The Other Side of the Bridge Read Free Page B

were up here. Ian’s mother had disapproved of it at first, but now she watched it more than he did. In fact, just lately she seemed to watch it all the time. She was supposed to be in with his father—she was his nurse—but apart from the odd emergency, Ian hadn’t seen her in the office for weeks.
    “Mum?” he said, standing in the doorway. She was in one of her absent moods—he could tell even though he couldn’t see her face. She had two moods nowadays, absent or annoyed, and whichever one she was in he invariably found he preferred the other.
    “Mum?” he said again. She turned her head a few degrees, not taking her eyes off the screen.
    “I’ve got a job,” Ian said.
    She turned a little more and met his eyes, and he saw the glazed look fade as she focused on him.
    “What was that?” she said.
    “I said I’ve got a job.”
    “Oh,” she said. She smiled at him. “That’s good.” She turned back to the television. Ian waited a minute but there was no further response, so he went into the kitchen to get a reaction from Mrs. Tuttle instead. She was breading chicken pieces for supper, dipping each piece in a bowl of beaten egg and then slapping it back and forth in a dish of bread crumbs.
    “I’ve got a job, Mrs. Tuttle,” Ian said.
    “Have you now?” she said, placing a breaded breast down on the baking tray and taking a pale, slippery-looking chicken leg from the hacked-up carcass on the chopping board. “That’s exciting. What is it?”
    “Helping Mr. Dunn on his farm.”
    She paused, then turned her head to look at him. Her glasses were splattered with the day’s cooking—a dusting of flour from the tea biscuits, a little smear of butter, a scattering of crumbs—even what looked to be a shred of carrot peel. “Goodness!” she said, ducking her head in order to look over the top of them. “Whatever did you want a job like that for?” Which was what he’d expected her to say, and therefore satisfying in its way, so he smiled at her and left.
    His mother was still in front of the television when he passed the living room door on his way upstairs; I Love Lucy had finished and she was watching a program in French. It struck Ian as strange, because she didn’t speak French. He wondered if anyone else’s mother watched television during the day. It was hard to know. The mothers of most of his friends were farmers’ wives and didn’t have time to sit down, much less watch TV. But his mother had never been like other people’s mothers. She didn’t come from the north—she was an outsider, from Vancouver originally. She wore smart shoes with heels, even around the house, and skirts with sweaters that matched, and had her hair set in loose waves instead of tight little corkscrews like the mothers of his friends. In the evenings, she and Ian and his father ate formally in the dining room, instead of at the kitchen table. They used napkins—proper white linen ones, washed and starched and ironed by Mrs. Tuttle every Monday. Ian suspected that no one else in the whole of Struan would have the first idea what to do with a napkin.

    One good thing about his mother’s moods of late was that suppers were fairly brief and painless affairs. In the past they’d been hard work because she would insist on having what she called a “civilized conversation” while they ate. That was what evening meals were for, according to her—they were for families to get together and exchange views and experiences in a pleasant environment. Maybe that would have been okay if he’d had half a dozen brothers or sisters to share the burden of thinking up something to say, night after night, but there was only him. He didn’t see why they couldn’t read at the table. He would have preferred it and he knew his father would as well—you could tell by the wistful, unfocused look in his eyes. He was longing to immerse himself in an article on the renewed threat of polio in rural areas or the latest wonder drug or