Free Mount Pleasant by Don Gillmor

villa with Amy and Trish and another friend. Was it ten years ago? Maybe fifteen. When she got back, she redid all the colours in the kitchen in the orangey tones of Siena, and had the back patio redesigned to look like a small piazza.
    What would she do with all the furniture, the paintings? While his father had no interest in art, his mother had bought a couple of large Pratts that Harry had always liked. “What are you going to do with all this?” Harry said, gesturing around him.
    “Clarington’s, thank god. They’re going to take it all.” She looked at him, anticipating his question. “This furniture is much too dark for you, too heavy. Gladys would be mortified. It would be like dragging a corpse into your house.”
    “The Pratts …” Surely they would bring in something.
    “You need a wall for them. You don’t have a wall.”
    To have the contents of her house sold at auction, to be perused and judged by neighbours. Worse, perhaps, to be bought by them. His mother was going through some kind of repudiation, like St. Francis.
    “It’s a dreadfully big, dreadfully expensive home,” Felicia reiterated, meeting his eye. “And not all the memories it contains are a joy, frankly.”
    The night she and his father were out on the front lawn, arguing drunkenly at two a.m. What were they doing on the lawn? Secrecy above all, that was the (secret) motto they all lived by, the whole street. Then his father’s quick right hand (the left holding a drink) and his mother crumpling onto the grass, Dale bending down to say something—an apology, a threat?
    Harry had watched from his bedroom, his body limp with fear and tense with hatred. Across the street, his friend Jimmy Carson was watching from his own bedroom. Harry lay awake, plotting revenge, driving a sword through his father’s guts.
    The next day had been a Sunday, his father nowhere to be seen. Erin was at camp, so he and his mother went to see Pinocchio on their own. The ten-year-old Harry had been frightened of the whale. He felt the coldness of that dark, ribbed room, the most desolate thing he’d ever seen. Afterward they took a long walk. It was a nice day, his mother wearing a white head scarf and her Ray-Ban tortoiseshell sunglasses to cover her black eye. She bought him a licorice whistle from an old corner store that still had wooden floors and penny candy, an anachronism even then. She held his hand and explained that a young man walked between the traffic and his escort. It seemed suddenly a brave thing to do, protecting his mother from the passing cars, holding her light, girlish hand. This was the universe that boys occupied with their mothers, one ofamnesia, hope and subtle wooing, and then you were thrown into the ring to kill your dad.
    Sunday was still a day of rest back then, most of the big stores closed, the city empty in late summer, Erin at camp. Instead of going home, they had dinner in a greasy spoon and sat in a booth of faded red Naugahyde. Harry felt they were surrounded by gangsters, but his mother seemed oddly at home, smoking and making jokes with the cook, a large man with a sweeping pompadour and a stained white T-shirt who stood behind the counter flipping thin steaks on the flat steel grill. There was a small jukebox at every booth, and she flipped through the thick plastic pages and played corny country and western songs and old Buddy Holly tunes, and they sang along together to the ones they knew. They walked back through the university campus. Students played touch football in the pleasant dusk while Harry protected his black-eyed mother from the sparse Sunday traffic. When they got home, the house was still empty. His father came back three days later, and the following morning the unheard pitch of their breakfast silence was different, the tone of that vacuum changed.
    Maybe his mother simply didn’t want to be reminded of age and hopelessness, Harry thought. It’s what she would see if she looked into the Botoxed