at bedtime, casting a glare in his direction. His own backyard is overgrown, grass matted, knee-high weeds gone to seed, everything dried out or wilted by the heat.
The hours have blurred, and well after ten the daylight lingers. Although he hasn’t paid his subscription in months, the newspaper still gets delivered, a pile of back issues stacked by the door. For weeks the headlines have concerned the forest fires raging across the entire Northwest. The haze of smoke in the air gives an amber tint to the light that Peter finds unnerving — too much like urban smog threatening to smother the whole country.
He rises from the step and goes back into the house where thoughts of the past await him in every room. He’s trapped in there and must live among them. The place has been for sale for six months, but the market is way down and there are no buyers in sight. But he has his memories…
“Look at my feet,” Peter said one day last November.
Karen did so, turning her head while brushing her teeth. She glanced down at his feet, undried and flushed from his shower, splayed before him on the purple bath mat as he sat naked on the edge of the tub.
“Uh-huh?” she mumbles, her mouth still full of toothpaste, checking her watch. He was like a sleepy child in the morning. This was a workday.
“Don’t they look like animal feet?” he asked. “I mean, do you ever look at a part of your body and have this primal flashback to huddling in a cave, squatting in a forest or something?”
Karen bent to spit in the sink, laughing with the rush of tap water. She wiped her mouth, examined her hair in the mirror. “My own body or yours? Sweetheart, it’s ten to eight. I’ve got a meeting first thing this morning, and I can’t be late. You’ll still have your feet tonight. We can study them then.”
“Okay,” he growled, reaching for his clean underwear. “Now you’re talking.”
Later that week, on Sunday morning, it happened. They had been together eight years, long enough that Peter could recognize the weight of an impending discussion by the way Karen spooned her muesli. Her hand moved too deliberately and hovered. Peter rose to top up his cup of coffee. He felt foggy, suddenly wary, outgunned by Karen’s powers of concentration.
“There’s something we have to talk about,” she said with none of her usual irony, and his heart faltered.
What really threw him was how quickly Karen proceeded from that opening cliché to the kicker, from gambit to checkmate in a couple of minutes. She looked as beautiful as ever, tawny hair slightly dishevelled, yet her green eyes were evasive. Strangely calm.
Snow was steadily falling, the coffee was still fresh in their vintage beige enamel percolator, orange slices lay on a plate, images from a poem in memory. Peter had fried some bacon, three eggs, and a tomato, and with his Lea & Perrins was all set to savour a country squire’s breakfast. Earlier they’d had a sleepy wake-up love session, and the note of her climax lingered in his ears. The final time.
“Is it the meat?” he asked, gesturing at his plate, appetite quickly fading. Reaching for any humour, even vegetarian, hoping for her smile, for that much reassurance.
“What?”
“The bacon. It stinks up the house, you always say. I try not to eat it very often, but I could go without. I could. Maybe there’s a twelve-step program for bacon hounds.”
She shook her head.
Her look hit him in the pit of his stomach. “Is it the Pink Panther thing? Humming that theme song, or my imitations of Inspector Clouseau? I’ll stop. No more silly accents. I promise.”
“No…” She glanced down with a sad half-smile she couldn’t help.
Her expression caused his heart and hope to stall, then tip into a perilous nosedive. After all, he knew the gist of what she had to say before the words came out. Details didn’t really matter, because they excluded him. So at least he was relieved of guilt in that regard. She needed some time alone, freedom. She’d met someone via an on-line discussion group or chat room. Somebody from Crescent City, California. They had already had a rendezvous in Seattle, that weekend “conference” two months ago. Karen had asked for a leave of absence from the school, for now, but expected she would be giving her notice.
“You’re serious?” He laughed, or attempted to laugh, but his face collapsed, words rolling out like miscast dice. “You have a pen pal in California? And now you’re off to try living with him? Yes, okay, I get it. Wow! Is he like a beach surfer type, or software tycoon, or what?”
“She’s an artist, a sculptor,” Karen spoke softly, head down, her reference to gender escaping him at first with his hearing impaired by anger.
Peter had slept with Karen nearly every night for eight years, knew the shape of her body as he had once known his mother, even more intimately than that. He loved her, body and soul, and the first sense of impending separation was like free fall, a countdown to his own destruction. He couldn’t imagine anything else that morning.
They had met while each was in their final year of university back east. Peter was six years older, having interrupted his studies to travel and bum around quite a bit: Mexico and the Mediterranean, then Thailand, one winter at a resort in the Rockies as a breakfast cook, skiing every afternoon. By contrast, Karen was intently focused on a teaching career and had job prospects even prior to graduation. They first met at an opening in a small gallery exhibiting the work of a painter who was a mutual acquaintance. For Peter the artist was an occasional drinking companion turned rival in the course of that night. Karen, it seemed, was a more special guest. Peter recalled the moment hearing her laughter behind him, a throaty, playful laugh that made his head turn. That was Montreal, c’est la vie. Later they shared a pot of mussels steamed with Pernod in a café on rue Saint-Denis.
Then Toronto. Karen’s first job was in a suburban school north of the city, near her hometown where her parents still lived. Peter never hit it off with the prospective in-laws, a well-established family that made him feel like a drifter and gold digger. For three years in Ontario he worked as a tutor and did a few stints cooking in fine but ill-fated restaurants, now with an English degree. When Karen raised the idea of moving west, Peter leaped at it, and within a week purchased a van to transport their belongings — a faded green Econoline. It had gotten them across the country, the Prairies, Kicking Horse Pass, and for him more or less back home. Big, clean rivers and sagebrush on the side hills. Now it seemed the beautiful middle of nowhere.
“What about the cat?” he asked suddenly that fateful Sunday morning after several minutes of reflective silence. Karen still sat at the breakfast table, Anais rubbing against her legs. He had rescued the tabby from the SPCA as a birthday present for Karen.
“I was hoping she could stay with you for now,” she said with her first hint of emotion.
Peter scowled, unreasonably pissed off by the suggestion. “Where?” he asked, on the offensive now, raising his arms wildly. “What about the house? You know I can’t pay the goddamn mortgage alone. Am I supposed to advertise for roommates or what?”
Karen had her head down and was stroking the cat’s back with her hand. “I’ll contribute my share for the time being, of course. Perhaps we’ll have to sell the house, and I’m very sorry if it means disrupting you. I don’t think we should get into all this at the moment. Peter, this means a big adjustment for both of us. I’m sorry to take you by surprise like this —”
He cut her off with an angry
