The Second Life of Samuel Tyne Read Online Free PDF Page B

noarms, nolegs, floating in a pool?” said Chloe.
    “Bob!” said Yvette. “What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs, stretched out on a porch?”
    “Matt!” said Chloe. “What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs—”
    “Yvette and Chloe, that is un-Christian and you will stop telling those jokes this instant,” said Maud. She looked in dismay from one face to the other. Last year she’d had a meeting with the twins’ school guidance counsellor. The encounter had been less than pleasant. In the counsellor’s tidy, moist office, Maud had sat in a child’s chair as a harassed, large-boned woman lectured her on the ills of her children from the vantage of her oak desk. It was not that the twins were poor students, the woman explained, but they were rude and insolent, and sometimes defied authority by falling completely silent. Painful as this was to Maud, she was fully prepared to comply with any of the school’s solutions until the counsellor spoke again: “And their speech is pretty sluggish, not very clear. Though I suppose we’re just not used to the accent.”
    Maud set her jaw. “The twins were born here. In Canada.”
    The woman raised her eyebrows in surprise, but made no further comments. Throughout her speech, Maud couldn’t help but feel the whole thing was some subtly racist attempt to discredit her daughters. Promising nothing, Maud got up and left, telling neither Samuel nor the twins about the meeting.

chapter THREE
    S amuel sat in the shed. It was a cold, vague day, with the dull feel of a hundred others, but for a time Samuel let himself be consoled by it. The weather seemed complicit with his mood. He pressed his feet to the electric heater under his workbench, rubbing his hands together.
    Something was bothering him, but he could not say exactly what. Three days had passed since he’d walked off his job, and he’d so far managed to keep his secret from Maud, who spent most of her days immersed in cleaning or shopping in town. He cracked open the wooden case of a radio and fiddled with its innards in a distracted, unskilled way. His workbench touched two walls of the tiny shed, and was riddled with wires. Forced to be fastidiously tidy at the government office, Samuel often let his shed get messy. Drops of solder speckled the bench, and the dust he roused each time he moved gave him a vague pleasure. Despite this, he still felt painfully preoccupied. It surprised him that he could be unhappy in his new freedom.
    Samuel’s hackles rose when he heard the shed door’s hinges rattling. He turned to see Yvette standing in the doorway, dwarfed in her mother’s wool sweater. Her thin, chapped knees peeked overtop a pair of his own rain boots. With her serious face, she looked like an old woman who’d shrunk. She let in the dry, metallic smell of winter.
    Samuel singed his knuckle on the soldering iron. Flinching and tensing his fist, he tried to smile.
    “What are you doing home from school?” he said after a moment.
    “What are you doing home from work?”
    The girl had always been bold, but not in any admirable way. Samuel shrugged and half rose from his bench, sitting abruptly when the gesture struck him as silly. He was terribly nervous. He cleared his throat. “Well, well,” he said, as though delighted to have company. “Well, well.”
    Yvette kicked aside his clutter of paint cans, stripped wires, burnt fuses, soiled newspapers, rousing the smell of kerosene. She sat decisively on the floor and looked at him. Samuel hesitated, turning away when he discovered she had nothing to say. Finally, as though bored that her silence didn’t bother him, she cocked her head to one side and said, “I woke up sick, and the thought of going to school only made me sicker.”
    Samuel giggled nervously. “Amen. You and I, we are two of a feather today.” He assessed her long, docile face. The fact that she didn’t scowl encouraged him to continue. “You know, when