Mount Pleasant Read Free Page B

honed in the hospitality industry. On those occasions when their visits overlapped, Dixie was always smartly dressed in dark clothes, and Harry wondered if she were trying out different funeral outfits. Harry was straining to recover something from his palsied relationship with his father, but he also recognized that both he and Dixie hovered over Dale with the shared expectation of a significant inheritance. Erin did notshare that unfortunate bond; she and her husband were discouragingly well off.
    Harry pulled out the book he had brought and started reading aloud. His father had little interest in fiction, but Harry remembered that he had enjoyed Ian Fleming’s Bond books, and he found a paperback copy of
Goldfinger
in a second-hand bookstore. Sitting on the chair beside the bed, he read slowly.
    When Harry had read to his son years ago, his voice became deeper, comforting both of them. Ben would fall asleep on Harry’s chest, and the smell of that perfect head filled him with a contentment that was unrivalled sixteen years later. Breathing in the essence of his only child in the comfort of that bedroom, the star and moon pattern of the curtains barely visible in darkness, he often fell asleep as well. Dale hadn’t read to Harry. And now, when young fathers gathered in the park with their offspring, resentfully searching for the diaper bag, wiping the non-toxic rubber nipple with the tail of their shirts, here was their triumphant conceit: we are much better than our own fathers. What would Ben say?
    Harry looked at his father, who showed no sign of having understood anything about the devious Auric Goldfinger. His collapsing face was blank. Harry closed the book and wished for his father’s death.
    Dale died three nights later. If dying was a final leaving, then the true moment of his father’s death may have been decades ago. Harry’s most vivid memory of his father was the recent version, his protracted death. Yet it was Harry’s duty to mourn.
    Standing at the entrance to the Anglican church, he shook hands and hugged, thanking people for their presence. He smiled at aging, addled friends of his father’s whom he hadn’tseen in two decades and assured them (falsely) that Dale had had a peaceful passing.
    Erin performed the same ritual a few feet away, clasping each outreached hand with both of hers. Gladys was beside him, offering accepting noises and sad smiles as a response to the condolences. Ben stood awkwardly with Sarah, his hands folded in front of him, gangly and useless and dreaming of escape.
    As Harry finally walked toward the front pew, he surveyed the gathered—dutiful, dry-eyed, shifting uncomfortably in the warming interior of the church with unpierced hearts. The financial community had come out. A few of the old neighbours. His mother looked elegant in a midnight blue dress. Dale’s second wife, Tess, hadn’t shown.
    He sat beside his mother and reached into his suit jacket for the reassurance of his written eulogy.
My father was a complicated man
. His mother looked at him, her face brightened by gin.
    “This is no time for honesty,” she said.
    Harry turned to look at the crowd. Dixie was exiled resentfully in the middle rows, splendid in black, her ash blond hair effectively pinned. Near the front were Dale’s colleagues from BRG, the firm where he had worked for most of his life. Harry hadn’t seen them in twenty years. The heroically named August Sampson was now stooped and bald, myopic, hair bristling on his outsized ears. Beside him, Prescott Lunden sat like an aging soap opera actor, handsome and silver-haired, the reassuring figurehead. In the pew behind them was the short, pugnacious Dick Ebbetts, who had greeted Harry’s mother and leaned in to whisper something into her ear for an inappropriate length of time. The financial world embraced funerals, reassurance that money was flowing downward at a sombre pace.
    Harry touched his head experimentally. He wasn’t sure, suddenly,