Free The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins Page A

their lost Stuart.
    Though Thorstad had been happy to work with a new crop of students every year, he had now and then wondered if he might one day encounter a young man who would offer his hand and say, “I don’t suppose you remember me.”
    When the people still living on the remains of the disbanded commune announced that instead of a funeral service for Bo Hammond they would hold their first spring market of the year “in his honour,” Lisa Svetic drew to his attention that this was his opportunity to act like someone intending to become part of the community. She kept his Teacher magazine pinned to the counter with her fist to make sure he heard her out. “Since none of your letters rescued you from the horrors of our company, you might as well force yourself to be friendly. Who knows—it might not even hurt.”
    She warned him, though, that because he’d never been anywhere near the old commune in all the years he’d lived here, he should brace himself for a shock. “It’s a disgusting, filthy, rundown pigsty mess, but you shouldn’t judge by first impressions.”
    Although Thorstad had no desire to go anywhere near the commune, he knew it wouldn’t hurt to put out a little effort to honour poor drowned Hammond. Even so, when the day came, before climbing into Lisa’s ancient pickup without doors—shuddering and emitting foul blue exhaust—he insisted on a promise that he wouldn’t have to stay for more than an hour.
    While he clung in rigid alarm to the edge of his seat in order to avoid being thrown into the roadside bushes, she hurtled them up the twisting road through the woods with little attention to protruding rocks or exposed roots, and only minimum regard for corners. At one sharp bend he believed his end had come when the truck swerved off the road altogether, carving a wide swath through patches of waist-high salal and barely missing a stand of sturdy pines. Some of the deeper potholes tossed them both off the seat.
    This road took them speeding through a part of the island Thorstad had never seen, past deserted farmhouses dangerously aslant, their doors and windows removed to be used somewhere else. Deer grazed in an abandoned orchard. In the front yard of a house painted green, a white-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair to read a book while her sheets dried on a clothesline attached to a leaning birch.
    Eventually they pulled to an abrupt stop at the edge of a clearing grown over with alder saplings and overlooking a cluster of log buildings and sagging sheds finished with slab-wood still attached to its bark. The postmistress yanked on the emergency brake and slid out to stand waiting for him to join her for the walk down to the buildings, but as soon as his feet touched the ground he discovered the reckless journey had left his legs a little shaky. By taking hold of a nearby limb he was able to swing down to sit on the fallen cottonwood it belonged to. “Go ahead without me,” he said. “I need a few minutes to recover from the Ride-of-Death.”
    She narrowed her eyes. “You chickening out?”
    He saw no reason to hide his smile. “Nothing in that market could be as frightening as what I’ve just been through. I’ll be along as soon as these legs remember how to walk.”
    Great piles of dry brush sat here and there waiting to be burned, and fallen trees had been left, it seemed, where they’d landed. A filthy, run-down pigsty mess, Lisa Svetic had said. He’d overheard at the Free Exchange that the proceeds from this market would be used for converting the largest of these old buildings into a bed-and-breakfast for visitors who wanted to stay overnight, but he could see no evidence that the work had begun on this ambitious task. Nor could he imagine why anyone would choose to stay there.
    The buildings were dwarfed by a pyramid of logs and car tires and scraps of old lumber stacked up to