LITMIR.BIZ

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side. In the silence of his grief, he bore the weight of his guilt, the consequences of his decisions. For it was McKelvey who had pushed back hardest against the teen’s drug use, the disrespect, the lack of appreciation for a home carved from the meagre bones McKelvey had gathered along the way. Nothing had come easy in his own life, so there was a desire to impart the lessons of a life learned the hard way.

      After a time, Caroline had steered herself towards a group of mothers who gathered in alternating homes to discuss their grief from a distinctly female point of view. So it was that Charlie McKelvey found himself adrift for a time, driving away from the suffocating city, up through the lush farmland of Holland Marsh, the only sound in the car the soothing rush of tires on pavement or the beat of his own ragged heart. Long drives, tanks of gas, packages of cigarettes and wads of gum in a vain attempt to mask the reek of tobacco. It was ironic, he thought, how he had quit smoking a half dozen years earlier for the very reason that he wanted to ensure he would be around for his son’s wedding day. Now there would be no wedding day. No grandchildren. The future, which only yesterday had hovered in the distance like the comforting and anticipated closing scene in a film, was now blurry and grainy, the storyline meandering without purpose. This was arthouse cinema. Their lives, both his and Caroline’s, reduced to a series of comings and goings, a joint bank account, their future anchored entirely in memory.

      Eventually, after much goading, McKelvey had agreed to participate in the men’s grief group up at the hospital. He saved gas money but found no solace in the depressing room that smelled of cheap aftershave and burned coffee stewing in the aluminum percolator they also used for AA meetings. The men were all ages, from the youngest, a thirty-year-old named Tim, to the eldest, an eighty-three year old with the antiquated name Bartholomew. They represented all walks of life, too, from a shoe salesman to a cop. They were balding or they had hair, they were overweight, and they were tall and short, and they were just a bunch of idiots sitting in a room trying to do something that—in McKelvey’s estimation—was akin to fucking around with a Ouija board in a darkened closet. He was not hardwired for this, and nothing good could come from it.

      Most of the men in the group drifted in and out of attendance, likely just as uncomfortable in the dredging of grief as McKelvey found himself. A rare few shared regularly, wept openly, and curled balls of tissue in their moist, clenched fists while the moderator knelt before them, rubbing a hand across their back. McKelvey hated it most when a crying man’s nose began to run, as though this physiological reaction somehow represented total and final defeat, a threshold breached. He felt sorry for them, and yet conversely he admired their ability to weep openly in a room full of strangers. It was beyond his grasp.

Two

      On this Tuesday evening, the wind was lifting bits of garbage, the detritus of the city, and whirling it around the visitor’s lot. Early December, the sky dark as coal and glowing at its edges from the burning lights of the city, the air thick with the dampness of coming snow. Upstairs in the meeting room, seated at the corner of a long conference table, Charlie McKelvey was chewing the skin on the side of his thumb. This was a habit his father had also possessed, one of the few things he remembered fondly about the man, an indelible impression. That and tearing his hangnails with his teeth. Caroline was always at him when his own thumbs were cracked and bleeding. Then McKelvey remembered it was something he’d seen Gavin doing on a number of occasions, this automaton’s movement of thumb to mouth, and he wondered then if it was possible for a quirky family trait to be so deeply embedded in the coils of genes and DNA. A sort of torch of the generations. And what other surprises had he passed along in that weathered packet?

      The meeting room was always too hot, and this day there was a pong of body odour, a lingering sour ripeness. McKelvey was not paying attention to the words unfolding around him. He was thinking about something his wife had asked him to do, and now he couldn’t quite remember the details. They had shared a rare moment during breakfast that morning, McKelvey guzzling a coffee while standing over the kitchen sink, Caroline up early and eating a bowl of granola at the table. She had raised her head to him, yes. Words spoken. But now he was at a loss.

      “Charlie?”

      McKelvey startled, and said, “Sorry?”

      He lifted his head and smiled benignly at Paul, the group moderator. McKelvey had been doing this since he was a child, the same quick little boy’s smile that carried him through school when his grades weren’t good enough. It was simply a part of his physical character now, like chewing the skin of his thumbs.

      “I said, ‘Did you want to say anything to Tim?’ From your experience?”

      McKelvey blinked at Paul, then looked over at Tim. Tim was a young man, much younger than McKelvey. A widower at thirty, a crime by any stretch of the imagination. The details were unclear to McKelvey. He believed there had been an accident.

      McKelvey shrugged and said, “Maybe next week I’ll think of something.”

      The moderator regarded him for a long moment, then he said, “That’s what you said last week. And perhaps even the week before.”

      McKelvey smiled and let the little poke roll off him. Then he shrugged and looked over at the young widower. He was a handsome kid, handsome in the fashion of a high school teacher, which is what he was. Sandy hair was swept back over a high forehead, and his clear eyes were framed by modern eyeglasses, small rectangles. McKelvey saw himself at thirty, intense blue eyes burning beneath a lid of thick black curls cropped short, already a married working stiff weighed down with the long shifts and routines of a life. Even back then he and Caroline had owned the choreography of roommates, roommates who happened to be intimate on a regular schedule. Even then it was only to answer a physical need, and it was in reality something they felt they could do for the other without losing ground one way or the other. He couldn’t imagine the house without her.

      McKelvey lowered his head and said, “I wish there was something I could say, you know. It’s just that...I mean, with my job and everything, I see what happens to people every day. It happened to me. It happened to us. I can’t change anything. And I don’t know how I’m going to live to be eighty if every day is like this.”

      Paul nodded and smiled. He said, “That was something, Charlie. See, you did have something to say.” Then he moved on to the man on McKelvey’s right.

      The men’s voices melted to a murmur then, the vague sound of a TV bleeding through the wall of a cheap motel room, and McKelvey got lost in himself. He drifted out and beyond the confines of his physical body, eyes closed, blood hammering in his ears, until finally it was the only sound he could detect, soothing as the methodical whoosh of wipers sliding across a windshield. Shook shook, shook shook. There was nothing for a long time, and it was good, just the blackness of the back of his skull, of the deepest part of himself, and when he squeezed his eyes there was a burst of fireworks, coloured pins, geometrical designs. Then he was pulled to a specific place and time, an earmarked memory. As easy as closing your eyes and moving through time.

      He is a boy standing in the sunshine on the sidewalk, squinting as he strains to look all the way up at his father, Grey McKelvey. There is another man standing on the sidewalk, someone who knows McKelvey’s father, another miner, and while this man’s features and voice are blurred, McKelvey understands there is a level of admiration here for his father.

      “Al Brooks at the Legion was sayin’ you might run for the union,” the man says.

      Grey McKelvey laughs with just the right amount of humility. Flashes his smile and dips his head, the modest and practiced gesture of a man well used to an easy sell.

      “Oh no,” Grey chuckles, “I don’t think I’m cut out for that racket. No sir, not me.”

      “Well, anyway, Grey, where are you two boys headed?”

      McKelvey’s face is warm in the sunshine, his eyes blinded by the soaring yellow light, the sky above

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