The escapes to the motels and the country homes were no longer enough. God, Evan wanted to love her, but the affection was as ephemeral as smoke. He began to dwell on how to get away, just for a while, maybe to heal, to get on his feet, to take a breath. Put some miles between them and then come back when the wounds had closed. He knew if he got away for a bit, she would soften. At least for a while.

To sleep he conjured new fantasies. In the latest variation, he’d spend the summer driving between folk festivals, across the country in the little car, him, the guitar, his computer and cheap motels, play music, write songs, work on a play and breathe. Yes, and maybe meet a woman or two who liked him. He fell asleep to that one many nights.

The best times were when her niece and nephew came over with the little ones and Annie got lost with the babies, playing with toys on the floor, being the grandmother she would never be with the grandchildren she would never have. He loved watching her at these times, the only moments she would gladly put work aside. He would shop and cook and serve so she could play. They loved Evan’s cooking. Annie was torn between her pleasure with the children and her jealousy of the affection they showed Evan and how much they liked his food.

On a Sunday in autumn, the kids were her break from anxiety over work and money, and, well, life. But Annie seemed to need more control. So she busied herself between the kids spread out in the living room, her niece dozing on the sofa, her husband on the floor with his sons and keeping an eye on Evan lest he make too much food. He was standing at the counter slicing onions and peppers for the pasta sauce. Annie was stalking the kitchen, standing behind him.

“Don’t make too much pasta,” she said.

“I’ll count every strand,” he said, moving the box out of her reach. The last time he had cooked linguini she had removed what she thought was a sufficient portion and put the box back in the cupboard. After supper, he made himself a sandwich.

“You always make too much,” she said. She pushed her hand across the counter and scooped up an onion peel and a rind of pepper.

“I’ll clean up when I’m done,” he said. “Why don’t you go play with the kids?”

“You never clean up, you never clean up, you always leave the counters full of peels and stuff.” She took a few garlic ends and then wiped the counter with a filthy cloth she dropped in the sludge fermenting at the bottom of the sink. She was speaking barely above a whisper, she didn’t want the kids to hear her. Evan took deep, long breaths. Annie knew what she was doing, Evan realized, and she could control it. She was afraid the kids would hear, afraid of what they would think. She had some control over the compulsions.

She liked to wipe cutlery with the filthy rag stored at the bottom of the sink and then throw them in the drainboard and the cloth back in the sink. He had taken to rewashing everything that she touched with the toxic rag. Everything had to be clean except the utensils used to clean everything. The rag made him wretch.

“Annie, go away.”

“I’m just helping,” she said. “Are you finished with this? Finished with this?” She was dragging things off his workspace and dropping them into the dishwasher and the spice rack.

“That’s the chopping knife. I’m not finished with that.”

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, retrieved it from the sink and wiped it with the fetid cloth. Evan washed it with hot water.

“Go away, Annie.”

She had become a dervish, manically bustling, her brain invaded by yet another uncontrollable compulsion. She adjusted the heat under the water — she didn’t like steam — so the water stopped boiling and she turned on the vent so it roared in Evan’s head and as he stepped back, she started scrubbing the counter where he had spilled tomato sauce. The kids weren’t giving her enough attention so she was in his face.

He watched her, the large chopping knife in his hand. He saw Stan’s ex-wife and her hand flash down onto the cutting board, the big chopping knife almost taking off Stan’s hand. He watched Annie manically rubbing away at the counter. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t finished. It didn’t matter she was in his way. Evan tightened the grip on the knife.

“It happened so fast, doctor, she always did that, reached in when I was cooking and I didn’t even see her hand, I was chopping up a chicken and I brought my hand down and … It was terrible. Can you sew the hand back on?”

Did he even have a chicken to cut up?

“Annie get the hell out of here and go play with the kids,” Evan said, whispering, gently placing the chopping knife on the counter. He turned off the fan, cranked up the heat under the water. “You can always work if the kids are resting. Don’t you have a lot of work to do?”

“Okay, okay, I was just trying to help.” She grabbed the knife and put it in the sink, wiping it again with the filthy cloth and dropping it in the drainboard. “I’m just helping you.”

Evan took the knife again and washed it again with soap and water and went back to the counter. He was tired. Do other people get this stressed cooking pasta?

She had come down that morning, which is why he stopped work and started cooking. He had spread files on the dining room table, the desk he had inherited with the office from her was too small. But her work must’ve not be going well because she started frantically straightening his files.

“Why can’t you work in your office? Why do these have to be there? The kids are coming.”

She was grabbing files and stacking them.

“You’re mixing them up, go away.”

“You don’t need to work, here. The table’s all messy.”

She was throwing his files together.

Evan stared at the wall and said: “Don’t add accelerant.” If he lost his cool, she’d retaliate, and he could already hear the abuse.

“You always lose papers, no wonder. You’re completely disorganized. These should all be filed away.” He took a breath, his voice light and cheery.

“Go away now.”

She didn’t.

“Please go away now.” He was still singing it, keeping it light.

“Okay, okay but you got to clean that all up before we eat,” she said. “I don’t want to eat with files on the table.”

“You know if you didn’t go nuts every time I mentioned getting a desk large enough for me to …” But he stopped. There was no point.

She opened the fridge and pushed all the jars and containers to the back so she wouldn’t have to see them.

Okay, Evan got it. The kids were coming so she was into domestic propriety mode. The house had to look as if they didn’t live and work there. It had to look like a museum. It had pushed her into a manic phase.

She liked the fridge best when it was empty, neat to the eye. But that meant he couldn’t see anything when he opened it, unless he bent down low enough, and then he might find, lined up against the back wall, forgotten jars and bottles of things long eaten by mould. Out of sight, out of mind and into the trash. It also meant when he went up to the country he’d return to find the fridge empty. Left alone, she didn’t buy food. Except cheese, wine and lettuce.

Being avuncular host to her niece and partner was one of the few things he could offer to bring her pleasure, the other doors to happiness were closing one after another, with barely a click when they locked. The kids were primary in her life and, if he was working on a deadline, the deadline was sacrificed to assuage her need to be with the children. It was worth the rare sound of her laughter and the joy on her face. As soon as they left, she went about scouring the house again and then climbing up to her office.

“It’s Sunday,” he’d say, until he gave up saying it.

“I have a lot of work to do,” she’d say.

As her anxiety climbed up the Richter scale and the kids and his shows the only things that seemed to bring her happiness, she jacked up her working hours. She brought in no more money. She worked for the sake of work and when she did get a cheque it was one more reason to panic.

“This has to last me until …” Life was to be a slog, joy dependent on the bank balance.

“You really think you’re going to make money on your music?” she said one night over dinner. “That’s why you’re not looking harder for a job?”

“No,” he said. Evan recalled a dinner party just a few months ago where a table full of media types had anguished over disappearing jobs. Radio, TV, newspapers were all cutting back. If you were over 50 and wanted a living wage, you could wipe down tables at Tim Horton’s from 8 to 4 and then do a shift at McDonald’s until midnight and maybe make $400. But Annie did not let reality intrude into her anxieties. It was Evan’s task to repair the vanishing media. Or she suggested, maybe he could become a speech writer for the Tories. They were advertising for a few to justify the country’s shift from peacekeepers to bomb droppers. Islamicism, as the always erudite prime minister had said, was the gravest threat to our way of life. Evan started filling out the forms and then stopped. “Am I fucking crazy?”

He was practicing therapist-schooled non-escalation. Which meant exiting quickly and not descending into the foxhole from which they could lob grenades at each other.

“Me and the record label and the manager, we’re doing this music thing for drugs and groupies. No one thinks I’ll make a cent, or sell a record, especially, it would seem, you.” He picked up his plate and dumped the dinner in the garbage, the dish in the dishwasher and went to watch the hockey game. She followed him into the living room, standing in front of the screen.

“That’s why you’re not looking for a job, you think there’s going to be money in the music and that’s bullshit.”

“I’m not talking to you about this now, you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk, I only had two glasses of wine.”

“You weigh 110 pounds. Two glasses of wine make you inebriated and slightly crazy and if you want to talk about my failures or your certainty of my future failure, we can do it when you’re sober. You pop the cork at 5 and you’re still sipping at 9. Two glasses? Really?”

“I’m not drunk.” She bent the TV forward so he couldn’t watch it. But she didn’t see a glass on the TV table and the screen shattered. It was a new 37-inch that he had bought against her wishes.

“You’ll just watch it,” she had warned.

Now, she looked at the spider web of cracks in the screen and was instantly humiliated, tapes of her parents’ boozeplagued life playing in her head. He left her to her ghosts and despair and grabbed his jacket. He had clothes in the country.

He looked at her before he left. She was watching him, her face a mix of dread and despair and helplessness. As it did most every night, she went from looking 50 to looking 70, the effort to maintain the appearance of sanity linked to the strength it took to maintain the sparkle of fading youth. Reality was the inevitable winner.

There were more and more stories popping up like his, men and women in their 50s and 60s suddenly put out to pasture, media people in a quick-change media world that no longer had room for them. Annie was fascinated by these stories and sympathetic to the characters portrayed. She loved his story in the Citizen and sent it to all her friends.

“Maybe you should write a book or a one-man play about it? Or make a film,” she said. “Did you see this piece in the Globe? It’s all about people like you.” That was one Annie. The other Annie held him responsible for being an unemployed professional in a dying profession. He wasn’t trying hard enough.