Free Larry's Party by Carol Shields

floor, even the fuel tanks, even the decorative touches, which is where Stu Weller comes in.
    It’s a fact that some of North America’s biggest and brightest names in the entertainment industry have ordered customized vehicles from Air-Rider, wondrous rolling homes and offices with white carpeting on the walls and Italian marble for flooring. A country-and-western singer - after a beer or two Stu Weller will drop the odd hint about who exactly this singer is - custom ordered a model with a bathroom floor that dropped open, bingo, to reveal a hot tub where the luggage compartment generally goes. A cool half-million dollars for that package. This same coach possessed a full kitchen with oak inlay cupboards and a hidden berth for the traveling cook. Last year Stu did the upholstery for a hospital coach, a traveling clinic for rural areas, and now he’s working on a coach for relocating prisoners, each seat transformed into a separate little jail cell with bars going right up to the ceiling. Slash-proof vinyl is what he’s installing at the moment, and the barest mininum of padding. Every order brings a new challenge. The floor supervisor always takes him aside and says, “Look, Stu, you’re the one with the experience. We need to have your particular expertise on this design.”
    On weekends Stu Weller naps or creeps around the house, waiting for Monday morning to come. His hands understand the secrets of foam and spring and frame, how to make the understructure invisible and at the same time strong. There’s a wide range of fabrics at his disposal, your velvets, your brocades, your suedes and leathers. For the president of an American television network he covered the coach walls with a shimmering mauve satin, and received a personal handwritten letter of thanks and appreciation. Next in the works is a special chapel coach for a well-known TV evangelist, and Stu’s planning to go heavy on plum-colored velour and white leather for the doors that separate the public part of the unit from the private. He’s learned that people are willing to spend money for quality; they want the best materials and they’re looking for top-notch workmanship. Over the years he’s been offered jobs in a number of Winnipeg’s better upholstery houses, but he’s never considered them for a minute. He knows the custom coach business inside and out, and can’t imagine working all day on mere furniture, on simple sofas or chairs.
    Of course, he’s not above a weekend project at home. The breakfast nook in the kitchen, built in the early seventies, is his own design, a curving red vinyl bench with bright brass tacking. Smart, modern, comfortable. And last summer he took apart the living-room couch, reglued the frame and reupholstered it in a midnight-blue textured nylon. Visitors to the house think they’re seeing a brand-new piece of furniture. His wedding gift to Larry and Dorrie was a trip to England plus a first-class upholstery job on an old Hide-a-bed Larry had picked up at a garage sale. It looks good, too, done up in one of those abstract prints that’re all the rage now, and it’s Scotchguarded so that when Dorrie leaves one of Ryan’s messed diapers lying around, as she tends to do, there’s not too much damage.
    He’s offered to do another upholstery job for Larry’s thirtieth. He could do a padded headboard, he suggested, in artificial leather, but Larry said no, he’d rather have a couple of loads of good topsoil for the yard. Well, if that’s what the kid wants, that’s what he gets. Christ Jesus. Dirt.
    From the way Stu’s scratching his shirt-collar you can tell he can’t quite believe he’s got a son who’s thirty years old today. He doesn’t, it seems, know what to make of his son and his slapdash wife (Dorrie, Dor, Dorable) and Larry’s funny-bunny ideas about hiking and the environment and planting shrub “arrangements” in his yard and working in a florist shop year after year, fussing with little