Mind Games by William Deverell Read Free Book Online Page A

make notes while I watched dragonflies dart among the floating lilies and listened to the shouts of red-winged blackbirds.
    As we walked along the seawall promenade, I must have sounded as effusive as a tour guide. Was I being tiresome? You didn’t need the local booster to point out the convoy of sailboats bobbing in the wake of a grunting tug, the North Shore mountains gazing disdainfully at us.
    Welcome to my world, Allis. I’ve studied by San Francisco Bay, visited Boston and New York, travelled Canada by train. But where else would any person of average sanity prefer to live but here in Vancouver, my enclosed, familiar, coherent world? I’m a product as well of its West Coast eccentricity, its manic depressiveness – morose and soporific in the winter rains, kinetic, vital when the sun crawls from hibernation.
    We must have looked like an odd couple in that park. Dishevelled me, in my old khaki shorts; graceful, ever-fashionable you, in your long, belted skirt. Do you remember, on the seawall, how I pulled you from the path of three careless line skaters, and almost tripped over my own feet as you and I made contact? And do you remember how I averted my eyes when we came upon a handholding couple too obviously in love? What did you surmise? That I was unable to bear their happiness?
    (The book fair in Bologna will be a long series of cocktail parties. People engage in aberrant behaviour at conventions. Celestine Post will set no good example. I must confront these concerns. It’s no vast calamity if Sally has a fling. She has to get it out of her system. She’ll love me the more when it’s over.) And I realized: I was being selfish – I’d merely lost a companion; you were grieving a loss of life.
    A thoughtful stillness came over you, and I let you stay there a while, only too aware of how my distress pales in the face of your young man’s death. In a perverse way, that realization has begun to work as therapy for me. I must not take matters so much to heart. Things happen.
    I was glad I was able to divert you from your thoughts with my account of the bizarre trial of Huff versus Victoria Dare. An arcane message to me from Clinton Huff bears deep analysis, so let me replay the scene.
    First, as a preface, late Sunday dinner at my mother’s house – an unpretentious frame structure in working-class Grandview, just off Commercial Drive. I’d stopped off at the Kowloon Moon for takeout (I’ve never mastered the kitchen; without Sally, my life has become a restaurant), and as I toted in the steaming cartons Victoria was at her computer dashing off one of her eighty-dollar-a-pop obituaries.
    This is her latest business venture, writing death notices and seeing to their publication in newspapers, where her own ad also appears in the classified columns.
(Unable to find words for
your loss? Literary Consolation Services will be pleased to help.)
Composing euphemism-laden obits nets her a better income than did her last job, managing a used-book store, but she finds the work boring.
    Maybe, as well, it influenced her choice of genre for her novel, though deeper factors were at play: her father was a mortician, and both he and her mother drowned in a float-plane accident when I was seven. (Birth of a neurosis. You were expecting something more tangled and obscure?)
    Victoria greeted me with a hug. At fifty-two, she seems even more striking than in her youth: tall, slender, black hair streaked with white falling to her waist. Expressive eyes that don’t always let strangers know she’s teasing. She still smokes, against my advice.
    She printed out her latest obit and asked me to critique it.
Until his brief ailment brought his heart to its final pause, Pops, as he was fondly called by relatives and friends, remained an avid gardener, whose roses were the envy of his neighbourhood
. I told her I was reminded of Emily Dickinson.
    Sitting beside her printer was a pile of manuscript. Victoria is hoping this new novel