Twenty-Six by Leo McKay Read Free Book Online

been lying on this mattress: the few days of heavier and heavier spotting, followed by the intense, painful cramping.
    The kitchen table was too small for a family of four and was surrounded by chairs that did not match each other or the table.She still thought of the table as new. Six years was such a short time. But the varnished surface of the tabletop was scratched and pitted, the result of countless turbulent meals.
    The living-room furniture, two matching couches and a wingback chair, were on the outer edge of the concentric rings. They were Scotchgarded, nylon-wool, button-tufted furniture, made by Sklar, and paid for in two payments less than a year ago, when Arvel’s mining cheques had started coming in.
    She wandered from room to room, taking a final look at what she’d be leaving behind in a few hours. She felt removed from the house already, as though in deciding to leave, in knowing she’d be gone in the morning, part of her had already left. As she looked at clothing and furniture, it struck her that all those things would have to be sorted through and divided. Final decisions would have to be made.
    From the floor of the closet in the hallway she dragged a grey plastic storage bin to the centre of the living-room floor. This was the box of memorabilia. All the loose ends of memory in her history with Arvel and before. When they had moved out of the old apartment on Bridge Avenue, all of the things this container held had been scattered about, some in smaller, disintegrating boxes, some loose at the bottom of drawers. Jackie had gone out and bought this box. She’d taped a label to the lid that said “Memories” and thrown things in in no particular order. She’d planned to sort through it all at a later date, but had never done so.
    She snapped the lid from the box and sat on the carpeted floor to examine the contents. The smell of yellowing paper and closed up dust rose into her nostrils. On top there was a scroll of paper tied with pink ribbon, a religious certificate. It was herfirst confession or confirmation document. The next thing that caught her eye was a square of yellowed newspaper. She picked it up and looked at the photo from the
New Glasgow Evening News
. This was a photo she’d seen several times before. It was Arvel at age two or three, sitting on Santa’s knee. Arvel’s big, square face was recognizable even as a toddler. The caption below the photo read: “Checking it twice. Santa stopped by the Steelworkers’ Hall last Thursday to double-check on his list of children who were being naughty or nice. Little Arvel Burrows, from Albion Mines, claims he’s been a good boy all year.”
    Jackie felt her throat thickening with emotion and snapped the lid quickly back on the box. She found a pencil on the shelf above the bar in the closet, and added a note to the label: “Arvel: half of these things are mine and half are yours. We’ll have to go through it some time soon.” She placed the box back inside the closet and closed the closet door, and considering what she’d just written on the box, realized that she had been putting off writing a note to Arvel.
    She dug in a drawer full of cookbooks in the kitchen and found a spiral notebook that looked as though it had never been used. Opening to the first page, she wrote
Dear Arvel
at the top. It was such a strange thing to be doing: writing a note for the husband she was leaving. It was an act from a soap opera. The page she was writing on was smaller than letter-size, but it seemed enormous and empty, white as a blank mind. What did she want to say?
    I’m sorry
, she wrote. She paused a moment and considered keeping the note to these two words.
I have moved to Halifax with the girls
.
    The girls will miss you and in lots of ways I will too, but you know as well as I do that we just could not go on with things as they’ve been for a long time. There’s been so much strife, so much turbulence between us and it makes us both lesser