February by Lisa Moore Read Free Book Online

mystified and hurt.
    Call me when you get to New York, his mother said. We’ll talk about the baby.

RENOVATIONS
    A Blast of Wind, November 2008
    WHY NOT LET the boy have a jawbreaker, Helen thinks. Then there is a blasting howl of wind and the world is whited out. The skate blade touches the sharpener and the sparks fly.
    Helen had been to Complete Rentals earlier in the afternoon to pick up a staple gun and sixty clips of staples. There was machinery in neat rows all over the floor at Complete Rentals and a woman in a grey sweatshirt served her. A sign on the wall, beside a real cannonball attached to a chain and shackle, said RENT A TRIAL MARRIAGE.
    So they were jokers, Helen saw, in the rental business.
    The girl in the grey sweatshirt paused to look out the window. The snow required a pause. It hurled itself at the glass and the wind rattled down the eavestrough, and the girl said, Do you need a compressor?
    Helen didn’t know about a compressor.
    If the guy you got working for you never said nothing about a compressor, you probably don’t need a compressor, the girl said. They usually says if they wants a compressor. He’s putting down a floor?
    A man strode out of a back office and also paused to take in the weather.
    A silence occurred and then there was a siren, far away.
    There’s a fire, or someone has had a stroke or heart failure, Helen thought. There was a spat of domestic violence or a holdup in the west end.
    Last night she’d bought gas after Christmas shopping at the Village Mall, and it had been cold on her hands, working the squeeze nozzle. She’d gone into the glass booth of the station to pay and the young man behind the counter was reading Anna Karenina and he turned the book over on the counter regretfully. She saw the big Russian saga drain out of his eyes as he took her in. Helen and the smell of gasoline and a freezing gust of wind.
    The coldest weather in fifty years, the radio had said. They would have snow. She had watched as the gas attendant dragged himself from a cold night in Russia, full of passion and big fireplaces and lust, back into the cold, lonely night of St. John’s to take Helen’s debit card, and she had felt motherly. The gas attendant was John’s age, she guessed, but he was nothing like John.
    If there’s a compressor involved they usually says, the man at Complete Rentals agreed.
    He didn’t say compressor, Helen said.
    Is he a good carpenter?
    He seems to be good, Helen said. She thought of Barry hooking the metal lip of the measuring tape over the edge of a piece of two-by-four, marking it with the pencil he kept behind his ear, then letting the tape skitter back into the case with a loud snap .
    Then he got his own compressor, the girl said.
    After the skate sharpening, Helen drives her grandson to a shop to buy a second-hand helmet. Children aren’t allowed to skate without a helmet these days, and at a red light she angles the mirror so she can see Timmy’s face, and his cheek holds the jawbreaker, round as a moon.
    . . . . .
    Water Everywhere, February 1982
    SOMEHOW HELEN HAD picked up the idea that there was such a thing as love, and she had invested fully in it. She had summoned everything she was, every little tiny scrap of herself, and she’d handed it over to Cal and said: This is yours.
    She said, Here’s a gift for you, buddy.
    Helen didn’t say, Be careful with it, because she knew Cal would be careful. She was twenty and you could say she didn’t know any better. That’s what she says herself: I didn’t know any better.
    But that was the way it had to be. She could not hold back. She wasn’t that kind of person; there was no holding back.
    Somewhere Helen had picked up the idea that love was this: You gave everything. It wasn’t just dumb luck that Cal knew what the gift was worth; that’s why she gave it to him in the first place. She could tell he was the kind of guy who would know.
    Her father-in-law, Dave O’Mara, had identified Cal’s