Bow Grip Read Free Page A

never even sat down at Ally’s desk since I gave it to her, just like she would never have touched anything on my workbench in the garage, or opened mail with only my name on it. It was one of the things about Ally and me that I had always appreciated, that we still had private spaces and lives. No rules or hassles about it, we just fell into things that way. We were both just naturally private people. Not like some couples get. Until she popped the news to me about her and Kathleen Sawyer, of course. That was the first time that her privacy turned itself into a secret, right before my ears.
    But my mom was right, Ally wasn’t coming home, and besides, she might need some of this stuff in Calgary. She had been pretty busy with school, kept saying she was going to come back for the rest of her belongings, but never seemed to be able to get away from the city. I hadn’t been able to bear the thought of this room being empty, and the house feeling definitely too big for one guy, plus I always felt
like sending her stuff might seem to her like I didn’t want her back, if something didn’t work out for her and Kathleen and she ever wanted to come home.
    Mitch Sawyer had sold Kathleen’s canoe and given her mountain bike away out of spite, to another teacher that Kathleen hated. He told me all this, not two weeks after they had left, like I would be proud of him. Like I said, I mostly try to avoid the guy, except for hockey, where I can’t help it. Can’t start kicking guys out of the league for being underhanded with their ex-wives, or there might not be enough bodies for a decent game.
    The top right drawer contained only pens and pencils and what looked like the charger for her laptop. The bottom drawer was full of files, school stuff like old essays and quizzes, all stacked in no apparent order, just like most of Ally’s papers always were. At the very bottom of the drawer was a framed certificate. I wasn’t snooping, really, but when I was putting it in the bin I couldn’t help but notice that it was a Master’s degree, dated 2002, more than a year before Ally had left. Three years into our marriage. In her maiden name, not the hyphenated version Franco had always hassled me about. It was from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton.
    I sat back on my heels and thought about the half-pack of stale Player’s Lights I kept in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I had been trying to quit, with limited success. But for some reason my wife had apparently spent at least a couple of years of our marriage going back to school and getting her Master’s degree in dinosaur bones without ever mentioning it to me, and I suddenly needed a smoke something terrible.
    I packed up the rest of her stuff without really looking
at anything, chain-smoking all the while. I dragged the bins out to the garage and heaved them onto the shelf next to the loose camping gear. Then I tripped over the snow shovel, cracked my shin, and cursed all the way back to the fridge for another beer. I parked my ass on the chair in the front room, and turned on the television.
    It was just after nine o’clock. I flipped through a rerun of Law and Order , past channel after channel of the American election debate, and finally landed on a movie. It was about this woman who was dating two guys at the same time, the one guy was a nice, respectable blue-collar type that her mother wanted her to marry because he was from a good family in the neighbourhood, and the other was a red-wine-drinking writer, a rascal that nobody but the lady approved of. She stands up the nice guy, choosing instead to try and hook up with the drunken writer, because he is of course the guy she is hot for. And the nice guy, he’s moping around at home hoping she’ll eventually show up. She does, but only after the writer guy acts like a total prick and breaks her heart, and only so her mom won’t freak out on her about what was she supposed to tell the nice guy’s mother, who was a