Free The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer

ever want. You’ll be in all the glossies—American
Vogue,
I guarantee it! Hell, you could even get into the movies!”
    Sonia’s fingers loosen their hold on the hammock. Bees hum drowsily in the plants on either side of the porch steps; a bird calls out, making the sound of a door creaking on its hinges. She’s so grateful for this part of the day, when the children are out of her hair and nothing is expected of her. It’s too hot to do any work—leaves hang in the air outside as though suspended in syrup. If she were to lift her head and look directly out the screen, she would see the remnants of her mother’s vegetable garden. Every summer she’d come up and plant carrots and beets and lettuce for them: runner beans, garlic, dill, onions, carrots. So wouldn’t they always be running to the store, and because she couldn’t stand the sight of all this good earth going to waste. The year they bought the cottage she’d got down on her hands and knees, sixty-eight years old and yanking up weeds with her bare hands. The weeds had turned out to be poison ivy. Thank God Al Vesiuk hadbeen there—he’d given her something to take care of the blisters, the oozing skin.
    Sonia’s eyes swim with tears: sleek, useless tears. The doctor’s given her prescription after prescription that she never fills: sleeping pills, Valium. Sometimes she thinks that the only real thing in her life, the only real thing about her, is this ragged, unquenchable grief at her mother’s death. She gets up from the hammock and goes out to sit on the steps of the porch, a lean, tanned woman in faded blue shorts and a striped tube top exposing the delicate wingbones of her back. American
Vogue.
The movies … She wipes her eyes, makes a little grimace, frowns. The porch steps are rotting—Max has been promising for the past two years to replace them.
    If her father were alive … He’d been a fine carpenter in his spare time; she still had a little cupboard, a sort-of treasure chest he’d made for her as a welcome gift when she’d come to Canada, this father she’d barely known, who’d left the Old Place when she’d been little more than a baby. Who’d been rushed to hospital a week after he’d met them at Union Station, having been injured by some brutal, overefficient machine at the foundry that employed him: no safety gear, no workers’ compensation, nothing. He’d recovered, somehow—even found work again because of the war, making shell casings to blow up the
Fasheesty.
And then, after the war had ended, and life had become slower and easier, and his children had married, and he’d held his first grandchild in his arms, a blood vessel had burst in his brain and he’d died twelve hours later. Never coming back to consciousness, unable even to tell them goodbye.
    Sonia sits on the rotting steps and holds her head in her hands, weeping for her father, who’d widowed her mother far too young, and for the mother who’d died before her time. A
baba
—meaningold woman, granny—but to Sonia she was still that lonely young woman who’d read out letters from their father, letters all about the distant country where they, too, would go one day, once he’d made a home for them. A country so magical that no one used naphtha lamps and you could flood a room with light just by pushing a button! How could any of them have known how long it would take for them all to be together again, what with the Depression starting so soon after he’d crossed the ocean to that place that had sounded like the name of a kind of candy:
Kanáda.
    Sonia wraps her arms across her stomach, as if there were a huge stone there, or as if a huge stone had been dug out of her and she has to hold in the emptiness with her bare hands. It’s still only afternoon, and she can’t pretend away the eight endless hours till the children will be asleep for the night and she can climb into her bed as if it were a ship sailing away. From eternally damp bathing suits