Everything is going along too smoothly and she is convinced it will go wrong very soon, but she pushes that miserable thought as far back as it can go.

“Wow, they sure got it up in a hurry, didn’t they?” her son breathes in wonder, helping her out of the car to marvel at their work. She leans carefully against his shoulder and, shielding her eyes, joins him in gazing.

“The most enthusiastic contractors come out of Treade, darling, since they seldom get to work on anything quite like this.”

The building itself hadn’t been the issue from inception onwards; it was securing the small tract of Hoban Wilson’s land on the outskirts of his coveted woods that had been the true test. Wilson claimed that there was something about this forest, something ancient and precious presiding here that would only take being tainted so far. “My family has been custodians of these trees for going on seventy years now, before this town was a town.” He had stomped his cane for emphasis at that. “These woods keep their own counsel, and they’d be damned to keep yours, too.” He went on to swear up and down that if her intentions hadn’t been at least partway noble, he would never have given her the half acre he so graciously let go of. She was fairly certain it was less her intentions and more her money that had whittled him down, in the end. Forest custodian or no, Hoban Wilson was still human. She remained confident that before the decade was out, he’d be selling these trees hand over fist, what with a war brewing overseas and the economy turning.

They cross the grounds, her on his arm, him leading her like the gentleman he is close to becoming. She beams up at him, pulling at the fringe of his curls. “It’s so soft; it feels like your baby hair.”

He purses his lips, grinning. “Now, now, Mother. I’ll cut it when I take the big business mantle. Until then, I get to keep the curls. The girls like ’em.” He winks and she nudges him playfully.

The tang of sawdust and the bitter scent of pine enrobe them as they confer with the project manager. The building will be done by week’s end, the door having arrived from Vancouver just last night, covered, as it is, in the intricate tapestry of mythological bodies swimming upstream against their own stories. It was commissioned by an artist on the West Coast, the entire composition of the door reclaimed driftwood, moulded and shaped by the sea.

“The wall shelves are being installed as we speak, but the standing cases won’t be ready for another week — we’ve had some trouble with the supplier in Winnipeg. Care to take a look inside and see how it’s coming?”

She raises her hands, feinting back a step before the threshold. “Old family superstition,” she explains. “Can’t go in until the door has been properly put on. Something about crossing over into the veil of another world. My Baba and her Ukrainian paranoia ran deep.”

Her son claps the contractor encouragingly on the shoulder. “We trust it will be splendid. And we can’t wait to share it with the rest of the town.”

After the last brief bit of news — looking over the individual petal panes that would make up the facing vestibule window — she relaxes under a nearby tree, taking the proffered sandwich from the basket he had brought with them. Reclining, they watch the sun climb.

“I didn’t think it would come together so seamlessly,” he admits with partial sheepishness. “The entire thing is like a dream.”

She sighs, absorbing the splendour of the very air. “One thing I can give credence to about the sordid things that brought us here,” and she shifts her tired face to his, “is that we could make something of it.”

He chews thoughtfully on a cracker. “Now this is the kind of legacy a man can be proud of. The kind Father ought to have had. The factories, all the backdoor deals. He was in the business of feeding a country; it was a noble work, but he lost sight of what he was doing. It devoured him.”

“And while your father fed grain to western Canada, you will feed them stories?” she asks, and he taps his nose.

“Stories were the original manna,” and now he’s waxing poetical, which he knows gets a rise out of her.

“My son, the dizzy dreamer. Girls want to marry doctors and businessmen, not tellers of tales.”

He shakes a finger at her, chiding. “Now we both know Father hooked you with a poem. The dreaming is sadly hereditary.”

It is a good day, so far. She can feel her breath rattling less, feel the ripples in her ventricles as a hum and less a clatter. Maybe she can live through this after all; here, in the last of the summer sun, watching their endeavour rise up from nothing, she is convinced that anything can be possible. For a price.

She pulls up a clump of grass, testing the waters. “About your birthday, darling . . .”

He sighs through his nose. “We really don’t have to go to the trouble you’re planning for it. A soiree, all those narrow-minded socialites from the city—”

“Watch yourself,” she warns, “you’re speaking to a girl who made her living at being a socialite.”

He scowls. “You and I both know that you don’t compare to those preening busybodies. And I don’t know that it’s doing your health any good to be getting this worked up about martinis and swanning around in a place that has no use for either.” His slender fingers push back his sunlight-kissed hair. “I don’t want Jovan Grain, Mother. Running this business has never been for me, even my father knew that. There are other men who can have it grow in their hands.”

“Lesser men,” she scoffs, but at first she doesn’t retaliate. It is not in his temperament to be shut up in an office, in the same way she never did well being a kept woman. He longs to walk along the lake on the other side of town, to write his musings in the sand and let them wash away. He has wanderlust in his soul, just like she once did, before the entire affair got away from her. Before her body abandoned her and her soulmate drowned himself in his work.

“Perhaps you’re right. We should give it over to someone else, someday,” and she stretches back, shutting her eyes. “In the meantime, we need a means to keep our dreams alive, my dear. Sometimes we must sacrifice a bit of ourselves to earn those moments that make us incandescent.”

Quiet now, pulling her silk, tasselled shawl back up to her shoulders, he simply murmurs, “Who’s the teller of tales now, Mama?”

She laughs. They spend the rest of the daylight revelling, for at their feet, their legacy rises out of the woods.