SHADE FRIGHT

Chapter 1

My boyfriend drives a dump truck.

I know — it's not the most glamorous job in the world, but one does crave some measure of predictability when life spins wildly out of control — like a when a car hits a patch of black ice or worse, when everything you've ever known or loved simply vanishes.

I mean, how do you cope with that?

You wake up one morning, you kiss the man you intended to marry and discuss what to make supper, only to find the apartment picked clean when you arrive home from work. A snapshot of him standing next to his precious BMW and a pile of ripped up wedding invitations that were supposed to go out in the mail are scattered across the living room floor. There are three stalks of celery in the fridge and a can of tomato soup in the cupboard. The only reminder of what you thought was a functional relationship is the stack of unpaid bills in both your names that he neatly piled on the toilet seat so you wouldn't miss them.

My therapist has strongly suggested that I learn how to "be alone", lest I condemn myself to continued failed relationships and a referral to a psychiatrist, because nobody, absolutely nobody, experiences breakups on the scale that I do.

Dave Webber drives a dump truck, and he's seemingly found the elusive balance we strive for in life. You know the one — it has something to do with total job satisfaction and the sense that you've carried out something meaningful when you punch the clock at the end of the day. When Dave isn't working, he's an avid reader, a home improvement enthusiast, and he's recently taken up photography, because he believes that Chapters needs a good coffee table book with glossy photographs showing the history of dump trucks over the past sixty years. Who knew?

All my girlfriends believe I'm crazy to have fallen for a dump truck driver, but after half a dozen failed relationships with well-paid professionals such as lawyers or oil industry analysts, I've learned avoid men in expensive business suits. They can't be trusted.

Before Dave, I had always looked down on blue-collar types. I assumed that tradesmen were beer chugging sexists who aspired to scratching their testicles while watching Monday Night Football with their cronies. We met after he had delivered a load of gravel for the new driveway that Dad was laying for the fifth-wheel he'd just brought home from Gerry's RV World. Mom and I were sitting on the terrace, watching what Mom refers to as "man's work" — she's a traditionalist that way. The last thing I expected was to see a truck driver with a gunslinger mustache and a white t-shirt with the words, "Get in touch with your inner Mozart" emblazoned across the front in gold letters. My ears pricked up when I heard Die Entführung aus dem Serail pouring

from the cab of his truck, and he sang along as he measured the area of Dad's driveway with some kind of roller doo-dad.

That I love the opera is no secret, and it's the main reason I decided to strike up a conversation with this strange man as he began poking at the pile of gravel with a steel-toed boot.

"Okay, I'll bite," I shouted, as I sauntered over. "I can name three people in the entire city of Calgary who know the words to even one Mozart composition."

"Mozart is life-affirming," he shouted back, as he reached for the shovel conveniently stowed on the side of his dump truck. "Kind of surprising when you consider that he lived hard and died young."

"What do you mean?"

"The guy was a party machine," he said, as he wiped the sweat from his brow with a gloved hand. "He was the late-1700's equivalent of a rock star — you know, extreme living, debauchery, and women aplenty. He managed to pump out over six hundred compositions and still found time to get married and father six children."