6

CASSEROLE INTERVENTIONS

I.

“I don’t care what it means back where he’s from. I don’t! Go ahead and tell me again, Jennifer, that it’s the colour of what? Of the dawn, over there in that—that little road apple’s African lion safari. Sorry, Barb, I know I shouldn’t say it like that, but damn it if your daughter isn’t trying her dear old dad these days. Have a look at her! Carrying on like she’s going to be the high and mighty Governor General by Boxing Day and she’s gone and found herself a fine-talking, spear-chucking footman for her Cinderella ride to Ottawa. Again, Barb, don’t make that face, we’re family and if I can’t speak my mind here then I don’t have one to speak of. Because, you know, I’ve kept my conscience all this long while, but now, as a father, and as a man with a name to consider in this town, I’m doing what needs to be done. And I’m saying what needs to be said.

“This is for our daughter’s good. Now, Jennifer, listen to me. This is your dad talking, not some big-words book about Lyndon Bloody Johnson. I said nothing, right, about your setting up the soccer with the kids and the African, though I heard about it at the gas station, that his touching their kids made a few nervous but they had to be polite. And I kept my mouth shut, right, about your going to that hoity-polloi Hollerwatty wedding with him, though again, people’s been talking about more than just his rhythm from what I picked up at the Legion the other night. But no matter, really, I have nothing against him. After all, what with dinner last night, your mother and I were doing our part to make him feel welcome and we even tried to get a little company going his way. Because I know it can’t be easy for his type, coming here from Lord knows what hellfire and jungle and famine. Surprised at your old dad? Yes, I do know something of that stuff, and also about the hiv going around over there in Africa these days like spring lice in a schoolhouse. Your dad reads the papers every so often and even tunes in his radio to the talking stations when the mood hits him. So what I’m trying to say is this, Jennifer: knowledge isn’t a Crown corporation of your very own in this house.

“What I’m saying is because, well, I want for you what you’re supposed to get. Jeezum Crow! I even signed my name to your petition about that Little Kristen or Sierra Mist or whatever they call the drowned girl. And fine, I’ll tell you that I was, yes, even a little proud of you when I heard from your mother that someone from the bank told her that you got up on a stage over at Centennial Park for that memorial rally and helped with crowd control or some such thing. But this, Jennifer, this is the one too many, this outfit, what you’re, what”—changing targets suddenly—“your daughter’s wearing right now, Barb, what she’s proposing to wear to a funeral, for God’s sake!”

Here Gus aimed his gravy-spackled fork at Jennifer’s ensemble and then at his wife, who was rewashing dishes at the sink and watching her husband rage on his inscrutable daughter. Who, as it happened, was withstanding her father’s grapeshot and bluster by calculating whether they would still be able to get good spots in the receiving line at Gallagher’s wake. That is, when the barrage let up. But then Gus drained his milk and reloaded his blunderbuss.

“Jennifer, I don’t care what it means in that Bokarie’s old country. And to tell you the truth and to save you the breath, I’m not too concerned, either, about what it’s going to do to your election chances in a few weeks, though I think in that respect you’re looking for a bumper crop where you might find fallow, my dear. Because the late George Gallagher had a name in this town and you’ll see that tonight at the Home—that is, after you change out of that heartburn of a dress you’re wearing, mind you. And I’d bet my best bush jacket that you’ll also see that his wife, Faye, who as I understand it is also running in this election, is going to get plenty of votes as the fresh widow. She’s going to get those votes, in fact, just by wearing black. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

Jennifer’s face crimped, sensing the rightness of her father’s forecast. She started accepting the hard logic of his case against her chosen outfit. Not that he was done.

“But the upcoming election, that’s another matter. We’re right here, right now, Jennifer, in everyday Canada. Do you hear me? Not look-what-Immigration-dragged-in-this-time Canada, but under-the-radar, regular-people Canada, just-trying-to-get-through-to-thenext-baby-bonus-cheque-and-farm-rebate Canada. Oh, and let me remind you of it, in case you’ve forgotten about that Canada, being too busy at your summit meetings with the Secretary-General of Gary’s Milk and Lotto. Just let me take a minute and remind you what Everyday Canada is all about. Because it’s in you, Jennifer, to the very marrow, and there’s no escaping it.

“Everyday Canada is finding a new coffee can for bacon drip; it’s making Canadian Tire money part of your grocery budget; it’s watching hockey on the French channel if that’s what God and the rabbit ears give you. Everyday Canada’s trying to convince your wife that she can’t have you strip perfectly good wood panelling from your living-room walls and repaint them something called Summer friggin’ Kumquat; it’s finding a good someone else to settle down with and then, well, as I still hope you’ll see someday, then life becomes deciding to brew an extra fresh pot after breakfast just to get a new can in time for the bacon drip and arguing paint chips to a draw and all the rest of what makes Everyday Canada what it is. Which isn’t much, granted, by comparison with the stuff you pull out of those books of yours that your mother …” Here he let up a second moment, just to send a little wither and shiver his wife’s way, because Gus was starting to hold her responsible for all of this since it started, in his mind, with that high school graduation gift of the encyclopedias. “But anyways this Canada has its values and its reasons and its rights and wrongs, and it’ll still be here long after anything they come up with to throw at us—including, mind you, your garden-variety-store Africans.

“Which brings me back to my point. I don’t care what it means in his country. In this one, in your country, Jennifer, which is Everyday Canada, YOU DON’T WEAR PINK TO A MAN’S FUNERAL. Now get upstairs and change and leave me to my cold supper.”

II.

She didn’t move, not just yet, because she was still measuring up her father as Riding Everyman. If this was in fact how the median voter responded to her wearing full pink to the late Alderman Gallagher’s service, it wasn’t in the best interests of the campaign. Jennifer was leaning this way when another intervention, more decisive, took place. Her mother dropped over to the kitchen table like a clipped duck and snatched her father’s plate away to reheat it. Flutter-limping back to the counter, Barb offered a sober second to her husband’s throaty filibuster. “Yes, go upstairs and change into something more becoming, Jennifer. Something black and proper. Your dad’s right—” Barb almost concluded “this time,” but with Gus in such a state, he might have caught it.

After Jennifer had gone upstairs, her father took a long breath and turned to address his wife. Barb was enduring a purgatorial wait for the microwave to ding its appointed conclusion, which would get Gus quiet and eating. Because otherwise, he was fired up and hungry to boot and so he kept at it.

“Barb, you think I’m just trying to save face, but there’s more to it than my stopping the girl from wearing a prom dress to pay respect to a man’s passing. This Bokarie, I don’t like her carrying on with him, even if, as I pray to God you pray to God, there’s no heart in it or physicals to speak of. And sure I’m disappointed that I don’t think that young man took to her at dinner last night and I don’t know why she came in and went straight up to her room after they went for that walk, except maybe he didn’t ask her for a second date, but I wasn’t exactly hoping for an engagement notice in today’s paper, just a little, well, interest on her part in anything other than politics and drownings and Africans. But anyway, Barb, take this … this pledge for what it’s worth—”

Here Gus Thickson’s voice cracked and he hurt, just a little, his nose tingling and crinkly and his eyes narrowing, levee-hard against the unexpected spillage. Because, leaving aside worries about his name and questions as to why it wasn’t a boy born to them, Jennifer was his only child, the flesh of his, and so forth.

“Take it, Barb, this pledge, for what it’s worth. Remember, I am the man who took your daughter by the leg when she was a little girl, do you recall that? How I took her and cut that leech off and did it so gentle-like she didn’t even scream or cry or hurt. Just stared. Anyhow, I’m trying to do the best I can by Jennifer, Barb, and right now, if that means cutting away another black bloodsucker, well, this time—”

PING!

Desperate, Barb had twisted the microwave’s timer to a premature conclusion, hoping fate would smile on her and the food would be hot enough. Though still upset and looking to take some action, Gus settled down at the noise. Fork in hand, he was ready for his daily comfort. His mashed and meat.

He made a few more noises about getting the number for Immigration, but she agreed him back to his crammed mouthfuls by repeating his rightness, that yes, Jennifer’s attempt to wear pink to the Gallagher funeral service later that night was simply out of the question. But she also put Gus at ease, and did away with any vigilante plans on the near horizon, by telling him that he had little to worry about, romance-wise, with Jennifer and Bokarie. When Gus asked for evidence, Barb invoked wifely privilege and maternal prerogative.

“A woman just knows these things, Gus, and that’s all there is to it. Do you want me to try to explain, really?”

Though she really had little idea of Jennifer’s intentions towards Bokarie in the romantic sense, or what she thought of that business herself, Barb was at least able to get Gus away from it. No need to worry about heart stuff, not just yet, not yet, she thought. Let’s see where politics and this African take her.

He let it alone, this question of Jennifer and the African, and he perceived suddenly how his wife protected him from that skull-softening world of women’s ways. Still waiting for Jennifer to come back down, Gus decided to take a minute with his wife. He went to the sink and nuzzled with her while the last dinner plate was scraped up and scrubbed, his sciatica-ripped hips buffing hers through their dark-toned, heavy-fabric funeral outfits. But it only takes so long to do a dish and put it away and scoop up the sink salad and wipe down the counter. And after all that loving, Jennifer still wasn’t ready, and now she was ignoring hollers and threats to present herself so they could get going because parking was going to be torture. Pacing the living room, Gus got all fired up again. Her offer of apple crumble and milk evaded, Barb had to redirect her husband’s fire and distract him from whatever was taking Jennifer so long up there. If he didn’t want the Summer Kumquat for the living room, she ventured, that colour being her choice and what did she know anyway, what did he think of bringing in one of these interior consultant types you hear about these days? She knew a woman down the street that had a friend whose son was known to be creative and had even done courses for that kind of frill and frippery in Toronto. Maybe they could even see about a discount?

She took heavy artillery, as expected, and it was mission accomplished. A husband’s executive powers were invoked and fifty more years of wood-panelled living was declared, which she accepted because it meant Gus forgot his half-forged promise to stop his little girl from tumbling into a big-lipped black hole. Looking ahead to future fronts, Barb was willing to accept this collateral damage. She could do that much for her daughter. Because even if it was never credited, even if Barb Thickson was universally assumed to be capable of little more than carpet-bombing cupboards with fresh contact paper every other spring and calibrating cream of mushroom shots for winter Crock-Pots, she had sense enough to know what kinds of publicity would and would not help her daughter at the polls.

III.

Black-skirted and mauve-bloused in compromise with her father’s edict, Jennifer was stalled, unexpectedly. Sitting in her bedroom, she was still thinking. About him, no less. Not Bokarie. He had his marching orders and matériel for the evening’s event. But about the other one, from dinner the night before, the one who had courted her by spinning the sugar line that he had a magnet in his pants and bet she had a steel magnolia under her dress. It was around then that she brought up an intervention.

But before that, and before he pulled out the monogrammed flask and before he encouraged her up the barn ladder with a thrusting, feely smack of the palm, she knew that this man her parents had invited over was intended to be an impediment against her future plans. And she’d been tempted.

Initially, Jennifer had been made wary by the sudden and opaque increase in place settings for the meal her parents were giving the Thursday evening after the Hollerwatty wedding. She thought the dinner was for her new friend, Bokarie, but then that night Barb asked Jennifer to set six for dinner, not four, and to take from Grandma’s collection no less, and also to be sure to skip plates with chips in them or too many fork scrapes. At these Christmas and Easter instructions, Jennifer had felt a little vault to the heart. At evidence that her parents were intent upon impressing the guest of honour. Little did she know.

Bile came quickly when she realized what really stood behind her parents’ unexpected suggestion, the previous week, that she invite that new friend of yours, Boo Cary, over for a little supper.

The date was set for one of those rare evenings in the Ottawa Valley between the fever hot of late August and the blouse cling of later September. The end-of-summer wedding itself, in its aftermath, was being recalled and studied around town less for the noblesse oblige of its open friggin’ bar—hard liquor, too, not just wine and beer—than for what was understood to be the most striking image of the affair. In subsequent representations and re-creations, particularly by those young men who had never had their dance with the lady of the hour, her having gone sleepy and stomach-achy a few songs after “Butterfly Kisses,” the bride’s four-minute twisty twirl with the town African was the big news. It had looked about as dangerous as a sapling twig dangling a campfire marshmallow, as classy as electric tape patching up a torn milk jug.

But Jennifer’s parents knew nothing of this chatter. They had made the dinner invitation in near direct response to her informing them that she was going with Bokarie to the wedding. And because of how freely this offer had come, Jennifer had been warmed by the idea. By her parents wanting to meet the new friend she’d told them about, even if she was feeling edgy at the prospect of these constellations of her life colliding over sweet corn and cider.

In thinking about Bokarie coming to her home, Jennifer was, in truth, as nervous as a fourteen-year-old girl who’d invited over a new friend with better hair and makeup. Upon his meeting her parents, she worried, Bokarie might refuse to help with her campaign, having seen evidence suggesting that her mouth was writing him cheques that her bloodlines couldn’t cash.

But she went through with it anyway, giving in to the desire for her parents to see Bokarie and understand what she had grabbed on to, to sense what he could bring her and understand where they could go together. Because then, maybe, she had hoped, Gus and Barb might start to believe a little in the rise of Jennifer Thickson themselves.

She had miscalculated. Profoundly. After asking her mother a second time why six, Jennifer realized that Bokarie was barely on their radar, and then she really understood: Oh nobody special just a young man also new in town that your dad sort of knows who might share your interests. There’s no harm in finding out so we’ve invited him to have a little supper with us too and when we told him about your friend from Africa the young man said he had someone in mind so there you are Jennifer your dad thought it up. All along her parents were readying something of a bloodless coup by trying to get her hitched up before she could get her shot at Ottawa.

And worse, she had almost taken them up on it. She could admit this much now, while her father was downstairs yelling at her mother about the eternal virtues of wood panelling.

Soon enough they would drive off to the service, at which point the campaign for the federal seat of Nipissing–Renfrew–Pembroke would effectively open with a eulogy, delivered by her main opponent and one-time mentor Faye Gallagher. The start of six weeks of grieving and vote grubbing in the black widow catbird seat. But before Jennifer left and the battle she’d wanted was fully joined, it was best to make sure, one last time, that she didn’t want him instead and what life he had proposed, what he had brought up for her.

IV.

Rick Hopewell taught grade seven and eight gym. He had been Gus’s choice. Thickson was getting on, and getting worried about the fate of his farm and daughter. Hopewell came his way on recommendation from the local gas station owner, who understood from cash register chit-chat that the young man was new in town but, unlike some people we know, had politely blended into the background. It was easy enough; he was indistinguishable from a standard national mould—reasonably well-kept goatee, hairline just starting to horseshoe, reflexively anti-American, kidney fat spilling over his cell-phone hip clip. On further inquiry, Gus learned that the young man happened to be freshly single after a long cohabitation elsewhere had failed to take. From Gus’s vantage, Rick seemed to have interests that matched his daughter’s well enough. Contact sports weren’t all that different from government, he figured, and when the gas station man snorted at this observation, Gus decided to use it as a conversation opener at dinner. Through the necessary channels, it was learned that Rick had shrugged some interest at meeting a young lady who had a really great personality and no brothers to speak of on a seasonably productive family farm. Eventually, speaking directly with Gus at a planned run-in at the gas station, Rick even offered to bring along a friend he knew of who might match up pretty well to Jennifer’s little buddy, given the specs provided. Gus was looking to do some parallel matchmaking in hopes of simultaneously neutralizing manifold threats. When this possibility was established, he had Barb ask Jennifer to invite Bokarie to break bread with the family.

The soiree itself was slightly below average for the latitude and tax bracket. A stifled-cough, lame-question affair, during which Jennifer played the part of coy catch, if unwittingly. She had bluntly refused to participate, pushing food around her plate in cramped quiet and thus forcing her parents to speak on her behalf whenever Rick asked a friendly question. She had barricaded herself against the suitor’s overtures, against her father’s touting her like a good used car, this inviting a buyer home to kick the tires and take it for a test drive. She was also embarrassed for Bokarie and more violently anxious that he was going to walk away from the campaign. He was marooned on the far corner of the table beside his dinner partner—a brisket-tongued, enthusiastic educational assistant from Rick’s school named Trinh, a Vietnamese Canadian who smiled and nodded and said, “Oh yeah huh really? Well I think that’s great and courajust!” to every comment that came her way, including queries about seconds and requests to pass the gravy boat.

When dinner was finally, finally over, and the last of the meringue had been shaved up between the men, Gus sensed things weren’t going that well and so he went to straight economics. After the dishes were cleared, he asked Jennifer to help the guests walk off the casserole—after all, Rick had eaten three servings!—by giving them a tour of the barn and the family acres. While this was a time and place self-evidently beyond dowries, Gus Thickson could, at the very least, give the suitor a sense of possibilities.

Meanwhile, Hopewell turned out to be more interested than he’d planned for. Initially, he’d accepted the invite to dinner with hopes of little more than a non-microwaveable meal and perhaps some no-strings rebound scoring. Sex and casseroles, these were his hungers, given his current situation as a new teacher in a nothing school in a nowhere town northwest of the capital. He had applied for a transfer outside of the Ottawa–Carleton board because he needed distance from a former live-in colleague who had recently dumped him for, as she put it, “forcing me to wait through five years of your shit in case someday I find a diamond in that coal pile.” Because they were both gym teachers, this meant many things lost. Twenty-five-cent wing and trivia nights, midnight coed hockey, annual road trips to see the Bills play, and other personally loved, professionally enriching pursuits had grown unworkable. So, having had little of either in the months since his transfer, sex and casseroles were the thing.

Extending his post-prandial exercise at the Thickson place, Rick had climbed up into the barn after Jennifer, allowing himself a view that led to a quick calculation of her presumptive merits, though this was merely the topographical confirmation of what his squash-happy hand had already intimated at lower rungs. There was a lot, space-wise, to work with here. Her uniform silence, before small-talky questions and casual feel-ups and other such magnetic punning and probing, was received as an openness to more intensive business. But Rick could tell she was a little nervous, sitting in the straw beside him and twirling her hair like a little girl, so he prepared for a soft landing and took an oblique approach.

“I think our little global villagers are really hitting it off, eh?” he opened, pointing out the loft window in the general direction of Bokarie and Trinh. Those two had ventured into the cornstalks when Rick broke Jennifer away from the pack and asked her to come see the sunset from up in the barn loft.

“Doesn’t surprise me, you know, those two getting along so naturally. Both living here and being from away—she’s from the east end of Toronto, originally, and he’s from, well, I never caught which one—plus she does ESL, as you can tell, and also”—softening his voice to sensitive potential husband tone—“you know, she’s done courses in special ed, and, well, given what your dad said about Bokarie and from what I can tell, I thought that would be a bonus in their getting together.”

She was staring, mutely, so he changed tactics.

“Well, you’re acting the shy type, but that’s not what I hear from your old man. He says you can talk up a storm about politics, which is fine by me, I lived in Ottawa for years. A little loosen on your lips, maybe?”

He brought out one of his hammered steel flasks, the fifth he’d been given the previous summer for having served as groomsman. This streak, which showed no sign of abatement, had in part led to the live-in colleague’s rock or walk ultimatum and the subsequent breakup. Jennifer immediately grabbed after the rum, which Rick took as a sign that this tractor just needed a little oil to get its gears working.

“Ottawa? You’ve lived in Ottawa? You know Ottawa?” Jennifer asked this with hot wonder, a little studied, but most immediately brought about by the scorch she’d just sent down her throat with a swig at his flask. But her stomach started gurgling and popping, not so much from the swig as from the suddenly potentially marriageable prospect sitting beside her in the barn, who had just taken the place of the lumpy grabby jackass that her dad had brought to dinner. Jennifer wasn’t so resistant to the trajectory laid out before her, all of a sudden. If this man could give her a little entree to Ottawa and, after the vows and the Legion reception and a Thousand Islands bed-and-breakfast honeymoon, if he would take over the farm while she found rooms in the capital and they together oversaw the family’s and nation’s business, wasn’t this both a perfect compromise between Gus’s wants and Jennifer’s plans and a more reasonable outcome than her drowned and out-of-Africa approach?

But she forgot. He was a gym teacher.

“Yeah, I lived in Ottawa a few years. But I didn’t really get it, the whole politics thing. I tried to follow for a while, but the Hill and, well, the entire city, Ottawa, it’s about as interesting as licking a phonebook. And that explains why I moved out here, you know, to be with the good people of the country, and maybe, I don’t know, you know, to settle down or something.” He leaned closer, her face distending in the dusk-light reflection of his wraparound sunglasses.

Having gone some months in monkish isolation, being tummy happy with a mummy-made meal, liking the idea of becoming a gentleman farmer and more so the opportunity to spite his ex with a wedding announcement only a few months after she had dumped him, Rick was mostly serious in his implied proposal. He was looking for no commitments or head games, just some country matter; but if he didn’t bother double-bagging and she got pregnant enough, why not?

And though Jennifer knew better, she was, for the moment, considering it herself. Because while she could tell the man was plainly retarded when it came to matters political, he was nice enough looking and clearly had hands for her—which was virtually unprecedented, Jennifer’s prior physical experience being limited to games of football Kennedy-style with uncles and cousins when she was just a little too old to present as nose tackle. But also, maybe this man was the better choice. Her chest and stomach heaved a little when she imagined abandoning her design on Ottawa. There was sadness at this, but also relief, exhaustion, ending.

Because Jennifer had been going at it since losing Graduating Class President by acclamation in high school, and she’d thumbed through enough of the encyclopedias and the LBJ book to know that politics never stops, politicians can never stop or else the gills get stuffed up and the lampreys attack and the carcass sinks to an indifferent end. So why not just accept her notch in the Middle Canadian grain, why not take this Rick onto her here and now and keep at it for a few minutes and months and go back to her HR job and gain what acclaim and dignity she could by showing off a new champagne diamond and then register for garden gnomes and push one out a few months after the I do’s and then—what? A life of looking forward to casual-wear Fridays at the office and measuring out morning and evening medicines for her parents and waiting for the weekly call from a daughter of her own who was trying to remember how many cups of peas it was for the tuna casserole.

Her lips opened.

V.

After explaining his no-strings rules for dating colleagues and then finding himself a fresh pair of underwear, Rick went to his laundry basket to get Trinh a T-shirt. They started trading stories of what had happened on their respective mini-dates at the Thickson place, the frustrations of which led them to decide on a nightcap at Rick’s apartment. After some subtle-like wordplay in the kitchenette, a tour of old hockey trophies in the living room, a little teasing and tickling before a montage of oh so cute pictures of the bachelor as baby, boy and young man carbuncular, and then, climactically, a chin-up demonstration on an iron bar wedged across the bathroom door, it had been a straight shot to the bedroom. And now the couple shared their most immediately available secrets in the body-sapped after-burn of their mushed lovemaking, in hopes of investing the explorations of the previous few minutes with some significance beyond the groans and short shocked cries.

Trinh was especially up for this, having wiped away the tears and redness with as much dignity as allowed by the gulch spot where she lay on Rick’s aged futon. Her story from the dinner was comparatively mild: She’d walked the African around the corn and asked him about his homeland. His quick answers were suggestive of a greater cognitive capacity than she’d originally assumed, but he wasn’t for her, in the end, being just a little too skinny and smiley. Anyway, she was looking for a manly man. Marvelling at her words, she felt womanly herself, fuller in the hips than she was, someone her mother would refuse to recognize as virginal daughter and her father would disown for no longer being one.

Rick had hip-buckled at the implied compliment and then agreed, explaining that he knew Jennifer wasn’t for him either because, after just one little swig from the bottle, she’d thrown up all of her casserole dinner beside them when they were talking up in the barn loft. For all her size, he reflected, she was just a little girl and couldn’t hold her drink. To turn this chit-chat more immediately productive, Rick further reasoned that Jennifer had gotten sick because of how nervous she was to be so close to, you know, a manly man, especially one who was treating her like a real woman.

Here he started pressing and moving in again, the conversation-making recharge complete. Trinh flashed a wrinkled smile, feeling a little lost, her eyes tearing up once more as she winced and took stock, winced and took stock, winced and took stock of what she’d done. It was so great and courajust and they could make the necessary wedding plans in the morning and, if necessary, discuss baby names on their second date.

VI.

Even from the back of the funeral home’s main showroom, where Jennifer and her parents were standing along with other latecomers and last-minute porch smokers and shrewder types who’d planned to be near the exit so they could beat the traffic on the way out, the noise was fit to bleed ears. Before the Unitarian-licensed deacon finally, delicately stepped in to adjust the microphone away from the penultimate speaker’s throat, the assembled masses were grimacing their way through the prologue to the eulogy proper. Which was delivered, in a manner of speaking, by the late councillor’s dearest friend and former colleague, Blaise Maurier.

Like the rest of the crowd, Jennifer could make nothing of what Maurier was saying, about the man with whom he’d once shared a modestly thriving real estate and mortgage consolidation practice in town. That was before George left the legal profession to take up his civic duty as an alderman and Blaise was felled, partially, by the Big C. Partially, because cancer had eaten away at Blaise’s famously honeyed tongue until he had to accept the necessary indignity of an automated voice box that he held to an incision in his throat to speak. In the pack-and-a-half-a-day past, many clients had been soothed by Blaise’s mellifluous sounds into agreeing to take on the short-term cost and long-term benefits of higher fixed rates, or to disregard the matter of capital gains because now now now was the time to sell. In time the community had accepted, even come to like, the lawyer’s now-monotonous and corrugated sounds; he continued to practise part-time, as per doctor’s orders.

But in all his post-operative dealings prior to speaking at his friend’s memorial, Blaise had never been in front of a microphone. Holding the voice box directly in front of it had the unanticipated effect of garbling and reverberating and chainsawing his considerate words into a barbarously electrified yawp. His mournful reflections were lost on the crimping faces before him, though he never knew this. He had started with the universal opening questions of small-town oratory: Can you all hear me okay? How about at the back? These were answered with a silence that he took as ready assent.

Her frontal lobe ground down as much as everyone else’s by Blaise’s speech, Jennifer was nonetheless impressed. Faye had been smart in arranging the order of speakers this way, softening the crowd up like this by force-feeding them the courageous, violently amplified words of the cancer-stricken as a prelude to her own. Jennifer watched how smartly Faye took to the podium at Blaise’s buzzing conclusion, how she embraced the speaker and swivelled him back to his seat. How, fully in control of the stage, she then looked up to her audience and readied to end the evening’s proceedings. To start the campaign.

The crowd, Jennifer could sense, was keen for this. They wanted to hear from Faye as a respite from Blaise’s metalled tonguing, and also because when she was done they could get to the basement reception hall for the sandwiches and pastries and coffee that, the deceased having passed while in office, the Incorporated Town itself had put up for, according to rumours circulating through both of the funeral home’s bathrooms. This meant more than the fridge-hard ham rolls and jam-glop Danish offered at plebeian wakes. Jennifer could also feel something more in the hungry crowd, for whom this alderman’s passing was an event about as close as they had come to experiencing, from near at hand, one of those fancy celebrity funerals that go on these days, for popes and former sitcom stars and such. The Little Caitlin Event, Jennifer stoically accepted, was for the immediate time forgotten, having happened some months earlier. Like the rest of Middle Western Civilization’s members, her fellow citizens’ memories were not those of elephants, even if they did move and snuffle for stirring words and tearful embraces and other such emotional pornography like palmfuls of peanuts.

Having checked the program to see what she had missed in addition to the receiving line by coming late to the service, Jennifer knew that George Gallagher’s funeral was a properly ecumenical affair. Hymns were selected in equal number from the Wesley brothers and Andrew Lloyd Webber. At one sobbing rise in the service, the Gallagher daughters had together read aloud their personalized version of “Footprints” so as to thank their father now in heaven for having carried them through the hard times. And just before Blaise’s speech there had been a slow-fade slideshow montage of Gallagher family imagery, set to a medley of Mendelssohn and Les Miz arrangements and projected onto a screen temporarily, respectfully, set up in front of the casket. The funeral home’s willingness to grant this request explained the location of the memorial service; no church in town, not even the low Anglican, would agree to audiovisuals in spite of the unprecedented numbers such a prominent passing would have attracted to the pews.

Now it fell to Faye to bring the evening to the right climax. As she readied to speak, Jennifer leaned in, waiting to see how Faye would use the black-draped podium to her advantage at the coming polls. No longer expressly studying, as she once did, her former mentor at work, but now hoping that Faye would go long enough for Jennifer’s first rebuttal to take to windshield.

“Family, friends, Mr. Mayor and Deacon Phil, thank you. On behalf of the children, thank you, thank you, thank you. The kind words, cards and casseroles we’ve been given since George went on— everything’s been beautiful, simply beautiful, and just so generous. Many of you knew my late husband as a leader, and much of what we’ve heard this evening confirms as much. But what I’m about to say, in these brief remarks, which I promise to keep brief”—bathroom-and coffee-ready gratitude spread through the hall—“may surprise you. I have come here today to praise George Gallagher, dear friends, as a follower.”

The audience gave up confused murmurs and frustrated growls at this proposal, like black bears searching through trash cans in vain. “Yes, a follower. I know we’ve come to understand that term as a negative in our culture, and rightly so in most instances, but not in the way I mean it today. George Gallagher was indeed a follower, his entire life. He was a courageous follower of one thing, my friends: Canadian values.”

Immediately the crowd released great patriotic drafts of affirmation and exaltation; so many discrete fantasies of what this meant whirled together. Faye looked up, nodding satisfaction at these billows. And then she harnessed the national blow-up doll into her private lodestar.

“Yes, he followed those Canadian values from his time as both altar and paper boy through successful family and legal practices, and then, because he kept following them, a series of terms as this town’s most devoted alderman. But, my friends, all of this was merely preparation for what was supposed to have been George’s next great search, his plans to run in a federal election.”

The crowd gasped and whispered and went collectively downcast at this news, at this bright-light-snuffed-too-early motif. Then they started wondering what Faye would do. Throw herself on her husband’s funeral bier? Take up the torch from failing hands?

She’d been so strong through it all, but now she opened up, her mascara running like a drained starfish as she sniffled and sobbed her closing remarks into a tear-drenched declaration for office. “George … he … he was never able to … to follow through on that dream, dear friends. But I stand before you today to make this promise.” Her voice quavered its last and then firmed with statesman’s resolve before flashing with showman’s promise. “My husband, the father of my children, the late George Gallagher, he knew best for all of us. And where he led—sorry, where he had wanted to lead—I, Faye Gallagher, I shall follow!”

She turned away from the microphone to pick up a paper and signal to the woman at the Clavinova. She looked up, smiling bravely, and opened her lips.

“Song sheets ready? I know this isn’t on the program, but I couldn’t imagine ending otherwise. So let’s together sing ‘Be Not Afraid,’ which, I think, is a fitting way for us, as a community, to look to the future, which is to say, together. Because George would have it this way, my fellow Canadians, going before us as he has done, and asking us, as I ask you, my friends, to come, follow me.”

Jennifer hadn’t noticed the handouts until just then, her focus divided between parsing Faye’s eulogy and marking its effects on the crowd. But then she saw the columns of efficient volunteers moving through the aisles, handing out lyrics to what was at once the concluding hymn of the funeral service and, in its refrain, the unveiling of Faye Gallagher’s campaign slogan for the federal seat of Nipissing–Renfrew–Pembroke.

Be not afraid.

I go before you always;

Come, follow me.

Mumbling and mourning with the rest, Jennifer had to grant Faye this masterstroke, this blend of religiosity and righteousness so politically pitch-perfect she wondered if her opponent had also been studying the American ways. But no matter, Jennifer decided. Having seen this, the best her opponent could manage, she was confident of her prospects in the race and the more confirmed in her earlier decision to throw up and off her chances at Middle Canadian nuptial bliss.

Because once the singing was done and the crowd, her parents included, had tired of watching close family and various friends embrace Faye and whisper and voice-box their support and admiration for her just-great and courageous plan to run, Jennifer recalled her counter-strike, which was in process. Even if these good Canadians, these everyday people, had been huffing and puffing with Faye at the funeral and singing her tune, Jennifer predicted they’d be thinking pink on the way home. She grinned a little at this cleverness and decided it would be a good conversation opener with Bokarie when next they met. Perhaps to distract him from what paper cuts and wiper blades he might recently have suffered through for the campaign.