“I was always going to take a flight home this morning. Now I’m doing a few days of work first, that’s all.”
“I know. I know you have to go,” her mother said, her voice cracking with sadness. “You have work.”
“Hey,” Sarah said softly, “you should move to Toronto. I mean it. This place is too quiet. It’s too easy to be sad here.”
“Oh, no. I don’t want to move to a whole new place where no one knows me.”
Sarah looked around their small house. It felt like a memorial more than a home, frozen in the era when Sarah had been a young child with two living parents. Since then, the house had never really changed, never shifted décor. Her mother didn’t see the point in buying something just for herself. The one new armchair in the corner had been purchased by Sarah as a Christmas gift, and Maureen had accepted it only with great reluctance.
“If you’re happy here, that’s fine,” Sarah said. “But if you’re not…”
Her mother looked around. “I didn’t know anyone would be coming over. The house is such a mess,” she said, although it wasn’t. Maureen didn’t get into enough trouble to make messes; there were a few knitting projects on the sofa in front of the TV and a couple of mugs on the counter.
“It’ll be fine. The house looks great. Ren won’t stay long,” Sarah said.
“And then you’ll be leaving.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sarah took her mother’s suitcase and brought it to her mother’s bedroom, placing it carefully on the bed.
“Do you want me to start your laundry?” she asked. Doing tasks together was a reliable trick for pulling her mother out of these spirals of sadness.
“Oh, I can do it myself, sweetheart.”
Ren knocked on the door only a few minutes later. Sarah walked over to let him in. He was wearing one of his especially charming smiles, which Sarah suspected would only make things worse.
“Hello,” Ren said, putting out a hand to Maureen when she approached. “I’m Rene Durand, a friend of Sarah’s. We didn’t get to meet at the wedding.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Her mother stared at him for a moment. “You met her at McGill?”
“First semester.”
“Well, come inside, it’s not very…” She waved a hand vaguely. “Can I make you a cup of tea?”
“Tea would be great,” Ren said.
“I only have milk, not cream.”
“Milk is perfect. Thanks.”
“Well, I wish I had cream, but I didn’t know I’d have people over. So I only have milk.”
“Milk is great.”
Maureen began to walk around the kitchen with the nervous, fluttering energy she always had when guests came over. Sarah led him into the small living room, thinking about how much it looked like a Newfoundland cliché: hand-knitted blankets, fishing lures in a glass case, carved duck decoys. She would have been mortified for Ren to see it during school, when Sarah still hoped to seem cool to people. His childhood home was probably full of books, while the only book in sight here was a dogeared paperback on the coffee table calledTouched by Angels: Real-life Stories of Angel Encounters.
“My family estate,” she said, gesturing towards the solid oak furniture and the ancient rocking armchair.
Ren smiled reassuringly, then walked over to the wall of family photos. The images in the photos were faintly yellowed, peeping out of circular and square cutouts.
“That’s your father?”
Her father had been a friendly man with curly brown hair and clothes that reflected his love for the outdoors. In the photo Ren was looking at, Sarah was probably five years old and looked winsomely adorable, her rosy-cheeked face tucked under her father’s chin as she crouched in a friend’s wooden canoe. Sarah had kept that same face into adulthood, alas: round and cute rather than dramatic and sexy. She had so desperately wanted to be waifish in her teen years.
“That’s my dad,” Sarah agreed.
Ren continued examining the photos carefully as Maureen spoke from the kitchen. “Her father died!” she called. “That’s why she has no brothers and sisters. We were thinking about having another, but I had trouble getting pregnant and then he was killed by a drunk driver.”
