Chapter 9 - THE CLEANING OF THE FOUNDATION
By November, the freeze had set into the clay along the Don Valley.
The plum trees in the back garden at 414 Pape had dropped every leaf, their black, crooked branches standing sharp against the gray morning sky like ink lines on linen paper.
I was on my knees in the third-floor front bedroom, wearing an old flannel shirt of Dad’s that smelled faintly of cedar chips and tobacco, pulling up the water-damaged broadloom carpet that a previous tenant had laid down in the nineties.
Underneath was yellow heart-pine.
Wide, clear planks, three inches across, held down with square-headed iron nails that had been forged before the first World War. They were dark with fifty years of floor wax, but when I ran my bare thumb over the grain, the wood was stone-cold and bone-hard.
"You’re going to ruin your knees," Carl said from the doorway.
He was holding two cardboard cups of coffee from the Greek bakery down the street and a brown paper bag containing two warm cinnamon buns.
"My knees are thirty-one," I said, sitting back on my heels and wiping my forehead with the back of my wrist. "They have another twenty years of scraping before they start complaining like Frances's."
Carl handed me a cup, stepped into the room, and tapped the pine planks with the toe of his boot. "The real estate board called this morning. Hugo’s license was formally suspended by the provincial tribunal yesterday afternoon. Pending the outcome of the fraud review on the variance applications."
I took a sip of the coffee. It was strong, black, and tasted of chicory. "What about Lena?"
"Lena Vance is a survivor," Carl said, sitting down on an overturned joint-compound bucket. "She produced three emails showing Hugo had told her firm he held the full beneficial interest through an offshore trust. She threw him under the municipal bus before the hearing even started. Last I heard, she’s doing commercial zoning in Calgary. Apparently, they don't care about heritage rosettes in Alberta."
"And Hugo?"
"He moved into his brother’s basement in Mississauga," Carl said, peeling open the paper bag. "He called the firm twice last week wanting to know if you were going to file for a division of marital assets on the loft lease."
"The loft was in his name," I said. "He can keep the security deposit. I kept the furniture Dad made."
Below us, from the main floor, the front door closed with that heavy, iron-latched thud that had signaled the end of my school days for twenty years.
"Abby?"
My mother’s voice carried up the stairwell, clear and unhurried.
"Up here, Mom!"
Her footsteps came up the treads. One, two, three... then the fourth tread—the one Dad had planed down with his hand-draw in the summer of ninety-six.
It didn't make a sound.
Jean appeared in the doorway wearing her gray woolen cardigan and carrying a small brass screw-eye and a length of picture wire.
"The plumber finished the lateral replacement," she said, looking around the bare room with its exposed pine planks. "He said the lead intake Arthur put in seventy-six was still holding sixty pounds of pressure. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Said nobody uses schedule-forty copper anymore. Too expensive."
"Arthur didn't like doing things twice," Carl said.
"No," Jean agreed, sitting down on the window sill where the morning light hit her tortoiseshell combs. "He was a very lazy man that way. He thought doing a job right the first time was the only way to ensure you had time to go fishing on Saturdays."
She looked at me, her blue eyes clear behind her wire rims.
"I had a letter from Hugo’s mother this morning," she said.
My hand stopped on the edge of the carpet pry-bar. "From Eleanor?"
"She apologized for the disturbance at *L’Avenue*," Jean said, her voice dry and even. "She said Hugo had always been ambitious, but she didn't realize he had become... common."
Carl choked on his cinnamon bun. "Common. That’s an eighty-year-old Presbyterian woman’s way of calling someone a horse thief."
"It’s accurate enough," Jean said. She reached out and touched the window sash—the original Douglas fir, its counterweights rattling softly inside the frame as a streetcar rumbled past on the avenue below. "She asked if you were going to contest the decree."
"The divorce was granted on grounds of material fraud three days ago," I said. "The decree absolute came in the mail yesterday."
May you like
"Good," Jean said. She handed me the picture wire. "Then help me hang your father’s survey map in the hall. It’s been sitting on the sideboard long enough."
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