Algoma by Dani Couture Page B

re-purposed leftovers—allowed her to feel as if she was not taking from her sisters, or the world. She was simply living off the oven-hardened edges.
    Algoma’s father, Richard, had been a large man who towered over everyone he met. He had the broad shoulders of a boxer and the soft jowls and dark piercing eyes of an aging movie star. When the girls were little, they’d fought over who could sit in his lap and watch Westerns with him, which was all he ever watched.
    Repairing refrigerators and air conditioners was Richard’s life calling and it was the only job he’d ever had even though his wife hated air conditioning.
    “It’ll rot your lungs out,” she said, when he brought a unit home during an unusually hot summer. She refused to let him install it. “It’ll bring up the electric bill.” The air conditioner sat in a corner in the basement until his eldest daughter took it with her when she moved out.
    Richard could fix almost anything. His large hands had a strange grace. Anything could be repaired, he figured, as long as you had the right tools and some time. His wife, Ann, did not fix things as much as she manifested them. She had a way of making everything turn out the way she wanted it to. “If I’m happy, you’re happy” was her favourite saying.
    Ann was a plain woman who managed to convince everyone that she was an “unconventional beauty.” Of average height, she had wispy brown hair that she styled strategically to hide her large forehead. It was almost impossible to find a photograph of her taken head on. Her face was always angled, her eyes looking somewhere else, possibly at the life she thought she should have had. The one she deserved.
    Between children, Ann worked as a waitress at a restaurant in town that catered to the elderly—soft foods, stews, and soups—although she acted more like a therapist or doctor than a waitress. Over soup and sandwiches, customers told her about their problems and their pains. Ann gave out her advice and diagnoses freely, which the customers readily ate up. She left each shift with her pockets full of tips. There were few things that Ann wasn’t a self-professed expert on, especially on the home front.
    Ann let Richard have his way from time to time, allowing him a few big coups a year so she could hold domain the rest of the time over everything from dinner to how often the lawn was cut. There was only one instance in their marriage when Richard put his foot down. The names of their daughters.
    While Richard had never been so much as the captain of a rowboat, he was obsessed with the freighters that navigated through the Great Lakes and across the Atlantic Ocean, the self-unloaders and gearless bulk carriers that transported everything from grain and ore to salt and gypsum from port to port. He was so taken by the ships that he named his daughters after freighters in his favourite fleet: Algoma Central Corporation. A photograph of the Algoma black bear on a stack or bow caused his heart to pump like a diesel engine and made his blood run hot.
    In the final weeks of Ann’s first pregnancy, when she looked ready to topple over from the sheer size of her belly, she’d begged Richard to consider more traditional names: Rebecca, Jane, or Julie. “Something normal,” she said.
    He refused.
    “They’ll be a team,” he said. “And we’ll be the captains.”
    Richard imagined his future children as empty ships he would send out into the world—across lakes, rivers, and oceans, and through all weather—children who would return to him with riches that would see him through the rest of his life, so that he could stop dreaming of the mille-feuille metal fins of the air conditioners he fixed. The ticking time bombs of failing motors.
    And so he named his girls Algocen, Algosteel, Algolake, Algosoo, Algobay, and Algoport. Ann tried to tell people they were family names that had been passed down through the years, but no one believed her.
    Richard favoured