Gargoyles Read Online Free PDF Page B

stopped living in their city, but how can it surprise him so deeply every time?
    His mother makes her way back across the living room to sit in a chair angled toward the picture window. Richard steps up beside her, takes in the million-dollar view of the harbour. In the near distance a sea plane takes off, though one can hear nothing. Sailboats creep along under power, some coming in from the wind, others going out to find it. He sees waterfront signs for a wax museum, an undersea world, some hotels.
    â€œI’ve always wanted this,” his mother says.
    â€œI can see why,” Richard responds neatly, pretending not to hear the weight in her voice.
    Adding even more weight, she lifts a beer bottle off the windowsill and sips from it. His mother, who never drank. Never, in all the years with his father, who enjoyed it almost to the point of abuse, who tried to get her to join him. Richard finds this beer of hers spectacularly perverse but he says nothing.
    â€œAnd how’s Melanie?” his mother asks.
    â€œShe’s fine. She’s good.” How
is
Melanie? She’s fine.
    â€œGive her my love when you phone her to report on things.”
    â€œI will.” The nose of a huge ship has come into view. White, a cruise ship. “How long have you been here again?”
    â€œRight after the doors came off.”
    â€œAnd how long has —”
    â€œI put up with the blankets for about a week.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œI couldn’t sleep. The first week a storm came right in our front hall, blew over the coat rack, and stained the antique hutch.”
    â€œI know. We talked on the phone, Mom. About those blankets.”
    She meets his eye in a way that says, If that is so, why didn’t you fly out and make things right? He wants to tell her that, at the time, he didn’t — he really didn’t — think it was that serious. During another, ritual phone call, his father had laughed explaining the blankets. His mother was in the background and she wasn’t screaming or crying. Richard knew she was scared, but he chalked that up to being less adventurous with age. He knew his father was being conceptual again, but he didn’t know how dangerously conceptual.
    â€œI checked in here three months ago this week.”
    â€œThis is a condo, right, Mom?”
    â€œYes. And the furniture was all here. And dishes for eight. Though I haven’t entertained. Well, just Dorothy that one time. New Year’s Eve we shared a bottle of wine she brought over. The cork almost took her head off!”
    â€œYou didn’t spend New Year’s Eve with Dad?”
    â€œHe didn’t spend New Year’s Eve with me.” His mother turns almost completely away to continue her watch over the small harbour.
    Richard reaches down to take her elbow and squeeze it. She doesn’t respond.
    â€œSo, Mom, did you buy this place? Or are you renting?”
    â€œI’m —” She stiffens, momentarily confused. A little spasm seems to help and, finding the word, she turns to him, angry with him for asking.
    â€œIt’s a lease.”
    Richard nods, not knowing what to say, except, “It’s nice.”
    â€œIt has a door.”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œWhen your father had our doors removed? And they were just awful empty holes? He called them his gargoyles.”
    â€œGargoyles?”
    â€œThat was it for me.”
    Richard easily recalls the summer at the lake when his father taught him about gargoyles. Gargoyles became a large part of that summer and several beyond. He remembers coming upon his father late one night, sketching under the coal-oil lamp. Even then his father embraced the old-fashioned. There at the lake, neighbours found his oil lamps more quaint than strange.
    His father was chuckling while sketching. Richard braved an interruption — he was in his pyjamas, he was supposed to be in bed — to see what was so funny. In