The Disinherited by Matt Cohen Page B

next two weeks, then he could live very comfortably for five years. Even ten or more.” He patted Erik on the arm and then left him, to join his colleagues and begin discussion of the next case.
    Erik went back into the lounge. His mother was talking to the man with the tumours. “What did he say?”
    “Nothing much,” Erik said. “We’d better go back in; he’ll be wondering what’s keeping us.”
    At noon, Brian and Nancy came back and Erik and Miranda went out to get some lunch. The old woman was still sitting by the fire exit, her hands in perpetual motion.
    “Oh God,” Miranda said. “Sometimes you two are so predictable.” At the hospital Richard had finally brought up the subject of the farm, asking Erik if he would stay there for a few months, until he was better.
    “I didn’t know what to say.”
    “You spend the whole day sitting on the windowsill, just waiting to pick a fight with him. Pass me the sherry. I don’t know why there’s never anything but cheap sherry in this house.” She took the bottle from Erik and re-filled her glass. “I remember when they first got electricity here,” she said. “Every light in the township was on all night. House and barn. Do you remember? Of course Richard had to do something special; the next day he drove into Kingston and bought a refrigerator. Everyone came to see it. You would have thought it was the Queen. My grandfather used to keep his playing cards in it. In Winnipeg. Made them snap, he said.”
    Erik lit a cigarette. Her father had been killed in the war. Or had just died in the trenches, no one was sure. He pictured the First World War as an endurance contest, set in a bog in France. He had never met any of his grandparents except through photographs and odd bits of stories. In their pictures they all wore high collars and stiff, set faces; they might have been anyone at all. “The trouble is,” Erik said, “I don’t even know if he really cares about who gets the farm.”
    “That’s not it at all. You know he cares.”
    “And you?”
    “It is all determined,” Miranda said. “We can only bow to our fates.” She nodded her head vaguely and then sipped at her sherry. “Madame says that we cannot escape our destinies.”
    “You believe this stuff?”
    “No,” Miranda said. “But life without faith is like an empty egg.”
    “Oh.”
    “You should meet her,” Miranda said. “You’d like her.” She reached down to the floor and picked up her purse. She put her hand inside it and drew out a card. “Here,” she said. “You can go see her when we’re in town tomorrow.”
    Rose Garnett
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    “I’ve taken a job at the University of Alberta.”
    “That’s wonderful.”
    “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”
    “It’s so far,” she said. “When will we see you?”
    For the past five years he had been coming home once a year, at Christmas. He stubbed out his cigarette. “You can come and visit me,” he said. “We could meet in Winnipeg and you could show me the house where you grew up.”
    “It’s gone.”
    “I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” he said.
    “Tomorrow, I’ll bake you some cookies.” She smiled at him and twisted her glass in her hand. He imagined her after Richard was dead: drinking a little every day and not having too much housework to do. “Your father went to the city, to university. He could have stayed but he decided to come back. It was the right thing for him to do.” Richard had told him once about his own father, Simon Thomas who had mourned his wife by forgetting her, and, as soon as he could, moved into town and lived common-law with a woman who couldn’t cook.
    “But she let him drink,” Richard had said. “And though she couldn’t cook, he never went hungry.”
    “Forty years ago,” said Erik. “In a few years only rich city people will be able to afford to live on this kind of farm. All the food will be grown on huge farms run by businessmen.