Free The Western Light by Susan Swan

patients.”
    â€œWas he, Mary?” My grandmother acted surprised. “Well, you aren’t a doctor. You’re a doctor’s child.”
    LATER THAT EVENING, JORDIE COVERDALE drove up alone in his truck. When my grandmother opened the front door, Jordie was standing there, a cigarette stuck behind each ear.
    â€œI don’t want my father to feel badly,” I said stepping in front of Big Louie. “You see Morley was too busy to notice I needed a desk.”
    â€œMary, what do you mean?” Big Louie asked.
    â€œThe sick need my father more than me. And he works every waking minute to cure them.”
    Jordie and my grandmother regarded me silently. They didn’t understand that I was proud to be neglected by Morley. Other fathers were sissies who pushed their children on park swings or barbecued for their family. It was enough for me that Morley and I watched
Hockey Night in Canada
every Saturday evening. I liked to sit in the chair opposite his and stop Sal from disturbing him if he fell asleep before the game, the newspaper in his lap.
    Looking up from the sidewalk, Jordie reassured my grandmother. “Never mind about the desk. I’ll tell John that Mary liked it and he won’t feel so bad.”
    My grandmother held my hand and together we watched Jordie carry the furniture out to the truck like a circus strongman. The next day my grandmother took the train back to Petrolia. Three weeks later a new study desk from Eaton’s was delivered. My grandmother had ordered it. Nobody mentioned John’s present again.

12
    ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AS WE SAT DRINKING NEILSON’S COCOA in the kitchen, Sal confided that John’s mother had asked her to tea. It had something to do with a letter Mrs. Pilkie was writing my father; Sal didn’t know the details. “The old bat must have her reasons,” Sal said, her round eyes glowing like headlamps. “Want to come? It’ll make it easier for me if you tag along.”
    She didn’t have to ask twice. I was ready in five minutes, my hair combed, my face washed. Hand in hand, we walked down Whitefish Road. Mrs. Pilkie had been born French-Canadian, but she didn’t live in French Town. According to Sal, Mrs. Pilkie’s father had been a successful dentist who looked after Englishspeaking patients so Mrs. Pilkie felt speaking the French language was beneath her. I didn’t get these complicated distinctions, although they mattered to Sal whose Irish mother had married Tubby Dault, a French-Canadian cab driver who worked for Thompson’s Taxi, our town’s most notorious bootlegger. Once I recited the poem, “The Wreck of the Julie Plante” to Sal: “On wan dark night of Lac St. Pierre, De win she blow, blow, blow, An’ de crew de wood scow Julie Plante, got scart and run’ run below —” Sal threw me out of the kitchen for making fun of her father’s accent.
    On our way to Mrs. Pilkie’s home, we passed the hockey arena, and turned up a path behind the post office. We were on the outskirts of town now. At the top of an empty lot stood a two-storey clapboard house. The front windows were halfhidden behind over-grown spiraea bushes. The bouncy branches covered in white lacy flowers made me think of Big Louie, whose standards of taste ruled my mother’s family. Spiraea bushes were vulgar, or “plebeian,” my grandmother said. As Sal knocked on the front door, I noticed all the window shades had been drawn. Maybe Mrs. Pilkie didn’t want to look out on the world or maybe she felt uneasy about the world looking in on her.
    â€œWas John’s bedroom up there?” I pointed at a secondstorey window imagining John’s boyish face staring down at us through the glass.
    â€œJohn slept at the back of the house.”
    â€œDid you know him then?” I persisted.
    â€œYes. Now quit pestering me,” Sal said as the front door opened. The mother of