The Perfect Order of Things Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t suit him at all and that, in other times, he would never have worn. He was quite the spiffy dresser, my dad, very old school. Blazers, crisp shirts, cufflinks, club tie, the whole business. But not that weekend. That weekend he gave up.
    So three days passed; and early on a grey afternoon he drove me to the train station in town. We waited in the car, the tracks in front of us, the little station house off to the left, and behind it the lake, white and frozen all the way to the opposite shore, a dirty line on the horizon. I asked about Dean, if he’d been up to visit. No. He started to explain, university, a new girlfriend, but ran out of steam before he got to the end of it.
    “What are you going to do now?” I said.
    He said, “I have to go to the city. I wish I didn’t.” He touched his fingers to a small cancer scab on his forehead, benign, but it needed removing. No big deal: into the car, an easy drive, stay in the Royal York Hotel, see the doctor in the morning; a drop or two of local anaesthetic, then back to the white house in the country. Done.
    But everything frightened him. Even going to the city.
    My train pulled away. I headed down the line and didn’t give him another thought, not for days. I was seventeen, I thought of nothing for very long except what I wanted. The girl with the hair under her arms. I wanted another night with her and the incense and the Buddha candles.
    Later that afternoon, the train a hundred miles away, my mother having a martini in the bar of her Florida hotel, thinking about coming back, how hard it was to find a “gent” like him, my father, John Patterson Monday, packed a small suitcase. A hairbrush, a couple of Oxford shirts, subdued tie, socks, shaving kit. He must have packed it just after he dropped me off at the station. It was getting winter-dark already, the gloom settling around the big house. He put on his raincoat and his hat; he poured himself a belt of Scotch. He was, I guess, just on the verge of calling a taxi from the town when he changed his mind. He rose to his feet, raincoat still on, went into his bedroom and pushed aside his old military uniform that hung from a hanger and selected my .22-calibre rifle, probably because of its short barrel. He went into the living room and opened the drawer of the Queen Anne desk that sat by his armchair and extracted a single, hornet-sized bullet from a box of shells.
    Then he returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table, opened the breech of the rifle, put the bullet in the chamber, snapped shut the breech, pulled back the hammer with his long fingers, and, still wearing his hat, put the gun to his temple and fired.
    I don’t know how long he lay there in the gathering darkness on that kitchen floor, but I know he didn’t die right away. You can’t, not with a small-calibre gun like that.
    It took people three days to find him. Finally the custodian who lived up the road broke a window and came in through the kitchen.
    Sometimes I wonder if my father, as he swept the gun up and placed the barrel to his temple, had, in the moment before he squeezed the trigger and the bullet knocked him onto the floor, second thoughts. Did he think it would hurt? Did he think about me? Could he see the ceiling of the kitchen when he hit the floor? Did he know, lying there, that he was dying? Did he regret it? Do you go on dreaming when you die like that, the images moving further and further and further away? Is that what he thought at the very last second: This is the perfect order of things.
    There is a peculiar addendum to this story. A year or so after his death, I started university in Toronto and I used to tell the pretty girls in the coffee shop that my dad killed himself. I told Raissa Shestatsky one fall afternoon and waited for the smile to fall from her face. Which it did. I figured it made me more interesting, more like a real writer than other people’s life stories made them look. I did it for quite a while