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are soaking from the rain and we put them on the woodstove to dry; the plastic soles melt, creating a stink.
    We play crazy eights and talk about sex. I say, “My mother has The Joy of Sex hidden under her mattress. I mean she’s explained the whole thing in detail, she’s shown me every other how-to book published, but they got The Joy of Sex as a wedding present and it’s like she thinks she’s the only one who has a copy. Anyway, I looked at it and the drawings are in soft pencil. I mean they’re really soft and gentle, even the leather and bondage section is gentle. My mother thinks that you only have sex with people you love.”
    We leave wearing rubber boots belonging to Darlene’s brother. We hitch a ride in a pick-up. It’s dark and it’s not until I’ve slammed the door that I realize the two men have rifles on their laps. They head immediately off the highway onto a dirt road. Darlene and I say nothing, they say nothing. We bump along and I dig my fingernails into my soaking coat sleeves. They drop us at the turn-off to Stephenville. I ask Darlene, “Were you afraid?” Darlene says, “They have a moose in the back, it’s out of season.” As the truck pulls away I see the bulk of it in the red brake lights.
    Darlene calls. Her visa has come through. I invite her to Pizza Hut. Toronto is getting the tail end of Hurricane Hugo. My feet are sloshing in my shoes. I have to wait fifteen minutes outside United Cigars watching headlights sword fighting the rain at the intersection. Then I see her. Her glasses are streaming with water. Our jeans are wet below our rain jackets while we eat our pizza, and they have the air conditioning on. Our teeth chatter while she talks about raw octopus, sleeping mats, paper walls and geisha girls. She says, “Japanese dentists are the richest men in the world, and if they’re single, who knows, maybe I’ll have a few teeth pulled.” She’s joking. We hug outside the subway and where we press together the water soaks through our chests, icy cold. Sayonara.
    Mike and I have moved in with Kate and Paulo. She’s a painter and he’s a physics professor. They take us to their cottage up north. It’s the end of summer, you can wear a sweater,but it’s warm enough to swim. Kate’s parents are there. They’re both seventy. Her father and I swim for almost an hour. We take turns diving off a board set upon a raft. He watches me and comments, his voice strong on the silent lake, “That’s a nice one, that was a lovely one.” My mother was a lifeguard when she was eighteen. What I call freestyle she calls the crawl. She does the crawl with even strokes. When she teaches children to swim, she says, “If you measure your strokes you can go a long time, you can go for ever.”
    Kate’s mother is sorting old slides. She says, “If we don’t know what they are, we’re throwing them out.”
    Kate says, “You can’t do that.”
    “Oh, yes I can.”
    Kate pins a white sheet over the fireplace. We each have a hot cup of tea. I have a fever now from the infection in my teeth. There’s a picture of Kate’s mother and father when they had just met. They’re laughing into the camera.
    A picture of Kate at ten with a kitten. A jungle in Malaysia. A falling cliff face in Venezuela.
    “That’s the earthquake,” says Kate’s father. A slide of a green field covered with mist.
    “Oh, I love England,” says Kate’s mother, and she claps her hands.
    A slide of a church window. Everyone leans closer.
    “Throw it out,” says Kate’s mother. “We don’t know what it is.” But her father clicks on.
    “You’re not throwing anything out, Dave.”
    A slide of a grave stone, out of focus.
    Mike tucks me in bed. He rubs my body vigorously because I’m freezing cold and boiling hot.
    “That’s some long life together they had,” I say.
    I’ve got a job. I’m working as an assistant in an office that is publishing a directory of Canadian artists, musicians and writers.