The Hour of Bad Decisions by Russell Wangersky Page A

Mrs. Bird, saw that she was, in fact, the thin, stick-like woman he had expected, the very way he might have drawn her in his imagination, except for the fact it seemed there was no way a woman that small could generate a sound that full. She just wasn’t big enough to be a bell that could ring with such a depth of tone. He saw her peering through the window, not standing in the centre of the glass, but off to one side, peering from the corner as if she were an adjunct to her own living room. Her mouth was firmly closed, a thin, disapproving line, but still he could hear the sound, could hear it as clearly as if the tone were still hanging there in the air, existing all on its own.
    And for a moment, he knew exquisitely and absolutely, not just the smell of the zest of lemons, but everything, even the sight of the nubbled yellow peel on the side turned away from him: he felt he could know her entire universe from the space around her, as if her life was captured in the china figurines along the mantel, the seven wooden balustrades he could see behind her, climbing up, as if her hopes and fears and desires were crystallized in that three-foot-by-two-foot glass rectangle, in what it held, and what it did not. How it had never changed, how she raged through it, her voice battering with the unanswered question of why, why this had not been enough.
    When she looked away, quickly, it was as if he had looked too carefully, as if she was shamed by what he might have seen or by what he knew. As if she had misplaced something, as if she was embarrassed that she couldn’t put her finger on just exactly where it had gone.
    He met her outside, later, moving down the icy lane, walking carefully in small, pointed, fur-topped black boots, her face down, her words indistinct and muffled in the wool of her coat. He took it for “good morning.” The words had come tumbling out, a low rush, and he had picked up only the tone of them, the way they were thrown out in one single exhalation, as if discarded into the air.
    She was past him then, her shoulders hunched and impossibly narrow, as if she might turn sideways and vanish completely. Kevin was sure that she kept talking after she passed, that the words had continued spilling out, falling over themselves and scattering like salt under her feet, becoming their own sort of murmured security as she fled.
    One night, the snow came, filtering fine through the trees at first, not touching the branches, sifting flakes caught only by the light. Thin snow threading down in lines, and then there was more, filling the spaces between. In the laneway, the flakes fell in careful, tipped sequence into angled drifts, leaning against the fence on one side of the lane, so that when Kevin stumbled home through the shin-high, powdery snow, his footprints did not so much fill in as create their own forgiving, erasing avalanches.
    And there was a woman with him, holding his hand loosely, trailing like kite string back behind him, her own footsteps toppling in like afterthoughts behind her. Just someone he had met while Heather was working the hospital night shift, Heather working another Friday night call-in as the emergency room filled with the bruised, the shattered, the drunk.
    It was something about the corner of the woman’s mouth, that’s what he would remember later, just something about the corner of her mouth, a small ironic fold that appeared when she smiled, that made the two of them come together in the cigarette smoke and the downtown dark. Eventually, that half-smile would be the only thing he would even be able to conjure up of her, the only piece he could gather from memory’s scattered threads. But Mrs. Bird, Mrs. Bird he would never forget.
    A twitch of the curtains, an instant of Mrs. Bird’s profile, the black bead of one sharp, alert eye, and he was taken for a moment with the image of crows fighting in mid-air, the way one will fold its wings and fall, as if