A Good House by Bonnie Burnard Page B

everyone would drift into the living room to surround Sylvia on the bed and talk. They would begin with shamelessly enhanced reports of recent events: somebody’s drunk, raging brother-in-law evicted from a dance at the arena, a wedding already planned for July with the bridesmaids to be decked out in dark red velveteen, the highest stained-glass library window unaccountably broken on Thursday night, likely in the middle of the night by a book-hating cult, Daphne said.
    From there they would move on to casual, recreational gossip, to conjecture and guesswork. When the momentum picked up they would home in on the oddest people, the misfits, or the ones they knew the least about, or the ones they didn’t like. In full swing they encouraged and contradicted and interrupted and accused one another and lied as much as they had to, to keep it going. Sylvia still knew everyone they talked about, she hadn’t been in bed long enough to forget how the world worked, and she egged them on and sometimes topped them with mildly nasty but apparently precise accounts from a distant past.
    When she couldn’t continue she would fade back into her stack of pillows and pronounce, “We are really, really despicable, every one of us,” and Bill would respond with his own line, “We’re not so bad we can’t get worse.” If Sylvia was very tired, the kids just squeezed her feet through the blankets as they made their way out of the living room.
    Bill left Sylvia’s daytime care to her mother because he still had to show up for work at the hardware store. And he still sat in the front booths of the Blue Moon with the other men who worked uptown, the wits, as they were called. The wits knew the situation with Sylvia Chambers and they tried to accommodate it, tried to group their working bodies around it. Normally they passed the time talking politics, casually confusing the facts and enlarging the issues to the point of hopelessness, repeating like slogans the words damnpoliticians and highertaxes. Some days, for a change of pace, they attacked rumoured advances in science or technology, theirsuspicions banked up by the always reliable tag team of half-baked information and rampant skepticism. But with Bill’s situation as it was, they stalled, hesitated a half beat before they spoke, tempered their jumpy, mocking, scatter-gun talk with oblique half-phrased sentiments and couched clichés carefully aimed to miss the mark. They endured the occasional silence, asked short, gentle questions, not for any answer but for the gentleness itself.
    This couldn’t last. Worn down and fed up with gentleness and care, they conceived a plan.
    The men knew that Sylvia had been moved down to the living room and that there was only the one bathroom in that house, so they decided that a group of dilettante carpenters would build her a downstairs bathroom. Archie Stutt was signed on and both grandfathers and the Anglican minister. Trevor Hanley, who had the Chev Olds dealership, said he’d come, said he was all warmed up because he’d just put the finishing touches to a shed out at the cottage last fall. And Archie said that he’d talk to the new guy at the Esso to see if he could be had.
    Bill didn’t put up any resistance. Although he’d pulled the old picket fence down on his own when he got home from overseas, he couldn’t help with something like this because even now, more than ten years after he’d had to start relying exclusively on his left hand, it wasn’t entirely trustworthy, not with precision work, not with heavy tools. And he wasn’t in any position to leave his job at the hardware.
    But he used his discount to pay for most of the materials and he borrowed a thirty-cup coffeemaker from the Presbyterian church. He made new coffee every morning and put it on a makeshift table in the kitchen near the back door because it was March and the ground was hard, the work was cold.
    T HE construction started from the outside. In the beginning