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organizers in Canterbury. It had been a busy and difficult summer, and by the end of August, when I hadn’t heard back from the conference people, I’d assumed that I hadn’t made the grade.

      I explained all this to Susan and George, while holding the heavy envelope in my lap, weighing it experimentally and tapping it with my fingers as if I might somehow divine what it contained by osmosis.

      “So—why don’t you go ahead and open it?” Susan said.

      “It’s probably just a bunch of promotional material,” I said. “You know—sort of ‘sorry we can’t sponsor you, but here’s some incentive stuff to make you feel even worse about not being able to afford to come.’ ”

      “Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed,” George intoned.

      “Well, considering that you’ll be seven months gone by February, and as big as a house, you shouldn’t be travelling, anyway,” Susan said. Uh-oh. She’d just used the dreaded “s” word. Shouldn’t. Ought not. Mustn’t. Can’t. May not. Prohibited—not allowed. She recognized her mistake at once as my eyebrow shot up into my hairline and George made a little wincing sound, as if he’d been pinched.

      I refrained from comment and opened the envelope.

      Congratulations, Ms. Deacon, the covering letter said.

      On behalf of the organizing committee for the Canterbury International Puppetry Festival (CIPF), I am delighted to inform you that you have been selected as the recipient of the Mary Chambers Memorial Bursary, an award which will cover your flight, registration and accommodation at this year’s event.

       We were enormously impressed with your work and hope that you will be able to bring a few samples with you and perhaps facilitate a workshop on construction techniques. Please let us know as soon as possible whether you will be attending, and we can work out the workshop details, arrangements for your flight and so on.

      I do look forward to hearing from you.

      Sincerely,

      Phyllis Creemore,

       Special Guests Committee Chair

      “Hot damn,” I said. “I’m going to Canterbury.”

      Four

      Stress and worry do not in and of themselves harm a developing baby, but if you are not taking proper care of yourself, it could potentially be harmful. If you are so stressed you are not eating properly, then you may not be able to supply all the nutrients baby needs to grow properly.

      -From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide

      All the retailers in Kuskawa manage their holiday decorating themes according to the principle of persistent overload, and it had been Hallowe’en at the Cedar Falls FoodMart since they took the Thanksgiving turkeys down on October 9. On the 31st, my friend Ruth Glass and I were there, buying last-minute ice and Clamato juice for Rico’s Hallowe’en party. My friend Rico Amato runs an antique and collectibles place out on the Cedar Falls highway strip mall. The party was a new thing—Rico had in years past gone in drag to a local gay-friendly resort to howl at the Hallowe’en moon, but the place had gone belly up during a booming tourist summer (go figure), so this year he was having friends over.

      “That cute Brent seems to be working out,” Ruth said, referring to Rico’s new roommate. We were wandering in the bakery aisle, whose shelves were bursting with jack-o-lantern cupcakes and bat-shaped cookies. Ruth brushed away a fake spider’s web, which was dangling from the “Scary Bargains” sign and tickling her nose. She was enjoying the quiet of being back home, I think. Ruth’s band, Shepherd’s Pie, had been on tour to the Maritimes to promote their fifth CD, Clear Cut Laundromat, and she looked tired.

      “Well, they’ve only been sharing the place a month, and the Royal Doulton’s still in one piece, so that’s a good sign,” I said. “You think we need more candy?” I was hefting a big bag of miniature chocolate bars that I’d scooped from a bin marked “Last Chance, Mom and Dad!” I’d already seen one harried parent-type rush towards the bin, make a grab and rush away again, like a seed-frenzied sparrow at a backyard feeder. But I wasn’t thinking of trick-or-treaters, to tell you the truth. It was just that I wasn’t drinking or smoking, so dammit, my baby was gonna have to put up with a night o’ chocolate.

      Ruth shot me a sympathetic grin. “We could always eat what’s left over,” she said and tossed the bag into our cart. Then she rolled her eyes at something she’d seen over my right shoulder and muttered “Incoming.” I turned around just in time to prepare myself. It was Donna-Lou Dermott, dressed like a chicken.

      “Well, hey, girls, don’t you just looove Hallowe’en?” she said. She carried a wicker basket full of eggs—her own—(well, the ones from her hens, I should say) and was apparently on her delivery route. Her chicken suit was remarkably inventive. She’d wrapped herself in some kind of quilt batting and then she must have gone at it with a pair of scissors and a hairbrush, producing a tufted, feathery kind of toga. She wore an orange, cardboard beak on a piece of elastic, like an oxygen mask, pulling it down to speak so it hung like a wattle under her chin. Her face was painted bright yellow, and she wore a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

      “I just ran this up on my Singer last night,” she said, “and I can’t tell you how many compliments I’ve had today.”

      “Fowl and fair,” Ruth said, which only made Donna-Lou blink a bit.

      “It’s nice to see you, Ruthie. Are you still writing your songs?” Donna-Lou said.

      Ruth, who hasn’t been called Ruthie since high school, smiled gently, which is more than I would have managed. Shepherd’s Pie does about as well as any other popular Canadian folk band these days, which is to say that they’ve been profiled in Saturday Night and Maclean’s magazines, have won some Juno Awards and occasionally get some airplay on the CBC. “Ruthie” was a fairly big name in certain circles, but not, I guess, in Donna-Lou’s.

      “Yep, still doing my thing,” Ruth answered. “Nice to see you, too, Donna-Lou. You still in the egg business?”

      “Well, I should hope so,” she said, affronted. Her feathers sort of ruffled, and I took note, thinking I would give quilt batting a try as puppet-hair. It seemed to have a kinetic life of its own. “Somebody’s gotta keep food on the table,” Donna-Lou went on. “Otis decided to seed the back field with hemp this summer past, and got a good crop, too, but the government confisticated it for some reason, just before harvest, so we didn’t make no profit at all.”

      I resisted the urge to correct her grammar. “Hemp? You sure it was the legal kind?” I said.

      “Well, Otis said it was, but I kinda wonder about that, now. He didn’t get arrested or nothing, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

      “Of course not, Donna-Lou.” I hadn’t seen anything in the Laingford Gazette about it, and if it had truly been marijuana in Otis Dermott’s field, you could be sure that the local press would have given it front page priority. On the other hand, maybe it had been the real stuff, and the government had snagged it and was storing it in the same place they stored the stuff they had grown themselves, in that government-sanctioned grow operation in a mine somewhere in Manitoba. Canadian lawmakers are kind of two-faced about the issue, having legalized the drug’s use for those who require it for medicinal purposes. They set up a highly efficient grow operation underground, a kind of hi-tech hydroponics farm, and rumour had it that the stuff they produced was so powerful, they were afraid to make it available to those who needed it. My theory was that they were stockpiling the stuff against the day when they finally legalized it and would start selling it at the provincial liquor and beer stores. “A six pack of Molson’s Ex and a pack of Doobies, please.” I can hardly wait.

      “So, how’s the mother-to-be?” Donna-Lou said. “I see you’re porking up a bit already. That’s good, dear, but you mustn’t let

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