Free Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking

all of it bound for my mother’s house.
    At the time, I thought he was choosing to live.
    John invited me back upstairs for another scotch. I looked at my phone and realized how very, very late I was for dinner with Nicole. I cursed, gave John his customary Toronto man hug, and sprinted home. After the scotches, driving was out of the question.
    Nicole wasn’t home when I got there but it was clear that she had come and gone. Her work clothes were scattered across thefurniture and her fall jacket was on the floor. She’d torn a sheet of paper from her notebook and left it on the kitchen counter. The note said
Thanks for dinner
and she’d cross-hatched a picture of a chubby bird with long tail feathers. I brushed my teeth, put the kimchi on the counter, and considered having another drink.
    “Way to go, you dipshit,” I said to myself. I left the apartment again and dashed to the Cuckoo.
    The night air bit into my skin, strikingly cold for September, a warning of the angry winter to come. I buried my hands in my pockets. Through the front window of the Cuckoo, I could see Nicole talking with a group of people, one or two women but mostly young men. She was smiling and it was clear she was having a good time without me around.
    I stood at the window watching them drink and laugh, and then I turned and walked home.

2006
    JUST LIKE ANY KIDS , Grace and I sometimes fought, tormented each other, tried out behaviours to see which ones would stick. One summer day, when she was nine and I was six, we went to play in the new subdivision, a construction zone up the hill from our neighbourhood. While we were wandering inside a half-built house, Grace started screaming. I turned around and she had her leg stuck between two planks of wood in the wall, a narrow space that the contractors would one day plaster with drywall. Her plan was obvious, to squeeze through that space and hide on me, only she had gotten stuck on her way through.
    I saw my chance, got right in her face and had the last laugh. She cried, no words, only wailing and swatting at me feebly. I wanted her to sweat, so I left her for a satisfying minute and watched with satisfaction.
    Once my gloating was over, though, it was clear that something was wrong. She sounded too serious, too hysterical, in too much pain. She was pointing toward the floor. I looked down and was horrified: the problem wasn’t that her leg was stuck, but rather thatshe’d stepped on a nail. I had no idea how long she had been pointing at her foot.
    I remember the nail being huge and rust-coloured, pushed straight through the sole and poking out the top of her shoe. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I started crying, too, and ran home as fast as I could to get help. Our father pulled the station wagon up to the construction zone, grumbling the whole way, yanked Grace off the nail without hesitation. We went straight to the hospital, Grace got shots, and for the rest of the summer she hobbled.
    I felt wretched about the incident, an unlovable little brother, but Grace never held it against me. If anything, it was times like these that actually bound us together. And after that day, whenever I saw pain ripple across my sister’s face, I recognized it immediately, viscerally.
    —
    “You really want to hear this?” Grace asked me.
    We were sitting in the Cuckoo at a small table, about a month after I’d arrived in the city. In the middle of our table was a tea light in a glass holder, and on either side of it were two large pint glasses full of amber beer. The bar was dim and most of the other tables were unoccupied. The bartender had put on some faint music and an acoustic guitar flickered around the corners of the empty room. I wasn’t sure what day of the week it was. September was almost over but autumn hadn’t come, yet.
    Grace was shawled, eyeshadowed, a little uneasy. It was the first time I’d noticed long vertical lines around her mouth, the first time I would have used the