A Good House by Bonnie Burnard Read Free Book Online

to get better.
    At the end of February they took their parents’ cherry bed apart as they were asked and brought it downstairs piece by piece and they helped their father move some of the living-room furniture into the front hall so the bed could be set up facing the picture window. Bill had told Sylvia that he was moving down with her. He could have borrowed a bed for the living room, could have kept the cherry bed upstairs for himself, but he’d decided he would not turn away from her at night, he would not leave her to go up the stairs alone. Barbaric, he thought, imagining himself on those stairs.
    He knew what people around town believed, that Sylvia had married him because he was so obviously a reliable man, that she had simply made a sensible, level-headed choice. What people couldn’t know was how good they had it here. How calm she could be, how capable, in spite of the fact that she was always open to nonsense. How with her sweat still sharp in his nostrils she could come down to breakfast looking so serene, so unaffected, right away able to become whatever the kids or the rest of the world required her to be. She moved so fast from the one kind of woman to the other. She’d told him once that it was kind of fun and, besides, didn’t he realize, it was what a woman had to do. How else? she’d asked him. Against the odds, expecting almost nothing, he’d got it all. And now was going to lose it, was going to have to sit still and watch the step-by-step approach of his own loss.
    The kids soon got used to having their mother in the living room and they got used to manoeuvring through the crowded hall to get up the stairs but each time they squeezed past the sofa or banged a shin on the sharp corner of the coffee table they were thinking, This won’t last. This is just for now.
    Patrick Chambers was older than Paul by four years and, finished with his growth spurts, had settled in at Bill’s slightly-less-than-average height. He would never reach his brother. He shared most of Daphne’s facial features, although where her mouth was pretty his was simply firm and sharply defined. His eyes too were that bright, beautiful, Wedgwood blue, like Sylvia’s, like Sylvia’s father’s. In addition to his size, he’d got broad, heavily muscled shoulders from Bill and dark, thick hair that he wore slicked back in a carefully groomed duck’s ass, a D.A. When he compared himself to the other guys he decided it was safe enough to believe he was good-looking, the evidence seemed to be there in his school pictures, in the way some girls tensed up when he looked at them.
    Daphne was Sylvia’s height exactly and it was obvious that if her jaw not been broken in such a peculiar way in that childhood fall, if the malformation of the healed jaw had not caused the alignment of her face to be noticeably and permanently askew, she would have been a ringer for her mother. She had the blue eyes and Sylvia’s sturdy smile, the extremely pretty lips, the widow’s peak under her bangs, the healthy swing to her long hair, the sophisticated, arched eyebrows that already required attention from Sylvia’s tweezers.
    Only Paul would not have been placed with the rest of the family in a crowd, his difference so obvious it was an occasional suppertime joke. Although the youngest, he had just recently and finally become taller than any of them and much taller than everyone else in grade nine, with most of his length in his hockey-strengthened legs. He wore his regularly clipped sandy-coloured hair in a no-nonsense brush cut, and down the sides of his nose and across his chin there was a ridge of acne which he did his best to ignore. He had just started to take Bill’s straight razor down from the medicine cabinet and he would often come to the breakfast table temporarily patched with ripped-off bits of toilet paper, his blood seeping through and then quickly crusting up as he ate