Free The Opening Sky by Joan Thomas Page B

talk to her since the Calhoun/Oliphants were over. After they left, she headed straight for the basement. “Cripes!” Aiden called after her. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” She was not drawn back by the pathetic repetition of his little witticism, and he had to get up and go to the head of the stairs and call her.
    When she dragged herself back to stand in the archway, he told her how proud he’d been of her throughout the meeting, the way she’d held her own.
    But she turned on him in fury. “I’m not taking money,” she said (just at the end they had talked in general terms about finances). “I’m not letting Noah give me money. It’s not his fault.”
    “Honey,” Aiden said, “we’re not talking fault here. You have to take it. He has to give it. It’s what he has to do.” He tried to lead her over to the couch but she stood adamantly in the archway, her face fierce.
    “It’s not his money. He has no money. It’s his mother’s money.”
    “Well, that’s his situation right now,” Aiden said. “He has to deal with that. God knows, you’ll have enough to deal with.”
    She’d already turned away when Liz spoke. “Sylvie, you knew Noah’s mother was Mary Magdalene. Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Because,” she called from halfway down the stairs, “this is not about you.”
    Aiden didn’t dare look in Liz’s direction. “She doesn’t give an inch, that girl,” he said. “You know, daughters have to work hard to separate from their mothers. You were probably just the same.”
    “Who knows?” she said. Not giving an inch.
    This morning she’s got her hair pulled loosely into a ponytail. You can see the grey it’s shot with for a quarter-inch along her hairline. She’s been in a state for two days, since the meeting with Noah’s family. He recalls her standing by the mantel, poised to go for drinks – they were exchanging basic biographical details at the time, acknowledging each other’s right to know – and he figured she was dreading the planned parenthood conversation, so he said, hoping it would be the last word on the subject, “Lucky Liz works downtown, in the Exchange District. But I’m way out on Portage Avenue, close to Assiniboine Park.”
    But in a voice you could only describe as savage, Liz spurned the gesture. “We may as well have our little joke and get it over with,” she said. “I’m the executive director of the Sexuality Education Resource Centre – SERC . We call it the circus. You probably know it as Planned Parenthood.” Then she turned a dreadful parody of a smile on Maggie: “So! What can I get you to drink?”
    Technically they’ve had lots of time to talk in the past two days, but he’s an experienced husband; he’s biding his time. He gets up again, pulls open the CD drawer, and picks out a Telemann, Tafelmusik. It was a standard in Christmases past, when there were wolves in Wales and Sylvie was up at five o’clock in the muffling silence of the eternal snows to check that Santa’s glass of milk had been drained and his cookie eaten. When out-of-town cousins slept over and a row of striped stockings hung from the mantel. There’s just one now, and it’s a silky cowboy boot, purple.
    “That’s her stocking?” He stands by the music system with the silver disc in his fingers. “Where the hell did it come from?”
    “Osborne Village. A chic Santa stocking for a chic young woman.” Liz makes a rueful face.
    Aiden drops the disk onto the CD tray and the machine swallows it smartly. Something bulges like a bunion in the narrow toe of the purple cowboy boot – a chocolate orange, no doubt. He fishes an iTunes card out of his shirt pocket and drops it in. Sylvie will hate this stocking and most of what’s in it.
    The music starts up, the delicate display of baroque instruments courting each other.
    “Is Noah coming over?”
    “No. They’re still driving to Calgary for the grandparent thing. They’re leaving