Harmless by James Grainger Page B

made him want to drink?
    “You were at that prom too, eh, Julian?”
    He didn’t like Mike’s faux-innocent expression. Mike hadn’t met Liz until almost ten years later, but he knew the prom party ended in Julian’s dad’s hot tub at five in the morning. Very soft-core, but it put Jane and Joseph in the same vicinity.
    “I was there, in my powder blues,” Julian said.
    “And that ruffled shirt.” Liz laughed. “Like cotton candy.”
    Franny and Rebecca leaned in closer, sensing intrigue.
    “Did you rent a tux for the big night?” Franny asked.
    Joseph nodded, not trusting himself to elaborate. He didn’t need Franny overhearing any cherished stories from his wild youth or even wilder early twenties, the details filling a biographical hole with the very Party Boy antics he needed to warn her off of. Dad with a dated haircut prowling the rec rooms, video arcades, and park parties of yesteryear, stoned, drunk, and on the make. Liz might as well hand Franny a photo, and by the end of the weekend she just might—even in the maelstrom, Liz had packed a camera.
    Luckily Jane mentioned dessert, and the boys reminded their mothers about a promised after-dinner movie. She shrugged as the kids ran to the fridge, followed by Franny and Rebecca, signalling the end of her formal parenting duties. Joseph took the hint and went to retrieve his belated housewarming gift, two bottles he’d picked up at industry events.
    When he got back to the table, Alex was telling an anecdote that tweaked Joseph’s memory. It was from when Alex was still living in the city, slogging away on another reality TV show, this one about downtown home renovations he’dnicknamed “The Shock Troops of Gentrification,” working fourteen-hour days without paid overtime. He’d tried to organize his fellow crew members into a union, a plan that went over as well as a recruiting drive for the Khmer Rouge and got him blacklisted after someone ratted him out to the producers. Alex had worked himself into an uncharacteristic fury when he found out, raging about his co-workers to Joseph with a torrent of personal contempt that Joseph mistook for drunkenness at first, lambasting their stupidity for supporting a system that would eat them up and shit them out at an accountant’s whim. And yet he’d left the bosses who blacklisted him unscathed, as if he expected no better from the executive class.
    “After I picked up my severance pay I just wandered around the west end,” Alex said. “I was on this side street that looked very familiar, and I didn’t understand why until I saw an old Baptist church that I’d walked past when I first moved to the city with Jane. I remembered it because I’d seen a man planting a young oak tree on the side lawn. He was having trouble fitting the tree roots into the hole, so I stopped to help him. Turned out he was the minister.
    “He’d been sent to the parish to try to raise the congregation numbers. The neighbourhood was changing, he told me, young families moving downtown because they wanted to walk to local stores and talk to their neighbours. They also wanted to tap into the traditions their parents had cast aside. The church could provide some of that, the minister said. He gave me a tour of the building—the daycare, the meeting spaces they were making available to community groups, and the hall where they had a soup kitchen. Finally,he took me to the top of the bell tower and showed me the bells. They were all rusted and pushed into a corner, bathed in purple and red light from the windows. He told me he wanted to restore the bells. ‘People love the sound of bells on a Sunday,’ he said, ‘it sets the day apart and reminds them to spend time with their family and their community, that there’s more to life than work and entertainment. What’s wrong with that?’ he asked me.”
    “Nothing,” Joseph said, picturing the earnest minister’s face.
    “If we’d lived closer I’d have checked out a