Cool Water by Dianne Warren

almost a teenager, has been allowed to “build” his own bedroom downstairs. Blaine didn’t see the need for it, but Vicki tried to be more understanding of Shiloh’s growing desire for privacy. She and Shiloh decided on the south – west corner as the driest and brightest spot in a mostly dark unfinished basement. Although she didn’t really have time (the garden’s bounty was waiting for her attention) Vicki helped Shiloh build a low wooden platform out of scrap lumber to keep the bed up off the cement floor. They carried a worn area rug down the basement steps and laid it on the platform, and they hung two old bedspreads from the ceiling to create walls, or at least the illusion of walls. Then they took Shiloh’s bed apart and reassembled it in the new room, and Vicki found a floor lamp and a couple of plastic storage tubs for Shiloh to use for his clothes, and she made him some shelves out of boards and bricks for his CD player and other personal things.
    Vicki noticed that Shiloh was sullen the whole time they were creating the room and moving him into it, but she didn’t say anything. She assumed it was his age and adolescent hormones, and she promised to get him a desk as soon as they had a bit of extra money, and even a computer if they could afford it. She ignored him when he said, “I guess that won’t happen anytime soon”—he was getting so like his father—and she said cheerfully, “Well, maybe not, but you never know, I might win the lottery.” She left him to his decorating then, and he covered the two cement walls with pictures of hockey players cut from Sports Illustrated and a poster from the national rodeo finals in Edmonton that Lynn Trass had let him take from the window of the Oasis Café.
    Shiloh Dolson, just shy of his thirteenth birthday, likes his new room even if he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t care that it’s dark and it doesn’t have real walls and he’s already had to squash a couple of sowbugs. There is one problem though, which he discovers on this, his first night in the basement. The problem is a heating duct that runs along the floor joists above his head. He wakes up at three in the morning, and through the duct he can hear his parents arguing. The fact that they argue is nothing new. Shiloh’s heard them a hundred times before. What’s problematic is that he can now hear what they’re arguing about. He’d always assumed money, being fully aware of the situation his parents are in. He knows the farm is mostly gone, all but the home quarter, although Vicki keeps trying to reassure him that things will get better and that Blaine will get the land back, or at least be in a position to rent before too long. It’s happened to people before, she tells Shiloh, and they bounce back. It’s not your father’s fault, she says, it’s the times, it’s like people running out of fish on the East Coast, not their fault, but things will change. Wait until people in Ottawa and Toronto have to pay five dollars for a loaf of bread, she says, then the politicians will come to their senses.
    Shiloh doesn’t know what to think. He doesn’t know what the cost of a loaf of bread in Toronto has to do with anything and, except for Vicki’s reassurances, what he hears, he hears on the TV news like everyone else in the country. Maybe there’s too much wheat in the world and Blaine hasn’t figured that out, although Shiloh does remember him growing canary seed a few years ago and swearing he’d never do it again because of the full-body protection he’d had to wear to harvest the damned stuff, complaining to Vicki about the itching and chafing he’d had to put up with to grow feed for canaries in New York City. But maybe the canary-seed experiment failed because Blaine is a bad farmer. Maybe it is all Blaine’s fault.
    There’s another possibility. Maybe, and