Annabel by Kathleen Winter Page A

the best for you. All fathers want the best for their children. He just wants to give you the skills you need to have a good life. He wants his son to be happy.”
    “He is mad. I can tell by his voice.”
    “Your father doesn’t raise his voice.” This was true. Treadway’s mother and father had screamed at each other throughout his childhood, and he had told Jacinta early in their marriage that he would not yell, and he did not want her to yell.
    “It all comes out one way or another,” Jacinta told her sister later on the phone, but her sister was in a Mount Pearl subdivision and could not help her.
    Treadway had no idea how to deal with tension. His house was as quiet as he had vowed it would be, but inner yelling was new to him, and when it began, he left the house and went in his boat to the island, or down his trapline.

9
    Lettuce Sandwich
    T HERE WAS A WAY YOU COULD WALK nonchalantly past Wally Michelin’s picket gate and make it seem you were on your way to the shortcut everyone used to get to the Hudson’s Bay store. Wayne wished he could go through Wally’s gate and knock on her door, but he could not. He wished he could pick pearly everlasting growing in the rocks, wrap the stems in long grass, and stick the bouquet in her letterbox anonymously, though in a way that she would instantly recognize as being from him only, but he could not do that either. He walked past her gate without glancing at it, and felt like a complete idiot.
    A red water gun hung in the Hudson’s Bay store window. He had outgrown water guns. A plastic radio did not interest him either. Everything in the window looked as if it had sat there too long. It looked as if the things had been sent to Labrador because people in other places had no use for them. It was one of the things his mother complained about.
    “They have blueberries,” she said, “in quarter-pint tubs for two dollars, when we pick our own five-gallon buckets a hundred feet from our own back steps.”
    The blueberries in the store were twice the size of the local ones and were nearly rotten. And the store had no fresh milk. Jacinta was the only person Wayne had ever heard mention this. In Labrador you drank tea black, with sugar. The store never ran out of sugar.
    On Wayne’s fifth day of walking nonchalantly past her house, Wally Michelin came out.
    “Do you want a lettuce sandwich?”
    Wayne had never heard of making a sandwich that contained only lettuce.
    “It’s really good with a can of Sprite. I always make one when my mom’s out selling Avon.”
    Wayne remembered the house from when Thomasina Baikie had owned it. Now it was different. Wally’s father had put in big kitchen windows through which the light of Hamilton Inlet spilled, and it was in this light that Wally placed four slices of Holsum bread. With a spatula she scraped Miracle Whip on the bread, where it sank into the white holes.
    “The most important thing is the mayonnaise.”
    “My mom waterproofs bread with margarine.”
    “I never heard of waterproofing bread.”
    She tore curls of lettuce from an iceberg head, shredded them, and scattered them on the bread, then shook salt. Wayne expected the sandwich to be tasteless. He thought it would taste as if someone had forgotten the luncheon meat.
    Wally bit. “See?”
    The lettuce tasted green, crisp, cold. Part of him felt that only a deprived person would think lettuce on its own tasted exciting. But it did, and this gave him a new sense that you could strip things down more than his parents had done; a thing like lettuce could sustain you. All the worries his father had, a man’s efforts for the survival of himself and his family, were they too elaborate?
    His mother was elaborate as well. Here, in Wally Michelin’s empty house, without her parents, without meat, and in the blazing light from which his own house turned away, Wayne felt an excitement he could not name.
    After the lettuce sandwich Wayne and Wally became friends. Wayne