Extreme Vinyl Café Read Online Free PDF Page B

started to giggle. Morley giggled. Mary smiled. And then Bert started laughing so hard he was pounding the table. They all laughed and laughed.
    It was really their only choice. You swallow your pride and you laugh, or you fight. So they laughed. It’s what good neighbours do.
    Dear Mr. McLean,
    I have started to date a lovely woman who has a five-year-old son. I don’t think the boy likes me. Any advice?
    Serge
    Dear Serge,
    Avoid ladders.

SPRING IN THE NARROWS
    A few springs ago, when Dave’s mother, Margaret, was going through a bad spot, feeling old and overwhelmed, Dave flew home to Cape Breton Island for a weekend to give her a hand with the things that need a hand when the seasons are changing. He went on a Thursday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon.
    While he was there, Dave took down the storm windows and put up the screens. He turned the garden, raked the twigs off the lawn and cleaned out the eaves. In the evenings, he walked with his mother into town to buy ice cream. He stopped in at the Maple Leaf Restaurant on Saturday morning and had breakfast with some childhood friends. And each night, he stretched out on his childhood bed in his old room at the top of the stairs, and he slept like a boy, deep and far away. When he left that Sunday, he left thinking that this was something he should have been doing for years.
    Since that spring, Dave has made the flight home twice a year, once every April to lay things out, and then again in October to pack them away. It makes him feel useful; connected to things gone by and to the swing of the seasons. He knows his mother looks forward to these visits. He likes that too.
    So Dave was surprised, to say the least, the spring he stepped out of his rented car onto his mother’s gravel driveway in the little town of Big Narrows, to see she had hired a man, and the two of them were working away at the windows without him.
    The man, his white hair wispy and whipping in the wind, was up the old wooden ladder, with a bucket hooked on the top rung, washing the windows of Dave’s sister’s old bedroom. His mother, with a rag and bucket of her own, was working on a pile of storm windows propped against the front porch.
    “David!” she said, as he stepped out of the car, her rag dangling by her side.
    He had taken an early plane, and his sweet time on the drive from Sydney, choosing the old road along the St. Andrew’s Channel. He had stopped for a coffee and sandwich in Irish Bay, eating it outside even though it was uncomfortably windy for that.
    “It’s David,” Margaret said to the man on the ladder, stomping toward Dave in her Wellingtons, big wet splotches on her olive-coloured pants.
    It felt good to be out of the rental car, the wind on his face again. Dave hugged his mother.
    “How was your flight?” she asked.
    They walked away from the car together, instinctively heading toward the garden, which Dave was surprised to see had already been turned. He pointed at the cold frame, at the little tomato seedlings pumping away.
    “You’ve been busy,” he said.
    “Smith’s been helping,” said Margaret.
    “Smith,” called Margaret, again, “it’s David.”
    The man came down the ladder effortlessly, almost carelessly, as if he had been living on ladders all his life. It was hard to tell how old he was, but he was older up close than he was coming down the ladder, that’s for sure.
    He was wearing a beige canvas jacket, with a grey fisherman’s sweater under it. The jacket was frayed at the cuffs and had clips instead of buttons. Dave was shaking the man’s hand, trying to remember where he had heard his name before, and coveting the jacket all at once.
    “Nice of you to help out,” said Dave.
    Then he remembered. This wasn’t a hired hand. This was the retired fire chief. This was the guy who had sealed up his mother’s laundry chute.
    “Get your stuff out of the car,” said Margaret. “Supper is nearly ready. I have a chicken going.”
    D ave