The Last Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

when her heel broke, she swore and threw both shoes in the ditch. She told Billy she was going to send him to his aunt in Manitoba because he had just cost her the best man she’d ever had. But when they got to Carton Harbour,his other mother appeared. She bought them cones at Whitbread’s store and they sat on a bench watching the boats go by. “I hope you go farther than me,” she said. Billy looked up. She seemed to have spoken to a passing sail. “You want to be one of the smart ones,” she said. “A doctor, eh? An airline pilot. Not like me. I had to drop out of school when I was sixteen – go to work in the mill. Not like me.” She took another lick of her cone. “You don’t get far without that piece of paper.” Billy wondered what piece of paper that might be. “You listen to me,” his mother said. Her voice had taken an edge. “You do your homework. It’s important. You got that?” Billy nodded, and for a while they sat in silence. “I always loved books,” she said, gazing out at the Harbour. “You got that from me at least.”
The next day, Hooch called. Soon his mother was singing around the house again – Hooch was back in her life – and now, for Hooch, for the date she had with him that evening, she was painting her nails. And telling him he had a girlfriend.
But he had no girlfriend – not if his mother was a girlfriend, not if the girls at the dock were girlfriends. Whatever he had, whatever had happened to him, was different. There was no word for it; he didn’t want there to be a word for it; and anyway, what did he have ? He didn’t have anything, at least not anything that anyone including him could see or touch. A feeling in his stomach. The memory of the girl’s hand reaching out to take the scone. The memory of the back of her arm brushing his, as they lay beside each other in the grass. As soon as he could, he wentback outside. A long red cloud pointed across the sky like a banner. Sitting on a rock, he watched as it shaded to pink, then dark blue, a shadow over the channel where she had driven off with her father.
For days afterwards he felt the lifting of a weight he had become so used to he didn’t notice it until it was gone. Now it almost didn’t matter whether his mother got drunk or yelled at him. There was a place in him she couldn’t touch. He spun until the trees whirled above him. He ran like mad through the bush. Using the jackknife Matt had given him, he gouged a deep mark in a pine; then he gouged another one beside it. The sap made a mess of his knife and his hands, but he felt he had done something that would hold the thing he feared was already slipping away: the feeling that something better than he had ever known was about to happen. Had happened. It was fixed there now in the gashes, like two yellow eyes in the dimness of the trees.
Then one day, surprising himself, he swore at his mother. She smacked him and demanded to know what had got into him. When he shouted at her, she smacked him again, and again, and still he came back at her, shouting – shouting for more, really, craving her blows, something hard, definite, for the girl had left him with nothing.
He drifted back to his friends, to the usual swimming and fishing and hanging around the co-op. Still, from time to time, he thought of her. It was hard to remember what she looked like. What came back was a feeling. But it was not the old excitement, the old sense that everythingwas going to get better. It was the fear he had felt when they first stood together in the sun and he was unable to answer her. For moments at a time, it could stop him completely, as if she was again waiting for him to produce an answer that (if he could only have found it) would have made everything turn out differently.
He travelled around the lake with Matt, who did work for the summer people. They built steps, hauled away rubbish, delivered firewood. He would sit perched up in the bow, watching the cottages draw past.