The Best Thing for You by Annabel Lyon

Liam says, shaking his hand.
    They call this work.
    “Katherine, you look amazing,” this man, this stranger, says,and he hugs me too. “My sister had the same procedure a couple of years ago and she’s fine.”
    “Okay, what is going on?” I ask Liam in the hall.

    Ty, when we collect him, is in a mutinous mood. “You told her,” he accuses us. He means Isobel.
    “Did you talk about it?” I ask, because my Liam is driving.
    “I knew it,” Ty says. “She was being nice to me.”
    “And normally, god knows, she’s very mean.”
    “Who else knows?”
    “Look, idiot,” I say. “We had to get a lawyer somewhere. Isobel referred us. Should we have picked one out of the phone book? You know what happens when you pick them out of the phone book?”
    “You’re going to tell me,” he says, so then I don’t. Instead I ask Liam about his little starlet.
    “You know,” he says meaningfully.
    When we get home he goes straight into his office and shuts the door. We hear the TV go on, the now-familiar screech of tires and sting of music signalling the start of
that movie again.
I tell Ty to get the hell into bed.
    “Sieg heil,” he says, and I slap him.
    We stare at each other, sharing disbelief. He reaches for, but doesn’t quite touch, the reddening mark of my hand on his cheek.
    Before this, the worst thing I ever did was vandalize a car. That ended badly, as you’d expect – getting caught, going to court with the sweating, stuttering, milky-eyed phone-book lawyer, facing my parents – but the core truth was it was fun and I’d have done it again. The car belonged to Liam’s aunt, though Ididn’t know that at the time; I thought it was Liam’s car. Nor did I know that she lived with Liam (or rather he with her); that she was watching me through the window, phone in hand, blue lights already on their way, while I tried to let Liam know how I felt about him pursuing me. Love was a disease I was immune to, for a while anyway.
    “Just so you know,” I tell Ty. “Your father’s been telling people I had a biopsy, to account for all the work he’s having to miss, because of you.”
    “I don’t know what that means,” he says. He’s crying, again.

    Stuffed in the bike courier bag I use as a purse, in my office at the clinic at the end of another endless day, these gifts: the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue CD of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” and a travel-size vial of chewable Gravol. No card, no note, no mystery either.

    Sunday night, end of the line. Rain hemorrhages. In our basement, what the Parmenters call the rec room, a window no bigger than a shoebox lurks near the ceiling. A watery black eye: rainwater makes sheets and swags of unclarity on the glass. Beyond I can see the wavering lines of the iron grille we bolted over the window after a rash of neighbourhood break-ins last summer, but not the low-down, grass-in-your-face, cat’s-eye view of the garden you get during the day. The garden is gone, the street is gone, the city is gone, and it is just the three of us, alone together in this cave carved out of the empty black stuff of night. Dark-red tones I had chosen for a colour scheme down here, and grouped before the single flickering light of the TV we could be prehistorics before a flickering fire, holed up in thefalse, ruddy safety of our den. We have adopted the following attitudes: myself at one end of the sofa, Liam lying with his feet on my lap, Ty between us on the floor, leaning half against the sofa, half against my leg. The movie is a soother of Liam’s, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake with the sound turned low. A few hours ago we told Ty we loved him. Then, not knowing what else to do, we suggested movies. He asked for popcorn, but the bowl sits full and untouched on the chair he abandoned to sit nearer to us. Now, touching, we are still and separate as three photographs. The rain rains, the movie moves, and the hours roll away like weights that kept our lives from