Epilogue
WINTER
It turns out that I hate January in Newfoundland.
The piles of snow get taller than the pedestrians in some places, and the stores are stocked with whatever sad, expensive fruit we can get from tanker ships.
The coast is stunningly beautiful, bedecked in white and ghostly silent under the frost, but the process of digging out your car every time you want to go anywhere gets old.
So instead, I’m sitting inside next to Paul’s woodstove—our woodstove, for the last year—and letting Paul take his turn running errands while I write a letter to Hannah.
She likes getting hand-written letters from me, and the more fancy Canadian stamps I put on them, the better.
She spent three weeks with Paul and me over the summer, and she has announced she wants us to have an ‘official wedding,’ since the first one we did was a hurried affair at the city hall which ‘didn’t really count’ because I had neither a princess dress nor sufficient flowers, and more importantly, because she wasn’t there to see it.
I’ve told her that she can come up and plan a better wedding for us herself when she comes back this summer, and we’ll have it somewhere along the coast. I’ve agreed to let her pick the spot, and I’m hoping she’ll choose a farmhouse in honor of my friend Jasmine.
There aren’t really that many people I’d want to invite.
I’ll start with Laura and her new boyfriend Ollie, who is a quiet tax attorney from Laura’s work who seems to make her happy.
I’ll ask Jasmine and Lucas and whoever they are dating at the moment, which changes frequently enough that they always qualify for ‘and guest’ on their invitations.
There’ll be Lisette, of course, and the rest of our improv group: Ellen and Jacob and Rene. The five of us make a good team, I’ve found, and you can do much more elaborate scenes and movie re-enactments when you have more people.
I’ll invite Mrs. Mahoney and her daughter Penny and her family, if they can make it up from Ottawa.
I’ll invite Kedar, who won’t come but will be glad to be invited, even though I only freelance for him now.
There’ll be a few friends of Paul’s, and his cousins, and two of Lisette’s siblings. He still doesn’t speak to his mother, but she has found a place to live further down the coast, and makes a point of ignoring us, which we both appreciate.
And that’s it. My whole world is smaller now, but at the same time it feels completely full of people, because they are all the ones who will turn up no matter what.
Paul comes in from outside with some groceries in a couple of large shopping bags.
He prefers to stop in at the local shop on his walk home from his school, and the groceries are often half-frozen by the time he gets them back into the house.
It is close to four, so it is already getting dark here, and he shakes himself warm as he comes inside.
I stand up and take the bags out of his hands while he unpeels the long orange scarf that Lisette knitted for him. By the time I’ve put the groceries away in the kitchen, he is seated by the woodstove, his boots off, looking through a small pile of mail on the table.
I sit next to him, pressing my face to his cold neck, until he wraps an arm around my waist and kisses me, then slides his hands beneath my shirt.
“How are your hands still warm?” I kiss his cold cheeks. “That is medically impossible. Your entire face is frozen.”
He laughs. “The miracle of human chemistry.”
I kiss him until he decides to stand up to pull closed the curtains. Then I pull him back down onto the sofa next to me.
“Remember that time you kissed me while I was meditating,” he whispers.
“During the improv? I thought we agreed that you kissed me,” I say.
“I was just being polite.”
I laugh and crawl on top of him, determined to completely undermine his inner peace.