Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani Page B

of mustard, too.” He poured himself a drink, had a minor fight with Aunt Fred about the mustard jars—“Why didn’t you just go out and buy a set of glasses!”—and waited for my father to come home from work.
    When Mr. Holmes arrived, he sat at the kitchen table with Uncle Fred and drank a glass of Nelson’s Blood.
    “Here’s to the spirits inside us, the ones that warm our bellies,” said Uncle Fred, and they clinked mustard glasses. There was an air of precarious jollity in the room.
    I believe Father liked the rum, though he sat stiffly, like a soul conflicted. Even so, he seemed to enjoy the story Aunt and Uncle Fred had to tell. On the way to our house, a great fight had taken place on the King’s Highway. They knew every pee stop on that highway, between our town and theirs. They knew where the washrooms were clean and where they were filthy,where to find homemade raisin pie and where the spice cake was stale. Uncle Fred swore that the best liver-and-bacon breakfast was served in a service-station diner. Aunt Fred said there wasn’t a handle on a toilet she couldn’t flush with her shoe.
    The fight took place at a pancake house, miles from nowhere. They quarrelled; Aunt Fred shouted, stood up, dumped a bowl of syrup over my uncle’s head and walked out. She got into the car and locked the door, but when she started the engine, she remembered that she had left her glasses in the restaurant and couldn’t drive without them. Inside, Uncle Fred was wiping syrup off his skull. The waitress brought a damp cloth so he could clean himself up. He left his pancakes, paid for the uneaten meals, scooped up my aunt’s abandoned glasses and stomped outside. He circled the car, threatening, until Aunt Fred rolled her window down an inch and then unlocked the doors. At the same moment, she spied a drop of golden syrup that had landed inside one of his huge ears. She hooted with laughter, which made him angry all over again. By the time he was sitting behind the wheel and she had slid over onto the passenger side, the two of them were exhausted. They locked the car and went inside once more, this time to share a pot of tea. They had lost their appetites, and the tea calmed them down. Just as they pulled onto the highway again, the wings of a great blue heron unfolded from the landscape at the side of the road. Uncle Fred was certain that this was a positive sign.
    They took turns recounting these things until I asked, “What was the argument about?”
    There was silence. Neither could remember. “It must have been something small,” Aunt Fred said. She lowered her brows and looked Uncle Fred in the eye, which meant that he wasn’t to tell.
    “I guess it wasn’t important,” Uncle Fred said, while we waited for an answer.
    But Aunt Fred told me later, out of earshot of my uncle, that she did remember the sensation of risk that had rolled through her like a wave when she held the syrup bowl in her hand and knew what she was about to do. I tried to imagine Phil dumping syrup over the skull of Mr. Holmes, but the image would not be conjured.
    After we’d all had our supper, we moved to the parlour so that we could listen to Boston Blackie , Uncle Fred’s favourite radio program. He refused to miss an episode, whether he was home or a visitor in someone else’s house. He and Aunt Fred sat quietly, not a hint of old quarrel in the air.
    Before my aunt and uncle left, I overheard my mother telling Aunt Fred how much she enjoyed working at the store.
    “I love having a proper job,” she said. “Even if I get tired of some of the customers. You wouldn’t believe what they find to crab about.” Her greying hair was now cropped below her ears. She had bought a pair of glasses and these had small, round lenses that magnified her eyes. She was filled with energy in the evenings, and she had begun to tell stories of her own. Stories about customers who came in and out of the store, what they wanted, what they paid,