Bow Grip Read Free Page B

friend of the family and went to the same temple and all.
    I was just about to grab the remote and change the channel, as the plot seemed unlikely to move towards a car chase or even any gunplay or explosions, which is mostly what I was in the mood for, when the nice guy asks the woman if she would dance with him in his kitchen, with the flowers on the table and the volume on the radio turned way up.
    I remembered that Allyson used to tell the story of how she knew she loved me by the way she felt the first time she
saw me dancing in a kitchen. She figured she could settle down with a kitchen dancer.
    I put down the remote.
    It happened at my little sister Sarah’s thirtieth birthday party, in her and her husband Jean-Paul’s kitchen. It was the year before Dad died, Ally and I had been dating for about six months, and this was her first full-on family experience. Jean-Paul had bought Sarah this fancy new CD player unit with detachable speakers, the tabletop kind of model. But it cranked up pretty good and Sarah put on Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train.” My niece Chelsea was about eight, I guess, and she grabbed my hands and stood on my feet for me to dance around the kitchen with her. Then I danced with Sarah and Chelsea both for a bit, until Chelsea’s two little buddies jumped on me, and I had to stop because I nearly threw my back out again.
    So the nice guy and the woman are dancing in the kitchen together, and she’s having a fairly good time in spite of herself. But she keeps smelling vanilla, she thinks. Finally, she breaks down and asks the guy is that vanilla she smells, because he’s the kind of guy she can just talk to about any old thing, and the guy gets all embarrassed. He tells her the odor is coming from him, because his family owned a pickle factory, so his hands usually smelled of vinegar and pickling salts and garlic and whatnot, not very romantic stuff, and his dad had told him that when he had a date with a girl he really liked, he should soak his hands after work in warm milk and vanilla. It was the only thing that could kill the pickle smell, plus the milk would make your hands softer, his dad had told him, in the event you should be lucky enough that the girl lets you touch her.
    The guy is explaining all this to the woman, and for
some reason suddenly the tears are pouring over my bottom lids and streaming down my face, down my neck, into my collar. I don’t remember what happened in the movie after that, or how it ended.
    What I remember is crying that night in my chair, even letting myself make noises out loud, outside of my body. Crying harder than I did when our first dog, Buck, had the run-in with the porcupine and we had to put him down the day after Boxing Day. Harder than I cried the morning Ally left town in the passenger seat of Mitch Sawyer’s new truck. They left Mitch with the minivan, for the kids. I cried harder and longer and louder than ever.
    I woke up with what felt like sand in my eyes, still in the armchair, with the coloured bars on the TV glowing and humming in the dark. I lifted the lid on the cello to look at it, then latched it shut, and went straight to bed.

I dreamt of nothing, and woke up an hour before my alarm went off. I washed the lone coffee cup in the sink, noting that it meant I hadn’t eaten anything at all for dinner the that it meant I hadn’t eaten anything at all for dinner the night before, shaved three days off my face, and took Buck Buck for an extra long walk before we headed to the shop. I even managed to beat Franco there, which he hated. Franco could sit sometimes for an hour and a half in the office in the morning without lifting a finger to get anything actually accomplished, but as long as he got there before I did, he figured he was still showing me what work looked like. I wouldn’t mind so much if he made better coffee.
    I put on a pot of strong stuff, swept the floor, and read almost the entire paper before it was time to plug in the open