Page 53 of Not a Word

A slow nod. “I do. Things can happen very quickly. One needs to be ready.”

“I want one,” she said.

Crane said nothing.

“But I haven’t the first idea of how to go about it. I mean, I know there are places where you can go and buy one, but then aren’t there background checks and waiting periods? And I’d much rather keep this from Brent, if you can understand that. He’s adamantly opposed to the idea.”

“He’s a wise man,” Crane said. “A gun is a very dangerous thing to have around.”

“I know, but—”

“But your feelings need to be considered as well.” The corner of his mouth went up a notch. “And spouses are entitled to have some secrets from each other.”

Catherine felt she was getting somewhere. “So how would I go about it, if I have those kinds of concerns?”

“Well,” Crane said, picking up a napkin and dabbing the corner of his mouth, “why don’t you leave that with me? But first, have you ever handled a firearm before?”

“No.”

“Well, it would not be wise for you to acquire one without some basic instruction in that area. It’s not as simple as pulling a trigger, no matter how easy it might look on TV.”

“Can you recommend someone who could give me those basics?”

Crane smiled. “I believe so.”

Nineteen

Reece

At breakfast, I asked Gage if he remembered what his nightmare had been about.

“No,” he said, breezing through only long enough to grab a banana. “I didn’t even know I was screaming.”

He’d woken Diana and me up. She’d been out of bed first, running down the hall to Gage’s room. I was four steps behind her. She flipped a switch in the hallway that allowed some light to bleed into the bedroom without hitting an overhead fixture.

And it wasn’t exactly screaming. Gage was shouting “No! No! No! No!” in his sleep.

He was thrashing about under his covers when we came into the room. Diana perched herself on the edge of the bed and gently rubbed Gage’s arm as she said, “Wake up, honey, wake up. Wake up.”

Gage opened his eyes, looked puzzledly at the two of us. “What?”

“You were having a nightmare,” I said.

He blinked a couple of times, said “It’s okay, I’m fine,” put his head on the pillow, and went back to sleep. Diana and I staggered back to our room and spent much of the rest of the night awake.

Staring at the ceiling, she said, “I guess it’s normal.”

I agreed. We’d all been traumatized. The shock of what had happened the day before was not going to fade from memory any time soon, and I believed it was as hard on Gage to lose a grandfather as it was on me to lose a dad.

Maybe harder.

And that got me questioning why I wasn’t feeling worse about this. I was shocked, for sure. The circumstances of Dad’s death had left me numb, confused, searching for answers, but his passing had yet to hit me on an emotional level.

There were times when I’d thought Gage’s relationship with Dad was closer than mine. Maybe closer is the wrong word. It was different. The dynamic between a man and his grandson is not the same as between a man and his son. When I was a boy, my father was consumed with making a living. The pressures on him were different than they were in his retirement. He had more time for Gage than he had for me. And Gage wasn’t expected to live up to my father’s expectations, which I was sure I had not met. And grandfathers didn’t have the same responsibility for guiding or disciplining a young man. That was a father’s job.

Of course, Dad wasn’t so thrilled about the circumstances of Gage’s birth. I got Diana pregnant before we were out of college. That really made my father’s day. (My mom’s too.) Any hopes he’d had that I might pursue future degrees, in commerce or business if he’d had his way, were dashed. The truth was, Diana’s pregnancy was something of a blessing, and not just because Gage was the result. The worlds of sales and business didn’t interest me, and while I did give real estate a shot at one point, I wasn’t sorry it hadn’t become my career. I liked to write and found an outlet for that talent in the news business, first in radio and newspapers, and then in TV news. It was a satisfying, if not hugely lucrative, career, right up until the time I got downsized. I was never a Wiffel-Smith salesperson of the year like my father, and I was fine with that.

Diana and Gage and I had what I thought was a good, if unremarkable, life. Diana’s red-light ticketing job wasn’t her life’s dream, but it was a paycheck. She’d once had ambitions of becoming an artist, and her Georgian Bay landscapes reminded me of works by Canada’s famous Group of Seven. But that may have led some galleries to judge them as derivative, unoriginal, and few had any interest in featuring her work.