Liberty Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

drinking water.
    In the morning, early, I got up and emailed Mavis to let her know I was on my way to Elliot and I wanted to sell the house. Then I wrote a letter of resignation, and sealed it in an envelope along with my access fob. A short time later I heard the shower running, and then Ian came from the bedroom with his carry-on, wearing a crisp and fashionable suit. I asked him if he wanted a ride to the airport and he said no, he would drive himself and leave his car there. I found it hard to believe that he had been such a mess the night before.
    He picked up my empty takeout coffee cup from the floor where I’d left it and threw it in the paper recycle bin. When he was on his way out the door, he turned and said, or rather asked, “You know that you are a person who resists happiness, right?”
    â€œThat’s not true,” I said.
    â€œIt is true. You don’t trust it.”
    Then he closed the door and left.
    I didn’t want to think about what he’d said. I did not believe it. I retrieved my suitcase from the front hall, and emptied out the dirty clothes and packed clean ones. I tookonly what I thought I would need for a brief stay at a time of year that could be either hot or cold: jeans, shorts, T-shirts, walking shoes, sandals. A rain jacket. A book and my laptop. Toiletries. I put the dirty clothes in the laundry, collected my suitcase, and left the house. On my way out of town, I stopped at city hall and dropped off the envelope containing my letter of resignation.
    I hit only green lights as I drove out of the city. Once the lights were behind me, I called our home voicemail and left a message saying that I was on my way to Elliot to take care of some business regarding the rental house, and I would call again when I’d arrived. As I dropped the phone on the seat beside me, I realized that it should have been included in the package I’d left at city hall, and that it would be disabled when my account was cancelled, and then I’d be without one.
    As I looked at the city skyline in the rear-view mirror, I began to wish that I hadn’t left Ian the message I had. There was an assumption built into it—that is, that he would be relieved to know where I had gone. Perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps I was a stranger to him now. I thought back to the moment when the marriage and the baby had slipped from their hiding places. I was like one of those women who commits a bank robbery and then goes into hiding as someone else, marries a doctor, becomes a soccer mom, and does volunteer work with the Girl Guides or the Humane Society, until it all comes tumbling apart when she is recognized from an old newspaper photograph by a neighbour in the suburbs.
    Only I hadn’t been recognized by anyone. I had done this to myself.
    When a number of semi-trailers passed me in the left-hand lane, I realized I was driving too slow. I stepped on the gas and turned my attention to the road ahead, to where I was going, or rather from where I had come.

2. We Two Girls
    I T ’ S N OVEMBER , A cold day. Five-year-old Frances Mary Moon, wearing new blue mitts and a matching toque her mother knit for her, sits on an old tractor tire filled with sand and surveys the yard around her: the white house that used to be just a log house but now has a modern addition on the back; the red barn with its hayloft on top and Kaw-Liga, the wooden Indian, standing guard by the side door, the one you can use to avoid walking through the cow muck; the bins and sheds and machinery, all lined up neatly along the fence; the caragana hedges and poplars that surround the yard and line the approach from the road. Everything is in its proper place, ready for winter. The sky is grey, as though today is the day winter might come, and even Kaw-Liga looks cold. The cows out in the pasture are all standing in one direction, facing away from the wind. Frances doesn’t like cows. She’s allergic to milk