A Good House by Bonnie Burnard Page A

feed on and off the truck, getting brown and bulking up. Late in the afternoon Margaret would lay out fresh underwear and pants and a shirt in the downstairs bathroom and watch for him at the kitchen window, listen for his footsteps on the gravel driveway. He’d come home coated in a cloud of feed dust and stand in the middle of the backyard to slap his pants and shirt hard and bend over to shake the dust from his hair and then he’d quickly strip to his underwear on the back porch, ducking into the bathroom to shove his head under the tap and wash for half an hour before anyone heard from him.
    Although he had assumed he would, Patrick had not liked living in residence much at all. The room was a lot smaller than the bedroom he shared with Paul at home, and John, the roommate assigned by alphabetic proximity, was a loud-mouthed, back-slapping jock from Ottawa who called girls wimen and acted like he’d just discovered booze and couldn’t seem to get enough of either.
    John introduced Patrick to his many, many friends and prodded him to come with them to the Brass Rail to find some friendly small-town wimen who might have their own apartments, their own apartments being the first and only consideration. Thinking there was a chance he had the guy all wrong, Patrick did go along for one of John’s “crime and corruption” nights but at the end of ithe found himself in the arms of a not very pretty girl who had no idea what was going on, who said almost nothing but welcomed him into her bed as if it meant something. Her own roommate was in the other bed with some other guy, not four feet away, moaning and whispering, and when everyone else fell asleep, he got dressed quickly and left. He didn’t even want to remember the not very pretty girl’s name.
    He said nothing, certainly didn’t tell Murray, and he turned down all further invitations. He watched John’s marks nosedive and hoped he’d flunk out, thinking, If there’s a God, this guy’s gone. Some small hesitation had kept him from telling John that his mother had just died and by October he was glad he’d hesitated.
    All his classes were huge. He hated that, the amphitheatres, the fact that not even the professors knew him by name. He and Murray ate lunch together between classes and they worked in the library, went to the odd Mustangs game, drank quietly at the Ceeps where they met but did not take up with several pretty, lively young women who were away from home for the first time too and game for almost anything anyone might propose.
    But now it was summer and he wanted someone, needed someone. After several weeks delivering feed, twice to the Elliot farm, he had phoned Sandra Elliot to ask her to go out to the Casino dance on Saturday night. Sandra was going into grade twelve with Daphne and he remembered her from high school, vaguely. He’d heard from Daphne that she had just broken up with some guy from Parkhill and he assumed correctly that they had worked all this out ahead of him, that his call was expected. Both times when he’d pulled into the yard with feed Sandra was just coming out of the house, as if by chance, and when he’d finished unloading she leaned against the truck to talk to him, turned and lifted her head quickly to make her dark red hair swing. She focused on him with big easy smiles, used her posture to make sure he was aware of her breasts, and bending to pet one of the dogs, offered little glimpses of very white cheek not quite hidden by short shorts.
    When he picked her up on the Saturday night, getting out of Margaret’s Pontiac to go inside and meet the mother, Sandra camedown the stairs in a sundress her mother said she’d got an A for in Home Economics. It was dark red with a full skirt and thin straps which Sandra identified, when they were in the car on their way out to the lake, as spaghetti straps. Spaghetti straps required a strapless bra, she told him.
    Less than a year later, when they were finally finished with