This All Happened(3)

            Maisie Pye folds her glasses by her plate. Ten years ago I went out with Maisie. Sometimes I think of this. I think, I could be married with a nine-year-old daughter. And so could Lydia. Lydia’s ex, Earl, has a son now. Earl lives two streets away. Once, when we were walking home from the Ship, Lydia told me to shush. We were talking about Earl, under his window.

            There is salsa and blue corn chips. Russian cold bean salad. Scalloped potatoes. Ham and pineapple. What a feed.

            I ask if I can borrow their house in Heart’s Desire. Oliver Squires dunks a cold shrimp into a hot sauce. That house is too cold for you.

            Lydia: It’s too cold and too far to drive.

            Oliver: Are you both going out?

            Me: It’ll just be me.

            Oliver: Put antifreeze in the toilet when you leave.

            Maisie says she lived out in Heart’s for one winter with Una. While Oliver finished his law degree at Dal.

            What she doesnt say is, When Oliver and I were going through a hard time.

            6 Snowstorm, the city closed down on Old Christmas Day―but from my windows it’s nothing compared with childhood storms. Lydia has stayed over, though she doesnt like it here. There’s no privacy from Iris and Helmut. There’s a grain of aggravation in Lydia that I can’t make a go of it without a roommate. And then there’s the fact that I owe twenty thousand dollars in student loans. Lydia is solvent whereas I’m scraping by. The bedroom doors have an inch gap at the floor, so it’s hard to be intimate. At least I could replace the doors. We wax up (waxes have lovely names: orange klister) and ski downtown, dropping off Lydia’s last mortgage cheque. She owns her house. It’ll be nineteen years before I own a house. Driveway shovellers encourage us by wagging their aluminum shovels. There’s a new, wider shovel called a push.

            Discarded Christmas trees are blown in wide arcs down the hill, clumps of silver tinsel attempting to make the trees respectful. Lydia slips by me on the road, crouched and silent, plunging into the downtown. Just a whirr from her skis. Her strength is sexy.

            All day the snow piles on. Towers of snow teetering towards houses. We buy split peas at Hallidays to make soup, and ski past the video store that glows against the twilight, the snow on the sills is fluorescent, a cat asleep by the cash register. We ski along Gower Street, to Lydia’s little two-storey clapboard house. She’s left lights on and it’s like a pumpkin house. How soft the city is, silent, in the snow.

            7 Snowbound in St John’s. I sit by the fire at Lydia’s with Tinker Bumbo. He is fifteen, arthritic, snores, and farts. His balls flop out of his hindquarters like a purse. Lydia’s doorbell rings. She’s in the shower, so Tinker and I get it. Tinker wags and moans, his balls swaying from knee to knee, a scrotum pendulum.

            A short man pushes past me.

            Hello, I say.

            He sits on a chair and slips off his overshoes. He lifts an elbow to me. I take it. He wears a blue suit, is in his fifties. His eyes blink, then open wide. And I see now, he’s blind. Short silver hair. Portly, with sausage fingers. He takes a dog biscuit from his breast pocket and Tinker sits to receive it. He leads me to the piano by the Christmas tree.

            Youre new, he says.

            Yes, I say.

            I’ve been tuning this piano for thirty years.

            He is wrenching off the small nuts in the back of the standup. It’s a fair model, he says.

            I ask if he’d like some coffee.

            I rarely have anything between meals.

            I bring coffee up to Lydia.

            The piano tuner is here.