The Glittering World

To Grandmother's House We Go

        Blue waited until Tuesday to call the estate lawyer in Halifax, who gave him the number of the local property agent responsible for the house sale. By the time they finally connected it was already Thursday, leaving him to wonder, with only two days left of the trip, whether it was worth seeing the house at all. What was he going to do, suddenly fall in love with the place? Not going to happen. Every credit card was maxed out, and he was three months behind on rent for Cyan. The problem was that he couldn’t keep up with demand, and had no idea how to manage costs or amortize his debts, especially his less savory ones.

        Speaking of which, he had received three missed calls on his cellphone in the past few days from Vincente Castro; the fact that the loan shark had ominously failed to leave any messages made Blue’s kneecaps itch. Even if he got fifty thousand bucks back for the house after taxes—and that was optimistic—it wasn’t much of a leg up. But he had to grab it, and grab it fast. He scheduled a time to view the house the next day and would sign the papers then and there.

        Meanwhile, he tried to keep himself occupied. He drove with the others to Baddeck for ice cream and strolled the boardwalk along the Bras d’Or Lake, followed by a lunch of lobster rolls and beer at the Water’s Edge; dinner at Chanterelle, overlooking St. Ann’s Bay; the next day a trip to Joe’s Scarecrow Village near Cheticamp and a second pass at the supermarket so they could stock up on provisions for the rest of the week’s meals. More nights by the fire, and whisky and wine, though Elisa refrained; he still couldn’t bring himself to ask her why. There was more hiking as well, though not for Blue, who refused to brave the woods. His sleep was finally sweet again, free of nightmares for the first time in recent memory.

        He arranged to meet the property agent on Friday afternoon while the others were out on a hike. Waiting at the foot of the drive, he halfheartedly smoked a cigarette; in the past couple of days, he’d only had two or three. The taste had become newly awful to him, as if the pack had staled overnight. Maybe it’s time I finally quit, he thought, and stubbed out the butt beneath the heel of his engineer boot.

        A dirty maroon Chevy Suburban pulled over to the side of the road, kicking up a cloud of gravel dust. “You Michael? Stanley Baker,” the agent said with a smile. “Ready to go?”

        Dressed in a black-and-red-checked shirt, his collar crumpled beneath a frizzy gray ponytail, Stanley bore little resemblance to the pseudoslick salesmen that Blue and his mother had traipsed after into dozens of rat holes over the years. They made small talk on the short drive; it turned out he was also a licensed attorney, so they could take care of the sale as soon as Blue saw the house. “It isn’t in great shape,” Stanley warned, “but you got a decent price for it. They’re foreign buyers, from Belgium. Go figure. There’s a lot on the market just sitting, so consider yourself lucky.” He went on to offer his condolences, which Blue thanked him for, though he felt a bit of an imposter seeing as how he hadn’t seen or spoken to Grandma Flora since he was five.

        Near the top of Kelly’s Mountain, the elevation caused Blue’s ears to pop. They popped again a few minutes later on the other side, where they wound their way down and then up a dirt path, the forest thickening as Portland Road snaked northward. To grandmother’s house we go, he thought, and grimaced.

      Just before the turnoff they passed a ramshackle old church that appeared to have slid into disuse, its birch exterior peeling white with its bell tower half collapsed, the bell itself nowhere to be seen. An enormous anchor rested in the small patch of unruly grass between the church and the road, beside which stood a weathered sign, a stark black-on-white Celtic cross insignia crowning the words Christ Church 1818 W. Macleod. The bottom half of the sign was a changeable copy board, a verse of scripture spelled out in a stark red procession of crooked letter tiles.