Stones by William Bell Read Free Book Online

sense of achievement it gave me to fashion something from a piece of walnut or oak, how I sometimes felt a sort of communion with the wood, how, when I worked, I entered a state of concentration that dissolved my sense of time.
    “That’s why, when I’m here alone on Saturdays, I only do simple jobs like this one,” I said. “If I get into a really complicated ordelicate project, I lose track of everything else and forget to mind the store.”
    She laughed. “I’ll bet you’ve lost a few sales that way.”
    “Dad got some complaints there for a while.”
    “Have you ever made a piece of furniture from scratch?”
    “You mean copies?”
    “I was thinking about originals.”
    How had she known that was exactly what I wanted to do? When I had time on my hands, mostly at school when the teacher droned on about land formations or family planning, I doodled and sketched cabinets, chests, tables — whatever came to mind, then balled up the paper and threw it away.
    “I’m afraid to try, if you want to know the truth.”
    Raphaella made no reply.
    “I’m scared that if I try I’ll mess up and ruin everything. I sound like a coward, I know.”
    She shook her head, but still said nothing.
    “My dream is to find someone to teach me to design furniture, then open my own shop one day. I don’t care if I make a lot of money, just enough to get by and live the way I want.”
    “Then do it,” she said simply, as if she was commenting on the weather.
    I laughed self-consciously. “Yeah, all I have to do is convince my mother. She wants me to Be Somebody.”
    “I know the feeling,” she said.
    A little later, Raphaella looked at her watch and told me she had to go.
    “I enjoyed our talk,” she said at the door.
    It was only after she had left that I realized she hadn’t said a word about herself.
5
    Normally when I talked with girls, I couldn’t relax. I believed that I had to say something clever or witty, or their attention would slip away. I’d make stupid jokes or end up saying something I didn’t mean. And I often had the impression girls felt the same way, so there was a constant tension that ruined everything. I couldn’t be who I was. I was always being judged, as if I had a meter attached to me that gave a reading somewhere between “cool” and “loser.”
    That afternoon, with Raphaella, it was completely different. Once I got over being rattled by her unexpected visit to the store, I talked likea normal human being. I wasn’t constantly monitoring my words or mentally checking the loser meter.
    What was it about her that had that effect on me? I didn’t know, but I liked it.

chapter     
    T hat same spring my family had been thrown into turmoil by what Mom and I had taken to calling the house thing. It was a typical Gareth Havelock scenario. The Bertram House, a Victorian monstrosity on the corner of Brant and Matchedash Streets with a mansard roof, a wrought-iron fence enclosing the yard, old hardwood trees shading the property, had come up for sale. Dad had had his eye on it for years, dying to buy it, renovate it and fill it with antiques. Mom was almost as keen as he was. I wanted to stay where we were, the house I had grown up in, but nobody asked.
    What should have been a simple real-estate deal — buy a house, sell the one you’re in, arrange a moving day — fell apart. We sold our modern bungalow on Peter Street across fromthe golf links — Orillia had a small course right in town — but the buyers wanted to move in before we got legal possession of Bertram. There would be a “little gap,” Dad told Mom and me. A gap of a couple of months. Probably. Unless the three parties could come to an arrangement.
    We couldn’t move into the apartment above the antique shop because the tenant had a lease. Besides, he was a family friend, a truck-parts salesman who was on the road a lot. Enter another family friend who owned and operated a mobile home park, Silverwood Estates, west of