for Stan. She’d left all her gardening utensils, including her prized stainless steel hand spade and the little mat she used to rest her knees on while weeding. Many of her books remained, the ones, he guessed, she never intended to read again. She had taken only one of her houseplants, the African violet. He’d suspected for years she had a special relationship with this plant and now he knew he’d been right. The ficus and the rubber tree stood where they’d always stood, though it looked like she’d dusted their leaves sometime in the last few days.
Otherwise, it had been a hasty leaving, he could tell, and with good reason. Recognizing what had happened, seeing that Stan had seen their hands laid casually one on the other, watching his face as he was dragged away from his timekeeper’s booth into a mob of suits and reporters, Louise knew the time she’d been anticipating had arrived. She had Jim accompany her in a taxi to the house on Saulter Street; they’d thrown her essentials into a couple of suitcases, grabbed the African violet and left. The note told Stan that she’d taken the car—they’d taken the car—but he knew without having to be told. They wouldn’t stay in the city. They would get away, far away, and for that they’d need a car.
Stan sat at the kitchen table. In front of him was his wife’s typewritten, unsigned goodbye, and beside it on the tabletop, a neatly stacked pile of twenty-dollar bills. He’d counted them three times, to be sure of things. There was nineteen hundred dollars in the stack. What man needs almost two thousand dollars to have a good time for one evening? What kind of life must that be? Stan didn’t worry that the drunk had jumped into the lake. He’d known drunks in his time. He’d listened to the remorse an evening full of whiskey can bring, and he knew it rarely prompted any serious action other than the kind of impulsive behaviour one generally lives to regret, like picking up a girl at the end of the night, finding yourself in an alleyway brawl, or giving away a pocketful of money because you feel sorry for how life’s treated you. He felt sure the man was right now sleeping himself into a hangover on a chesterfield in his wife’s luxurious mansion overlooking the lake. If he even noticed his missing allowance the next morning, he’d chalk it up to more bad luck and add it to his list of grievances against himself. Stan felt too sorry for himself to feel sorry for some poor drunk rich guy.
For the first time in years, Stan listened to a hockey game on the radio, at the local tavern up on Queen Street. He listened all the remaining games there, heard Toronto win the championship. When the final whistle blew, he pulled a small fistful of money from his jacket pocket and bought a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. He was grateful to the crowd in the bar. Stan’s picture had been in the paper for a week following the game that had lost him a job and a wife, but if anyone did recognize him, they said nothing about his two-second mistake. They let him drink and enjoy their enjoyment of the games. For hours after the final game, Stan walked through the crowds on the street, watched them bang their pots and blow their horns.
In the early summer, Stan received a letter with a Winnipeg postmark. This note was handwritten (she’d left her typewriter behind). She apologized for the abruptness of her departure and for the way in which Stan had to discover her relationship with Jim. She was sorry he had lost his job and she hoped he’d be all right. She did not explain how it had all happened, the affair, the destruction of their marriage. She didn’t have to. Since their wedding day, a hot day at City Hall, Stan had anticipated an ending much like this. He knew Louise was an ambitious woman, someone who longed to travel and see the world, someone who would not stay in one place for very long. He, on the other hand, would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his life as a timekeeper in Toronto, to see each year develop much the same as the last, with only the team’s performance through the playoffs from year to year determining any difference. He often wondered what it was about him that convinced her to marry him in the first place.
He was, he knew, boring, and while he didn’t mind being bored by himself, he couldn’t imagine anyone else standing for it. If he’d been a stepping stone for her, he was a willing one. Temporary or not, Stan had loved his marriage and adored Louise. He couldn’t bring himself to blame her for ending it. She had clearly given him more than he’d given her.
At the end of the letter, after wishing him well, Louise wrote that Stan could find his car at the corner of Main and Robert in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She was sorry to have taken it without asking, and sorry to not be able to return it, but she was certain it was safe and would remain where she’d left it until he could manage a trip up there to fetch it.
It was a five-hour bus ride to Penetang. Stan sat in a window seat beside an older woman who was going to visit her son in prison. Manslaughter, she said, over and over again. Stan told her he was visiting relatives. The bus left the station at Bay and Dundas in early orange light, picked its way through empty city streets and found countryside to the northwest. They sped past the tiny airport at Malton, a field and a windsock, and found the northern highway, number 27. Here the landscape was hills and trees, one farm bleeding into the next, and towns with curious names, each of them a brief stopping point for the bus—Kleinburg, Nobleton, Schomberg, Bond Head. Further north, near Barrie, Stan saw a sign for a town called Utopia.
The bus stopped for half an hour in Barrie to off-load some passengers and pick up others. Stan took the opportunity to stretch his legs. He walked along Dunlop Street past an artillery gun cemented to the sidewalk as a war memorial. Apparently, Barrie had sent more than fifty men to their deaths in two wars. So many for such a small town. Late morning light bounced off Lake Simcoe and shimmered between the shop windows on the street. Stan walked down to the water and gazed north, up the bay to where it widened and disappeared in distance. It looked so different from the lake he knew back in Toronto, so empty and wild. He imagined that people had stood in this spot for thousands of years and seen pretty much the same view. Trees and water and sunshine.
An hour and a half later, he was walking the streets of Penetang, looking out over a different bay on a different lake. He’d seen his car at the central intersection as the bus chugged past, and now he was trying to remember his way back to it. There wasn’t much to the town, so he didn’t worry about getting lost, but he had no other reason for being there, and an idea had begun to demand time in his mind. He wanted to get back to Barrie as quickly as possible.
The car was parked by the side of the road, across from a furniture store. There was no ticket on the windshield, and no sign it had been tampered with in any way. Only in a prison town, Stan thought. It was unlocked and the keys were as Louise had described them, under the passenger side of the front seat. There was a full tank of gas. Stan imagined Louise insisting on it and Jim begrudgingly paying for the fuel. How does one get to Winnipeg from Penetanguishene without a car, Stan wondered.
The car had been sitting in the sun all morning, the air inside hot and stuffy. As he sat down on the driver’s side, Stan was overcome by the smell of his wife’s perfume. It was more than just the after-effect of her presence; it had been spilled into the upholstery somewhere on the back seat. He tried not to imagine how that had happened, and instead just opened all four windows before starting the car. He drove to the edge of town and found the highway south. In Barrie, he found Dunlop Street again and pulled to the curb beside the real estate office he’d walked past that morning. Shoreline Lots, the window said, Prime Wooded Property.
“Somebody’s been having fun in this car,” the salesman laughed out loud and waved his hand in front of his nose. “Smells like Paris, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.”
Stan was following the lakeshore roadway north out of town. Beside him sat Gino (Gene) Auden, sales agent for Simcoe Realty, specialist in vacation and cottage properties.
“My folks were the first Italian family in Barrie, so they say,” he boasted, shaking Stan’s hand in the office. “Changed all our names right away to try and fit in, but I like Gino, it’s more manly than Gene I think.”
Gino Auden was a giant of a man, over six feet tall and easily more than 250 pounds. He kept his thinning
