Free Minister Without Portfolio by Michael Winter Page B

a window doing, framing how you look at the world. What you saw was a hill with not a tree near it. He got up close to the window and his breath fogged it. And in the breath he saw something grow: the print of a child’s hand.
    HE SAT DOWN AND FOUND other letters in a drawer and read them. There was an old radio and he turned the knob and it leapt alive. Batteries that still held power. It was an oldies station. He turned the knob to get some modern music and then he remembered the old man in the Spur singing that song of the woman whose head he kicked to the wall. He turned the raspy knob back to the oldies station and listened. This is what Nellie Morris had listened to before she left the house. The station was run by volunteers in their eighties and they spoke gravely of religion and there were public service announcements that warned seniors of the dangers of identity theft and the commercials were for dentures and funeral homes—Muirs has been carving monuments since 1841. Tender has a monument from Muirs on the road to the lighthouse. They call them monuments.
    Henry figured out, through the letters, an entire family. The structure of the family involved a widower, Melvin Careen, who had married the aunt, Nellie Morris, but the aunt already had a girl—out of wedlock is the term—with the serviceman on the ship anchored in St John’s harbour. When Melvin Careen died the children from his first marriage had tried to push the aunt out of the house—there were legal letters, threatening her. Henry thought of the aunt, all alone here, perhaps her nephew—Patrick Morris—had helped fend off the legal threats. Henry stared at the pumps and her dresses and her letters in the drawer and the notes she kept in the leather pouch. He was letting all this affect him.
    I am concerned, he realized.
    He bent down to smell the bedframe and there was a rank scent of mould. He surprised himself with this motion: his own reflection caught in a bureau mirror. His torso hovering overfurniture. He realized, in a fussy instant, that this figure in the mirror was a bully. He had bullied Nora into leaving him. He didn’t know how to be himself. He found he was shouting at Nora Power. When you shout you don’t know you’re shouting. But it can ambush you later and that was happening to Henry now. He never liked that Nora was being herself. He confused her being herself with disloyalty. And now he knew she was right— she had been bewildered and surprised. Why does he think this way. Think ill of her motives. Think of her as judgmental. It had driven him insane with a rage he couldn’t gauge for he had no mirror, no one ever looks in a mirror when in full fury. Perhaps all the mirrors fold away on little hinges. Until she left him. Or asked him to leave. And in that sorrow, or realizing he did not know how to be himself without being angry at others, he had decided to capitulate.
    But I love you.
    This man in the mirror has never owned a house, all he’s owned are contents. I’ve never owned people, and people have never owned me.
    He turned off the radio and walked downstairs. He looked out the window to see if anyone was watching him. The glass in the windows was the old kind that warbled. His breath fogged the window but there was no child’s hand here.
    The woman’s coat on the chair. Tender had been late so Nellie took off her coat and laid it over this chair. This was her last afternoon in the house. She had collected a teacup and her slippers and a pack of cards and stowed them in a green box made of papier mâché and then Patrick Morris arrived and took her by the elbow and helped his aunt out the door and around the house to the car. They got in the car and reversed up onto the road andhe drove her out to the Aquaforte seniors complex Rick Tobin had built where she lived until she died.
    But she had forgotten her coat. Her coat lay over this chair. It was a light