Bow Grip Read Free

could figure how to get it started.
    I closed the case and walked into Allyson’s office. Her desk was still there, a third-hand solid oak number I had found for her on our first anniversary. There was still a coffee cup sitting on the desk’s faded top, the remains of its contents now dried like varnish on its bottom and sides. The cup was orange, Allyson’s favourite colour. It had lime green and lemon-coloured flowers on it, like from the seventies. I think it used to belong to my parents. I think we once had the whole set. Ally had probably scooped it from Mom and Sarah’s pile of yard sale stuff, when my mom bought the new set from the IKEA in Calgary. Ally loved old stuff. The first real fight we ever had was over the kitchen appliances, when we first bought this place. She loved the Harvest Gold fridge and stove set. My mom thought they were hideous and had to go. I didn’t really care either way, they still both worked fine, but I let my mom talk me into thinking we needed a new stainless steel set, and that Ally would love it. I thought Ally would be pleasantly surprised, but instead she wouldn’t even let me unload them out of the back of my truck. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she would prefer Harvest Gold to stainless steel.
    I ended up sitting through a serious lecture about how
it was unhealthy for a grown man to let his mother make decisions for him, and how I was married now and that meant it was my wife’s job to tell me what colour the stove was going to be, not to mention that buying new stuff when the old things weren’t broken was exactly what would eventually turn the planet into one big toxic landfill, and so on. We ended up cutting a deal. I took the new fridge and stove back the next day, but we got Rick Davis to come put a new hardwood floor in the front room, in place of the orange and brown shag that Ally claimed to love. The guy at the Sears laughed at me when I showed up again the very next morning to return the new fridge and stove, explaining that my wife was attached to the old stuff. He asked me if my wife was from the city, because the vintage look was all the rage these days in Toronto, even Calgary now. Then he tried to sell me a brand new fridge and stove that was built to look old already, from a catalogue. Ally really laughed when I told her that bit later. Said it was painfully ironic, didn’t I think? What Ally doesn’t know is that the old Harvest Gold stove finally kicked the bucket not a week after she split, and now I have a brand spanking new stainless steel range, right next to the old gold fridge. I still owe Rick Davis free oil changes for a year yet, in trade for part of the labour from him putting in the new floor five years ago, and he’s still bitching about paying good money for a baritone saxophone collecting dust in the basement because his fucking kid decided to study political science in college instead. Meanwhile, I’m the only divorced guy around these parts who doesn’t have a built-in ice cube maker. Painfully ironic, you bet.
    I took the dried-out coffee cup and put it to soak in the sink, cracked a cold one, and went in to the garage. I dug out
two plastic bins, emptied out the camping gear inside them onto a shelf, and took the bins into Ally’s office. I started packing up her remaining books: mostly school stuff, paleontology, some Jung, and a few novels. Books on gardening, pottery, and beekeeping. She had wanted to keep bees one day, when we sold this place and bought something bigger, farther out of town, somewhere on a lake. We both had a thing about swimming in lakes. Ally had already taken all the cookbooks from the cupboard in the kitchen. She once told me when we first got together, before we even moved in, that she never went anywhere without her cookbooks. She had kept her word about that bit.
    The books filled one bin to the top, and three-quarters of another. I took a breath and opened the top right drawer of her desk. I had