Free Lauchlin of the Bad Heart by D. R. Macdonald

polite. But at the end of all their feigned casualness she would suggest, as if it had just occurred to her, that they meet sometime and he of course said sure, okay, why not. They had an intense attraction to each other that had never, despite everything, dimmed, and it could, after a long absence, brighten suddenly and blind them for a while to what had caused them to break off many times before. And what an indulgence, how he had come to expect that renewal every summer, to draw close to her again as if nothing bitter had ever passed between them.
    But last summer there had been no call, and no exchange of letters since the year before. So he took his time with his supper, the haddock was good and he was hungry, he twirled his potato in the butter he was supposed to avoid, savoured the fresh greens. Yet after he’d finished his black tea, his wheat bread and blueberry jam, still missing pies and cakes the way a smoker misses a cigarette, the evening layempty before him. He didn’t want to get caught up in Morag tonight, too angry with her, cutting him off from Nell’s death—was that a door closing, intentional? He looked at his dirty plate, at the table set for him and him alone, at the big country stove his mother kept as a backup, and he had to admit there were days when this familiar house comforted him, he knew it so well, by now there wasn’t anything in it that had not been arranged to his or his mother’s liking, and some of it to his dad’s still remained. His mother of course had her tastes and quirks but they were just the texture of their lives here, her threads and his, warp and woof. He’d never thought he would in his fifties be waking in the same bed he was weaned in, his mother moving about the house in the morning as she always had. When he opened his eyes it was always to hear her first, and there were mornings when he thought, Maybe I wasn’t meant to get much beyond this, my own house, my own mother. When your heart goes, maybe you need such a house, its quiet and familiar rhythms, you steer clear of surprises round the corner, out that door. He and Johanna had their rituals of openings and closings, beginnings and endings every day, and bits of gossip from the store, who was ill or mending or in need of something, physical, spiritual, good or bad. They observed the weather over the water, the mountain, the shadings of the Slios. She was born over there on the other side, on a farm near the shore, gone now to a gravel pit. She never liked that name, the Slios, the sound of it. I never heard it called that, she would say, in my life, it’s New Pabbay, look at the road sign on the highway, look at a map, New Pabbay is what it says. But that’s not what they called it in the old days, Lauchlin would remind her, they were all speaking Gaelic then, Ma. Speaking it when I was girl too, my mother and father, but after all wasn’t it my grandfather that gave it the name in the first place, being from Pabbay as he was, there in the Hebrides? He had the little post office there in his house, so that’s what he called it. She had little Gaelic herself anymore and so she got into the old tongue differentlythan she might have when she was young. He kidded her about the old days, bits of gossip about the past he’d picked up or made up, but the truth was he had a soft spot for the old days, he liked hearing about them, in part because he didn’t have to live in them, but it was pleasant to imagine them, what it might have been like to be there, the hardships and the joys. But he himself was moving into that zone of his life when he had his own old days that he’d lived, and the further they receded, the stronger they seemed to grow in his mind, like those he had spent with Morag.
    He wanted to see Morag now but the ritual was fixed. To break it might raise up too soon the old difficulties, and this time she owed him a call, did she not?
    He located a package of brown sugar and conveyed it to the store