Free Juliet in August by Dianne Warren

local furniture store and saw the parking lot filled with row after row of couches and La-Z-Boys and bedroom suites. A portable sign on the sidewalk advertised a one-day-only pavement sale.
    Norval got out and had a look, and sure enough, there was Lila’s couch, or one close enough to it that he couldn’t tell the difference from the picture she’d given him. So he bought it for a third of the price and called the Regina store and told them to send the fancy one back. Even when he paid the shipping and took the deposit into account, the parking lot couch was still almost two thousand dollars cheaper than Lila’s special order. There was a manufacturer’s tag on the back—the wrong one, of course—but Norval figured if he could get the couch installed against the wall in the living room before Lila could look at the tag, he’d be home free. And he’d gotten away with it. Lila had never examined the couch closely enough to find the tag, and the manufacturer of the expensive couch had never phoned to ask why it had been returned. Norval had paid the credit card bill without Lila’s seeing it, and he’d saved himself some money and proven that even Lila couldn’t really tell the difference between haute interior décor and the local offerings.
    Norval flips through a variety of infomercials—cooking appliances, home gyms, skin care products—and finally settles, as usual, on the weather channel. Its forecasts for the West are notoriously wrong, but he listens to the perky female announcer who tells him the day will be sunny, warm, and windy, with a slight chance of a thunderstorm later in the day. Well, he thinks, you could probably make that prediction for southern Saskatchewan on any day in the summer and stand a pretty good chance of being correct, although the thunderstorm part of the forecast has been unusually absent for the past few summers. He stares at the television, which makes the same prediction every ten minutes, until his eyelids begin to feel heavy.
    He’s just about to lie down on the couch when he hears a truck pull up in front of the house. A door slams and footsteps sound, coming up the walk. Loud footsteps, Kyle’s boots. Norval makes it to the door before Kyle can ring the bell.
    â€œWell,” Norval says to Kyle, who is teetering on the top step, one hand on the railing, trying hard to look sober for his future father-in-law but not succeeding. Norval notices that he’s left his truck lights on.
    â€œGood evening, Mr. Birch. Sir,” Kyle says. He’s trying to stand steady, but gravity pulls him back down a step. It takes him a few seconds to regain his balance.
    â€œIt’s hardly evening, Kyle,” Norval says. “It’s more like, well, the middle of the night would be more accurate.”
    â€œSorry,” Kyle says.
    â€œWhat can I do for you, Kyle?” Norval asks. Of course he knows Kyle is here for Rachelle, but he makes him say it anyway.
    â€œCan I talk to Rachelle?”
    â€œI would imagine she’s asleep,” Norval says.
    Kyle shifts from foot to foot, still holding the railing. A full minute passes. He seems to have forgotten where they are in their conversation, if it can be called that.
    â€œI guess I should go,” he finally says.
    â€œI think that would be best,” Norval says, feeling irresponsible for sending Kyle out on the road in the state he’s in, but damned if he’s going to let him into the house to climb the stairs and crawl into bed with his daughter. He has his limits.
    He watches Kyle stumble down the walk, a cell phone in one back pocket of his Wranglers and a round tobacco tin in the other. Kyle’s about to get in his truck—he’s having trouble finding his keys—when Rachelle bounds down the stairs and pushes past Norval, now wearing some kind of gym pants and a very worn and almost transparent T-shirt. She and Kyle throw their arms