep, and all was silence. I took two extra-strength tablets and collapsed into bed myself.

Around three-thirty in the morning, I woke up again. I might have had half an hour's rest. Chuck was moaning in his sleep. I took a look at his leg. It had swollen. I reached to take off the tensor bandage, then drew my hand back. I didn't know what to do next. So I woke up Chuck.

"Come on," I said.

"What's going on?"

"I want to have a friend look at that leg."

We gathered together our belongings, and I settled them and Chuck into the car. I checked out, and we headed off down the highway into the darkness.

"Where's your friend?"

"She's in Nova Scotia, in Wolfville."

"How far's that?"

"About eight or nine hours maybe."

"It'd be a lot simpler to take me to a hospital."

"No, it'd be a lot quicker to drive you to a hospital. After that, no part of it would be simple."

"Plenty simple for me," he muttered.

I said nothing.

"How good is your friend at doctoring?"

"She got through at least two years of nursing school," I said.

"Two years?"

"At least, I said."

"That's not much."

"Maybe not, but it's all she's likely to acquire before you see her. And it's all you're getting."

That finished the conversation for another hundred kilometres or so.

Incredibly, Chuck managed to doze off. When he awoke, he looked out the windows on all sides, very slowly.

"Where are we?" He seemed to be speaking slowly.

"Somewhere in New Brunswick."

Chuck squinted as he looked out each of the windows in turn.

"I had a dream," he said.

"What about?"

"It seemed real, this dream."

"Sometimes they do. What was this one about?"

"I was trying to remember how I ended up in the middle of Ottawa. And then I started to remember really clearly. I was feeling homesick. You know how it is when you're away from home for the first time?" Chuck looked at me, and I nodded. I felt an insane urge to laugh. It was my past, and I was asking myself if I remembered. I trod down hard on the accelerator, and nodded at Chuck.

Chuck continued. "Someone must have noticed I was homesick, because out of nowhere, this guy introduced himself. Eli Kelly. His father was a Newfoundlander. They lived in Galt. Eli said there was a Newfie night …" Chuck wrinkled his nose with distaste at the word "Newfie". "… a Newfie night in Galt that weekend. All of a sudden I wanted a feed of fish and brewis more than I wanted a girlfriend whose favourite colour was sex. Eli said he'd drive me up to Galt. But then he had to back out. He told me to go on without him. Offered me his car, but I wouldn't take it, so he drew me a map of where to go and gave me his father's telephone number."

As Chuck described it, memories of each part unfolded for me. I remembered Elias Kelly. He had made the Dean's List that year, which is more than I ever had.

"I put enough for overnight into my pack, and hitched a lift as far as Woodstock. Then I spent hours standing by the side of the 401, waiting for a lift. Then a fog came up. God knows where from. I started to feel a little dizzy, and the fog seemed to be rolling at me in a bank, and then I was in the middle of it, engulfed by it.

"And then I was in Ottawa."

"Some dream," I said.

The sun was no longer just coming up, it was up.

"Why are you being such a pain in the ass?" Chuck asked me. "Have you totally lost it or something?"

"What?"

"I run away, so you run after me. The logical thing to do would be to let me shag off. I hurt my leg. There again, the logical thing to do would be get me some medical attention. You, of course, decide the only person who can look at me is three provinces away. So naturally you drive. You were really nice to me when I was living on the streets. Now you're like this combination of a prick and an asshole. What happened?"

I said nothing.

"I mean, seriously. I can see why you'd be freaked out. I'm freaked out myself. But what's pissing you off?"

I said nothing, but then, for a reply, neither did he. I caved in first.

"You know, I have reason to believe I'm not the only one who's being visited by his younger self."

"Yeah?" Chuck sounded really interested. "Who else?"

"A high school buddy of mine."

"I'll have heard of him, genius."

This seemed undeniable. "Gord White."

"Old Gord? How is he?"

"Dying."

Long pause. "Oh."

"Yeah. He's dying, and his younger self happens to show up."

"So what?"

"So I think old Gord is going to fade away, and young Gord has showed up to take his place. I think you're here because I'm going to fade away. I think you're my replacement."

When he spoke, his voice trembled. "How do you feel about being replaced?"

"I'm not going without a fight."

When Chuck didn't say anything, I looked in the rear-view mirror. He appeared to be thinking.

The next time I looked over at Chuck, just outside of Fredericton, he had his eyes tightly shut and a furrowed forehead. He bore his pain as best he could for six more hours. By the time the highway signs started mentioning Wolfville, he was ready to crack. And I was ready to drop. I pulled in at some high-end inn, and borrowed their phone book to look up Katie's name. There it was.

"Could you tell me where this is?" I asked the desk clerk.

She frowned. "Miss Baird likes her privacy," she said firmly. "She doesn't like to bothered by fans."

"I went to school with her," I said with equal firmness. "I just need directions to her house, which is, after all, listed in the phone book."

Sniff. "Head into town. Go straight until you see the third road on your left, and go up that. Turn right, then right again, and you'll see a white house not far from the cemetery gate."

Chuck was looking white when I got back to the car. I got lost, and stayed that way for at least ten minutes. Then I spotted the cemetery, found its gate, and knocked at the door of the nearest white house. No one came, not even when I knocked even louder. I looked around. No one stirring. Now what? I walked back to the car parked at the cemetery gate. I scratched my head and looked down the hill.

Suddenly a small old woman with a permanent smile was standing at my elbow. She had a small bouquet of yellow flowers. "Were you wanting help finding someone in the cemetery, sir?"

"Actually, I was looking for Katie Baird."

"Oh, no, her house is down by the other gate," the old woman gesture vaguely. "You've come to the wrong gate. But you know Katie's not there, right?"

"Not there," I said dully. "No, I didn't know."

She looked at me sharply. Evidently the smile only gave the impression of permanence. "What's the matter, young man?"

"My young fella there hurt his leg. I was hoping Katie remembered enough nursing to tell what the trouble is."

Her smile returned. "I was a nurse on Cape Breton for forty years," she said.

I carried Chuck into her front room, and laid him on the sofa. She had a first aid kit on the floor. "My name is Edith MacKinnon," she told Chuck. Chuck didn't reply. She addressed all further remarks to me.

"What happened?"

"He fell while running. Onto the sidewalk."

Mrs MacKinnon clicked her tongue. "Has he been walking on it?"

"Not very much."

"No, I mean, did he walk away from the fall?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, then." The topic no longer seemed to interest her. Mrs MacKinnon started to unwind the bandage. She took considerable care to do this gently and more slowly than I would have believed possible. "So you know our Katie, then?" she asked brightly.

"We went to school together," I explained. "Back in Newfoundland."

"It must have been five years ago I met her," Mrs MacKinnon said. "She was looking for someone hereabouts to teach her Gaelic. She wanted to learn the Gaelic songs."

"I didn't know she sang Gaelic songs until last month when I heard her sing something on her CD … something wondrous."

Mrs MacKinnon sang a few lines of the song I had heard Katie sing. Her voice was old and worn, and she kept her voice soft so as not to irritate Chuck, but her voice was strong with the pride of the song and I felt my heart lift.

"That's the one," I confirmed.

"Yes, I taught her that one. Goes back a long time, that one does." Mrs MacKinnon was very matter of fact. She was nearing the end of her bandage, and switched all her attention to that.

"Young man," she began. It took me a moment to realize that was me.

"My name's Charles Carter," I supplied.

"Mr Carter," she amended, "would you step along to the bathroom and hunt me out a little bottle of alcohol? It should be under the sink."

There were at least a dozen bottles under the sink, and I tried to examine them all without disturbing any of them. I heard one little startled cry from Chuck, and listened for more, but heard nothing. By the time I got back to the front room, Mrs MacKinnon was nodding her head in satisfaction, and the colour already seemed to be coming back to Chuck's face.

"Thank you, Mr Carter," she said, taking the bottle from me. She took some cotton from her first aid kit, wetted it with alcohol, and cleaned Chuck's leg a little. He flinched, but nothing more.

"Nothing to worry about here," she announced. "Nothing broken and nothing torn. You'll have a wonderful big bruise and that'll be tender, of course." She finished her cleaning, and drew a fresh bandage from the first aid kit.

"Why was he in so much pain?" I asked.

"I'm afraid his bandage was wrapped far too tight."

I blushed.

"Leave it to the experts, dear," Mrs MacKinnon said. "You have a doctor look at him just to check things over. Mind you do it today."

Chuck tried to sit up. "Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome, dear, but just lie there for another few minutes please. I don't know that I ought to give advice, but I'd consider taking a few aspirins if I were you, laddie."

Chuck nodded.

"I've got some extra-strength in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom," she said, rising.

"Please, let me get them," I said.

This time when I got back, the old bandage and everything else had been cleared away. There was no sign of Mrs MacKinnon. I heard water running, then she stuck her heard through the kitchen door and held out a small juice glass with water. I took the glass and tablets to Chuck, who swallowed two, then sank back.

I took the glass to the kitchen. It had yellow and orange-coloured outlines of the cross-section of an orange all over it.

"My grandparents had glasses exactly like this," I said.

Mrs MacKinnon was filling a flat-bottomed kettle, and she smiled at she set the kettle on the stove, and turned the burner on. She sat at the small chrome table, and motioned for me to do the same. "My daughter has a fondness for those glasses. She says they remind her of being a little girl. She'd be about your age, my daughter. About Katie's age."

"I don't know how to—"

Mrs MacKinnon held up a hand. "You're welcome, dear, but you can thank me best by not mentioning it to the doctor."

I was puzzled. "Which doctor?"

"The one you're going to take the boy to, next thing," she said.

I nodded. "Fine. Is Katie going to be away long?" I asked. "I'd have liked to see her."

"I'm afraid she won't be back for a month or more, dear."

"A month?" I felt my heart sink. I hadn't been prepared to admit how badly I wanted to see Katie again, but my heart was having no nonsense.

"Yes, she's house-sitting for a friend in Halifax."

"Would you have her address?"

Mrs MacKinnon's smile changed subtly. "Katie doesn't like me to hand her address out willy-nilly. The visits from her fans can be a bit disrupting."

I tried to smile winningly. "You think I'm just one of the star-struck?"

She allowed herself a tiny smile, and turned her head away slightly, as if to examine me with her peripheral vision. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, looked me full in the face, and began again. "It's what I intend to think until you present your bona fides."

"Fair enough," I said. "Her full name is Katherine Clarissa Strathie Baird. I heard the middle names for the first time when we graduated from high school together, back in St. John's. She was never my girlfriend, but I was in love with her."

Judging by the expression of her face, this line of conversation seemed to suit Mrs MacKinnon, even though she considered it didn't prove anything. "Do you think she was in love with you?"

"Hardly," I said.

Mrs MacKinnon leaned forward. "If you know her well, answer me this. What's her daughter's middle name?"

I blinked. "She has a daughter?" My heart was sinking. I wanted to ask "How long has this daughter been around?" but couldn't. Time enough for that line of enquiry later. One pod person at a time.

Mrs MacKinnon laughed delightedly. "Her daughter is named Holly." She didn't mention the second name.

I held up both hands, empty palms forward. "I honestly don't know, ma'am. I haven't been in touch with her for years and years. The last time I clapped eyes on Katie, she was single."

"Oh yes, of course," Mrs MacKinnon said. She gazed at the wall for a moment. "When Katie and her boyfriend Ed split up, did she jilt him, or the other way around?"

I stood up. "I'm sure I don't know, Mrs MacKinnon. Thank you for everything. We should really be getting along now."

Mrs MacKinnon smiled so hard that her face crinkled up. "You pass. You don't lie very well, but you pass. You know exactly who left who. Even if you didn't, you know about her dating Ed, and that's good enough for me." She stood up and took an address book from a drawer, copied an address on to a slip of paper, and handed me the paper. "That's where you'll find Katie and Holly. Give them both my love."

I spent a moment memorizing the address. "Thank you again, Mrs MacKinnon. I don't know how to repay you."

"You'll think of something," she said, then chuckled.

"Tell me, do Katie and her daughter look alike?"

"Oh my," she said, and clicked her tongue. "Mr Carter, the resemblance is amazing even now, but Katie tells me that Holly looks a lot more like Katie did as a young girl."

"How old is Holly?"

"She'll be twenty in January."

"We really must be going," I said, and I collected Chuck. Mrs MacKinnon opened the car door for me, and I put Chuck in his seat. Before climbing in myself, I asked Mrs MacKinnon, "How did you know whether Katie dumped Ed, or vice versa?"

Mrs MacKinnon laughed. "I don't. Katie won't tell me. I just asked because I was hoping you knew. I'm nosey. It's my besetting sin."

I laughed as well. "Thank you again."

"You're welcome, dear," she said, "but tell me, do you have any intention of taking the lad there to a doctor?"

"None whatsoever," I said.

"Ah," she said. "Then take a few extra aspirin for him. And thank you for being honest about it. It really is the best policy, you know. I think you're honest by nature."

"I hope so," I said. "Someone once told me I was no good at lying."

Her face crinkled up in a smile again, and she stood waving at us as we drove off down the hill.

The drive to Halifax was short—just over an hour. Once in Halifax, I headed for Keddy's Motel for the only reason that it was a name I remembered from family trips to the mainland during the summers of my childhood. I dumped some clobber on the bed, then dug the scrap of paper with Katie's address out of my pocket.

"Wait here," I told Chuck.

"Great," he said flatly from the other bed. He was circling through the TV channels in hope that a new one had begun its broadcast day in the previous fifteen seconds.

The house was a grand old home in poor repair just south of the Dalhousie campus. I knocked. The door was opened by a younger edition of Katie.

"Yeah?" She was dressed in black chinos and turtleneck, and all that seemed to be left of her hair was a dark shadow. I thought immediately of Sinead O'Connor.

"I'm looking for Katie. Katie Baird." I explained.

"Why?" she asked.

I didn't feel I could say "To ask if she's living out the teen version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers." So I said "To say hello. I used to go to school with her."

"Oh," the girl said, relaxing enough to start swinging on the door frame. "I thought maybe you were a reporter." She titled her head back. "MOM!" she called. "C'mon in," she added, to me.

I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I felt like a fool. This girl was definitely Katie's daughter, and not a younger Katie. This was the wrong place for me to be.

The girl had slouched on a sofa and was staring out the window. From the kitchen at the back of the house, I saw Katie walking toward me.

I waited until she got close enough for anyone near-sighted to see properly, then I started to introduce myself before there was an awkward pause or, even worse, an awkward speech. Katie silenced me just by unveiling her smile.

"Charlie Carter! My god, it must be twenty years if it's a day!" Her pleasure, like her voice, was quiet, which made the pleasure seem more genuine. "Did you meet Holly?"

Holly appeared briefly around the doorway to the living room. "Yep."

"I'm going to pour a cup of tea into Charlie," Katie called to Holly. "Want anything?"

"Some peppermint tea?" Holly asked.

"Sure thing, kiddo," Katie said, then took me by the hand and dragged me into the kitchen. As we went, we heard Holly add, "And a slice of bread and jam. And some petit-fours. Bon-bons. Mimosa. Peeled grapes. And an individually sized Baked Alaska."

Katie laughed. "Smartass."

"Better that than a dumbass," I suggested.

Katie laughed again. "Yeah, you always were an ass man."

I held up my hands. "Truce."

"What brings you to Halifax?" Katie said as she plugged in an electric kettle.

"I'm on my way back home," I said.

"When are you expected?"

"I'm not," I admitted.

"Well, we can put you up with no trouble. It'd give us a chance to get really caught up."

"Thanks, Katie, but it's a little complicated. I mean, it's not just me. I'm travelling with someone."

"Who?"

"That's the complicated part."

"Oh, I can't miss a word of this. Just wait until I take this to Holly." Katie waited while the kettle came to a boil, then took a two-cup pot of tea out to the living room.

I sat down at the 1950s chrome kitchen table and scowled at it. In Mrs MacKinnon's kitchen, the same kind of table seemed to suit her, a choice she'd made years before and never regretted. Here, it forced me to remember how many people hadn't been able to afford new furniture in forty years, and how many more could afford it but felt actual shame at the idea of buying anything new. Lying on the kitchen table were a ring of keys, a Sobeys flyer, and two or three sealed envelopes with Katie's Wolfville address. Sticking out from the bottom of the pile was a letter. Near the bottom of the letter, an office number was a circled in thick marker. The letter was signed by the secretary for the Oncology Department. I frowned at the letter, and put my index finger on the bottom third so that it would stay flat enough to read.

Almost immediately, a hand appeared and grabbed the letter. I looked up. Katie looked furious.

"I'm sorry," I said, standing up. "I should go."

"Damn right," Katie said.

Back at the motel, Chuck was flipping through the channels with all the interest evoked by a spectator in a game of Pong.

"Been having a good time?" he asked.

"Go to hell," I snapped.

He lurched into the bathroom instead. I heard him running water for a bath. Afterwards, he climbed into bed without a word. I did the same.

The sound of someone pounding on my door woke me up. I looked over at Chuck's bed. It was empty. I pulled on my trousers and a shirt, and opened the door.

Katie stepped inside. Immediately, she started to nurse her hands. She glanced at the bed, then at my hair. "Do you always sleep that soundly?" She didn't sound mad.

"I shouldn't have snooped," I said.

"No, you shouldn't," Katie said. "But I shouldn't have overreacted. It's just that I'm trying to keep this thing quiet, and too many people would love to make it front-page news. That letter was from the Victoria General Hospital."

"The oncology department," I said.

"Yes," she said. "The VG is just up the street from the house that I rented."

"That you rented?" I repeated.

"We told everybody in Wolfville it was a house-sitting job. That may have been dumb. But anyway, I rented it because it's close to the hospital. There'll be lots of trips to the hospital from now on."

"What is it?"

"Cancer of the liver," Katie said.

"How long?"

"It could be a month. It won't be six." Katie choked up. I stood, but she waved me away.

"Does Holly know?"

Katie blinked. Blinking keeps the tears back. "Of course she knows."

I admired her strength. In her shoes, I wouldn't have known how to tell Paul I was dying of cancer. Forget telling my only child—I wouldn't have known how to tell Cath, for crying out loud, or my worst enemy. It's a hard thing to say. It's a hard thing to hear.

"I don't know what to say," I said. "What can I do?"

"Holly and I could both do with some company. Stay with us for a few days. Please. We hardly have any friends in Halifax. Those we have … don't know."

I didn't say anything for an awfully long time. "I can't."

"Why not?" she demanded.

There was an even longer silence. It was even more painful.

"I find it incredible that you'd take the trouble to show up and then refuse to talk to me." She looked annoyed.

"I thought you might be having the same problem I am. I can see now you're not," I inhaled deeply. "I can see you're having an even worse problem."

"Yeah, I am. Don't you dare show up out of nowhere and then walk out on me, Charlie Carter. We both need company. The hours between the trips to the hospital are long." Katie looked away suddenly so that I couldn't see her cry. She stamped her foot angrily, and tried to stop crying. It didn't work, and she stamped her foot again. "And too few. You already have something on your mind. You didn't need to walk into our soap opera. I'm sorry."

"Katie, it's okay. I thought if we were having the same problem, maybe you could help me and I could help you. Maybe we don't need identical problems."

And on the word "identical," Chuck limped in the door.

He looked at Katie, then came forward with his hand outstretched. "We haven't met. You must be Katie's mom."

Good manners, but no brains.

"And you must be Charlie's son," Katie said, rallying.

Chuck and I couldn't help it. Our eyes both flicked toward the other one.

"You'd think," said Chuck.

"What's that supposed to mean? You rearing up a smartass of your own, Charlie?"

"Look, Katie, maybe you don't want a piece of this."

"You both look so damn guilty that I definitely want an explanation. What did you do?"

A half an hour later, my headache was approaching Vesuvius level. "Can we compromise? You don't have to believe it. Just agree not to contradict it or interfere with it."

"Look, I'm not his son, okay?" Chuck said for maybe the tenth time.

"Chuck, she understands the concept," I snapped at him. "She just doesn't believe any of it."

"Who the hell would?" Chuck threw himself down on his bed.

"I should have listened to you," Katie said. "I keep making the same mistake."

Chuck looked at me. I shrugged my incomprehension.

"At least come say goodbye to Holly," she said.

"I'll say goodbye. Chuck here can say hello."

So we checked out.

"Holly, here's Charlie back again," Katie said. "And this is Chuck."

Holly smiled very nicely when Chuck shook her hand. "Hi, Chuck. I'm glad they didn't call you Junior. Welcome to Halifax. Mom, are these guys hanging around long enough for me to play tour guide?"

"I'm afraid not," I put in quickly.

"Shoot," Holly said.

"Holly, do you feel up to giving our guests a tune?"

A huge smile brought Holly's face out of shadow. "Can I use your guitar?"

"Sure, baby," Katie said gently. Holly returned in a few moments with a guitar case, opened it reverently, and took out an acoustic Martin. She tuned it carefully, then without strumming any preparatory chords, launched into "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" by the Police. And for the rest of my life, while I could enjoy Sting's vocal, it always made me think of Holly's superior take on the song. She'd inherited her mother's talent.

After she was done, Holly politely offered the guitar to Katie, but Katie smiled and shook her head, and Holly carefully put the guitar back into the case, and disappeared upstairs.

When I looked at Katie, she was looking at Chuck. Chuck was so silent I suspected he was otherwhere. I stood up. "We should really get going now."

Katie spoke slowly. "I think maybe you should stay for supper."

Holly and Chuck walked to the Sobeys to get some chicken breast for supper—Chuck suddenly insisted his leg was fine, that it just needed the stiffness walked out of it—and Katie gave me the job of lighting the barbecue while she shucked some corn. It was twilight by the time the coals burned down. After supper, Katie informed us we were staying the night and Holly quickly abandoned drying the dishes to go up and make up our beds.

That left the three of us alone in the kitchen. The room had high ceilings and no windows in the pale yellow walls. During the day, the yellow and the white trim made it seem cheerful. Now, at night, the room seemed as though it were lit by one very old 40-watt bulb. I was deliberately not looking at Katie. Katie kept looking at Chuck and cocking her head. Something outside seemed to be droning.

"Chuck," Katie said. "Let those dishes soak in the sink for a bit. Come sit over here."

Chuck walked over in kind of a daze, and sat down docilely. Katie moved her chair so that she and Chuck were facing each other, and only a foot apart.

"Charlie," Katie said. "I'm already at the point where I think you guys have been telling me the truth. I'd like to know it, not just think it."

I had been feeling lazy and content. Now I sat up and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, apprehensive.

"Your part, Charlie," Katie said, "is to keep quiet. Chuck, your job is to close your eyes and listen."

Chuck seemed caught up in his dream. He smiled, nodded, and closed his eyes.

"I want to tell you about a memory I have, and I want you to tell me if I'm remembering it wrong. Okay?"

"Okay," Chuck said.

"It's the closing-night party of some Agatha Christie play. We're all out at Bill Oliver's cabin. A bunch of us are gathered in front of a fire. You're not. You're standing back in the dark, leaning against a tree. Your face is in shadow. In fact, most of you is in shadow. I can make out an outline, but I don't know who it is yet. My boyfriend Ed hands me my guitar and drinks from his flask. I strum my guitar tentatively. It's me. It's Katie, the girl who plays the guitar. I'm playing my guitar. I think the first song I play is 'I'm Free' by the Who. At any party, it's my way of asking people to put down the burden. Is that how you remember it?"

"Uh huh," said Chuck. "Then 'Pinball Wizard'."

"It sure could have been," Katie said. "I don't remember. It would have been something faster with a bit of howl to it on the chorus. A bit later on, I remember I played 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps'. I looked up, and you had moved close enough to the fire that I could at least see your face. You were looking at me. At first I thought you were watching me play, but then I didn't think so. What were you looking at?"

"Your arms," said Chuck. "Your shoulders. You're wearing a sleeveless top. Your arms are so slim. Your skin looks golden in the firelight."

Katie swallowed. I thought she was going to look at her arms now. She didn't. She looked at Chuck. After a moment, she continued.

"The fire starts to burn down. Bill Oliver tries to stand up to get more firewood, but you tell him you'll do it. You know where the firewood is. You know where everything is. You always do. After you've brought the wood, Sherri Taylor says she and her boyfriend can make room for you at the fire, but you retreat to your tree again. I play 'What's the Buzz?' from Jesus Christ Superstar, and everyone joins in one the choruses. Except you."

"I can't sing," Chuck says.

"I play 'Lola' by the Kinks. The whole gang joins in on 'L-O-L-A Lo-la!' Except you. I've pretty much made myself hoarse, so I start in on my last song. Halfway through, I look up and I can't see your silhouette against the tree any more. My boyfriend has lapsed into unconsciousness before the song ends. I get up and put my guitar in the cabin. When I come out, I see you sitting at the end of Bill Oliver's little wharf. I walk out to join you, and you turn around as soon as the first board creaks. I peel off my shoes and socks, and dangle my feet in the water. It's too cold, and I take them out again really quickly, and sit on them to warm them. Without saying anything, you take off your windbreaker and put it around my shoulders. I turn up the cuffs on the sleeves of your jacket so they're not too long. Then I look at your profile, and I move closer to snuggle in to you, and you look into my eyes. You can hear the waves lapping against the wharf's pilings. If you look past me, you can see the moon reflected on the lake behind me. But you're not looking past me. You're looking into my eyes. You can see something in my eyes. Your whole world, for this one moment, is about what you see in my eyes." Katie paused briefly, then ever so quietly asked. "Do you remember what you see in my eyes?"

Chuck didn't say anything. It's like his eyes just suddenly started leaking.

Katie stood up, and her chair scraped against the kitchen floor. I jumped a little as the spell was broken and I came to. Chuck didn't. He just sat there with his eyes closed. There were tear tracks down both cheeks, but he was smiling.

Katie headed toward the door. As she passed my chair, she laid her hand on my shoulder. "It is true," she said. "You're both Charlie." Then she left.

I went over and picked up Chuck. His eyes stayed closed. I carried him up to bed. He was light, no weight at all. His eyes stayed closed the whole time. Then I went out walking in the Halifax night.

I was the last one up the next morning. As soon as I came into the kitchen, Katie was on her feet. "A cup of tea, Charlie?"

"I can get my own tea," I told her, but Katie waved a hand at me. I sat down heavily in a kitchen chair.

She plunked the milk and sugar down on the table and stood there looking at me with her hands on her hips. "Are you going to stay with us awhile longer, Charlie Carter?" she demanded.

"I feel in the way," I said. "I feel out of place. Why on earth would you want visitors now?"

"I told you," Katie said. "I need to be distracted, taken out of myself."

"Nice," I said. "Now tell me why you want visitors." Luckily for me, she smiled. Wanly, but she smiled. "Why aren't you spending every precious moment with your daughter while you still have the time?"

The kettle was boiling. Katie made the tea, gave me the cup, and set a plate of sweet biscuits in front of me. Then she stood next to me, so close I couldn't see her face without tilting my head right back.

"I always had my songs. When times got tough, I could sing about the pain. They've gone, Charlie. They've deserted me. I haven't been able to create one single solitary thing. I don't even like to play now. I've never needed the release more than I do right now, and I can't get it going. My escape hatch has been sealed. If I don't have something to take my mind off it, I'm going to explode. And if I explode, I'm afraid what I'm going to take out."

I poured milk into my tea, then got up and put the milk jug back in the fridge. I sat down at my tea again, and stirred in the sugar.

"Thank you," I said. "We'll stay a week. Then we have to go."

When Chuck and Holly got back from their visit to the harbour, I told Chuck we'd been invited for a week, and he grinned like a robber who's just spotted an open bank vault. His limp was almost gone.

So I called Marine Atlantic and cancelled our booking. They warned me I'd lose my deposit. I asked if I could preserve my deposit if I made a new booking for a week later. The voice on the other end was lowered conspiratorially. "Going home?" it asked. I said I was. "When you call back," the voice said, "ask for Barb. I'll see the deposit gets applied to the new booking. But don't take longer than a week." I promised I wouldn't, and hung up.

We had a late lunch, due mostly to my late rising, and afterwards Katie suggested that Holly drive us all to a nearby lake for swimming. "Don't we have to wait a half-hour after going in to swim?" Holly teased her mom.

"No, but you wait to wait long enough for Chuck and I to buy swim trunks," I told Holly, so it was close to four o'clock by the time we arrived at the lake.

Except for swimming pools (one had been the pool at the Keddy's in Truro), I'd never been swimming in Nova Scotia before and I was pleasantly surprised at the temperature of the water. I had feared the cooler temperatures of the ponds and lakes on the Avalon Peninsula. I was, as always, immeasurably embarrassed by wearing swim trunks, particularly when it turned out that I was the only one of our party sporting a round belly. Katie was still slim, but her muscles were more defined than they had been the last time I'd seen her in swimming costume. Holly wore a startlingly small bikini that made me assume she'd wet her toes, then spend the rest of the day sunning herself on a beach towel. Instead, she took Chuck by the hand and they ran into the water, sending up a huge wake. I turned to Katie with an open mouth, and Katie said, "I don't know, myself, but I think it's white magic. Either that or white glue."

By six o'clock, we had the beach to ourselves. There had been few enough people when we arrived, but now they had all gone home to supper. By seven, my stomach was staging a minor revolt, but Chuck and Holly seemed to be happy with swilling down soft drinks, then running back into the water. Katie opened the cooler, dug around in it, and offered me a sandwich. I peered into the cooler, and saw hamburger patties and steaks. "Let's drop back to one of the campsites and make a fire," I said.

Katie made a sound something like "tk", then said, "Oh, I brought a Coleman stove, and didn't remember to haul it down from the car. Wait there till I fetch it."

While she was gone, I watched the two youngsters playing. In what seemed a blink, Katie was back, and caught me wiping tears from eyes.

"I can only say, Charlie Carter, that you're exactly the person this would happen to." I think she had meant to josh, but there was genuine exasperation in her voice.

I felt the muscles at the back of my neck tighten. "That what would happen to?" I said.

"You've called your past back so you can watch it pass in front of your eyes."

"You don't miss being a youngster?"

"No, and neither do you. What pisses me off is that you can't admit it, even to yourself. When is it that you think you were happy, Charlie? You hated school. You looked frightened all the time. I never saw you at recess, and once I went looking for you. I found you sitting on the floor of the corridor, back against the wall, trying to pretend you were alone, and safe, because the only safety came when you were alone."

"I got good grades in school," I said defensively.

"That was the part you liked, all right. When you got a good grade. You didn't seem to like to do any of the work that got you good grades, though. You got so hung up on being smart, and doing it every minute God sent. Being smart became all that you were. It defined you. You were always 'on'. You remember that English class where you mispronounced 'discretion'?"

I felt my cheeks grow really warm. I remembered, all right. I had heard the word, but had never connected it with the way it was spelt on a page, and I thought it was pronounced pretty much the same way as "excretion". I hadn't thought about that for five years. Before that, I suppose I thought about it half a dozen times, never without wincing. However many times I had remembered it, this was worse, because it was confirmation that someone else had remembered it as well.

"I knew you'd remember it. Anyone with any sense would have to ask me what the hell I was talking about. You know why I remembered it? You were miserable about that. Mortified. You made one tiny mistake. A mistake in pronunciation, for heaven's sake! And you acted like all your smarts had been sucked into a black hole, and now you had to start building your brain and your reputation all over, from scratch. One mistake—one incorrect fact in your brain—does not negate everything else you know. And even if it did, you think we didn't like the way you reacted to facts? You saw things differently, and commented on them, and showed me what it was like when a brain was still alive, and considered what it was given, when the rest of us were all so bored with things we didn't care about. We didn't care how twisted up some modern American poet could get because he was proud he'd thought of a really cool way to describe some native American. We didn't give a living crap about John D. MacDonald and his moronic constitutional crisis, and you'd wonder aloud if, in the middle of the crisis, he'd been uncharacteristically sober for two consecutive days. You have such a human reaction to everything, Charlie."

"If it's a human reaction you prize, why the heck are you beating me up for having blushed over a mispronunciation?"

"Touché," she laughed.

I didn't feel like laughing, not at all. Katie saw my face.

"Charlie, you should have trusted us. We didn't need constant reminders that you were smart to ensure we didn't forget about you. That was your mother. We didn't fall on you and tear your flesh from your bones when you made a mistake. That wasn't us. We weren't like that."

"My mom never made me feel bad when I made a mistake. My dad, either. That was me. I did that all myself."

"Right. You were born that way. You felt immense shame when you mistook a pacifier for a nipple, and suddenly realized why you weren't getting any milk out of the damned thing."

"Shut up for a minute, Katie!" I snapped. I drew breath. "Sorry. But, honestly, Katie, you it's you who doesn't remember what adolescence was like."

"Charlie," she said, "please tell me what you remember about being a teenager."

"Girls," I said.

"Charlie."

I didn't say anything at first. "I remember all the things you had to do for the first time and fail at, with people watching. No one liked me for what I was, and I couldn't do anything that would make them like me, the way you could with your guitar. Practically everybody was vicious. Nobody knew who they were, what they were, or even that we were supposed to have selves. The only way to feel at all secure was to make sure someone else was under attack, not you."

Katie chewed on that for several moments. "So you became a watcher," she said slowly. "You watched what other people did so you'd know when it was safe to speak up. And you watched yourself. Doing the wrong thing became so scary that your default reaction in any situation was to do nothing. Charlie, you can't just watch life go by. You got to live it. Sometimes there's nothing to do but react. But most of the time, you have to act."

I honestly do not know what I would have done if I'd had to reply. Fortunately, I didn't have to. I had another option open to me. I took off.

I didn't just leave, I ran. In my head, I saw images and heard words I didn't want in there at all, so I tried to outdistance them.

When you run in the woods at night, you are going to trip and fall. The only issue is how long you stay upright before it happens. When I picked myself up, I didn't know which way to go, so I listened for the sound of Chuck and Holly's horseplay. I couldn't hear them. Then I heard somebody swimming, and as my eyes adjusted, I realized I was only five car-lengths from the edge of the pond.

Holly was swimming in to shore. There was no sign of Chuck. As she neared the beach, she rose up quiet suddenly and started to walk. She climbed on to a rock and stood there in the moonlight, looking around. I moved quietly behind a tree.

She was so beautiful that she seemed to be from another time, another planet maybe. In that moment, she was perfect. Longing grabbed hold of me and moved me forward—slowly, quietly, not wanting to frighten her and have her dart back into the wood.

Which was when I spotted Chuck ahead of me, also gazing at Holly. He didn't stand there for long, he just moved forward and joined her.

I couldn't hear what they said. They didn't say all that much. Then Chuck put his arms around Holly and kissed her.

I moved away until I found a clearing. Then I sat down on a rock and trembled. Up until that point, in the mental movie of my life, I had always cast Harrison Ford to play me. Now I saw that I'd be lucky to get Woody Allen.

If you must find a young girl attractive, you make damned sure you keep quiet about it. You don't tell the girl—hell, you don't tell your best buddy, not even when you and he have downed more than a few. You keep it locked up tight inside because that's what best for everybody.

And if you don't speak about it, you darned sure don't act on it. Not so much as a few minutes pleasant conversation in which you happen to ask who her boyfriend is. You don't do a thing.

Which doesn't explain why I ran straight to tell Katie. Nor why she laughed so hard. Nor why she hugged me so tight after she stopped laughing.

We decided to return to Katie's rather than cook out. Holly turned in early, and Chuck fell asleep on the couch not long after eating enough food for about six. Katie and I drifted into the kitchen to talk, but neither of us said anything for the longest time. I got lost in thought, and when I finally looked at Katie, her cheeks were wet.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said. She tried to calm herself. "I'm sorry. This is the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with."

I didn't know what to say. "You're sorry?"

"This isn't easy for you. This isn't fun for you. I don't want to drive you away."

"Katie. You won't. I'm your friend."

"You think you can't drive friends away?" She sounded bitter. That might have been the first time I ever heard her say anything truly bitter. "I was unemployed once and seriously depressed. I had a friend who would check in with me every couple of weeks. She'd always ask how I was doing. I told her. She was the one who got the truth from me. One day she exploded, telling me I was a misery to be around. She didn't know. Couldn't know. Had never been unemployed for one month, let alone thirty-six. I thought she was telling me I wasn't bearing my burdens with sufficient grace to suit her. I thought she was telling me she would have done better in my place. Everybody always thinks it's no big deal until they have to deal with it every single day of their life. It was like being subjected to the Chinese water torture, and she was telling me what I big fuss I was making over a few little drops of water."

"And now—?"

"Now? Nothing's changed. I still think that."

"What did you say when she exploded?"

"I— I think friends should be able to be honest, but I think someone who is abusive isn't your friend. I tried to warn her. I told her 'I think this friendship is over.' She was no longer treating me like a friend, but like someone she felt she could lecture. There was time for her to pull back so we could be friends again. I suppose she misunderstand, and thought I was telling her I was deliberately ending our friendship."

"Did you try to clear up the misunderstanding?"

"I only hoped it was a misunderstanding. I was afraid to find out it wasn't."

"What else?"

"I worked at minimum-wage jobs, and I saved all my money for summers. A boyfriend needed money, and I offered my entire life savings. As meagre as they were, they were everything I had. Then we had a falling-out."

"What happened?"

"He made demands on me that I couldn't fulfil. I kept going with him, but I was unhappy. I kept pretending I wasn't. It got to the point where telling him I was unhappy was no longer an option. I left him. And he retaliated by keeping all my money. He went on to become well-off, and we've had money worries ever since."

"Didn't you want—you know—revenge?"

"No. Revenge—that's heavy-duty stuff. Serious. Before you start messing with revenge, souls and blood should be on the line. Not selfish things like hurtful points of view."

"At least you admit their points of view were selfish and hurtful."

"Not theirs. Mine."

Katie was firm that neither Chuck nor I could accompany her on her trips to the hospital. She and Holly always went together, and I felt I had to give both of them the space they needed. That meant Chuck and I had to turn to each other for company.

We were close enough to walk downtown in a quarter of an hour, so I let Chuck take me to the places Holly had shown him. I never did figure out who had showed Holly around.

"Holly sure looks like Katie. Well, like I remember Katie."

"I hope you're not moving as slowly with Holly as I did with Katie."

"I don't think you can go slower than a dead stop," Chuck grinned.

"Oh, har de har. You're still young. You think you have all the time in the world to be with the people you love. You think time is infinite. You think people are immortal. It doesn't matter how much you love people. All the time you're going to get to be close is one lifetime. Theirs or yours. And when it's the right person, a lifetime is never time enough."

We went into a book shop, and Chuck immediately sat on the floor, out of sight, in the popular culture section, his eyes wide. I stood in front of a bookshelf in front of a plate-glass window that gave out on to Barrington Street, and browsed in the humour section. After a while, something didn't feel right, and I looked up from my book. Outside on the sidewalk, smiling at me through the window was a lady with a deep tan and coarse blond hair that was snow-white where it parted in the middle. The child welfare lady. Her smile clearly said, "Your ass is mine."

I calmly put my book back on the shelf, and walked outside to talk to her before she walked in and spotted Chuck. She spoke first.

"Best break I've ever had, running into you like this."

"How did you know I was here?"

She laughed. "You've put two hotels on your credit card."

"How do you know what I've put on my credit card? Don't you need some sort of warrant?"

"All I need is your postal code and your credit card number. Then I call the 800-number on the monthly statement for the card, and an automated attendant makes me punch in each of those, and I can list your last five transactions."

"I can only think of one person who'd give you one of my credit card statements. You're working with Cath on this."

She was clearly alert, but she knew how to keep her face from showing it. "When your wife divorces you, she'll have something to say about hiding your illegitimate son from her."

It was my turn to laugh. "I wish her luck with that."

"I was a bit worried when you disappeared from that Halifax hotel, but knew I still I had a line on ya for the crossing. When you cancelled the crossing, I was real worried. Figured you'd decided to light out for the States, maybe. Away out of my jurisdiction then. Yes, today has been the nicest break I ever caught."

She sort of squinted at me. "Where's the boy?"

"Down there." I gestured with my head.

"Where?" she asked firmly.

I pointed down the hill toward the harbour, but didn't wait to see if she turned to look. I ran up the hill as fast as I could. Better she follow me than Chuck. I looked back to make sure she was. She was, and she was gaining on me.

As soon as I saw the library, I put on an extra burst of speed. I ducked in through the front door, figuring to hide in the stacks and double back without much trouble. The library was crowded, which made for better cover. For ten minutes, I crept around the stacks like an idiot in a bad spy film, holding my breath and shuddering every time the floor creaked. Then I made my way back to the front entrance.

There she was, arms folded and leaning against a wall, waiting. Of course. Why bother to chase me? The library had just one way out so that people couldn't steal the books.

I made a complete circuit of the building to check on other doors. At the back of the library, in the children's section, I found an emergency exit with a warning on it. If you open this door, it said, you'll set off the fire alarms. I pushed through it and ran. When I looked back, people were streaming out of the library everywhere.

I got back to Katie's, and Chuck was sitting on the front steps. There didn't seem to be anyone else around. "What happened to you?" he asked.

I wrote a note for Katie and Holly, and we jumped in the car. All the way to Truro, I weighed the costs of phoning Marine Atlantic and providing the child welfare lady—and Cath—with a way to track us … versus the likelihood of being stuck on the dockside at North Sydney. In Truro, I pulled into a gas station and told Chuck to fill the tank. I used their pay phone to call Barb at Marine Atlantic.

"How soon can you get me on?" I asked her.

"Where are you?"

"Truro."

"If you hurry, you'll just make the Port aux Basques ferry. Don't stop to eat." Barb gave me my confirmation number, wished me well, and hung up.

I bought some junk food from the gas station and paid for the gas. Before long we were on the highway to North Sydney.

"Can I drive?" Chuck asked.

"Show me your licence," I said. Chuck slumped in his seat and frowned.

I was aware of my pulse rate increasing as we drew near Baddeck. It might have been the view from the hill. It might have been that I've always associated Baddeck with being close to the ferry, ever since I drove off it the first time. I had had practically no gas in my tank, but hadn't wanted to pull over and get behind all the eighteen-wheelers on the ferry.

"We're close to home," I told Chuck.

He looked sleepily out the window. "Great."

"What is with you?"

"Hell, what's with you? I was home last summer. I was bored senseless."

"Well, good for you. But I haven't been home …"

Chuck looked a little more alert. "How long?"

"Years." Since our mother died, asshole.

There are times when the wait for the ferry seems longer than the drive through Quebec. We had made it in time to join one of the long lines of cars. By my estimate, we would be one of the last cars off. I was forced to revise that estimate when at least six dozen other cars pulled in after us.

I watched a plump woman heave herself out of the front passenger seat. She opened one of the rear doors, and helped an old man to emerge. "Do you want to go to the washroom, Dad?" she asked him loudly.

"Eh?" the old man quavered.

"Do you want to go to the washroom!" Somehow it was no longer a question but a battle-cry.

"No," the old man said, testing his legs to see if he could stand by himself. The daughter gripped his arm more tightly.

"If you do, we got to hurry."

"No," said the old man.

"Do you want to sit down? On the bench?" she asked.

"Eh?"

"Sit! On the bench!" she boomed.

"Yes," he said. And the two of them walked to a desolate concrete bench by the side of the road.

I turned to look at Chuck. His eyes were closed and his feet were on the dashboard.

"Was there anything you wanted to ask me?"

Chuck opened his eyes. "What?"

"Assuming that you're going to be replacing me."

"Crap," said Chuck. There was a long pause. "I don't know where to start."

The very first column of cars seemed to be moving. Most people started their engines immediately, including me. We knew it would be quarter of an hour before we could move, but we wanted it to be sooner, and were trying to encourage the fates.

"Well, think about it," I said, and kept looking for signs that our line was about to move.

My parents reared me to believe that when a truth is wounding, one avoids stating it, unless that would do some good. The truth is that Port aux Basques doesn't present much of a welcome to the Newfoundland tourist. But oh, the welcome it provides to Newfoundlanders! The west coast of Newfoundland has scenery you won't find equalled anywhere on the island, but you won't see any of it from the Trans-Canada Highway.

Some Newfoundlanders speak wistfully of the day they can move back home. Others are acutely aware that the island holds no future for them. Even some of the latter class will admit that they sometimes consider coming home to die. I've even come across a few exiles that have no interest in going back for a visit. In my experience, these people are very young. The few that aren't are still immature. The odd one manages both. Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself has said, "This is my own, my native land!"? Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, as home his footsteps he hath turned from wandering on a foreign strand? Yes, Sir Walter—sure we're lousy with 'em. How many do you want, what sizes, and how soon can you take delivery? We've only got 'em young, so you don't have to worry about them being tender.

"Never saw anybody get so het up over a pile of grey rock," Chuck said. I had to rewind mentally to be sure he'd really spoken. I glanced out the side window and, sure enough, the landscape was particularly desolate. "There's nothing out there," Chuck added when I didn't reply.

"It doesn't look like much. Maybe it's not much. There's something out there if you know what you're looking at. You never even flinched when we drove through the Wreckhouse, but the drivers of those eighteen-wheelers kept a close watch on each other, and over their own shoulders too."

"Oh. The Wreckhouse. With all the wind. Right," Chuck said. "It didn't look like much," he complained.

"Chuck," I said, "life doesn't provide dramatic background music."

"Well, you only knew about it because you've been this way before," Chuck said. I said nothing. Eventually he groaned. "Okay, okay. I get it."

"Look, Chuck, neither of us knows how much time—"

"I said okay," he cut me off. "I think maybe the question I want answered most is this: What should I avoid?"

The question shocked me in more ways than I can enumerate. What about joy? What about potential? What about hope? What about dreams? What about …?

"Like, I mean, what do you most regret?" Chuck opened his mouth to continue, then closed it.

"You're afraid of something," I said.

"Right now, I'm afraid of everything," Chuck said. I knew that feeling.

"Right, but aren't you also afraid of something specific?"

Chuck kicked at the floor mat. "I don't know—I didn't get much chance, but—she didn't seem that nice."

I was fogged. "Who?"

"Your wife?"

"Cath? Well, she thought I'd fathered an illegitimate child."

"Forget it."

"No, go on."

"No, this is too hard."

"Yeah, it is," I said. "But it's got to be done, and you and I are the only two people who can do it. Go on."

Chuck cursed to himself, then blurted out: "What attracted you to her?"

"To Cath?" I wished fervently, not for the first time, that I had a photograph of Cath as she'd been the first time I'd seen her. "Well, do you remember what attracted you to your first girlfriend?"

Chuck wrinkled his brow. "You mean—to Holly? I don't think that really counts. She's not really my girlfriend." He blushed.

I didn't slam on the brakes, but I know I wanted to. I gripped the steering wheel a little more tightly. "You haven't had a steady girlfriend yet. I forgot."

Chuck blushed some more. "Not yet."

"Then you should know that one thing I wish is that I hadn't taken so long to find a girlfriend."

"Shag you. Be serious."

I had thought I was not only serious, but in earnest. I tried again. "Cath was my first serious girlfriend. What attracted my eye was her figure. She was lean and trim. Cath was also strong and cool and collected. She didn't seem to approve of very much, so when she started to like me, I felt I'd really earned something worth having."

"And was it?" Chuck asked. "Was it worth having?"

"Chuck, I don't know what you're trying to ask me, I only get the feeling that you're not asking it. Don't get hung up on figuring out how to ask it, just ask it."

"I'm not sure I like Cath. I'm not sure I want to end up with someone like Cath. I want to know what to look for so I can avoid someone like Cath." There was a pause so long I'm not sure I can categorize it. Finally he asked his question, "Am I wrong?"

I took nearly as long to begin to answer. "I can answer, but I'm not sure it will be accurate."

"Tell me how you feel."

"That's the part I'm not sure is going to be accurate. Cath wants to divorce me right now. Right now, I'm not doing handsprings at the thought of Cath."

"Tell me about the last time you did handsprings."

"No."

"Why not?"

"It's private."

"If it involves her naked, I don't think I want to hear about it."

"You're not going to." I very deliberately said nothing more.

"Do you like Cath?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I hate those questions. You can't sum up a relationship. You can't justify it. I just like her."

"Do you want to end up with her?" Chuck asked.

"Yes," I snapped. I looked away at the gas gauge, and saw we had less than a quarter-tank. I pulled into the Ultramar station, and stood outside in the cold, leaning against the car as I pumped the gas.

Are you with Cath now? No. Who are you with now? Chuck.What did you do when Cath threw you out? I left town.Do you think you and Cath will get back together? No. Have you asked? No. Why haven't you asked?

The gas hose gave a shudder as the pump reached its cut-off. The tank was full. I open the passenger door and waited until Chuck met my eyes. "No," I amended, and shut the door hard.

After I paid for the gas, I used their washroom. I looked among their stock of chocolate bars for a Graham Sandwich before remembering that I hadn't seen one for sale for five years at least. I headed back to the car.

"So how do I avoid getting sucked into a relationship with someone like Cath?" Chuck asked once we were back on the road.

I thought about that. "It's going to sound like a cop-out," I warned him.

"Okay."

"My best guess is that you're on the right road already. I'd rather shut up and say nothing, because I'm afraid any advice I give you about this one is just going to kick your ass an awful lot later."

Chuck shrugged. "Fair enough."

Somewhere along the line—I don't know where—it became obvious that Chuck and I knew exactly the same amount about the past we shared. I no longer had to explain things. In fact, he could finish my sentences. Although I don't remember where or when this happened, I know when it began to happen.

We had swung off the Trans-Canada and were on a little two-lane road. It was paved now, but it hadn't always been. We had ridden on it plenty of times, even after 1965, when it had been a dirt road that kicked up the kind of dust that made me feel travel-sick. We passed a landmark—a particular distance sign next to a particular rock. We weren't even all that close to Bakeapple Cove. It was just a kind of a sign that marked our route, something that I had used since the age of four to tell me how far we were from the my father's parents' house. There were at least another couple of hours to go, and Chuck sat up, and started paying attention. We both began to grow ever more alert in hopes we would spot other indications, other landmarks. On the downhill side now. Getting closer. Miles to go before we slept, but not as many as had already passed. Old friends. A chance to see the town afresh, too. Actually notice the changes that we hadn't been there to see happen.

I considered myself to be in town long before I caught sight of the "Welcome to Bakeapple Cove" sign. I knew the Anglican church, sitting on the shoreline, exposed to the ocean, for all that I had never been inside it, for all that its congregation belonged to another community. We came up over the rise, and saw the water tower far in the distance. The closer we got to the harbour, the harder it was to determine whether I was alert or relaxed. When we saw the house that had been my grandparents', Chuck moved his hand to his side, ready to release the seatbelt. If I hadn't been driving, I know I would have been doing the same.

We pulled over on the side of the road. The place looked the same as ever she had. There might have been more paint than wood, but that was the way it had always been since I had been coming here. Chuck accompanied me to the front door. I knocked, then turned the handle. Locked.

"I'll check the back," Chuck said. A moment later, he returned, shaking his head. "Now what?"

"Now I go borrow the spare key from Perce Templeman. You wait here."

I climbed up over the grassy hill to a yellow house with a meticulously rolled and trimmed lawn on which lay an assortment of youngsters' bikes. I went around back, knocked at the door, then walked through the back porch into the kitchen. Lisa was sitting at the kitchen table, warming her hands on a cup of tea.

"What would you be doing home this time of day?" I greeted Lisa.

Lisa beamed at me. "Well, Glory be to God!"

"Amen," I said. "Is himself around?"

"I see. No kind word for the likes of me, just head straight for the man of the house," Lisa said, eyes twinkling. Suddenly she bawled out, "Perce! There's a mainlander loose in the kitchen! Bring your gun!"

We both heard Perce thump down the stairs. "Are you home for long?" Lisa asked me.

"Probably not," I admitted.

"You'll drop up for supper," Lisa said. It wasn't a question. It wasn't really an invitation or a command either. It was information being passed on.

"Got the young fella with me," I said.

Lisa smiled, nodded, then considered. "Your wife not make the trip?"

"Still upalong," I said. Lisa said absolutely nothing, but not quite quickly enough that I didn't catch her at it. Her children believed Lisa to be clairvoyant, but my theory was that she could wield Occam's razor faster than anyone else on the island and never spill a drop of blood.

Perce appeared in the doorway, and raised his eyebrows at the sight of me. "What's the story there, Charlie?"

"Once upon a time there was a prodigal son who wanted the key to his brother's house, and he was given it, and they all lived happily ever after."

"Heard that one already. What else you got?" Then Perce grinned big, and threw the key at me. "I knew your voice from upstairs, and fetched it down with me. Heard from Si?"

I shook my head. "You?"

"He was down here a month back, so you should find his place running in good order. Let me know if there's anything that needs to be fixed."

"God, yes, Charlie," Lisa put in. "And don't be shy about it. The man's got me drove cracked. In fact, if nothing's broke, break something, will you? He's easier to live with when he feels he's being useful."

"One minute you're calling me a Come-From-Away, and the next you're asking favours. It's a hard life."

Lisa laughed, and waved me out of the kitchen. Perce accompanied me as far as his front gate, stopping to pick up the bicycles on the lawn and lean them against the house. "Kids could use a bike rack," he muttered.

I laughed. "You've got it as bad as Lisa says."

"That I have. Don't ever retire, Charlie b'y. Stay in your traces until you drop." He waved at me as I stumbled back down the steep, grassy hill.

Chuck had moved into the back garden to stare at the harbour, but moved out to the road when I returned. I unlocked the door, and hung the key on the nail in the porch without even thinking about it. The house was no darker inside than when it had been occupied, for all that the shades were drawn on the side of the house facing the road. Chuck raised the shade in the front room without my mentioning it, and I opened the curtains in the kitchen. We moved around the house separately, getting it ready for use, neither of us duplicating the other's actions, a perfectly choreographed demonstration of efficiency. And then, just as efficiently, we went around again, and checked on everything the other had done. Prepare for arrival and cross-check.

While I lit the stove, I heard Chuck sitting in the front room, playing the piano. The notes were hollow to the point of being ghostly, and not especially close to in tune. To the best of my knowledge, they never had been. As I filled the kettle with water, I heard the piano bench scrape against the floor, then heard the front door open and close. If it had been me, I would have walked down the street to buy fresh milk for the tea. I reached down a bottle from the shelf, filled it with tap water, and was on the point of putting the bottle in the fridge to cool when I looked at it. The bottle was of clear glass, vaguely rectangular in shape, and had originally held orange juice, but that had been many years back. If I transported the bottle back to the manufacturer, I doubted there would be anyone in the plant who would recognize it. By association of ideas, my eyes flicked up the shelf and spotted the tumblers with the orange-cross-section design, exactly like the ones Mrs MacKinnon had in Wolfville.

While I was indulging in all this bull of peering hopefully in every corner for friendly ghosts, Chuck returned from the store, carrying milk. We sat and had our tea with milk and sugar and happily didn't say much of anything until it was time to report to Perce's and Lisa's for supper.

"You remember Paul," I said.

"My God, he's the living image of you, Charlie!" Lisa said.

"Lisa," said Perce.

"When you were just a baby, you had Cath's chin for sure, but all I can see in you now is your father," said Lisa.

"Lisa," said Perce.

"And when you were came to see us when you were two, you were a chubby little thing, but look at you now—thin as a rail, now, just like your father!"

"Lisa," said Perce.

"Of course, you won't remember us …"

"Have a seat, you two," said Perce. "And a beer. Not necessarily in that order."

"Can he have a beer, Charlie?" asked Lisa.

"Lisa," said Perce, holding out a bottle of Labatt's Blue for both of us.

Marian stuck her head around the door and looked around. Of the four of us, only I could see her. Her eyes rested on Chuck.

"No thanks," Chuck said. Perce tipped one the bottles to his lips and held out the other one to me.

"I still don't, I'm afraid, Perce," I said.

Marian looked hopeful. Lisa reached out, took the second beer, and took a swig. Marian's face fell.

"Hello, Marian," I said.

"Do you remember Charlie Carter and his son Paul?" asked Lisa helpfully. "This is our Marian."

After supper, there were cards. And stories. And songs. And more tea. With sweet biscuits and more fresh bread. And laughter. And so we returned home too tired to start our search for the birth certificate, as I had known we would.

The next morning, however, we began in earnest. I began by catching Chuck up on some of the things he had missed out on by taking the shortcut while I had taken the scenic route.

"The main rule is that this has to be an invisible search. You can probably sum up in one word the worst thing about Si."

"Sorry, can't do it. 'Miserable prick' is two words."

"I was thinking 'fussy', but you're not wrong. Even at the best of times, Si is exactly the sort of person who would notice if you took one tissue from a box. But these days, it's a lot worse."

"How?" Chuck practically screeched, then coughed and composed himself. "How exactly?" He amended.

"Because he's an alcoholic. He imagines he's hiding his drinking, and that makes him check his hiding places regularly to be sure he hasn't been caught. So for God's sake, don't touch any of his bottles. If you can manage to not see them in the first place, you'll sleep better, I promise you. But the rule is: don't disturb anything if you can help it. Every single obstacle, go around."

My nephew had drowned a few hundred yards from the house. One day the sea was rough, and he had been fascinated by its power. So he got too near, and—to use one of Newfoundland's most apt expressions—"the sea took 'en." Si had been furious at his own son's stupidity, and hadn't been able to accept being angry at his dead son, and made the short journey from man who drank a bit too much to stone alcoholic. Si had disinfected the viral memory of his son from his home in St. John's, and moved every possible tangible memory to the attic at what passed for our ancestral home in Bakeapple Cove.

For as long as I've been making memories, the attic has never been capable of holding less junk, only more. So the task before us was unlikely to be a short one. Mindful of Langley Collyer, whose badly decomposing dead body took 19 days to find, despite the fact that it lay just 10 feet from the dead body of his elder brother Homer, I forced myself to take the box of junk nearest the attic steps. I took a second box for Chuck, and we took them both downstairs to the kitchen table, where I sketched out the top layer of the contents of each box before either of us was allowed to remove a single item.

We removed each item singly if we could. We were nothing if not thorough. We looked inside items too small to hold the birth certificate card on the theory that Si might have crumpled it into a ball in his rage. I believed utterly that Si could damage it beyond actual use, but that Si could never bring himself to destroy it.

Had I not known Si, I would have expected a large cache of boxes, all full of his dead son's effects. I'm sure that was how they had arrived in the attic, in their own little ghetto. But in the intervening years, each reminder had been diluted by being placed in the middle of a box of foreign objects. A box containing ribbons and electrical wire turned out to hold a bag of marbles and exactly five hockey cards in a plastic sheet designed to hold twelve. They were not marked in any way, but I knew whose they were. These little moments of hope that we might be on the right path became false hopes.

Soon, we greeted each book with a sigh, and each stack of papers with a groan. Books we flipped though slowly, painfully slowly, in the expectation of finding the certificate used as a bookmark. Practically every old book did contain some slip of paper. A newspaper cutting or a magazine picture. It was hard not to try to figure out what exactly had been interesting about each newspaper snippet in an effort to relieve the boredom, but we soon learned that it merely increased the feelings of futility and isolation.

Books were bad, but stacks of paper were worse. Every single page had to be turned over singly, one by one. Late into the night.

It was dreary to do, and is dreary to talk about or listen to, but I couldn't just not mention it. In case maybe, just maybe, that very dreariness explains and even excuses what happened eventually. I mean, probably not, but there's still that chance.

I've never been a nine-days' wonder myself, but starting the next morning, Chuck made himself into one by the simple expedient of walking down to the store for more milk. Three teenaged maidens caught a glimpse of him, engaged him in conversation, and thereby all three could claim to have seen him first. Which unleashed a whirlwind. Being mere men, we would not be aware for it some days to come. We just turned our minds back to the hunt for the birth certificate.

Chuck chose a cardboard box that seemed to be half full of Popular Mechanics from the 1950s, and half full of objects that had fewer than two flat surfaces—two-prong extension cords and the smallest size of Mason jar, for example. He dug his hand into the box as though it were a lucky dip, and examined each object he drew out minutely. I busied myself with a home-made plywood box containing less printed matter. Before long, Chuck drew out a tin box with a massive lock on it, and tried to rattle it until the padlock hit the back of his hand.

"What do you reckon this is?" he said, wincing and sucking the back of his hand.

"I reckon that's paydirt," I said.

Two hours later, we still didn't have it open. The box lay on the kitchen table, mocking us in every way short of making faces at us. Chuck was all for cutting through the tin lid and its portraits of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose. I was all for not having Simon know we'd taken the birth certificate. Because I had declared myself a majority some days earlier, what I said went.

"How about working the hinges open?" Chuck suggested.

"No," I said. "Too easy to spot when we render the hinges utterly useless and the box never opens again. We'll have to pick the lock."

We'd been trying for two hours, using such implements as a bobby pin, a paper clip, and a jeweller's screwdriver. It was a wonder to me why B&E-ers weren't all starving in the gutter. I had cut three fingers on each hand without affecting the lock much, but then I was keen not to leave scratches on the lock.

Night fell, and the only change was that Chuck had cut his fingers as well. We turned in, hopeful that the morning light would make the job easier.

In the morning, I started trying to pick the lock before I was fully dressed. Chuck was hovering, eager for his turn. Hunger forced me to take a break, and I ate and dressed while Chuck had his go. When I came back to the kitchen, Chuck was gone. He returned moments later, carrying a bottle of acetone that seemed to have bottled before Confederation. He poured a little into the lock, then banged the lock against the table while I held the box. He wielded the jeweller's screwdriver and the paper clip.

"I think I've got something," he said. "I've pushed something back. Pull on the lock."

I pulled. Nothing.

"I don't want to let go. Grab the bobby pin and see if you can get it in there."

It made for some awkward positioning, but we managed. I prodded and felt something move. It slipped back again. I cursed. I prodded again. The bobby pin broke. Chuck swore.

I found a safety pin and prodded. "I think I'm getting it—"

The front door opened, and both of us let go. Chuck covered the box with a section of newspaper. Perce walked in to the kitchen.

"Have you seen our Marian?" he asked.

"No," Chuck answered.

"She's worse than Houdini," Perce said, and walked out again.

Chuck waited until he heard the door close, then uncovered the box. He fiddled with the paper clip and screwdriver, and said, "No." At least two dozen times, with rising intensity.

"Let me try," I said.

"No."

"I can't do any worse than you are."

"Shag off," Chuck said. I started pacing. Chuck didn't open his mouth—in a very marked manner. Then he cried, "Gotcha! Now get going."

I eased the safety pin in. "Nope. No. No. Damn. Almost. Almost." I heard the door open again.

"Don't you dare move," Chuck said. I heard and felt something shift inside the lock, and pulled. The lock came open, and I pulled it away. Chuck opened the lid.

And my older brother Simon walked into the kitchen and frowned at both us.

"Make yourself at home, why don't you?" Simon said from the doorway.

There were several things I didn't want, and none was foremost. I didn't want to spend any more time with Si than strictly necessary. I sure didn't want a fight. Most of all, I didn't want Simon recognizing Chuck.

Simon walked unsteadily over to the table, grabbed the box and the lock, and snapped the lock shut again.

"You thieving bastards," he said. "Get out and stay out."

I looked at Chuck. "Time we were on our way," I said, and stood.

"Yes, bugger off back to St. John's and take this gobshite with you," Simon said.

"We're not headed for St. John's, uncle," Chuck said. "I guess we'll have to stay at the Bay Qu'appelle Hotel." Chuck showed no signs of moving. He wouldn't take his eyes from Simon's.

Simon didn't say anything, but his face grew red. He wanted us gone immediately, but he'd perish if word got around that his blood relatives were in the cove but weren't staying with him. It would be unforgivable.

Simon wouldn't let his eyes drop. Finally he found a way out, "Arsehole mainlander! The Bay's been closed gone two years now. You'll have to stop here if you're stopping."

"Perce Templeman would give us a bed," Chuck said.

Again there was a long pause before Simon said anything. "Stay then if you got to." I hadn't thought he'd be able to choke that much out, but then I knew Si wasn't done. He looked Chuck up and down and his expression was his unsubtle parody of pity. "So this is your young feller, is it? Got him turned into a faggot yet?"

I saw Chuck's right eye narrow slightly. He said, "You can't keep that hopeful tone out of your voice, can you?"

"You little shagger," Si said, and punched Chuck in the stomach. Chuck doubled over. I stared at Chuck. Where had that come from? Chuck had some trouble getting his breath back, and Simon stood over him, ready to go.

"Never mind, Si," Chuck said at last. "Everyone understands that you got to have some way to get off now you can't get it up any more."

This time, I moved quickly enough to grab Si's arm, but he still managed to put the boot in. I pushed Si back against the wall and tried to hold him there. "Leave him alone," I said.

Simon wriggled out of my grasp, but didn't move toward Chuck. "You're in my house, little brother," Si said. "You don't tell me what to do in my own house." He frowned, seemingly at his own nose. "Shag that. You don't tell me what to do, ever."

He walked out to his bedroom, taking the box with him.

I waited a long time before I spoke. "It might be better if we did stay with Perce."

"After all it took to get us invited?"

"You can't think you won anything. Just a chance to get knocked down again tomorrow."

Chuck frowned at me. "I'm not being drove off."

"If you're going to stay here, you're going to tell me why you came." Si had only had the two beer, but already he was ramping up.

"Homesick," I said.

"Homesick? For this hole? When you bother to come home for a visit, you never stray from St. John's and you always calls on daddy first."

"And I wanted Paul to see where his grandfather grew up."

"He's not already bored senseless, so you thought you'd see if this backwater could do it, is that it?"

"If it's such a rotten place, why do you keep coming here?"

"I owns the land," Si said. "I owns it free and clear. I can't be drove off it by nobody. And when I comes, I come alone. Got to get shut of the women."

"Well, you are shut of the women. It's only me and Paul."

"No women? You're an old woman, and about as much use. Have been since you could talk."

"You wouldn't have this place if you weren't so good at sucking up to old women."

"Well, I do have this place, and it's my right as eldest regardless of how I treated Grandma. Makes no odds how much you whine, there's no one left to whine to. This place is mine and no one is taking it away from me."

I was out on the back bridge when there was a rap at the front door. Si actually answered the door himself, but only because he thought he was the only one home. I heard the door open, then heard Si say, "Yeah?"

"Do you want to support the volleyball team, Mister Carter?" The voice was female and kind of squeaky.

"We're selling chocolate-covered almonds." The second voice was less squeaky.

"No thanks, girls," Si said. He tone was civil, which meant he probably thought he was being ingratiating. Pathetic.

"Maybe the young feller wants to buy some?" the less-squeaky voice suggested.

"Roxanne!" The squeaky voice was scandalized at this lack of subtlety.

"Which young feller?" Si asked.

"You got a young feller staying with you. Lisa here saw him down the store," Roxanne informed him. "Is he from Sin John's?"

"No, he's not!" Si told them. "He's from away."

"Oh," said Lisa, managing to infuse into that one word a world of possibilities.

I decided to hop the back fence and leave in order that I might appear and break up the row before it had a chance to get on the boil. By the time I had worked my way back to the front door, Roxanne and Lisa had been joined by Chuck and a third girl. I piloted Chuck inside as soon as I could manage it.

"Listen," I told him, "Two of those girls are too young for you. The other one is too old for you."

Chuck smirked. "Shows what you know. They're all the same age."

"And that shows what you know. All you're doing is counting years."

"Actually, most of my mind is on other figures."

"Your mind is barely involved in the process at all. There's nothing but trouble for you there. Steer clear of all three of them."

"That sounded like an order," Chuck frowned.

"Really? It was meant as advice."

Chuck went back to the front door without another word. But the girls had gone.

Si waited until Chuck was out of the house.

"Funny that you didn't bring that flat-chested wife with you," Si began. A typical opening gambit.

"Jesus, Si, you're not in a courtroom now. If you've got something to say, then say it."

"I do things my way, at my own speed, little brother," he said. "Especially when I'm in my own house."

"Ah, well, take your time then." I stood up. "When you're ready for the part that requires me, send up to Perce's for me, will ya?"

"Ah, more running away. Yer still the same little sook, even with a few gray hairs in your head."

"There's a difference between running way and sitting still for utter crap," I said.

"Sit down and tell me why you're really here. Don't try to feed me any more crap about being homesick. When you're homesick, you come alone. The odd time, you'll bring both wife and child. This is the first time you've come with young Paul alone. Did your wife kick you both out?"

I saw a chance. "All right, yes, Cath and I are getting divorced. But she did not kick us out."

"Funny, but I almost believe you're telling me a bit of truth in there. No, it could still be all lies from start to finish. Maybe I should talk to your young fellow; ask him how he's getting on with his mother."

"No!" I said.

"Aha," Si smiled. "That's it. She's divorcing you, and you kidnapped the boy. Does he know that, I wonder? Well, if he does or if he doesn't, my duty is still clear. I'd better tell her where you've both got to."

"All right, what do you want?"

"More than you can deliver, that's for damn sure."

"What do you want to let us stay and keep your mouth shut? There's no money, so don't ask."

"Why the Christ is there no money?"

"I got laid off. So think of something else."

"No, I don't think I'll bother. I'd rather just have you owe me one."

The next night, I went up to Perce and Lisa's for a game of 45s, and went for a walk afterward among the engulfing shadows cast on streets with no street lamps. When I got back to the house, Chuck was sitting on the front steps, surrounded by five girls, and they were talking in quiet tones. They were still all audible from a distance, but that may have been because everything else was so quiet. There were a couple of lights from down near the harbour to give enough light to allow me to move among the six of them without treading on anyone's fingers. As I passed, none of us said anything.

I found Simon in the kitchen with a two-four open on the table in front of him. He held the box closed with his left hand as I entered, then let it go once he saw it was a non-drinker.

"You're home early," he said.

I wasn't, but I nodded.

Faintly, from outside, I heard a female voice calling. "Sher-ree! Sherry! You get in that house right now before your father gets home."

Not long after, I heard the door being closed and locked, and Chuck dragged himself into the kitchen and sat on the daybed.

"Everyone gone home?" I asked.

"Right after Sherry left," he said.

Simon downed his bottle of beer and managed to get his tongue stuck in the neck. He pulled it loose with a pop. "The girls you're used to don't put out, do they?"

Chuck shook his head.

"Well, for God's sake don't waste your opportunities while you're here in the cove. These girls aren't the stuck up bitches you're used to. Cove girls enjoy a good shag as much as any woman on this planet. Only out here, they're not mortified at the thought of admitting it to you. The young ones know you want to shag 'em, but they wouldn't think of punishing you for it. They won't let nobody punish them either. God bless 'em."

"Every one," Chuck added.

The following night, Chuck had slipped off somewhere, and so had Simon, so I was alone in the house when the phone rang. Now, the phone never rang, since its sole function was to wait to handle an outgoing call in the event of some imagined but inevitable emergency. As I lifted the receiver, half of me was expecting, even hoping, that it wouldn't work.

"Hello?"

"Ah, Charlie," said my father's voice cautiously. "There you are." Said as if he knew I would I turn up eventually if only he were patient. "How are you?"

"Well enough, Dad. You?"

"Not too bad. You know your wife is looking for you?"

"Yes." I took a pause, and so did he, and we both knew everything we needed to about that topic. "I might not be coming to St. John's on this trip."

"I wouldn't think so. But next trip for sure, all right?"

"Absolutely," I promised. "Did you want to talk to Si?"

"Si?" Dad sounded surprised. "No. I really only called to find out from him if he'd seen you. Dana made me promise I would do it tonight. I'd better call her back. Take care of yourself, son." Dad hung up.

I don't give my father pain by reminding him that Si and I don't get along, because he loves all his children and would like it if they loved each other. I don't lie to the old man, I just don't remind him of truths he already knows and has made his peace with. I can't find enough ways to tell him how much I love him. I hope he knows anyway.

My arms were full of fish and chips, and my nose was full of their aroma. In the enclosed space of the car, that wonderful smell had come close to unseating my reason. I balanced the bounty in one arm as I open the front door, then opened the porch door with my foot. I let the packages fall to the kitchen table as gently as ever I drop something that's threatening to brand me with its heat. Simon grabbed a styrofoam package greedily.

"Chu—!" I stopped myself. "Chips! Fish! Malt vinegar! All good things that are really bad for you! Come and get it, boy!"

Chuck stepped out from the bathroom, still smoothing down his hair. "That's great, Dad, but I'm heading out. See you later."

"I'll have his share," Si said indistinctly through chips.

"You can take five minutes for supper," I said.

"I can," Chuck said coolly. "But I don't want to. So I won't."

Simon snickered.

"You're heading out where?" I asked.

"I'm headed out now," Chuck answered, and brushed past me.

I chewed my bottom lip, then dug around the paper bags for a wooden fork.

"Leave the boy be," Simon said. "He's got a hot date."

I looked Simon straight in the eye. "Is that so?"

"It is. He mentioned it to me earlier. Funny he didn't tell you."

I nodded. "It is."

I arrived at Perce and Lisa's to see that most awesome of things, Perce angry. He was barrelling through this front garden on the way to the gate. In front of him was a well-dressed fellow, greying at the temples, clutching at a tape recorder. Perce had a firm grip on his collar.

"Really, Mr. Templeman, there's no need …"

"I'm just seeing you finds your way, that's all," Perce interrupted. He kicked open that gate, and pushed the man through. "Now if you ever come on my property again, I'll have you jailed for it."

The well-dressed man tried to recover his dignity before setting off, but Perce, impatient to see the last of him, roared out "JESUS!", and the man scurried off down the road and out of sight.

"Friend of yours?" I asked Perce.

"Reporter from St. John's," Perce snorted. "Down here to do a story about how we all live on UI. Except of course he never once called it anything but the pogey."

"Limited vocabulary," I suggested.

"Fixation," Perce corrected me. "At least he wasn't as bad as the last one. He came down here dressed in dirty sweater, rain pants, and rubber boots, so he'd fit in and we'd accept him."

I spurted with laughter. "Sorry, Perce, I shouldn't laugh. It's not funny."

"Well, no, it's not funny, but I still think you got the right idea. Wish I could learn to laugh at them instead of letting them get me mad. You should have seen me when the fella came to do the story about illiteracy. Told me, as if I'd never heard of it, about the Sun newspaper findings. The ones that everyone quotes. 'Young fella,' I told him, 'two years before the Sun commissioned their poll, Stats Canada released information on literacy in Newfoundland and Labrador. Nobody paid no attention, because we were so close to the national average. Then Sun newspapers, whose hands aren't exactly clean, make a claim, and that's the one everyone remembers. You think we managed how to forget how to read in two years, and you tell jokes about us being stunned. Go back, research it properly, and then you can come ask me what I thinks of it.' And I threw him out."

"Did he ever come back?"

"No, and I don't think he ever told anyone what happened, either. If he had, I'd never have another reporter come near me. How is it that someone supposed to be in search of truth is so tangled up in prejudice? They cling to their ignorance like it's the only thing keeping them warm."

"Reporters are in search of facts, Perce, not truth," I said. "Are we really going to have this conversation?"

"It would save me having to talk to you about your boy," Perce said.

"What about him?"

"Well, do you know he's seeing a different girl every night?"

"To be honest, I wasn't sure he was actually seeing any girls."

"He disappears. At night. And doesn't tell you where he's going."

"Well, yeah."

"What did you think he was doing? Step-dancing?"

"Well, okay, but I didn't know …"

"Time you did."

"Just how young are these girls?"

"Old enough, is my guess."

"Perce," I said cautiously, "Can you say a bit more?"

"Old enough for this not to be their first time at bat. That's what you're worried about, right?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"I'm worried about something a lot more important. None of 'em are on the pill as far as I know. I'd buy the boy as many boxes of rubbers as you think he can use in a month."

"Oh, hurrah."

"Charlie, that's the easy part. The hard part is scaring him into using them. Tell him the entire cove has the dose or something."

I said nothing.

"And act fast." Perce headed back inside without inviting me in.

"Perce," I said, "How do you know all this in so much detail?"

Perce turned around to look at me, and then didn't. "Our Marion," he said, "Got a crush on your young fella. So naturally she knows who he sees, when, and what they do."

"Got it."

Perce closed the door behind him without another word.

"Chuck," I said, "You're being an asshole."

"Well," he drawled, "I'm glad you pointed that out. Now that I know that, I guess I'll stop it. Thanks for the chat. Anything else?"

"Yeah, you're also being a smartass, but I don't care so much about that."

"What I said was, anything else?"

"Yes. Start behaving a little more responsibly or I will kick the living crap out of you."

"Wake me up when you get to an actual point."

"Look, I'm thrilled you're the flavour of the week around here. Since it is only going to last a week, maybe it's fine to take advantage of it. But if you are going to do it, don't do it in a way that gets anyone pregnant."

"I'm careful."

"Be more careful. Wear a condom every time. Protect these girls and protect yourself. I don't suppose you've been with four of these girls yet?"

"You suppose wrong."

"Excellent. Then there's a really good chance that if you haven't been using condoms, you've already got a disease."

"Oh, Jesus. Now you're making stuff up."

"Not statistically I'm not. One in four teenage girls has a venereal disease. Look it up yourself."

"How?"

"If you can't ask a librarian a question like that without blushing, you're too young to be shagging everything that's wearing skirts, at least at the beginning of the evening. Now those are just American statistics, the one-in-four bit, and it may not apply to outport Newfoundland, but just in case it does, wear a goddamn condom every single time."

"Isn't it going to cause a lot of talk, me stocking up on condoms?"

"Probably, but you're already causing more talk than you have any idea about. And if you think you buying a few condoms was a topic of conversation, imagine what people are saying now that I've bought a few dozen." I threw a paper bag at Chuck, and walked away. "And since you asked so regularly, now is the point where there's nothing else."

I cut off a slice of bologna about as thick as the lid of a jar of store-bought jam, laid it into a small frying pan, and put it on the stove. When it had been sizzling for a minute or so, I picked up the pan and flipped the bologna over, pancake style.

I heard a knock behind me. Perce was standing in the kitchen door, one hand on the moulding around the doorway and the other clutching a wrinkled plastic grocery bag. "My son," Perce said, "you've been on the mainland too long."

"How's that, Perce?"

"Well, to start with, there's no other way I knows of to be there. Also, you're turning bologna over like it was a shaggin' omelette."

I blushed. "How do you know I just can't find a spatula?"

"Why wouldn't you use a friggin' fork?" Perce grinned, and threw the plastic bag on my counter. "And more to the point—even if you turned it over with your fingers, you just fried up one slice of bologna. There's not a community on the island where you the smell of bologna frying won't turn up somebody else hungry for a slice."

I turned the bologna on to a plate, and held it out. "Have this one."

Perce shook his head. "I'll have one with pleasure, but I prefer 'em a bit thicker." He caught up the knife and carved off a slice about as thick as hockey puck—or as thick as the lid of a jar of homemade jam. I sat down and started to eat.

Perce went to the fridge and brought out a tub of margarine. "I suppose you wouldn't have a slice of bread to go with it?"

"Sorry, Perce …"

"Good, then you'll have space for these," Perce laughed, and took two loaves out of the plastic bag. "The missus sent this over for you. Slice of white?" He let the knife hover over the loaf and, when I nodded, cut off two slices, each as thick as his hunk of bologna.

Perce turned the bologna—using a fork—then fetched a plate for himself. Then he tipped the bologna out of the pan, though it couldn't possibly have warmed through. "So where's that youngster of yours got to? Still tomcatting around?"

"You're in such a good mood I kind of assumed he wasn't."

"I'm a good mood because our Marion has finally shut up about him and stays home nights without sulking. Now I knows it's a reprieve and not a pardon, but I'll take however long Marn gives me."

"Even if it's just a week?"

"Yes, but I'm counting on nine days."

By the time the darkness of the night came, my laziness had graduated to a general tiredness. By nine-thirty, I was fighting just to stay awake and upright. What's more, I felt as though I had a head cold coming on. I managed to locate a couple of Tylenol before collapsing onto my bed, still fully clothed.

My sleep was long but not restful, and certainly not unbroken.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, I had the uneasy feeling that that horn-rimmed handles of the bureau drawers were staring at me hungrily. I sat up slowly, never taking my eyes from theirs until I was sure I was fully awake and that the drawer handles were just handles. I dressed quietly and crept to the kitchen gingerly. In the kitchen I found Chuck flaked out on the day-bed, but there was no sign of Simon. The kitchen table was covered with beer bottles, empty and half-full, and the smell was overpowering. I rooted in the fridge for milk, but found only the glass orange juice bottle with about half a cup of water left in it. I walked out on the back bridge to look at the harbour. I found Simon lying among the raspberries. He was still clutching a beer bottle in his hand.

I watched until I saw his chest rise and fall, then crept back into the house, feeling the disapproving gaze of unseen neighbours all the while. I stood in the hallway, feeling trapped. All the things I need to do to begin my day involved noise—lifting the stove lid to light the fire, running the water to wash my face, boiling the kettle—and I didn't want to wake anyone. I stood quietly undecided far too long for any grown man, then padded to the bathroom and stood urinating against the porcelain as quietly as I could.

I might as well not have bothered. I had hardly begun when I heard Simon pound up the steps to the back bridge and throw the back door wide open. To my considerable surprise, he then pushed open the bathroom door, shoved me aside, knelt and vomited noisily into the toilet bowl. I found myself urinating down the side of the bathroom wall, and tried as best I could to stop the flow.

Having finished, Simon rolled sideways onto the floor and lay in the pool of my urine, knocking me into the bathroom sink. As I zipped up, I looked steadily at him for signs of consciousness and detected none, only saw the rise and fall of his ribcage. I drew my left foot back and aimed it at him, then closed my eyes and exhaled noisily as I relaxed the leg again without taking action. I opened my eyes and stepped over Simon on my way to the kitchen. I lit the stove and boiled the kettle, and Chuck slept on.

That whole day, I felt like doing nothing, as though I had contracted chronic laziness—perhaps a terminal case. Eventually, I couldn't stand the air in the house any longer, and I took myself for a walk. As I passed Perce and Lisa's, Lisa came out of the front door, and came at me without even a greeting. Her arms were folded as she walked. I stopped dead in my tracks.

"Charlie," Lisa said, "we got trouble. Marion is upstairs in her room, crying to break her heart."

"Seems to me we're all lucky that the young fella has been leaving her alone. Especially Marion."

"But that's the thing, Charlie. He hasn't. He took her out necking the first chance he could, and hasn't been around since."

I shuffled my feet, embarrassed. "I'm sorry."

"You got to reign him in, b'y," said Lisa. "If he comes back around, she'll be so bloody glad about it—"

"That anything might happen," I finished.

"Charlie," Lisa said, "everything might happen. I hope to God we got her reared up too sensible to get pregnant, but I'd rather not put it to the test, with her so young."

I didn't get home for ages. I walked all over, where there were people and where there were none, trying to figure how what to do next. Eventually hunger drove me back. The only light in the kitchen came from a Coleman lantern on the table. Si sat in the easy chair in the corner, barely able to lift his head enough to transfer his gaze. But he didn't transfer his gaze to me. He transferred it to the young man straddling the kitchen chair. I couldn't see the stranger's face.

"Another?" said the young stranger. Si grunted. The young man reached into the carton on the floor, took out a full bottle, and twisted off the cap. He took the empty from Si's hand, dropped it back into the carton, and put the fresh one into his hand.

I went to bed. My dreams were worse, the short time I managed to sleep. I went to bed exhausted; I woke up exhausted and just lay there for hours.

When I got up next morning, both Si and the younger stranger were still there. This time, the young fellow had to help Si form his fingers around the fresh bottle.

"That's the last of them," he said. He looked at his watch. "They'll be open now. I'll fetch another."

The stranger turned around, and I for the first time I recognized him as Si's younger self. I was startled, but not unbelieving. I was a little surprised when Si the younger wouldn't meet my eye.

I shifted the carton of twenty-three empty bottles against the wall, then started making my breakfast. When I turned away from the stove at last, Si's beer bottle was empty and I still hadn't seen him move.

Si the younger carried the fresh two-four into the kitchen and set it in the same place the other had been. Repeat business with bottles. While I ate breakfast, Si finished his beer. Then his eyes rolled up, and his head turned, and he dropped the beer bottle. Si the younger caught it before it hit the floor, and put it away.

"He'll be all right by himself now," Si the younger said.

"Have you been up all night?" I asked.

Si the younger nodded, then left the kitchen. A rap at the front door dragged him slight off course, probably on automatic, but he kept that conversation short. All I heard was, "Yeah, he's in the kitchen." Then the young fellow clumped up the stairs and I rose to walk to the front door. I didn't even get out of the kitchen.

Perce came in a full steam. "Charlie, I don't want us to be bad friends."

"Perce, you tell me what to do, and I'll do it."

"Get him out of the cove, and don't bring him back."

"That's not going to be easy," I said.

"I don't give a shag if it half-kills all of us, as long as he's gone."

The following day, I felt as bad as I've ever felt. At first, I thought it was a morning chill and tried to chase it with an extra cup of tea. By nightfall, I was cold enough to ask "Is it cold in here?"

Chuck ignored me, but the young Si shook his head.

I tried sweaters and aspirin and moving about to keep warm, but the chills didn't stop. Eventually, I realized that my own replacement was imminent. So I sat Chuck down and made him listen. He didn't bother to hide his relief—or maybe it was his contempt. I was in no shape to split hairs.

Chuck's tone was more contemptuous than relieved. "What do you want me to do, wish you luck as I wave you goodbye?"

"I want you to help me get out a little early."

"What do you mean?"

"I want you to row me out to the middle of the harbour, to the other side of Old Man's isle, and tip me over the side."

Chuck looked at me for the first time. "You're serious."

I could think of no explanation. "I used to play there as a kid. Go on picnics."

Chuck snorted. "So did I. Remember?" Both his eyes narrowed. "I don't see why you're giving up before you have to. There's a catch somewhere. What is it that you want from me?"

"I want you to leave the young maids of the cove alone after I'm gone."

"Oh, sure," he said.

"I'm serious."

"Try 'crazy.' It's not gonna happen."

"You've all the time in the world ahead of you, and you're living like there's no tomorrow. Slow down. Everything in this world has a price, and you're nowhere near ready to pay for the way you've been living since we came here."

"This is simple. They want to. I want to. We do. Nobody coerces nobody. Nobody wheedles. We get on with getting it on."

"Can you not do this one thing for me before I go?"

Chuck snorted again. "I can lie to you and tell you I will, if it means that much to you."

I stood up. "Ruin your life if you have to, but don't ruin her life!"

"Wait. Whose life?" Chuck was alert.

I waved my hand in a huge arc. "All the lives of the few young women in the cove."

"No, that's not it," Chuck was sure. "You're worried about— it's Marion, isn't it?"

"Will you leave her alone, for God's sake?" I bawled at him.

He looked me square in the eye. "I will. Ya happy now?" He smirked and left.

I had use up all my strength. I collapsed on the floor, and lay there for I don't how long.

When I eventually got up off the floor, I knew I had to phone Dana. I tried to ease into it.

"Dana," I said, "you know why young Chuck is here, right?"

"That depends on where you two have gotten to now. Are you still in the Cove?"

"Yes, but that's not what I meant. I meant, do you know why he showed up?"

"Are you sure there's a 'why' to it? I'm not."

"I wasn't sure. Now I am."

"Are you going to tell me?"

"Of course, only … are you sitting down, by any chance? It's bad news."

I heard her settle. "Go on," she said.

"He's here to replace me."

"What?"

"Look, Dana, I'm feeling awful. Getting weaker every day. Chuck seems to be really coming into his own, getting surer every day."

Dana tsked. "In other words, you're coming down with something, and Chuck's getting used to a weird situation. What's all the drama?"

"I think there's more to it than that."

"Yeah, but there probably isn't."

"It feels like there is. Especially with a young version of Si showing up."

"You didn't tell me that."

I said nothing.

Dana asked, "How is Si?"

"Drunk."

"Same old Si. What about young Si?"

"He's settled in to take care of our Si. Like he knows it won't be long. I don't think it's long for me, either. I called to say—"

"Charlie, stop it!"

"Dana, there's never a bad time for me to tell you how much I love you. And now seems like the best time … just in case."

"You mean I'm going to lose both of my brothers?"

Dana sounded frightened. I hadn't heard her sound that alone or that vulnerable since the night she had downed three vodkas, sat me down, and told me she was a lesbian.

"We'll still be here. In a way."

"Charlie, don't go. Don't leave me. Don't you dare do it."

"I love you, sis." I hung up, and crawled into bed. To wait for nightfall. To be ready for it.

The cove was dark as we pushed out in Si's old dory, and we had a little trouble not hitting other boats at first. Once we were clear, I sat down and started to row.

"Didn't you ask me to row you out?" Chuck asking, already in a bad temper.

"Let me go as far as I can. You'll have to row back by yourself," I reminded him.

Nothing but the sound of oars going into the water, making the kind of racket they do when a townie wields them.

"Did you ever think of anything you wanted to ask me?"

"I might have," Charlie said, "only it's clear you don't have a handle on one goddamned thing in your life."

"I suppose you think you could have done better."

"I think I'm going to do better, yeah."

About seventh-eights of the way to Old Man Isle, my strength gave out. I scrambled away from the oars to make space for Chuck, but instead of sitting down, he grabbed me by the collar and by the waist of my trousers.

"Over you go, dad."

"You bloody fool, the whole damn cove can see—"

I swung frantically, and caught the boy in the face. He dropped my collar, and I pushed hard on the back of his knee, and we both landed, neither of us of anything soft. The current had us, and we were starting to move. He grabbed an oar, and caught me on my lower back, but swung too hard and was on his knees again. I tossed one oar overboard. Chuck started to get up, and I wrapped both hands around his ankle, and pulled hard. There was an almighty splash.

I leaned over the side of the dory, trying to see him to grab him, but all I could hear was the sound of him thrashing. I got a piece of him once, but was too weak to hang onto him. "Chuck!" I cried out, but I didn't hear an answer.

The current kept me heading along in front of the island. I used the remaining oar as best I could, and landed on the far end of the island. I hadn't the strength to haul the dory, so I made her as fast as I could. I called out, but I suppose the wind took my voice away. If no one had heard Chuck go into the water, then it wasn't likely they'd hear my calls. I was exhausted, but in the cold wind, it still took me a long time to fall asleep.

When I woke up, I felt stronger somehow, as though a fever had broken. Not long after dawn, I heard an old make-and-break engine heading toward me. Sure enough, it was Perce. By his silence on the trip back across the harbour towing the dory, Perce let me know just how little he thought of me.

As we parted, all Perce said was, "Si will give you hell for losing one of his oars, ye foolish gommil."

I was on the very point of escaping into Si's when Maud Maheney hailed me. "Where's that young fella of yours?"

"I haven't seen him since last night. What's he done now?"

"If I find he's been putting his hands on my young Lily, there'll be trouble," Maud warned. "Lily ain't been seen since last night either."

"Isn't your Lily a bit young for him?"

"Word is, your young fella ain't bothered by that."

I couldn't admit the truth of that, but it was still accurate. The thing was, I knew where Chuck had gone, and it wasn't with any of the locals girls.

Si the younger came in with two tall papers bags. He set one of them on the table, and carried the other to the pantry. I looked inside the bag. Lamb's white rum. Forty-ouncer.

The young fellow came back, skinned off the paper bag, balled it up.

"Moving him on to the hard stuff, are we?"

"I'm not encouraging him."

"You just make sure his supply never runs dry?"

"I guess I do. I wish he'd stop. I tried to stop him, he lashed out at me."

"And you gave up that easily."

"Back off! I gave up once he beat me so bad I pissed blood. You want to call that easy? I still wish he'd stop. But he won't."

"How can you be so sure? How can you give up on him?"

"I'll never give up on him. I never gave up on nobody."

Si was sitting in the dark, and the smell convinced me that he hadn't moved since the previous time I had seen him. I sat next to him. He was shivering without pause.

"Do you know what I should have done?" he asked suddenly. "I should have hauled down that wallpaper and painted the kitchen top to bottom. I'm sick of having wallpaper in a kitchen. Who the Christ does that? Do you know how long there's been wallpaper in this kitchen? Hell, this exact wallpaper has been here since we were kids, and that's thirty years if it's a day. I'll wager there's four other layers of wallpaper beneath what we've been looking at since the 1960s."

"What colour would you paint it?" It wasn't me who asked that. It was the young fellow. I hadn't seen him there, and it startled me.

"It don't matter what colour, all that matters is that its paint, so's you can wipe the grease off it," Si said. Then he added, "Something bright, I guess. Some kind of yellow. Nothing too bright. Nothing too faded, if it comes to that."

"I'll buy the paint whenever you're ready," the young fellow said.

Si nodded. "It won't be long now. It'll be good to have the place a bit cheerful, eh, Charlie?"

"Yes b'y," I said.

"Maybe get a new fridge and stove in too," Si said. "Could we have a bit more wood in the stove? I'm perished. Don't know when we've had a summer this cold."

The young fellow tended to the heat without a word.

I got up to go to be.

"Are you off, then?" Si asked. "All right then. May choirs of angels sing to your rest."

When I came down the next morning, Si had finally moved from the chair. I was amazed the young fellow had gotten him to his bed with no trouble, but happy to see that the sodden pile of blankets were no longer covering the chair. Both windows were open a crack, too, to air to place out … but the shades were pulled down to just above the cracks.

I made breakfast and thought no more about Si until suppertime. But when I checked his bed, he wasn't there. All I found in the kitchen was the young fellow, stacking cases of empty beer bottles as near to the doorway as he could without blocking it.

The next morning, all the cases were gone. The shades were up, and the young fellow was giving the whole room as deep a clean as it had since our grandmother had been alive. Still no sign of Si.

The morning after that, the kitchen was a wreck. The young fellow had strips and patches of the old wallpaper strewn all over the floor, and gallon cans of yellow paint and primer set on the counter next to the sink.

"Fifteen layers," he said to me as I came in. Then her turned back to the scraping the most stubborn bits of wallpaper.

Si had been gone for four days before I worked up the nerve to ask the young fellow where he was. Instead of watching him apply another coat of yellow paint.

The young fellow just blinked at me. "I don't know."

"Where you think he is?"

"I don't understand."

"Is he coming back?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Do you think he's coming back?"

He paused. "I don't think so, no."

The front door opened, and Perce was with us. The younger Si found somewhere else to be.

"Have you had the cold that's been working its way through the cove?" Perce started with.

I stared at him. "Is that all that was wrong with me? I thought I was on my last legs." Dana had been right. Again. I ought to have had more faith. I had been sure my being replaced had been imminent.

"No sign of Lily Maheney?" I asked Perce.

"I'll bet a full case of beer she went off with your young fella."

"I don't think so, Perce. Not this time."

"Where is he then?" Perce demanded.

I couldn't look him in the eye.

"Charlie, b'y, it's me."

I said nothing.

"This is a bad place for secrets, Charlie."

"The whole cove has its secrets, Perce. The only difference is that everybody knows them."

"Only half the cove."

"Better than half the cove. All the women, and whatever men there are that listen to their women." I paused. "I don't see my way out of this one, Perce."

"Tell the truth and shame the devil," Perce said unexpectedly.

"Is that your secret?"

"If I has a secret, it's that I don't act like I'm always right," Perce said.

"I don't either," I said. "Why doesn't it do me any good?"

Perce said nothing.

"Perce?" I said.

"Sure you want to know?"

Easy to say "yes." How to show it's true?

"You're right when you say you don't act like you're always in the right," Perce said. "But you go too far. You rush toward the possibility that you're not right."

The next morning, I began packing up the car. The younger Si watched me, but didn't say anything. "It's time I moved on," I announced, as though to a wider audience than just young Si. "I'll say goodbye to Perce and Lisa on my way out."

"You might want to deal with the lady who was looking for you."

"Maud Mahaney I can do without."

I heard a car pull up, but didn't pay enough attention.

"Not Maud Mahaney," young Si said.

"I don't know anyone who could be looking for me," I said.

"Oh yes you do," said the child welfare lady. She was getting out of a car so new and clean that it had to be a rental, and smiled toothily as the wind parted her coarse blond hair right at the snow-white part.

"I love small towns," she said. "I can show up with a name or even a vague description, and anyone I pick at random can tell me exactly where anyone else will be for the next hour."

"I thought I lost you in Halifax," I said.

"You did. But your wife suggested three places you might be headed for, and you weren't in the first two." She shrugged. No big deal. "So here we all are again."

"Not quite all," I said. "Your main quarry seems to have run off with a local girl."

"You're not up on the latest bulletins, Mister Carter," she said. "The youngest Mahaney girl turned up at daybreak. Alone. Her only plan had been to drink herself stupid. Apparently, that took less time than she had thought."

"So if he didn't run off with a girl, where the hell is he?"

"My first theory was that you gave him money and food and told him to lie low someplace."

"Well, I didn't. Not your brightest theory, really. Hard to lie low around here."

"Which is why I abandoned it in favour of my second theory. This boy," pointing at the young Si, "is your brother's son. And no one's seen your brother for days. Obviously they're somewhere together."

"Excellent. I can kick the crap out of both of them at once."

She applauded me. "Nicely delivered. Obviously complete crap, but delivered with a good amount of feeling and conviction."

"I promise you, I am aching to kick the crap out of someone."

"Funny, that's not how you look."

"I'm dying to know—how do I look?"

"You look like someone planning to skip town."

I chuckled. "Us regular folks just called it 'leaving.' You're way out of your jurisdiction. You're not even with child welfare, are you?"

She showed me an investigator's licence with her picture on it. The name on the licence was Bedelia Johnston.

"Who hired you?" I asked. "And why?"

She raised her eyebrows, but continued to smile at me pleasantly. She was clearly alert, but she knew how to keep her face from showing it. "Okay, I might as well tell you that. Your wife hired me."

"Look, Mrs—"

"Don't have to be so formal. 'Less you want to. You can call me Bedelia."

"No, I honestly don't believe I could. What do your friends call you?"

She shifted her weight slightly. "Friends?"

"All right—how about people around the office?"

"Bedelia."

"Nothing shorter?"

"Some of 'em call me 'Beady'."

"And you like that?"

"Not at all."

I couldn't figure out why she was being so informal. Then I realized. All she knew about me was where I was standing right now. She hoped I'd let something slip.

"Do you mind if I ask how you got into this business?"

"No."

I waited for her to go on, then realized that she had given her complete answer to that question. "How did you?"

"I'd always been good at noticing things. Minding other people's business." She shrugged. "When my husband died, I had to earn my keep somehow."

"Getting an investigator's licence couldn't have been easy."

"I got it done. I still do." She shifted her weight. "Whether you call this leaving town or anything else, it doesn't look good. You came here for a reason. Looks like it's done. Why else would you be leaving?"

"You know I don't have to answer your questions, right?"

"You'll have to answer questions sometime, mister. Maybe I won't be the only one who thinks that this doesn't look good."

"I see." I thought about it awhile. "Well—bye now!" I got into my car and drove off, not even stopping to say goodbye to Perce and Lisa.

She followed me. If that's your idea of a large time, sister, go right ahead; knock yourself out. Why would I care? But funny enough, the next time I looked behind me, she had gone. I suspect she made sure I was bluffing, then headed back to the cove, but I never learned for sure.

I headed back to St. John's. I didn't get in touch with anyone there, but I did phone back to Dana and let her know that both Si and Chuck had disappeared and confess that all I had had wrong with me was a cold.

I spent a day visiting my old haunts, and I felt that my days in these places were gone forever. It was almost as though the city didn't feel like home any more. But there was worse than that. I felt as though someone were watching me, someone perpetually just out of sight.

Eventually, I phoned my dad to let him know where I was.

"Charlie, I don't know where you've been, but you got to get to Halifax right away. Katie Baird says it's now or never."

"When did you hear from Katie?" I asked, trying to fight a cold feeling in my chest.

"Almost a full day ago. She called Si's looking for you first. She sounded frantic."

I drove right to the airport, but there wasn't a flight to Halifax for a couple of hours. I walked around and around the terminal, still feeling like I was being watched, and expecting Bedelia Johnston to pop out at me at any moment.

She didn't. But just when I was getting ready to head to security, Chuck popped out at me.

"How the hell did you get here?" I asked him.

I didn't like his smile at all. "We have to have a little talk."

"What about?"

"Just for starters, you leaving me for dead. But more urgent than that, you getting me a seat on that plane to Halifax so I can see Holly. I'm dead broke."

"The way you've been carrying on, I'm surprised you want to let Holly see your face."

"Shut up about Holly," he said. "Whatever I've done, it's nothing like you trying to drown me."

"Screw that," I said. "You tried to heave me out of the boat, and I ended up heaving you out. But I tried to get you back into it, tried as much as my strength would let me."

"You tell yourself whatever you need to in order to get to sleep at night," Chuck said. "But don't talk to me like I wasn't right there for all of it. Bad luck for you that I was close enough to the island to swim for it. Nobody came looking for me."

"I thought you had … faded away."

"You mean drowned. And the word you're looking for isn't 'thought'; it's 'hoped'. You didn't even have the decency to organize a search for my body."

"You tried to kill me."

"You asked me to, remember?"

I glared at him. "Now, it's my turn to remind you that I was there for all of it, too. I know what you tried to do."

The public address system butted in. "This is a pre-boarding announcement for Air Canada flight 8118 to Halifax. Would all passengers with children, and any passengers requiring assistance to board please present themselves at gate 1. This is a pre-boarding announcement only. General boarding will follow."

"Get me on board," Chuck practically spat at me.

I went back to the ticket counter and bought another ticket. They said that they couldn't find two together, and I said that that was the best news they could have given me. Ninety minutes of sitting next to a spoiled version of myself with paranoid delusions would have done me in.

Something happened to Chuck during the flight. Instead of acting like a minor baddie in a black-and-white film, his focus had shifted. Judging by the number of times he collided with someone or something, the only thought on Chuck's mind was moving forward. I grabbed him and we both piled in a taxi that took us right to the hospital. I skidded to a halt at the reception desk, and grabbed roughly at Chuck's sleeve and held onto him as he tried to keep going without the benefit of knowing where.

"Where's the cancer ward?" I asked.

The receptionist frowned at me. "The patient's name?"

"Baird."

"Room 941. Take the south elevators."

Those were our only directions, and so we got lost. At first we seemed to be headed right, but soon the under-lit corridors became dark and empty. When I realized we were in a wing of the hospital that had been shut down, I despaired of ever finding our way again, for there was no one to get directions from. Somehow, Chuck's forward motion brought us back to the lit and inhabited areas, and I spotted a sign reading "Rooms 931-960."

As we turned a corner, away down the hall, outside the door of room 941, I saw two people: a nurse facing toward me and someone else facing away. The nurse was being stern with the other, won her point, and disappeared into room 941. The forlorn and broken figure turned to face us, and it was Katie. I was confused. How could Katie be well enough to be out of bed? Katie saw Chuck coming, then me, and she moved toward us, her hand help up in an effort to stop us, slow us, or quiet us.

"It'll just be a moment. The nurse has to—give her an injection," Katie said.

At that moment, the nurse passed us on her way out on the room, and I looked inside to start at the sight of Holly, looking grey and without any energy whatsoever.

Katie stood in the doorway, blocking Chuck, but it was no longer necessary. He had lost his momentum.

"One at a time, you two," Katie said. She took my hand, led me unresisting to Holly's bedside, said "Here's Charlie now," and left us there together.

I had nothing I could say. On the plane, I had prepared speeches to comfort Holly that would—I now realize—have been useless no matter who was saying goodbye. So I stood there, deeply ashamed, until I realized that Holly was opening her eyes. Holly didn't say anything, and I didn't see any expression on her face or life in her eyes. I didn't think she was there at all, but I gently laid my hand on hers, taking care not to put pressure on any intravenous tubes. Eventually, her eyes moved in my general direction. I was afraid she couldn't make out my face, so I said, "We're back from Newfoundland. Chuck's here too. Right outside."

Her lips opened a little, but no sound came out. I moved my ear to her mouth. Very softly, she said what sounded like "cha." It could have been the start of my name, I supposed, but I was sure she was asking for—or about—Chuck. Or maybe, being Holly, she was trying to say, "Cutting it kind of close, aren't you?"

I didn't know what she needed, so I brought her Chuck. But first I bent to kiss her forehead and said, "Gorgeous." I don't know why I said that. I don't know what it means.

Just as Katie had done for me, I took Chuck by the hand and led him to Holly, and announced his presence. As I was closing the door behind me, I heard Chuck say, "Don't leave yet."

Dumb as I am sometimes, I knew he was not talking to me. I left the door open just a crack, enough to barely make out the low murmur of his voice as he tried to find his way back to Holly.

"Holly and I had just said our goodbyes," Katie said, "then she had to have another shot. For the pain. Then you showed up. You made it before she sank. Thank you. And anyone else involved."

"Will she last the night?" I asked.

"She won't last the hour."

I glanced at the clock. Ten minutes to three.

I confessed then. How I had thought it her who had cancer. Who I believed Chuck was. That I had been sure Chuck had come to drive me off, and even told her how, initially, I had thought Holly was her younger self and her replacement.

It's shaming now to think how I was deep inside my own head when Katie was losing her daughter. I said nothing to bring Katie comfort. Perhaps that's why Katie said nothing. She simply couldn't see why I was telling her any of it. Then or ever.

I became aware that I could no longer hear the rumble of Chuck's voice. I tried to listen only for that sound. Nothing.

Gently, I pushed on the door, and saw Holly on the bed. But of Chuck there was no sign. Not under the bed, not in the bathroom, nowhere. There was one small window open a crack, but even opened all the way it barely made enough space for a cat to crawl in. Katie had been standing with her back resting against the door frame, and I had been looking right at the door. But somehow Chuck was gone. Somehow he found a way out.

Holly came around one last time, but what she said wasn't especially coherent. As best we could piece it together, Holly said that Chuck just disappeared—one moment, he was rocking her, and the next, he wasn't there.

"I think the morphine put you out for a little while there, best girl," Katie said to Holly, but Holly shook her head. The effort caused her to drift off again.

Katie told me go back to their place to get some sleep. I wanted to be there for Katie, but I think Katie wanted to go through it alone, so I left, but I didn't sleep. Well, one doesn't. Not when that's the kind of thing you're waiting for.

At about 5 AM, Katie came back to the house herself. Holly had died during the night, but Katie had been there to make sure she didn't do it alone. I made us both some breakfast, but neither of us even nibbled. Once the rest of the world was awake, Katie started making funeral arrangements and that kind of thing. I gave her what help I could. What help Katie would allow.

Katie and I flew from Halifax to St. John's. Once we were airborne, Katie took the urn from her overnight bag and held it on her lap until the pilot announced our descent. Katie rented a car. I drove, so that Katie could hold on to the urn. We drove right to Bowring Park. Katie got out and walked all the way down to the lawn beneath the bungalow, then she stood on a bench and scattered the first handful of ashes to the four winds. I retreated to the steps of the bungalow and sat there and watched as a small pile of ash gathered at her feet.

Katie poured handful after handful. When she was done, she turned the urn upside, shook it, and hurled it away from her. Katie was quiet for what seemed like a long time to me. Then she started to sing. It was the proud, glad Gaelic song I'd only ever heard her recording of. She sang it now a cappella, loud and carrying from the first note. The tears fell down her cheeks one after the other but her voice remained strong and clear. At first, people pretended they didn't see her and didn't hear her. A little girl walked past with her parents. The parents ignored both Katie and their little girl. The little girl stopped walking and stared up at Katie standing on the bench and that little girl never took her gaze away. Then the little girl started to sing. It wasn't the same words—in fact, I don't think it was any words—and it wasn't the same tune, but the little girl started to sing with Katie. The little girl's parents kept whispering commands at her "Come on!" but wouldn't speak in a normal tone, nor would they retrace their steps to get any nearer to Katie.

Three kids around twelve walked cautiously up and watched. One of them clearly recognized Katie. An elderly couple picked up the urn and put it on the bench near Katie's feet, then stepped back. The little girl kept going "la la la", and Katie kept belting out her song of rejoicing. I got up from the steps and walked as close as I dared.

When Katie stopped singing, she stepped down from the bench gracefully, took my hand, and we walked away without a glance back. I had been afraid that one of the kids would ask for her autograph, or that someone would applaud, but no one said anything. The parents quietly collected their daughter, and the old couple sat on the bench and looked wonderingly at the urn.

We went straight back to the airport and she returned her rental. With that done, she had nothing to do except wait to be allowed on board her plane to Halifax. Katie held me for a very long time. Then she let go.

I went out to the airport parking lot to fetch my car, and started the long drive back, solo, which is no way to make the trip off the island. I drove to Halifax to help Katie shut up the house she'd rented. I offered to stay until she was done, then drive her back to Wolfville, but Katie insisted that I begin the long drive back to Ottawa. So one grey morning, I woke up well before dawn, got on the road early, and made the drive from Halifax to Ottawa without stopping. Halfway along, I wished I had someone who could spell me off driving for an hour or two. I'll never do that drive again non-stop unless someone's life is on the line. I don't remember ever being so tired.

When I got to Ottawa, Dana had a letter for me. The letter was from Cath's lawyer. Cath had hired a moving firm to remove all of my possessions from our house. The letter explained which self-storage mall they were in, and enclosed a key to the lock. Also attached were the bills from the storage mall for the space, a year paid in advance … on the joint household account.

I wandered in the maze of metal doors until I found the locker. Cath had used a rusty lock I had bought when we had first moved to Ottawa, and I spent several minutes having it stay locked. Once I rolled up the broad garage-style door, I saw that the room was huge, and almost half-empty. Even so, there were too many boxes for one person to have amassed.

I spent a week going through those boxes. An agonizing proportion of it was junk, and most of that junk was paper. A copy of my master's thesis. Income tax returns for the past eighteen years. In one box, I found my Grade V report card. That was the year I got all A's, right through the year, right across the board. I hadn't kept my Grade VI report card, because I'd messed up that year by letting two B's on to my transcript.

I couldn't manage to throw all of it out, but I reduced the collection down to a third of its original size. Then I moved everything that remained to a much smaller storage locker. And then I realized that a week is long enough to spend in a room, winnowing down papers, and I locked the door and came away.

Paul phoned me at Dana's, and said he wanted to see me. I suggested lunch at Zak's in the Market.

I was there early, of course, but Paul surprised me by already being there. He had snagged a booth. Paul looked—no, I don't know what the word is. Have you ever had a friend who was considerably overweight who really sheds some serious pounds? They don't just look lighter. They look more alert. More determined, sometimes. Paul had never weighed much to begin with and, although he hadn't lost any weight that I could see, he had that same kind of look of having changed.

At lunch, I waited a very long time for him to begin to tell me off, or ask me questions, or whatever he intended to do. When he didn't begin, I told him a little about my trip back home. I left a lot out.

Paul tried to pay for both our meals. When that didn't work, he insisted on paying for his own.

We were standing awkwardly on the sidewalk outside Zak's. Neither of us seemed to know how to say goodbye.

"Want to walk up to the sci-fi book shop with me?" Paul suggested.

The House of Speculative Fiction was in the Glebe, the trendy, yuppified section that you could afford to live in only if you were old money, or a star in the high-tech world. It was at least a thirty-minute walk, and the wind-chill was tuning up. But it was an interest Paul and I shared.

"Great," I said, and we started walking. Past the great children's bookstore on Sussex, then turn at the Rideau Centre up past the Chateau Laurier and the Houses of Parliament to Bank. A walk along Bank Street to the Glebe involved some definite urban funk.

"Mom's talking about custody," Paul said. "She's going to ask that you be denied all visitation rights."

I raised my eyebrows gently. "She can ask for that, but no halfway sane judge will grant it."

"Mom has totally flaked out," Paul said in low tones.

I wasn't going to criticize Cath. "She's just angry at me. Really angry. Even the most righteous anger in the world won't make a court forbid me to see you. Don't worry about it."

"Dad, you don't understand."

"Your mom can divorce me because she thinks I fathered a child before our marriage, and I can't make her believe I didn't. She can and will get sole custody. Your mother will not be able to prevent me from having contact with you."

Paul stopped walking, so I did too. We had entered that bleak region of Bank Street just before the Queensway, where you're convinced you're at the end of the retail section that expects foot traffic.

"Dad, I'm sixteen years old. In two more years, I'll be eighteen. That's the end of the idea of custody."

The whole time he was speaking, Paul looked straight into my eyes. After he stopped talking, he kept my gaze until he was sure I had heard and understood. Then we got all male again, and neither of us knew what to say, so we started walking up Bank Street again. Just under the Queensway, the deserted feeling disappeared and we were on the outskirts of the Glebe, with the clean-looking shops that seemed to be intended to entice the tourists, most of whom stayed at least five blocks away. But the storefronts remained bright, and the owners were as welcoming and pleasant as the bells that jingled lightly when you opened one of the shop doors.

I got myself a nine-month contract with the federal government, writing project proposals. I also got a bachelor apartment. Dana swore I was welcome at her place until the horizon turned forever black, but we both needed our space.

I walked down to the post office and got a grocery bag full of change of address cards, and sent them out to everyone I could think of. Friends I hadn't written to or spoken with since I'd left Newfoundland. Relatives I'd only met once. A few of Cath's relatives even. About a week after I'd posted them, I had a postcard from Gord White. He'd scrawled on it, "You keep popping up, don't you? Sorry to hear about your divorce. We've a bed for you any night you don't feel like being alone. Love, Gord." I phoned him that night, and he made me promise to visit soon. "Soon," he stressed, and I told him I understood, but that I had legal proceedings tying me up.

The divorce was kind of ugly. Neither of us wanted to be with the other any more, and both of us resented the wasted years. Less than a year afterwards, I finally realized that the years hadn't been wasted, and that the resentment, however natural, was embarrassingly juvenile. I hoped Cath felt that way too, but I never found out. The financial upshot was that Cath didn't get all she'd expected, and I wasn't divested of as much as I'd feared, though I knew I'd never own a home again without financial assistance. But that was still in the future then.

After reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and seeing how far Van Gogh progressed based on where he started, I started taking night classes in drawing myself. I suppose it would have been even more appropriate if I could have taken the exact same drawing course that Van Gogh had. I didn't progress as far as he had, but I was satisfied enough with my improvement that I generally had a pencil in my hand.

One weekend Alice Osbourne phoned me, and invited me over for supper, and I met her husband Ray. They were living in a one-bedroom apartment in a tower block. The apartment had tiny narrow passageways to make sure you wouldn't mix them up with the actual rooms.

"What are you both up to? Did you get that job at Carleton, Alice?" I asked. Alice bit her lip.

"A beer, Charlie?" Ray asked me. "Maybe a drop of Lamb's?"

"I'll stick with the juice, thanks, Ray," I said. "What's wrong, Alice?" She had turned her face profile and was looking out the window.

"No, I never got that job, thanks, Charlie. I signed up with a temp agency, and they gets me the odd job as a receptionist."

"Alice got to chatting with someone else who was interviewing for the job," Ray said. "Do you know what they told her at Carleton, Charlie? They told Alice she should go back where she came from. 'Never you mind coming up here taking our jobs,' that's what they said." I'm used to the garbage about how we all collect unemployment, so I knew they sure as hell don't want us not working. It turns out they don't want us working, either."

Alice spoke sharply. "You got to choose your battles, Ray. We got to go up against everybody else in the job market, now. We knew we were in for that when we left Newfoundland. As bad as it is here, we still got a better shot here than we did back home. I won't go back, and I won't sue, and I won't let a few rotten shaggers make me treat everybody from Ontario like they're all the same. We got enough people thinks Newfoundlanders is all the same. I won't do to them what they been doing to us." She had turned to face us, but now she looked out the window again, then she laughed. "Jesus. Come spend a pleasant evening with the Osbournes!"

I couldn't help it. I snickered, and that set Ray off, and we were all away.

Once we'd recovered, I told Alice about Gord, and how he didn't have long, and how Dana and I were going to be driving up soon. "What are we waiting for?" Alice asked.

"I have to find someone first," I said. Alice picked up on something in my voice, I don't know what, and she leaned forward to extract the details.

Two days later, I had a phone call from Alice. "Got 'im," she said.

I was flabbergasted. "That quick?"

"He doesn't look in the best shape, Charlie."

"I'll be right over."

Sitting in the corner of Alice and Ray's kitchenette was the tall young fellow with the bushy red hair who had run away from me, months earlier, on Carleton campus. Back then, he was tall and gangly. Now he was tall and had filled out an incredible amount, but he looked disoriented and his clothes stank as though he hadn't changed them since the last time I'd seen him. It seemed entirely possible, as they were the same exact clothes. His eyes rarely moved, and when they did, they moved slowly. He didn't look as though he might die. He looked as though he might start weeping, and never stop.

That was nothing compared to how Gord looked when we all finally got to Mississauga. Gord was thin and his skin was a kind of dark grey that told me we were just barely in time.

And of course, I was wrong about that. Gord looked bad, but his partner Jamie told us that Gord had actually been discharged from the hospital a few days earlier. Gord rallied well, and accepted the reality of the young, bushy redhead in less than an hour. He was just too tired to talk about it much that first day.

Dana and I had to get back to Ottawa, but Alice wouldn't leave Gord, so Alice and Ray decided to try their luck at getting hired on in Toronto. A week later, Ray called Dana to enlist her help in subletting their Ottawa apartment. Ray had gotten hired on at a construction firm by a manager who had known Ray's father and elder brother.

Two weeks after that, Alice called me. Young Gordie had pleaded with Gord's partner Jamie to be shown how to care for Gord. Already Gordie was flying solo, although Alice reported that Jamie had been in such a state that Alice had had to take Jamie out for coffee, and keep him from phoning the apartment easily twenty times in the first hour. They had gone to an old haunt of Gord's and Jamie's, and Alice had asked Jamie how long it had been since he had been there. Nearly two years, Jamie had said. Alice had told them they would come back the very next night to start making up for time lost.

"Oh no," Jamie had said. "I can't. I have to look after Gord. There's no one else."

Alice said that as soon as the words were out of Jamie's mouth, he was staring at her, then he was staring at nothing, and finally he was giving great wracking sobs.

They came back to the coffee shop the next night, and managed five more visits before Gord had to go back into the hospital where he died. Alice, Dana, and I all attended the funeral in Toronto. Alice supported Jamie, and Dana supported Alice. Young Gordie had refused to attend. When we got back from the graveside, Gordie was preparing to move out. After a lot of hushed argument, Gordie agreed to spend that night with Alice and Ray, but insisted he wanted to leave early the next morning. I never saw him again. Alice told me that she watched at the window until Gordie was out of sight, then she went straight to the phone and called her sister to talk about the young doppelganger she had seen on the streets of Winnipeg.

The last year before Paul went off to university, he tried to cram all his preparation into a few frantic months. He wanted my help in choosing his top three, and I visited Waterloo, Western, and York with him. He wanted to stay in the province. I kept my mouth shut about that.

At the end of my government contract, I went to the Stratford Festival, mostly because I wanted to see the Festival Theatre again. As I walked down Stratford's main drag, Ontario Street, I was reminded of the Glebe. It was a little touristy-trendy, perhaps, but restrained enough that it had a genuine welcome. I went back to Ottawa and a three-month contract. And I found a guardian angel that offered me considerable financial help. That's a completely different story, but I keep confidences.

After the theatre season closed, I made enquiries about houses in Stratford. One weekend in mid-December, I drove down to Stratford and checked into the Stratford Inn. I called Julia Hamilton, based on her photo in a badly-printed local real estate guide that left ink on my fingers. She was the agent who looked the least as though she had been selling used cars the previous month. When she arrived in the inn's lobby early the next morning, her makeup was understated and her manner warm but not overbright.

"Mr Carter?" she said as I approached. "I'm Julia Hamilton. I have three properties lined up for you this morning. Would you like to grab a coffee before we start?"

I shook my head. We went into the parking lot, and she unlocked the passenger door on her four-wheel drive. I climbed up.

"I'm glad I have this beast this morning," she said.

"I'll bet," I said. "Getting to Stratford was quite a drive once I got past Toronto. That's when the snow really started falling."

She stopped to allow the plough clearing out the inn's parking lot to complete its path, then pulled out. Ontario Street, normally four lanes at this point, was down to two. "I have two very attractive properties to start with, both fresh on the market. Both are going concerns."

"Going concerns?"

"Oh, yes. Not everybody stops taking guests once the festival is over. Some folk stay open right the year round."

"I think there's been a mistake. A miscommunication," I amended.

"I'm sorry," Julia said immediately, but looking wary.

"I'm just looking for something small. For myself."

"Not to run as a bed and breakfast?" Julia's face was getting red.

"Not," I agreed.

"Whoops," said Julia. Then unexpectedly, she laughed.

"Whoops is right," I said.

"You want a private home," she said, and waited for my response.

"Correct," I said.

"A single-family home. Gosh, are those still legal inside the city limits?"

"You don't sell many?"

"Not to out-of-towners. Gee. This is going to be fun."

Julia pulled over and pulled out a cell phone and a laptop computer. First she cancelled the appointments she had made at the going concerns. She did it very nicely. Then she started her laptop. While we were waiting for it to prepare itself, she drew off her brown suede gloves and folded her hands in her lap.

"Let's start over. Did you say you wanted at least three bedrooms?"

I remembered. I had said that when I called her. "Well, yeah. But one of them can be a pretty small bedroom. I need it as an office. I'll be working from home. But I have to have two bedrooms—one for me and one to use as a guest bedroom."

"Aha!" Julia said. "Now I see what I did. When you phoned me, I somehow heard 'guest bedroom' and 'working from home' and turned that into a bed and breakfast. That embarrasses me. I apologize."

"I accept." I smiled, then made a "let's move on" motion with my hand.

"So you'd accept something with two bedrooms and a den instead of three bedrooms?"

"Well, sure. Of course."

Julia started typing on her laptop. "If I'd told this thing to search for three bedrooms and nothing else, we would miss some good stuff. Okay, here we go."

My spirits started to rise as soon as I saw the second house. These houses were small but not cramped. "These prices are more in my range," I told Julia as we headed for a third house.

"You're looking at an excellent time," Julia said. We headed down a street with houses set a fair distance back from the road. People were still shovelling out their vehicles. In one driveway, I saw a frazzled lady at the wheel of a compact and a red-faced gentleman trying to push it. "Would you pull over for a moment?" I asked Julia.

The street had only been ploughed once, and was about three-quarters of a lane wide. Julia did her best to pull over to the side, and I hopped out before her vehicle had stopped.

"You look like you could use a hand," I called to the couple in the compact as I walked back toward their driveway. The lady looked hopeful. The gentleman just looked winded. Julia joined us and we all pushed, and the extra muscle helped, but it was still no go. By now, cars had approached Julia's car from opposite directions, and instead of leaning on their horns, the drivers jumped out and joined us in pushing. That unstuck the compact, and we all headed back to our vehicles, all of us smiling.

We looked at four more houses that day, two of them warm and decorated for Christmas. I slept on it, then made an offer on the smallest house around nine-thirty the next morning. Closing the deal took some time, thanks to the formalities that exist mostly to make lawyers a little better off. I imposed on a friend of a friend for a two-month contract in Waterloo, about 45 minutes' drive from Stratford, and moved in.

It took no time to get to know my neighbours, but I wasn't close with any of them. They were so definitely Upper Canadian, and I was so definitely not. For the first time since I had moved to Ontario, I felt different but not isolated.

I had great fun learning about HTML and putting together a website about where in southwestern Ontario you could find goods every Newfoundlander needs, like hard bread and roast chicken chips. The owner of the book shop that sold me the HTML books and other technical manuals asked what it was really all about, and liked the simplicity of my answer enough to hire me to make a website for his store. By spring, long after the Waterloo contract was done, I was learning regularly enough to make each successive website that I was hired to do just a little better and easier to use. The fact that I could actually draw seemed to set me apart from most other website services. Before too long, I had clients across the country, but I reserved a little time and a special lower rate for the local businesses. They had been comfortably elastic about me paying my bills to begin with. Now that I had repaid the actual cash, this was the only way I could think to repay the kindness.

I renovated and decorated and generally made a mess of things, then sometime around May I let it be known I now had a spare bedroom for visitors.

One of the houses I saw in the search must have been constructed by a novice builder. You walked in the front door and there was no open space, no public space, just a corridor with doors. It made me think that the doorway or archway had been walled up after the house had been built, perhaps in attempt to keep the cold air out of the living area, but if so, it had been done very adroitly, for I could see no trace of the renovation. It was an unpleasant house to look over. We stepped inside, and there was nowhere to stand. You could venture down the corridor and open the doors into what might be a bathroom, but there were no hints as to which doors were safe to open without intruding. No clear sign that visitors were welcome anywhere at all. You had to chose between staying in the corridor until someone came to issue you an invitation, or break trail in the hopes that your instincts would lead you only through doors where nothing irreversible would happen. I didn't buy the house. I'm not sure I even finished viewing it.

Dana drove down from Ottawa with her latest belle in tow, and they dragged me to A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I can't stick at any price. Dana's friend was one of the quietest and shyest people ever bred, and I gave up on ever making her acquaintance when she and Dana returned from the Tom Patterson Theatre one night, and even though her eyes were bright and wide, her heart bumping, and her brain fully engaged, she still sat and listened to Dana ask questions so rapid-fire that even I could tell it was the asking that was important to Dana. I don't think Dana and her friend are still together. Some people are so crushed by their childhoods they never recover, and I think that if Dana's friend was one of them, she may have been the highest-functioning one in the country.

I attempted to coax Paul into a visit to give him a break from the university application process, but he had reached a stage of panic not so very far from fatalism. Not long after that, Roger had the nerve to ask if he and Cath could stay a weekend, and I found the nerve to tell them to go to hell. Several people found the need to tell me their opinions of whether I had responded appropriately to Roger, and I found the serenity not to listen and not to write them all off altogether for having spoken up.

I got a very nice note from Katie, asking me to secure her tickets for Antony and Cleopatra. When she arrived, she seemed much less shell-shocked for the little I saw of her. Although she was on the mend, and was working hard to shuck off her mourning, it was still a little too soon. I admired her for trying hard, even when it was trying too hard. Katie stayed at the Festival Inn, and she left quietly the morning after the performance without phoning up to say goodbye.

I cleaned the guest bedroom and felt alone.

I drove to Toronto to see Alice. She and Ray had a guest bunking on their couch. Their guest looked to me to be eighteen years old, what little I saw of her.

"What sort of progress?" I asked Alice after their guest had announced her departure from the apartment by slamming the door.

"Slow but definite," Alice insisted. "She comes back here to sleep every single night now. It's weeks since I had to go out looking for her and drag her home. It's Darlene who worries me. She won't fly up, and she sounds more depressed than ever."

"Have you told her …?"

"About young Dar? I tried once, but I'm not sure any part of it went in."

"I think you've done your hitch, Alice," I told her. "Let me work on Darlene. I'll invite her to my house. If I have to, I'll fly back home and drag her back."

"Can't afford it, Charlie," Ray said.

"I can, Ray. Now that Cath's remarried, I'm a bit more comfortable as 'gards money."

"It's not your burden to shoulder, Charlie," Alice said.

"It's as much mine as anybody's," I said, "but that's not the point. The point is that you need someone to spell you off, if only for a week or two."

I installed Darlene and her husband in my guest bedroom. Ray drove young Dar to Stratford. Darlene's husband declared us all to be cracked, and flew back to St. John's. Young Dar accused me of being part of a conspiracy, and Darlene was too deeply depressed to accuse a bluebell of being blue. No great communication ensued, and I started to get a little depressed myself. Darlene flew back home again.

We might never have convinced young Dar, only for Alice. One morning, Alice had hopped a streetcar and seen a dazed teenage boy who never once looked up to see if his stop was approaching. Alice had recognized him as our mutual school chum Smithy, aged about sixteen. He and young Dar started talking. A week later, young Dar flew home to talk with Darlene. Smithy came to stay in my guest room. And that was when Alice started calling my guest room Doppelhaus.

My worst shock came when a young version of Cath turned up. I had my shameful experience with Holly to protect me from falling in love with young Cath, but it nearly happened all the same. I know I gave her a piece of my heart, and I did it knowing I'd never get it back again. She was so lovely, but I could see now how utterly self-absorbed she was. There must be worse sins than that, but I tell you it chilled me right to the bone. I suppose it can be that way when you see so clearly that there is someone to whom you don't matter at all, not even within the limits of civility. I couldn't do anything at all for young Cath, and that was hard. I hoped that young Cath wasn't planning to take over in the foreseeable future, because I knew that Cath prime wasn't going to be easy to defeat.

My Doppelhaus didn't last long. Stratford, to its everlasting credit, was never central enough. Alice and Dana between them set up Doppelhauses in Toronto and Ottawa, and my role was limited to funding. It wasn't exhausting, which was good, but it didn't make me feel good, which was dragging me uncomfortably close to self-pity. I wasn't getting any better at connecting. I tried to concentrate on my successes at pretty much the same time that Paul needed my active help with universities.

To my slight surprise, Paul got scholarship offers from both Waterloo and Western. He chose Waterloo. I tried day-visits with Paul on weekends until Paul complained that Kitchener-Waterloo's restaurants were deadly. I didn't mention that his expectations were based on having been reared in Ottawa. Instead, I suggested he visit me in Stratford, where there were enough decent restaurants to cycle through. Those weekend visits made us both a lot less homesick. Maybe it was because I could offer Paul a bed, and he didn't have to arrive and leave on the same day. When I finally bought a television for the house, Paul asked, "What would you buy that for?" When science fiction great Kurt Vonnegut Jr came to speak as part of the Festival's writer's series, Paul and I bought our tickets as early as we could get them. When I finally persuaded my dad to come visit, he brought cod fillet, fresh from Water Street, and as soon as we left the airport, he insisted I stop in Mississauga and buy a cooler and some ice to put in it. He cooked it for Paul and me that same night, and insisted on washing the pots and dishes afterwards.

While Dad was conducting his symphony for Paderno in Kitchen Sink, Paul sank into a chair and I noticed his glum expression. "No date this weekend?" I asked.

I had hit the bulls-eye. "Being alone sucks," Paul said.

"Totally," I agreed.

"Hey!" My dad had come out of the kitchen and was standing there, dripping suds on to the carpet. "What would either of you two amateurs know about it?" He was trying to look stern, but the corner of his mouth kept twitching. Paul fired a magazine at him, Dad batted it back with the frying pan, and I laughed the hardest.

The weekend after, Paul wasn't visiting and my father had flown back home. The place seemed huge. I mentioned that to Alice, and she suggested I look for, if I recall the noxious phrase correctly, a "special friend."

For a long time, I made no attempts at dating. Several locals were singularly tactful about not setting me up with anyone until after I had been picked up by a snub-nosed New York woman with the most gloriously liquid eyes. Then, relieved to have the question of whether or not I was gay finally settled, several people were frighteningly mindless in setting me up with everyone until I paid for a small classified ad in the Beacon Herald informing one and all that this nuisance must now cease.

Unattainable beauty means a lot more than what I thought it meant. I had it mixed up in my mind with unattainable women, who are almost always beautiful in appearance. But a woman is always unattainable, no matter what she looks like. Any person is unattainable. You can't achieve anyone. Maybe you can't even reach anyone.

A lot of people judge women based on their appearance. That's pretty mean. Maybe it's unavoidable, too. But then we have to pretend that we don't do it, and that's even meaner. I've begun to believe that it's the pretence that we don't do it that has caused us all to judge men based on their appearance, too. Or maybe, it's because we've stopped pretending that we don't do it that we judge men based on their appearance.

It's clear now: It's not enough to be so good a singer that you can send chills down someone's spine, whether your talent is natural or acquired by hard practice. You have to be good looking, too. Man or woman. Child too.

You have to look the way people want you to look. And that's unattainable. It's unattainable all of the time for nearly all of us. It's unattainable most of the time for those few that are left. Even if you have the most pleasant, the most even features, time seems to stand still for all of us observing you. But time doesn't stand still. On your most attractive day ever, you may be spared the knowledge that your attractiveness will forever after slip away from you. But it will happen, and all of us will judge you less worthy as you grow older but still no more attainable. The distance between me and Grace Kelly is constant, and would be, even if she were still alive.

The only way to have an attractive partner is to be attractive yourself. But I guess attraction happens on multiple levels.

When I did return to dating, the results were not encouraging, which I suppose means only that I was getting the true dating experience. After I called a halt to the dating, I found myself reading all the papers particularly thoroughly. When I finished my regulars, I went out and bought more, including papers I never buy, like the Globe and Mail. In the Globe, I noticed that the Stratford Festival were looking to hire a music director. They needed someone to compose incidental music for the various Shakespearean productions. Oddly, I hadn't heard about this position on the merchant's grapevine. I went for a long walk, churning thoughts for over an hour before I realized I wasn't accomplishing a thing. I walked down to see Mister Gale in his shop. Mister Gale knew everything about the festival before it was officially announced.

"Yes, it was pretty sudden," he acknowledged. "Apparently, Mikla Shourrasov got a better offer from the States, and backed off from the contract he had already signed."

"Will the festival ding him for breach of contract?" I asked.

"Mikla can probably afford it now that Uncle Sam has deigned to notice him and therefore validate his existence," Mister Gale suggested.

I laughed. "Did you see the job ad in the paper?" I asked.

"Oh yes. As usual, the most important qualifications aren't listed in the ad."

"Such as?"

"Well, there are the usual two. First, we must have heard of you. Second, our patrons must have heard of you."

Mister Gale might have continued his list of unofficial qualification, but the next thing I actually heard him say was, "Yoo-hoo! Anyone in there?"

"Sorry," I said. "I just remembered I have to make a call."

"Use mine," he offered, pushing forward the phone.

"That's okay," I called back over my shoulder, "it's long distance."

I tore back to my own place, and looked at the way the newspapers had been scattered, as if someone was preparing to paint the ceiling and wanted everything well covered. I threw enough aside to uncover the phone, then picked up the receiver.

There was no dial tone. "Hello?" I said tentatively.

"Charlie," Katie said. "Thank God. I've been calling for hours. Listen, who do you know at the Stratford Festival?"

THE END

Bio: I am a technical writer living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. My previous publications have been long- and short-form non-fiction.

E-mail: Douglas Cuff

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