A Boy of Good Breeding Read Online Free PDF Page A

hadn’t packed up their rice cakes and moved back to Vancouver Island last week, the recent arrival of Knute and her daughter would have put Algren’s population at fifteen hundred and two, and that would have been two too many. Hosea closed his eyes and thought about his letter, the one from the Prime Minister. Well, okay, it wasn’t a personal letter, it was a form letter, but Hosea’s name was on it, and so was a photocopied signature of the Prime Minister’s name, John Baert.
    The Prime Minister had promised to visit Canada’s smallest town on July first, and Algren, the letter had noted, was one of the preliminary qualifiers in the contest. Everybody in Algren knew it had been short-listed, why wouldn’t it be? After all, check out the sign on the edge of town. Even the Winnipeg daily paper had mentioned, in one line, on a back page, that Algren had been picked as a nominee for the Prime Minister’s visit. But the people in Algren went about their business with very little thought of July first, other than looking forward to the holiday from work, and the rides and the fireworks. If Algren had the smallest population at the time of the count, great. If not, who really cared? After all, they thought, the Prime Minister had made promises before. Of course, theyknew Hosea Funk was extremely proud of Algren’s smallest-town status, he was proud of everything about Algren. Good for him, they thought, usually with a smile or a raised eyebrow. Might as well be. But nobody in Algren knew what Hosea knew, or what he thought he knew, or just how determined he was to be the winner.
    Hosea wanted to relax, to savour the early morning calm, to stretch out in bed, enjoy his nakedness, and happily welcome the new day. A small part of him wished his mornings resembled those in the orange juice commercials where healthy clean families bustle around making lunches and checking busy schedules, kissing and hugging and wishing each other well. But he was alone. And he hated orange juice. It stung his throat.
    So Hosea lay quietly in his huge bed. For the last year or so he had been working on his panic attacks. Mornings were the worst time for them. And for heart attacks. His buddy Tom had had his in the morning just about an hour after waking up. Hosea suspected, however, that his determination to stay calm was a bit like overeating to stay thin and so he tried not to think about it too much. Instead he tried to relax his entire body starting from his toes and working his way to the top of his head. The alarm on his clock radio came on, as usual, ten minutes after he woke. It was set to a country station, and Emmylou Harris was wailing away, Heaven only knows just why lovin’ you would make me cry, and Hosea thought, Ah Emmylou Harris, a voice as pure as the driven snow, a real class act, all that hair and those cowboy boots with the hand-painted roses …
    Hosea lay naked in his bed and whispered Emmylou, Emmylou a few times and closed his eyes and mumbled along with her, Heaven only ever sees why love’s made a fool of me, I guess that’s how it’s meant to be … He thought of Lorna and the last time they’d made love and then tallied up the days, and the weeks. Almost two months.
    He tried to leap out of bed, just as his own personal joke, but ended up getting tangled in the sheet, knocking the radio off the bedside table, and yanking the cord out of the outlet, so that Emmylou Harris was cut off and fifty-two-year-old Hosea Funk, mayor of Algren, was left alone again and aching.
    But not for long because by now the sun was up and he had work to do. Fifteen minutes on his exercise bike, a piece of whole wheat toast with honey, black coffee, half a grapefruit, a freshly ironed shirt, and a shave, and Hosea was out the door of his modest bungalow and driving down First Street in his Chevy Impala, humming the Emmylou tune on his way to the Charlie Orson Memorial Hospital.
    The town of Algren had four long streets running