Catch Me When I Fall by Westerhof Patricia Page A

Military Figures. Saturday nights were the worst. That was the night he and Lucy had leisurely shared much more than toast before they drifted off to sleep. He swallowed the last bite, rose, and scrubbed the plate clean under running water in the sink. The plates were looking scratched these days. Probably he should use a cloth rather than the pot scrubber. He added “dish cloth” to the grocery list taped on the fridge.
    Lucy had called herself a breast cancer warrior. She didn’t like the term survivor , said surviving seemed too passive, like you were just waiting for luck. They were planning to move east once she completed her PhD thesis. He was going to become a training development officer with the armed forces—he already had a master’s degree in education and was a member of the Reserves. They were going to have children.
    He added bread and bologna to the grocery list. Tomorrow he would do laundry and drive to Safeway. Keep moving. Because Lucy the warrior was now resting in eternal peace. Good soldiers, he reminded himself, did not brood on lost battles—unless there was something to be learned. He should think about his work instead. It too felt like a battle. His grade ten social studies class, the western history class, and, really, the Canadian history class too. He was marching students through the content, but they weren’t grasping the significance. Didn’t see how understanding the past enabled one to embrace a deliberate life in the present.
    Stan placed the pencil in the cutlery drawer and ambled into the bathroom. The problem was, he thought, that when students left his room, discipline vanished. Because of teachers like his colleague Liana Steen, who never seemed to educate—she just showed DVD s and assigned group presentations. Or Eliza Zylstra in the English department. She taught many of the same kids he did, and destroyed his efforts with her touchy-feely discussions and lax rules about deadlines.
    Still, he found himself thinking as he brushed his teeth, she looked good today. The fullness of her flesh, the tantalizing purple lace. He tried not to notice breasts, or at least not to dwell on them. It seemed a betrayal of Lucy. He looked away from women in tight T-shirts or with cleavage-revealing necklines. Ally, a short girl in his grade eleven Canadian history class, habitually leaned forward so that her large breasts rested on the desktop, like two plump dinner rolls at a banquet. When he’d found his eyes straying too often toward her, he moved her to the back corner of the room.
    Stan got into bed. He read a few pages of Rommel’s Desert War: The Life and Death of the Afrika Korps . Feeling wide awake, he turned on CNN with his bedside remote control. Another roadside bomb in Afghanistan; no background story, just the smoky image of an overturned jeep. All hype and no depth in the reporting. He hauled himself out of bed, walked to the spare room, and rifled through his desk for blank paper. None there. He checked the kitchen counter and finally wrote on the grocery list, “Explain to the grade tens the difference between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Use maps.”
    That was another infuriating thing about Eliza. Her thinking was simplistic. Illogical. Ron, his department head, had told him with some concern that Eliza suggested they gloss over wars in their lessons, instead spending their time highlighting great deeds in history. “Use HISTORY class to provide students with ROLE models.” Ron had mimicked Eliza’s strange emphasis on certain words. Staring at the grocery list, Stan imagined Eliza saying his name with that trilling voice. Maybe she’d call him Stanley instead of Stan, like his first girlfriend had.
    He thought about the lacy undergarment. He’d snickered when he described it to Ron after school, but only for a moment. Liana, the only female member of their department, was at her desk, and besides,