Free The Uninvited by Tim Wynne-Jones

kind of day?” she said, bending to catch the nose of his canoe.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Are you good?”
    She reached out her hand to him, and when he took it, she pulled him and the canoe toward the shore as if he hadn’t done this a thousand times by himself. Still, it was a nice thing for her to do.
    “Is Bunny behaving?” she asked, patting the curvy side of the canoe, the tumblehome, as if it was the neck of a faithful horse.
    Cramer climbed out onto the grassy bank, nodding.
    “Remember that old canoe you found in the barn?” she said. “I was scared shitless of you going out in that thing, but there was no stopping you. No, sir.”
    “It’s still around,” said Cramer, pointing ­toward the drive shed. “Still seaworthy.”
    “Yeah, right!” she said. “Seaworthy. That’s a good one. Hey, maybe I should haul her down here? Get out on the creek myself?”
    Cramer smiled encouragingly, but he couldn’t quite imagine his mother doing anything like that. They had canoed together in Bunny, when it was new, and she’d been good at it, as if maybe there had been canoes in her life, when she was young. Her arms were strong enough, but still. He couldn’t see it.
    He hauled the canoe out of the water.
    “We love Bunny, don’t we, Cramer? Remember when I got you Bunny?” she asked, her voice as excited as a kid’s.
    “I do,” he said.
    “And it was the best birthday present ever, wasn’t it?”
    He balled his fists on his hips, arching his back to stretch after the upstream voyage. “It sure was, Mom,” he said. In truth, it was the
only
birthday present he could remember receiving. The last few years there would be a card—handmade. He kept them all. They were works of art. But Bunny was the only actual present. She was every birthday present rolled into one.
    He gave his mother a smile. She had been right about the emerald. It was exactly the color of her eyes, and those eyes were gleaming now, with sharp glints of yellow sunshine in them. He knew what was going to happen. She was going to tell him the story about when Bunny arrived in their lives, how surprised he was.
    “You were just bowled right over,” she said.
    How she had led him, blindfolded, out to the drive shed—
    “Made you open that big old door yourself to show me how strong you were getting.”
    And there was the canoe sitting on two sawhorses, brand-new and glistening red.
Red as
—
    “Scarlet lake,” she said.
    I was only ten
—
    “You were only ten,” said his mother, shaking her head back and forth at the bright happiness of this memory.
    And it was a good memory. She’d been painting well—painting up a storm! And somehow she’d attracted the interest of a gallery in Ottawa.
    “I hightailed it down there in the Taurus one day, when the Taurus was new, and damned if Simon Whiteside didn’t offer me a show.”
    A one-woman show
—
    “A one-woman show.”
    And every piece sold
—
    “Every damn piece sold, Cramer. Can you believe it?”
    He looked at her, her face shining, as if the show had happened that very week instead of half his lifetime ago. She never knew—he’d never told her—how terrified he had been arriving home on the school bus that day to find the house empty, no note—no nothing.
    But it was all water under the bridge now. He didn’t mind. She could tell him this story every day, if it made her happy. Her contentment helped to ease his mind, distract him from the other things he was thinking, feeling.
    She reached out for him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and held him tight. She only came up to his chest. He rested his chin on her head.
    She sniffed. Sniffed again. “What’s that pretty smell?” she asked.
    Cramer gently pushed her away. “Must be some new flower come up,” he said, looking all around, hiding his face from her scrutiny.
    She grinned at him, one eyebrow raised. “Smells like a girl to me,” she said, in a teasing kind of voice. “What are you getting up to on