The Master of Happy Endings Read Online Free PDF

strangers, curiosity in students, admiration in some women, and envy in competing swimmers. Though his habit of swimming naked here was considered eccentric, he knew the islanders attributed this to his having married a Spaniard, since Europeans were known for immodesty. That he swam during even the year’s coldest months was not so easily explained.
    When a week had gone by since he’d mailed his letters, he began to walk up to Svetic’s Store once a day, though he behaved as though this was only for butter or salted peanuts or some other item from the shelves. He’d begun to wonder whether he really wanted to see what his advertisement might bring. Often Lisa was sitting in her large red-leather chair to study the weekend coloured comics, and sometimes worried aloud about family members in “For Better or For Worse.” “I wish she hadn’t killed off the grandma. It’s getting too damn sad.” Eventually she made a great show of hauling herself up out of the chair to take his money. “No letters today. You’ve got me so curious I’m tempted to open the first one that comes, just to see what you’re up to.”
    It had never occurred to him that she might read his mail, but of course she was perfectly capable of it. He’d been a fool not to have crossed the strait with those letters!
    Rather than give her the opportunity to witness his impatience, he adopted the habit of arriving at the dock in time for the ferry that brought the mailbag across, but the ferry was so often late that he was sometimes forced to wait amongst the rusty pickups and mud-caked old sedans parked chaotically on the gravel, some with doors left open by last-minute drivers who’d been almost left behind. Sometimes he waited down on the floating pier, breathing the sharp smells of creosote and rotting seaweed. He knew enough to bring a book with him to reread. Heart of Darkness , As I Lay Dying , The Good Soldier .
    When the clouds opened up and sent down rain he moved inside to wait amongst the crowded rows of tools, dishes, machine parts, and cast-off clothing in the Free Exchange, a converted boathouse of faded cedar planks and patched-up shingles, resting at a tilt beside the government dock. Here the smells were of old gumboots, sweat-soaked mackinaws, and fishing nets, sometimes a kerosene lamp or a half-used can of paint. Framed pictures were stacked against a window coated with mud and salt spray. An entire shelf was devoted to discarded trophies—statuettes of human figures holding basketballs or showing off a large fish. Above the heap of old boots, a sign offered a bargain:
    TAKE A PAIR OF GUMBOOTS OFF OUR HANDS AND WE’LL
THROW IN ONE OF MURIEL PARKER’S VELVET PAINTINGS!
    No money was ever exchanged here. If you found something you wanted or needed, you took it home. If you had something at home you didn’t want, you brought it with you and left it for someone who did. There was seldom anything Thorstad needed. He hadn’t broken a dish in seven years, and he was still wearing the three good shirts Elena had bought, the only man on the island who wore his shirts buttoned to the throat. But occasionally there was something he took away in case it came in handy one day, adding it to the pyramid beneath the blue tarpaulin behind his shack.
    Since retiring to the island, he no longer purchased something new if something old could be repaired. He rummaged amongst people’s tossed-out equipment and useless machine parts abandoned beside the road, and whatever he couldn’t use himself he brought here for a possible second life. He was aware of the figure he sometimes made—a lank Goliath wading through the underbrush in order to rescue a discarded basin, a long-backed Ichabod with a card table on his head, bringing it in to the Free Exchange.
    As a place to wait for the mail, this building was at least dry. It was sometimes interesting as well. He’d