A Good House by Bonnie Burnard

his bones and his skin. He said this was the only way he could think to describe what was wrong with him.
    A month before she died Sylvia had told Bill that anything might happen. Lying in their damp bed he’d listened to her worries about the kids and then he’d heard her describe a probable life for him in the arms of some other, unimagined woman, heard her say clearly that he wouldn’t have any choice, he would just have to trust his needs and take it as it came. She said she believed that if she were in his shoes, that’s what she’d do. She would just have to.
    Although Margaret was carefully casual with Bill in the company of others, in their own bed she stroked him and tried to soothe him. She praised Sylvia. She talked about Sylvia with all the affection she could muster, about her courage, her spunk, how she had loved herchildren, the way she could mimic people, the way she could get everyone laughing. She prodded Bill to remember Sylvia’s take on his sister-in-law, made him laugh with her, remembering. Margaret believed she could do this, allow Sylvia to continue on in him. They weren’t kids.
    Gradually her kindness began to work its magic and eventually she found the courage to say that, like it or not, life simply has to be for the living. She told him it was a good thing to keep living. When Bill confessed like a sinner that what he really felt was lucky, lucky having had Sylvia and now having her, Margaret nodded yes in the dark and pulled him down, hoping only that because her own body was so different from Sylvia’s he would be able to believe that this was a very separate thing he was doing now.
    In the early spring, after some blunt but encouraging counsel from Doc Cooper, she allowed herself to become pregnant, guessing correctly that babies sometimes alleviate suffering. Walking uptown to work on a bright, clear morning, watching the branches on the trees along the streets sway with the new weight of buds, she willed the sperm she had just received an hour before to give it their very best effort. There will be prizes, she told them.
    The kids didn’t bother themselves with thoughts of Margaret in bed with their father. They, too, were not without instinct. The harder adjustment was watching her large hands on their mother’s belongings: her aprons, her mixmaster, her clothespins, her sewing machine, the junk in her junk drawer. The irritations were petty and jolting, the way she blew her nose in short, quick bursts, and her bags, her growing cache of bags, the way she flattened and folded every bag that entered her domain and tucked it in a drawer, just in case.
    Living on her own in the long, narrow apartment above the Hydro office, working at her oversized desk at the back of the hardware store, all those years entering her ledger numbers precisely for an easy balance at month end, her only deviance an occasional ticket for speeding on her way into the city, Margaret had once in a while taken some time to imagine a life something like this one. Among the many choices she’d imagined she would have, things like clean windows and lots of them, good meals carefully prepared and nicelyserved, a mirror in a bathroom opening on a private, ordinary mix of male and female toiletries, she had always thought she would call a daughter Kathleen and a son Tom.
    But late in the summer, when her condition became so evident it had to be taken into account, Daphne, meaning only to make a show of maturity, to be seen to be accepting of this baby and all its implications, brought the naming to the supper table as if she were absolutely entitled to do this, asking Bill as she added another possibility to her list, “So who named me?”
    Margaret sat back and let them do it. Stephen it was. Stephen Thomas. Or Sarah Kathleen. Sally.
    H OME for the summer in early May, Patrick had got a promotion at McFarlane’s mill. He was now driving a one-ton truck around the countryside making deliveries, heaving sacks of