Free This All Happened by Michael Winter Page B

sleeps in her bed. My last line would be . . . No, I would have no last line. There would be an ellipsis. There are no last words. Only words that belong in no last line. There are end words such as possibility and promise.
    23      Called Maisie to get a book. She says she admires Max because he persists in doing what he thinks is right (integrity) whereas Oliver does what people seem to expect.
    Me: People expected he’d stay with you.
    Maisie comes from a deep-seated philosophy, you can depend on her to say a point of view. And I realize I dont come from there, I’m too sceptical of a truth. I argue not from a position, but from an example.
    A sheet of thick plastic is wrapped in the bare oak on Long’s Hill. Max says the denser the wood, the harder it is for leaves to unfurl. Oak are the last to bloom. Beyond the oak the brick church steeple with green copper peak. I like looking at this spire while I write. I’m going to look up the kirk’s style. Squinches in spires.
    24      Maisie says she was washing dishes one day. And she slipped the ice cubes from a whisky glass into the dishwater. It was Oliver’s glass, from when he was on the phone with his brilliant paralegal student. Maisie held those cubes of ice under the warm water, held them fiercely, and noticed her wedding ring on the windowsill. That’s when she decided to leave Oliver.
    25      Lydia offers me the dental floss. She brings me coffee and sliced oranges to bed. I love the way she pours coffee. She sits on my lap while on the phone to Daphne. Daphne says the rumour is Oliver got his student pregnant.
    Where did you hear that?
    Daphne: You hear everything in social services.
    Lydia, to Daphne: Craig Regular is in town. I saw him last night. He’s looking great.
    When she hangs up the phone, I say, You never told me that Craig was in town, or that you saw him.
    She says, All your best friends are women.
    I say, All your best friends are men.
    That’s not true, she says.
    Me: Well, maybe women are easier to be best friends with.
    26      I’m crouched at Lydia’s car door in the dark, having thanked Max and Daphne for the rhubarb pie and coffee. Lydia says I love you and I say, But I can’t get your door shut. She drives home with my arm across her midriff holding the door handle and she asks if I’m loving her a little more today.
    I say, Every day that happens.
    Tell me something you love about me.
    I love it when you wear your red kimono and sit on your kitchen counter to read a recipe book with your goggly glasses on.
    At the lights a fire truck screams past us and we follow it to my place.
    Daphne had confessed to eating things in grocery stores. She will not buy an orange before she pokes her finger through one to taste it. Lydia says she does the same with peaches.
    Lydia had asked Max for a light. And for a second I am jealous. But also, in as brief a moment, I am assured she is committed. I realize jealousy knows no bound. That I could think of a moment when Lydia and Max were sexual.
    What I love of Lydia is that her head is full of new, unfinished thought. No complete ideas, always renovating opinion. She has conviction, yet she can be converted, if she believes your evidence.
    Daphne tells us a story of a horse she had as a child that got into the grain grain that hadnt been watered.
    Daphne: I had to pull that mare off the ground. And walk it around Brigus. The field arcing up and the sky bending down, tugging this horse around to save it.
    I’m going to use this detail in the novel.
    Talking about the past, Max says. It’s like sewing a fabric and pushing the needle through two thicknesses, through both sides of the cloth. His father, Noel Wareham, is going blind. When Max visits, his dad asks him to thread all the needles.
    27      Snow is melting under mounds like sudden child pee. Bold shadows thrown onto