Lauchlin of the Bad Heart Read Online Free Page B

him sometimes at odd hours, about long hot baths when he was hungover or depressed, about her not wishing to be left alone into the wee hours of the morning when he was off all night with a woman—she Johanna who had lived inthis house by herself for the years he was away working or at university or teaching and was all but fearless so far as Lauchlin could tell—about his whereabouts when she could not locate him. It wasn’t that she badgered or scolded, it was just that her desire for information about him was always there, even when unspoken. Just that kind of unwanted interest had changed his life. When you were a kid, it was all right, you’d think it strange if your mother didn’t care where you were or what you’d been up to, but as a man he didn’t want it.
    Yet they knew each other’s ways, they could slip and slide through one day after another, sit civilly in the same room, conversation was not always required, on some days they let talk go. And that made their occasional anger more bearable because it never came out in shouting but in frost, in definite and calculated silences. That was in Lauchlin’s blood anyway, his dad could go for a week with scarcely a murmur, there was no grudge or meanness in it, some people needed talk like lungs needed air and some didn’t. Lauchlin and his mother knew the whole play by now, what atmospheres to be wary of, what each would tolerate, admire, laugh at, dismiss. If asked separately, they would have said, yes, there isn’t a thing we don’t know about each other. But that of course was not true, and if it were, Lauchlin would have left long ago. He still remembered the time he’d passed his mother’s bedroom, seen her brilliant hair unloosed down her back, long and silvery against a blue nightgown, like a woman in an old tale, sitting on the edge of her bed in the light from her bedside lamp, her hands folded before the window that faced the road, her husband recently dead, and Lauchlin, struck by this, had stopped still in the hall and watched her as long as he dared, this woman who had sides to her he hardly knew.
    He heard her come in the back door, shove a chair aside in the kitchen.
    “What’s Slide burning in that car?” Lauchlin called to her over his shoulder. “Charcoal?”
    “The Irving man delivered our diesel this morning?” she said, washing her hands.
    “He did.”
    “Yes, and into the wrong tank. We’ve got a dozen cars on the road by now burning diesel instead of gasoline.”
    “Lord. Slide, poor devil, he’s not the only one who’s baffled I bet. Keeps that Buick tuned like a fiddle and suddenly she’s driving like a Model A. It’s Irving Oil’s mistake.”
    “And you can bet we’ll pay for it, not them. You better go down, Shane shouldn’t deal with it alone. Malcolm’s there on his throne, of course. He spends so much time in that chair we should charge him rent.”
    “Or hire him.” With Malcolm in the chair, the afternoon would pass quicker.
    “Oh, he wouldn’t want that, the old fool,” Johanna said.
    “You’re hard on him, Ma.”
    “Why shouldn’t I be? I’m hard on myself. There’s a letter there from Frank. He’s flying into Halifax soon. I don’t know when I’ll be seeing those grandsons of mine. What is it, three years since they were here last with their father?”
    “They’re busy boys now. And their mother likes new horizons, I think.”
    “She seemed to like our horizon well enough at one time. I don’t understand why Frank doesn’t bring all of them out here like he used to.”
    Lauchlin could have said, Well, Elaine and me maybe, and one particular summer, but he didn’t know how true that was anyway. Elaine likely had no interest in the Hebrides, not anymore, though she’d once claimed a specific interest in Scotsmen, late one night at the kitchen table, fuelled with Frank’s single malt and heavy doses of old country sentiment, the ancient islands of their great-grandfathers they had