Free Come See About Me by C. K. Kelly Martin Page B

every room crammed with Bastien memories, but I appreciate not
having to worry about money so much. Being responsible for just food costs
means my savings are draining at a dramatically slower rate, and on top of that
my mother has been sending a couple of hundred dollars every month. There’s a
certain calm that accompanies this financial freedom, even though it doesn’t
take any of the pain of Bastien’s absence away.
    I do imagine him
here. Feel him here. Even though we were never in Oakville together. Maybe it
would’ve been the same in Burnaby, but for now I’m glad I didn’t stray far from
the place he lived and went to school. And the next several days aside,
Abigail’s home gives me the solitary time I need.
    With her in
town, though, I feel both in need of space and like I have something to prove.
I stay home while she’s at the store but spend more time out—by the lake, the
library (where I flip through comic books but never check any out), and in
various coffee shops—when she returns in the evenings. Sometimes Julie, the
woman who manages the Oakville location of Bulla, or another friend comes over
in the evenings. I’m polite but brief and stay out of their way. Having
remembered that Bastien was in the middle of reading The Handmaid’s Tale for an English class when he died, I begin carrying it with me everywhere, like
a security blanket.
    Sometimes I open
random pages and read a sentence or two, which is as much as I can absorb.
Tonight my eyes land on the sentence: “She said: Because they won’t want things
they can’t have.” The words mock me. I don’t know much about the Aunt Lydia
person who’s saying them, but I’ve decided she’s cruel.
    With Abigail due
home soon I walk to the lake with the book tucked under my arm. It’s grown a
little colder during the past couple of weeks and I’m wearing a light cardigan
and black cargo pants, which used to fit without a belt but now require one to
prevent them from slumping down past my hips in a wardrobe malfunction. At a
glance I can see that all the nearest benches are taken, but as I wind along
the path near the lake a man happens to get up from his seat. He nods almost
imperceptibly at me as he passes and I realize it’s the Irish guy who was
looking for directions to the post office a couple of weeks ago.
    I plop down on
his vacated bit of bench, next to a woman of about forty who is busy texting on
her phone and chewing her lip. She seems aggravated, sad maybe. The sun’s
hanging low in the sky, throwing a dappled golden light in the space between
shadows. Tonight there are no geese in the water, only seagulls. I watch them
bob along the dark blue waves as people parade by on the path with their dogs.
A skittish Chihuahua glances anxiously in my direction as it passes.
    Bastien used to
point out the sort of dog he hoped to have one day (he singled out so many
different sizes and varieties that I can’t remember them all) and when I see
the shivering Chihuahua I think, Not one of those , Bastien , too
fragile for the outside world . A gust of wind could carry that dog away and
it knows it. No wonder girls carry them in purses; you’d be afraid to set it
down lest a squirrel pick a fight with it.
    Being near the
water sometimes makes me think of Johnny Yang, who gets a swooshy feeling in
his stomach whenever it’s about to rain and then knows he must find water to
immerse himself in straight away. At the point where Bastien left the story,
Johnny, who has learned to carry an extra stash of clothes with him everywhere
in a waterproof bag, is emerging from a neighbor’s above-ground pool (the
closest water source he could locate near his school) following a brief
drizzle.
    If I could
concentrate, maybe I could do something about finishing the story. The words,
at least. But who am I kidding; the longest thing I’ve written in months is
three paragraphs to Bastien’s mother to thank her for the photographs. She
struck me as the kind