Elizabeth and After by Matt Cohen Page B

you’d be dead.” His father’s face and eyes were tinged with yellow. Theway they’d been when he’d collapsed and the doctor had told him to quit drinking or he’d be dead in six months. McKelvey, being McKelvey, had circled the day on the calendar and kept on. At the end of six months, the yellow had turned orange and he was staggering around the farm like a walking cesspool. Carl had come down one morning to find his father lying on the kitchen floor, panting like a cow in labour.
    “Coffee,” McKelvey had commanded.
    Carl had made him coffee, put it on the floor beside him. Then he’d taken down the bottle of brandy and set it beside the coffee. “Go ahead. It’s fifteen minutes before I have to go to work. If you die first I can get the day off.”
    “Fuck you,” McKelvey had said.
    That was when they still had the farm. Or what was left of it. All the stock gone except for one bull and the few cows it serviced to give them some calves to sell for beef. A couple of tractors they spent most of their time repairing so they could get in enough hay to winter the cattle.
    “You should have seen this place in my father’s day,” William McKelvey would say. At some point, Carl didn’t know how or when, his father had lost it—
it
being the ability to get up every morning and make the farm a farm instead of a mass of unpredictable vegetation and broken machinery, the ability to go out there and do whatever had to be done instead of wandering about the countryside, a bottle in his pocket, or sitting at the kitchen table tied to his coffee pot and the newspaper. “I could have done it with her,” McKelvey told Carl, and Carl first thought he meant if Elizabeth had lived. Then he realized that McKelvey meant not only her presence but her cooperation, he meant he could have done it if she’d stayed at home instead of going out to work—he could have done it if she had done it for him.
    “You want coffee?” The door had opened and a girl was standing beside them holding a tray with two full cups, containers of sugar and milk. She was short, black-haired, almost pretty, and she was smiling down at McKelvey.
    “Meet my boss,” McKelvey said complacently. “Her name is Moira and I mostly do what she tells me.”
    “My father,” Carl said, nodding at McKelvey.
    “One of my favourites,” Moira said. She had a quiet voice and as she set down the tray Carl could almost see her judging him, trying to make sense out of the fact that not only was William McKelvey his father, but he William McKelvey’s son.
    Carl McKelvey looked out at his truck. Being born William McKelvey’s son was like being born with a limp or a blind eye or a birthmark on the face. “I ‘ll be seeing you,” Carl said. He stood up and started across the lawn. Now he was really back. Carl McKelvey, the McKelvey boy, another fuck-up McKelvey whose fists moved faster than his brain, always ready to lash out or wrap themselves around a nearby bottle; after everything that had happened he was back and pretty soon he’d probably either be in jail or in hospital. One certain thing: he had a long way to go before he’d be splayed out like his father on a fat wooden chair with a pretty girl to pat his head and bring him coffee.
    Later that night, his first in the Balfer place—trying to drive out the ghosts with the smell of cooking, the sound of his own voice, his boots on the floor, the disorganized pile of possessions he was unloading into the centre of the living room—he wondered how it would be to have a woman here, what kind of wild echo that woman’s voice might find in the empty rooms.
    The truth was, thinking about women he had never met was a way of avoiding Chrissy: the way she’d looked openingthe door to him, her eyes larger, more liquid than they used to be; her tawny hair cut shorter; her lips pale, full, lips he’d kissed for the first time on a New Year’s Eve, kissed while he was stealing a dance with her from Fred