One hour. She’d stay for an hour, and then find an excuse to leave. Many of the church ladies had knit blankets and booties and other handmade items, and the women gave each article its due praise as the gifts were passed around the semi-circle of folder chairs. Monica could appreciate the labour that went into these creations. Compliments flowed from her lips as naturally as breathing; she’d trained for this. She was the picture of serenity until a plain onesie landed on her lap. She lifted up the soft white cotton and tried to imagine someone small enough to wear such a thing. What an ordinary object, she thought. She didn’t even realize her eyes had filled with tears until Gilda Heins passed her a tissue.

What he wants to say, what he thinks is, this isn’t a job for a woman, but that makes him feel old, and he doesn’t need another reminder of his impending birthday. Besides, Elise’s arms are strong. He tears his eyes away and heads back to his inventory nook. He’s working on a Vanagon for a couple headed up the Peninsula and needs to find an accelerator cable. He meets a lot of vacationers because he has all the right spark plugs and know-how to clean up rust deposits and get travellers back on the road. There’s a certain pressure to fixing up a vehicle that doubles as someone’s accommodations. He prides himself on getting customers rolling before dark and for that, earned a mention in The Beatniks Guide to Van Life: The Canadian Edition. It’s silly, he knows, but he loves seeing his name in print. He finds the cable in the loft and heads back down the ladder. Elise appears at the bottom, holding it steady.

He nods his thanks, and she shrugs as though it was the most natural thing in the world to spot him.

“Off limits,” he mutters. How many years between them? Fifteen at least.

He is mocking her. They are in bed, the lights are on and Lorne is staring at his wife, amused at her valiant efforts to stay awake. Determined, she tries her best to concentrate on the words on the page in front of her, but she cannot help it. Her eyelids slowly close, her wrists grow weak…thunk! The novel on her lap falls to the ground. Lorne bursts out laughing.

“This thing is as heavy as a phonebook!” he says, fetching it from the floor. “Don’t tell me…it probably won some fancy prize, right?”

Monica sighs and snuggles into her pillow. “Marjorie picked it. I have three hundred and eighteen pages left to go.”

She’d never finish it on time. For a moment she fantasized that one of her parishioners might get sick—not too sick—appendicitis maybe, (the appendix is a superfluous organ, isn’t it?) only they’d suspect it was something far worse, so she’d rush to the emergency department to offer comfort, thus possessing a convenient excuse to miss book club and not have to admit she hadn’t finished that month’s selection.

“Marjorie, huh?” Lorne says. “The retired principal?”
“She likes big books.”

“Hmmm.” Lorne opens the book. “After you have read this story of great misfortunes…sounds like torture.”

Lorne closes the store early that hot, July afternoon. He tapes a note to the door that reads “Closed – Folk Festival.” He considers writing a little poem, by way of explanation, something along the lines of “the answer is blowin’ in the wind,” but he doesn’t want to annoy farmers who pull up looking for a box of screws and leave with only Dylan. Only Dylan.

His father-in-law, bless his soul, would turn in his grave to see the shop darkened for a concert, but then Norm McKinnon didn’t love a banjo solo the way Lorne does. Or the sweet harmonies of a Celtic trio wafting in the summer breeze above a crowd of tie-dyed shirts. You can’t explain the pull of outdoor music to the living, let alone the dead.

He whistles while he washes off the dust of the hardware store and discards his navy work pants and collared shirt, the thick one with Lorne embroidered on the left breast pocket. These days, thanks to his ex-wife Sharanne’s handiwork, his hair is close-cropped, but every once in a while he feels the ghost of his teenage pony tail on his neck and wishes he could go back in time. Never mind. He pulls on a pair of soft faded jeans and a concert t-shirt from the 70’s.

For one brief moment he wonders if he’s playing dress-up. “Grow up man,” he says, pulling off the old t-shirt and replacing it with a plain yellow polo.

Most years, Lorne has gone to the Folk Festival by the Bay with Monica and Ella, but this year Monica had to rush to the city to check on her sister, Violet, and Ella was up north at summer camp.

“I guess it’s just me this year,” he said to his wife before she left. He wasn’t looking for sympathy. It might be fun to wander from stage to stage, to go where the music led him. But she wasn’t having it. Monica sees too much loneliness in her line of work. So, before he could stop her, she mentioned to Brad, the Volkswagen mechanic three doors down who kept her old Beetle running, that Lorne was going to the festival alone. The next thing Lorne knew, she’d set him up.

“It’s not a date,” she said. “You already know Brad.”

“Yeah, but we never talk about music.”

“You talk about cars,” she said. As if it was the same thing.

He finds his ball cap and folding chair and trudges down to the alley. Brad is already there, leaning against the hood of Lorne’s pick up. Lorne looks him up and down and breaks into a big smile. Brad, whose hands are still grease-stained from the day’s work, is wearing the very same shirt Lorne rejected.

Rock on.

Were it not for the farm, they would have never chosen to move to the Valley, to a town smaller than the Newfoundland hamlet where Bruce had taken his first breath. While cycling through the countryside one amber-hued Sunday afternoon they’d seen the “For Sale” sign and stopped to take in the view from the roadside. The plot of land, surrounded by sugar maples, sloped towards a pond where two chairs sat facing one another, as though their occupants might return at any moment to continue their conversation. Leaving their bicycles by the cedar rail fence, they’d wandered down the lane. Bruce knocked on the door but there was no answer. A radio diffusing the O.J. Simpson verdict had been left on in the kitchen but there weren’t any vehicles under the leaning carport. He remembered looking towards the water thinking the pond was so clear. In the winter he’d play shinny on the ice. He hadn’t played much hockey since leaving Bell Harbour, but if they moved here, he’d lace up his skates again. At least, that was what he hoped for. But even as they discussed the logistics of packing up their home in the city, he knew a beautiful view would not be enough. They could settle in the heights, but the pulse of the town beat in the coffee shops and diners, hair salons and ice cream parlours, the arena and the library. Life happened down the hill, in the valley. And more than the view, Bruce wanted that, too.

After he closes the blinds at Valley Hardware Norm McKinnon enjoys a cherry-tipped cigar. He places the ‘Closed’ sign in the window, hauls the sandwich board in from the sidewalk and locks the door behind him. He always waits until closing time the count the day’s earnings, easing his large frame into a creaky rolling chair. There’s a small window in the back office that looks out onto the racks of outdoor inventory. His wife Lois often tells him to clean it up, but why bother? He knows exactly where everything is. He’s halfway through the two dollar bills when a crash breaks his concentration. Glancing up, he reshuffles and starts again. Sharanne, his daughter, is sweeping the floor. She knocks on his office door. He looks up, annoyed. Dinner will be ready soon and it’s taking longer than it should to finish up.

“What?” he says, exasperated.

“There’s a man rifling around in the yard.”

Norm flies out of his seat and whips open the back door but he’s too late. A man in a hunting jacket gets into a navy blue Ford pick-up and tears out of the alley. Norm throws his cigar to the ground, swearing as he realizes the culprit has stolen every last bolt of stainless steel fencing cable.

“Well I’ll be..”

Sharanne stands beside him. “What are you going to do?”

He turns to his daughter. “Don’t worry. I’ll get back what’s mine.” Norm sends her upstairs to her mother. By the time he zips up the day’s purse, he’s formed a plan to catch the thief and make sure no one ever steals from Valley Hardware again.

Every November, after the apple harvest in the Valley, Lorne does a massive clean-up of the shop. His mother-in-law Lois and his daughter Ella are there to make sure he purges, since his natural inclination is to simply “artfully re-arrange.” He’s searching for a tin trough to display overstock gloves when from the shelf above, a silk bouquet tumbles down and hits him in the head. The petals are covered in dust, but tiny silk beads still hold the stems together.

“Look what I found!” he hollers down from the ladder.

Ella peers up from below. “I built a fort up there once. I guess I left my centrepiece behind. Oh well, keep going, Dad. We’ve got two more aisles to finish before closing.”

“Okay,” Lorne says, but he takes the tiny bouquet to the back room and sits for a moment at his desk. There’s a photograph of Ella at four years old, standing in front of a ferry with the mountains in the background. He’s wearing sunglasses so you can’t tell he’d been crying, but if you look closely, you can see that he’s holding Ella tightly, like he almost lost her.

When Ella proposed the idea, Sharanne was assembling a lattice crust on a homemade apple pie with surgical precision. There was only a week to go until the annual Apple Barrel Craft Show and Fair.

“Camping in October?”

Ella sat at the kitchen island wearing the same “Mary Lake Camp” hoodie she’d possessed since late August. It still smelled of wood smoke, sweat and axe body spray.

“It’ll be awesome.”

“It’ll be freezing.”

Sharanne pinched the edges of the crust together, straightened up and faced her daughter.

“Not if you’ve got one of these,” Ella said, tightening the string on her hood until she looked like a fleecy turtle.

“Fine. If you want to sleep outside in October, that’s your business.”

“Great! So, can you give me a ride to London next weekend?”

Sharanne stared at her daughter, pointed to her pie and slowly shook her head. “There’s not a soul in town who could drive you anywhere next weekend, sweetie. You should know that.”

Lois and Bert Nicholson had been parishioners at All Saints since 1952, the year they married during the hottest August since the end of the war. Until his death this past spring, Bert had been head usher and Lois ran the women’s auxiliary. Opening doors for her without fail for nearly fifty years, it was obvious to all that the man treasured his wife. The only time anyone ever saw Bert out of sorts was when it came to “the hated contraption” – the hearing aid he’d begrudgingly use on Sundays since going deaf a few years back. Most often he preferred to stand close to his interlocuters or smile benignly if he judged the conversation mundane or unimportant to his survival. Reverend Monica Chambers found him charming. On the delightful occasions she’d found herself alone with the Nicholsons, he was content to let his wife Lois do all the talking while he served dessert, submitting to his hearing aid while Monica was there, something she later realized was a great honour. Bert would serve whipped cream from a can and if he remembered, he’d toss a few berries on top. “Now isn’t that cloud nine?” he’d say with a twinkle in his eye, bits of white on the tips of his moustache.

Hilda McGuire is browsing for a new hose in Valley Hardware – she’s decided to try vegetable gardening again, she tells Lorne. He remembers when he and Monica were first married and she grew cherry tomatoes on the balcony; that was almost a decade ago.

“I’ve been married almost ten years,” he says, almost to himself.

Hilda’s eyes light up in a way Lorne has learned to fear.

“Ten years... why, that’s bronze!” she exclaims. She is now pointing a nozzle towards him, willing him to understand.

“I beg your pardon?” Lorne says.

“There’s a traditional gift for each year of marriage. This year you must find Monica something bronze.” Lorne has no idea about such things. He’s planned on getting her matching lawn chairs that extend with a foot rest, like a foldable Laz-y boy. Hilda McGuire gives him a withering stare when he explains his intentions, exhaling sharply as though letting the air out of a tire with a machete.

“I honestly don’t know how you ended up with her, Lorne.”

“I should go to the jewellery store then, eh?”

Hilda smiles and slaps the hose on the counter like a dead snake. “You’re learning.”

From the moment the boy burst onto the school bus, scanning the seats like a wary cougar, his pants hanging below his bum and a skater’s cap balanced sideways on his head, the other children turned to look at the stranger in their midst. Eldon Sheridan observed him uneasily in the rear-view mirror. His name was J.J, according to the list the bus company gave him. Jay-jay? What kind of a name was that?

“He got on without a backpack,” the elderly bus driver said to his wife that night. “Who goes to school without a backpack?”

Eldon was asking Merle in the middle of Jeopardy so she didn’t answer, didn’t actually hear him in fact. Later, when they were getting ready for bed, Eldon said, “there’s just something not right about that kid.”

“What kid?” Merle said. But by then Eldon had turned on his electric toothbrush and the topic of J.J. was momentarily forgotten. Their conversations have gone like this for almost five decades.

In the most sophisticated of establishments, of which Valley Hardware most definitely is, flocking is a holiday tradition. It’s a ritual that started long before Lorne took over the store from his ex-wife’s late father. The front windows, large bay windows, are flocked each year on the first of December. It’s a tradition Lorne secretly looks forward to, especially now that he’s recruited his daughter into the flocking enterprise. This year, it’s her turn to spray the fake snow over the well-worn stencil. Lorne holds a level so that the picture isn’t lopsided. They’re almost done when Monica walks in through the back door. 

            “Perfect timing,” Lorne calls over his shoulder to his wife. “I need you to hold up the star while we finish the village.”

            Monica squeezes into the display beside her husband and step-daughter, careful not to trample the train set that has been assembled around the small pine tree in the centre. She knew nothing of flocking until Lorne moved into her life.

            “One the first day of Christmas…” Lorne pulls away the stencil, humming to himself, completely satisfied. Ella goes upstairs to make hot chocolate. Monica marvels that she has married a man who is so easily pleased. She fiddles with the bridge of the train set; its paint is wearing. Her forehead creases in concentration or worry. 

            “Is something the matter?” Lorne asks. 

            “The Dean called. The keynote speaker for next week’s conference broke his leg in a skiing accident. The seminary wants me to step in and give the opening address.”

            Monica specializes in the writings of a beloved Dutch priest who wrote about the spirituality of solitude, community and compassion. Lorne knew nothing of modern monasticism until Monica moved into his life.

            “Aren’t you a little busy to take this on right now?” Lorne asks. December in the parish is… how can he put it nicely? A Gong Show. From choir rehearsals to cookie exchanges, food drives to community turkey dinners, it’s the most wonderful – and insane– time of the year. But he can see from her expression she hasn’t said no.

            “They’ve offered to put me up at the King George Hotel for a few nights.”

            Lorne nods. “Nice.”

            “Yeah.”

            Neither of them say anything for a long moment.

            “Will you see her?”

            Monica puts the battered bridge back on the tracks. It’s already getting dark outside, snowing early this year. The city’s shelters will soon be full. 

            “I’ll do my best.”

There are exactly two Chinese restaurants in Lorne’s hometown of three thousand souls. Mr. Tang owns the King’s Buffet, where patrons can sit up front on vinyl banquettes or in the formal dining room in the back, where the Rotary Club meets on Tuesday nights and the Daughters of the Empire meet on Thursday mornings. The Lams, who arrived in town in the mid-seventies, opened The Palace across the street. Friday nights, when shift ends at the Welland Pump & Compressor, workers in search of a generous pour head to the Palace. The only telephone booth on Main Street is located in its smoky front entrance. Lorne tells his daughter Ella to “run to the Palace” if she needs a ride home from the pool, if she needs anything. But Lorne has never eaten there. He’s been loyal to the King’s Buffet, not for the food, but because he’s had a soft spot for Mr. Tang ever since the older man first came to Lorne’s hardware store years ago, looking for, of all things, wallpaper glue.

            Lorne had never seen Mr. Tang outside his restaurant. He’d never seen him without his apron, or his clipboard. Mr. Tang looked older under the weight of his puffy winter coat; a fur-lined hunting cap balanced on his head.

            “Mr. Tang!” Lorne said. “What can I help you with?”

            “Pat Quinn is falling off the wall,” Mr. Tang explained.

             “I beg your pardon?”

            “Orland Kurtenbach, too. All the players are peeling away. I need glue.”

            Now, if Lorne had bothered to look around in Mr. Tang’s restaurant, he would have recalled the peeling poster Mr. Tang was worried about. But Lorne was always in a hurry on Friday nights, and he simply ran in and out with his warm brown take-out bag. More often than not, he snuck at least one chicken ball in the car, burning his fingers and tongue, dripping pineapple sauce on his best plaid jacket.

            “I’ll come have a look. Get a better idea of what you need.”

If you had asked Monica Chambers ten years ago what she’d be doing when she was on the cusp of forty, it’s unlikely she would have said that she’d be staring at the attic ceiling of All Saints Church, poking her finger into soft plaster and pinching her nose against the overpowering smell of mothballs. A younger Monica pictured herself in a warm, wood-panelled den, patiently counselling some weary soul or standing tall in her heavy pulpit gown ready to inspire and encourage. This Monica – sweaty, dust-covered, searching for lost strawberry festival decorations Monica – was a far cry from the picture she’d imagined when she graduated seminary more than a decade ago.

            “I think I found them!” she called out to Hilda McGuire, who’d nominated Monica to check the attic.

            “Excellent! Now we can get to work,” Hilda said. She was one of the more spry seniors on the Strawberry Festival Committee. She ordered the berries and shortcake every year and made sure the folding tables were arranged in the parking lot in perfect formation, like soldiers or girl guides – long-suffering folk Hilda was partial to. 

            “There’s just one thing…” Monica said, as she lowered the box onto the floor and set aside the ladder.

            Hilda’s carefully pencilled in eyebrows arched. “Oh dear. I don’t like that look.”

            Hilda has been a member of All Saints since she was a baby. Her great grandfather’s contributions to the parish are commemorated in the stained-glass window to the left of the baptismal fount, right under the portrait of Saint Paul.

            “I think the roof is leaking,” Monica said.

            “Heaven help us,” Hilda said. “We’ll have to convene the Building Committee.”

            Heaven help us, indeed.

            Hilda hadn’t been this excited since she got booked in for hip replacement. 

Sharanne is taking her time with his hair, shaving the same straight edge at the base of his neck over and over.

            “What’s on your mind?”

            “How do you always know?” she sighs.

            He looks at her in the mirror over the counter, where a mason jar filled with blue antiseptic holds her combs and picks. Neither of them have changed their hairstyle in years; they still look like the teenagers they were on their wedding day.

            “Did Ella tell you about basketball tryouts?”

            Lorne tries to remember what he’d asked his daughter that morning, as she gulped down her cornflakes with alarming speed. They’d stayed up late watching a sitcom about four friends in New York City, which Ella loves and Lorne can’t stand, yet he watches it every week because more and more Ella wants to hang out with her friends and buy jeans that look like they’ve been pre-loved by a drywaller. He catches himself patting the couch cushion, like she’s a pet and he wants her to sit, stay. And he does. He’s afraid she’s slipping away.