Bouvier des Flandres named Willie, my first male dog and my first Bouvier, and so far he had brought credit to neither his gender nor his breed. He was sweet but not gifted. The day before, my son Angus had come home with the news that it took Bouviers two years to grow a brain. As Willie bounded towards me with the remnants of one of my new sandals hanging out of his mouth, I found myself wondering how he and I could make it through the next twenty-two months.
I took the sandal from him and picked him up. He licked my face wildly. The smell of puppy breath won me over. “Okay,” I said. “I was young once myself.” I shifted his position, so I could establish eye contact. “But commit this to memory, Willie: during the summer of love, I scaled the heights of ecstasy many times, but I never once chewed a shoe.”
I was studying his earnest face to see if my words had penetrated when the phone rang. It was Ed Mariani.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said. “Willie and I were just having a heart-to-heart. He chewed through one of my new sandals.”
“Expensive?”
“Top of the line at Wal-Mart.”
“Another gold star for one-stop shopping.”
“One of these days you’ll have to take cold terror by the hand and try it.”
He laughed softly. “Jo, I did have a reason for calling. Are you still planning to come over to get the keys to the cottage tonight?”
“I’d forgotten all about it. More coals heaped upon my head.”
He laughed. “We’ll pass on the coals this time. I just wanted to make sure you still wanted to go out there this weekend.”
“Absolutely. Taylor’s been rattling on about the lake for the past two weeks. When’s a good time for me to come by and pick up the keys?”
“Seven? And, if she doesn’t have other plans, why don’t you bring Taylor with you? We have a new addition to the family.”
“A pet?”
“A nightingale. One of Barry’s old clients moved on to the next dimension and left him her bird. Don’t laugh. Inheriting a bird is a serious matter, especially if you hate the idea of anything being caged, which Barry and I both do. Anyway, Barry has built Florence the Taj Mahal of aviaries.”
“The nightingale is named Florence?”
“We have been spared no indignity,” Ed said dryly. “But I promise you Taylor will be dazzled, and if Florence isn’t enough, we’ve laid in a fresh supply of paper umbrellas for Taylor’s Shirley Temples.”
“You spoil her,” I said.
“Not a bit. Your daughter’s paintings are going to be worth a fortune some day, and Barry and I want to get in on the ground floor.” He sighed heavily. “Jo, I’m glad you’re coming over. I really was very fond of Ariel.”
“Everybody was,” I said.
His correction was gentle. “Not quite everybody.”
After I hung up, I was hit by the weight of the day’s events. I looked over at my kitchen counter: tins of kidney beans and tomatoes were neatly stacked against the wall. I’d put them there that morning. I’d also chopped a large bowl of onions and celery, and put three pounds of lean ground beef in the fridge to defrost. My plan had been to come home after Rosalie’s luncheon and make a pot of chili to take to Katepwa with us the next night. For the first time since New Year’s, my whole family was going to be together: my daughter Mieka, her husband, Greg, and my eight-month-old granddaughter, Madeleine, were coming from Saskatoon; my son Peter was driving from Calgary, where he’d just begun work at a veterinarian’s clinic; and the rest of us were heading out from Regina as soon as the kids got home from school. Given the unpredictability of possible arrival times, chili had seemed like an inspired idea. It still did. I took the beef out of the refrigerator, threw it in the frying pan, picked up the can opener and started cranking.
By the time the kids got home, the chili was simmering, and I was feeling less fragmented. Angus and Eli, the nephew of Alex Kequahtooway, the man in my life, floated through the house long enough to get Willie on his leash and take him for a run before they drove downtown to get their tuxes fitted for graduation. The week before, Alex had left for Ottawa to teach a month-long class, Minorities and the Justice System, and Eli had moved into Peter’s old room to finish off the school year. I was already missing Alex, but the sound of two seventeen-year- olds buzzing about dates and after-grad parties and tuxedos was a potent antidote to loneliness. Taylor revelled in having Eli around, too. When he arrived, she’d presented him with a drawing of Angus and himself in cap and gown, hanging out of a silvery stretch limo, throwing their mortarboards into the sky. Taylor, wearing a chauffeur’s cap, a billowing scarf, and a Cheshire cat grin, was behind the wheel. In art, as in life, Taylor saw herself as the person in the driver’s seat.
It was a witty piece, executed deftly. Taylor came by the skill naturally. Her birth mother was the artist Sally Love, and her grandfather was Desmond Love, a man whose name appeared on most art historians’ millennial lists of significant makers of art in Canada. From the moment she could grasp a pencil, Taylor had demonstrated an extraordinary mastery of technique, but her art teacher had pointed me to Taylor’s real talent by quoting Marcel Duchamp. “A technique can be learned, but you can’t learn to have an original imagination.” At seven, Taylor was already impatient with the accessible and fascinated by unexplored territory.
As we headed south on Albert Street towards Ed’s, it was apparent my daughter was wired about the weekend ahead. “The minute we get there, I’m going swimming.” She darted a glance my way, and headed off the objection she saw coming. “I don’t care how cold it is. And after my swim, I’m going to make a little bed on the floor next to mine, so Madeleine can sleep beside me. Angus says Saturday night there’ll be fireworks and I’m going to hold her so she won’t be scared, and Eli says maybe he can build a bonfire and we can have a weenie roast. It’s going to be so awesome -” She stopped in mid-flight. “I mean it’s going to be really interesting.”
I turned to her. “What happened to ‘awesome’?” I asked.
“Ms. Cousin says if we use a word too often, it stops meaning anything. She says if we use the word ‘awesome’ when we talk about an ice cream cone, we won’t have a good word to use when we see the pyramids at Giza.”
“Ms. Cousin deserves the Governor General’s Award,” I said. “But you may not have to wait for Cheops to see something awesome. Ed tells me he and Barry have a nightingale.”
“A nightingale?” Her eyes were wide. “Just flying around?”
“I don’t think so. I think they have an aviary – that’s a really big cage.”
“I’m glad it’s big,” she said. “It wouldn’t be any good being a bird if you couldn’t fly around.”
Ed was in the front yard putting in bedding plants. We were a month shy of the longest day, and the light was mellow. He was wearing his uniform of choice: a generously cut shirt that he found so comfortable that he had had it made in a variety of fabrics and a palette of colours. Tonight’s was raspberry cotton, and as he approached the car with a flat of deep pink Martha Washington geraniums in his hands, he glowed with well- being.
“Barry’s the gardener, but I thought I’d surprise him by putting in the old standbys. He can decide where his prima donnas will thrive.”
“Is he out of town?” I asked.
“In New York,” Ed said. “At a kitchenware convention. He’s doing so well he’s thinking of opening two more stores. A prisoner of the work ethic.” He bowed deeply to Taylor and crooked his arm in invitation. “But Barry’s obsession has dividends for you and me, Ms. Love.”
Taylor took his arm. “I’ve decided to be Taylor Kilbourn, so I can be the same as everybody else in the family. But I’m still going to keep Love for my middle name. What do you think?”
“I like it,” he said. He glanced at me questioningly.
“I like it, too,” I said. “In fact, I couldn’t be more proud.”
“In that case, Ms. Kilbourn, will you join me in paying a visit to the world’s most expensively housed nightingale?”
I always felt a thrill when I entered Ed and Barry’s house. They had designed it themselves to take advantage of natural light, and it was a graceful and welcoming place. We could hear the nightingale’s sweet song
