

The Book of Cakes

by Lisa Pasold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Lisa Pasold

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commerical or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoy this book, please return to your favourite retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

About Lisa Pasold

Free Bonus Chapter from RATS OF LAS VEGAS

The original manuscript of THE BOOK OF CAKES was written over Labour Day Weekend, 1994 as part of the Anvil 3-Day Novel contest. This e-book version has been spell-checked, shifting names have been corrected & some lines have been rewritten for clarity due to exhausted typing at time of origin, but otherwise, this novella was entirely written over a three-day weekend. I wrote in the kitchen/main room on East Pender Street, in Vancouver British Columbia, while my husband made plum jam from the fruit trees in the garden.

The Book of Cakes

by Lisa Pasold

Shilling Gateaux:

These goods have been attracting the attention of confectioners more and more in recent years. They are, or should be, both bright and pretty.

I.

She was driving away in the rent-a-car when she realized she had forgotten her contact lens solution. But she did have her toothbrush. There had to be a pharmacy en route. And maybe she could try phoning her uncle one more time. Maybe he'd finally be at home. Maybe not. He wouldn't have a problem with her simply showing up on the uneven boardwalk outside his house. He had invited her to stay often enough. It was just she was taking him up on the offer without any warning.

She wondered if the Slough was the same. Fats was constantly complaining about the real estate agents, development mongers, environmental threats, and the lack of water pressure in his not-exactly-up-to-code plumbing. On the other hand, and while she thought this, she smiled at the landscape going by, the greenness of it, the traces of rain on the windshield, on the other hand Fats liked complaining about exterior details. They distracted him from his half-broken back, his phenomenal girth, and the fact that he missed fishing. Working for BCTel did not have the same allure. Fats really did miss fishing—industrial fishing, not the kind you do at the side of a river with a single fly-fishing rod.

Moira hoped he'd be glad to see her. She needed some neutral company, or at least, she needed a change of scene. She had given her boss one day's notice. "I'm leaving for a week. Family emergency. I'm so sorry." She tried to look contrite and Sam had believed her. He'd thrown a small French hissy fit, then cheerfully accepted the replacement baker she'd found. Charles wasn't particularly committed to making cakes, but he was capable, and his icing was—let's be honest—at least as good as hers.

And Charles was reliable as chocolate cake, the exact opposite of the kind of man that her boss usually fell for. This was carefully planned. Moira needed a week off, not a full replacement. She needed Sam to welcome her back at the end of the week. She promised she'd be back at the bakery for Friday morning, in time for a couple of elaborate party orders. "Cross my heart," she said, tracing an exaggerated X across her gingham apron.

She'd been at the bakery for just over a year and hadn't taken a sick day in that entire time. She'd worked through Christmas and Independence Day. But now she needed time to think. And Sam, to his credit, didn't ask her any questions about the kind of family emergency she might be leaving for, so she didn't have to make anything up.

She took the exit for Richmond and mentally held her breath through the suburban developments, as if the construction smelled bad. Her driving was better than she expected; she hadn't been behind the wheel for a couple of years, not since she'd moved to San Francisco. But she rolled smoothly through the shopping strip until she spotted a London Drugs and parked the Buick. Trust Avis: there were no economy cars available, so the counter guy had bumped her up to a powder blue, automatic everything, wide as a pool hall, Buick. Thank god she didn't have to do any parallel parking.

London Drugs offered everything she wanted: saline solution, a box of Mae Wests, a crate of Canada Dry, and toilet paper. She couldn't trust Fats to have a fully-equipped outhouse; last time she'd visited, he was using the newsprint real estate circulars.

She backed out of the parking lot, narrowly missing a startled-looking man in a Mazda. She randomly pressed stereo buttons until she hit a Canadian country music station, to welcome herself back to her own country, however unpatriotic she generally felt.

Dyke Road made her smile, as it had in the past. She hoped there was at least one dyke who could claim the address as her own. Then she rounded the curve, to where the Slough parked its cars. Fats' orange Ford pickup wasn't there. He couldn't have acquired a new vehicle. Replacing the '76 Ford was against his religious principles. He could be at work, of course. She stopped the Buick behind a dilapidated fifth wheel that was propped up on blocks. She hauled her shoulder bag out from the under the front seat, catching the strap on the gear shift. She untangled the strap, grabbed the crate of ginger ale, and kicked the heavy car door closed with her green platform Fluevogs. The crepe sole left a black smudge on the Buick's blue paint.

The bridge over the swamp was still bleached board, just wide enough to drive over, though only an overly-optimistic imbecile would try. A new laminated billboard welcomed visitors and offering a tasteful flyer about the wetlands. She grabbed a flyer and stuffed it into her pocket. The gate to the right was closed, with a hand-painted sign which read "WRONG WAY, GO AWAY", the white paint of the final Y dripping down along the unpainted fence. She jammed the ginger ale under her arm, unlatched the gate and stepped through to the narrow boardwalk, a motley assortment of recycled boards, a bit unsteady underfoot but still plenty reliable.

"You're going the wrong way," said the tree behind her.

She turned. A blonde girl, maybe five years old, slid down from a low branch at the edge of the boardwalk. "You're looking for the other gate, the open one. Ours says Go Away."

"I'm Fats' niece."

The child shrugged. "He's not here. You can leave him a message, I'll deliver it for you." She skipped ahead of Moira and stood on the boardwalk in front of her, like a sentry blocking the path. Then she held out her hand. "My name is Julie."

Moira put down the crate of ginger ale and shook the child's small hand.

The girl looked at the soda. "Can I have one?"

"If you like." She leaned down, tore open the cardboard, took out a can and opened it before handing it to the girl. "Be careful. The tin edge is sharp to drink from and I don't have a straw."

"I'm not a baby," said the child. "And you're supposed to tell me your name when we shake hands. You're supposed to say, Pleased to meet you, Julie, my name is..."

"Moira Fernie."

"You should speak to my mother. She's inside." The girl slid back into the grasses, holding the can of ginger ale against her cheek.

Moira considered finding Julie's mother, who probably lived in the white house that was closest to the gate. But she kept walking along the boardwalk, past the clump of uninhabited mud and brambles, towards Fats' place. The wide twisting plum tree still there, she noticed with satisfaction, the wild branches looking like something invented by Jim Henson for the forest in The Dark Crystal. Beneath the glossy leaves, small fruit, not yet ripe—Fats had planted the tree when he first arrived in the Slough, and the sapling somehow fended for itself, toughing out air and space in the limited West Coast sun, surrounded by thorny blackberry bushes that trailed ferociously over the edge of the shed. Her minds was translating the wet-looking blackberries into pie and crumble recipes when she passed the shed door. It was padlocked with a shiny yellow lock. She took the uneven mud path around the shed with sinking certainty and walked towards the house. The battered green shutters were closed.

"Shit."

She plunked the ginger ale and her shoulder bag onto the crooked porch in front of the door, then sat herself down too, careful not to nudge the decrepit handrailing. She should've called before she flew out of San Francisco. But her uncle never went anywhere. She thought of what the child said, that he wasn't here. Not that he was sick—he couldn't be sick. He'd shuttered the place and bothered with locks, he obviously had this planned out. Her uncle was nothing if not organized—despite the overgrown condition of his homestead, he was in some ways surprisingly meticulous.

The Slough smelled the same, damp, with the river just beyond the grass sucking the mud out from under the boardwalk. Nothing for it, she thought, and rummaged at the bottom of her shoulder bag. She found a paper clip and a safety pin and with a certain amount of bending and swearing, she picked the shiny padlock off the shutters. Behind the crooked louvers, the old wooden door had a cheap modern pop-lock in the handle. She got her credit card out of her wallet. The rent-a-car had pushed her balance well over her limit and she needed to start saving money. Ruining the magnetic strip on the card was one way to do it. She slid the plastic rectangle between the calking of the crooked doorframe and the heavy oak of the door, caught the pop lock mechanism and sprang the door free.

She stepped inside the cabin and flicked on the light switch. Nothing. Fats, of course, would turn off the power. She crossed the room, ran her hand along the dark wall in the corner until she felt the edge of the fuse box. Found the matchbooks she knew Fats kept on the metal lip there, lit a match to see the master switch. She flipped it and the light bulb in the centre of the cabin jolted into life above her.

"What in hell are you doing?"

She turned. A woman in a pink shellsuit was standing in the doorway, hands on her hips. Her black hair coiled across the top of her head like Medusa's snakes.

"Fats is my uncle—where is he?"

"On holiday. Wouldn't you know that, being family?"

"Do you know Fats? He's not exactly..."

The woman smiled.

"He didn't go to California, did he?" That would be too much.

"He's driving to Ottawa."

"To visit my mum? You're kidding."

"He's gone to see his sister."

"My mum. God, what came over him?"

The woman shrugged. "Says he's old enough to let bygones be gone."

Moira wondered what her mother was going to think about that.

"So you're Mina."

"Moira."

"Whatever."

"I've got a week off. I came to see him. When did he leave?"

"Couple of days ago, let me see, Thursday, no, today's Sunday, right? He should be nearly there..."

"In that orange Ford? That thing doesn't go more than fifty miles an hour, he won't be there yet."

"Said he was going to take his time."

"He'll have to, in that heap."

"That your Buick?"

"Rented," said Moira.

They were having tea in the white house, Moira, and the woman in the pink shell suit, and the owner of the house, Ed, who was somewhere in her thirties and had two daughters—the blond child, Julie, was hers. The woman in the pink shell suit was in fact Julie's grandmother, an actual Finn living in Finn Slough. Descended from the original Finnish fishermen who'd settled here.

"And the woman responsible for calling me Edwina," said Ed.

"It's a perfectly good name," said Mrs. Halko.

"It is, mom, it is."

Moira hadn't drunk tea since she couldn't remember when, real tea where the teabags are soaked in steaming water until the tea is mahogany-colour, and poured with a swirl of milk into the teacup. A slightly sticky sugar dish was balanced on the top of a pile of school books. She still didn't like tea, but under the circumstances it was vaguely reassuring. "Pete still live at the far end?"

Ed nodded.

Mrs. Halko said, "So you're saying he can confirm your identity?"

"Mom..."

"Sure, Pete can vouch for me."

When she finished her tea, she went back to the cabin. Fats' bed was a lumpy double futon on a salvaged wooden frame. The back room wasn't anything more than this built-in bed, the ceiling close enough for her to reach up and touch, slope-roofed because it was merely a lean-to that Fats had attached to the back end of the square cabin. She lay down on top of the red Hudson Bay blanket, pressed her face against the old rough wool and inhaled the smell of tobacco and cedar and fishy Finn Slough mud.

She dreamed she was standing outside an apartment building in San Francisco, trying to find a way to break in. She knew she had to get inside, because there was a girl there, sleeping, and she had to get inside to wake her up, though she wasn't sure why. And then she was inside, trying to keep the door barricaded. She wasn't sure who was trying to break into the apartment. She was wearing a white tulle dress and there was no furniture to use to reinforce the door.

She woke up to someone knocking outside. Where am I? She opened her eyes to red wool blanket. The damp tobacco smell brought her back to Fats' cabin in the Slough. She hauled herself upright, went through the main room and opened the door. Pete was strung with cameras and lens cases, exactly as she remembered him, a tall guy with hair like an upturned bowl of grey Vietnamese noodles. He gave her a hug. "You're too skinny for a pastry chef. Bad advertisement for the wares, y'know."

"I don't take after my uncle."

"Few could, darlin', few could. He'll be heart-broken, find out he wasn't here to greet you." Pete sat down on the front porch and a muddy yellow dog immediately emerged from the underbrush to stand guard at his feet.

"How's my uncle doing?"

Pete scratched his beard. "Alright I guess. Looking forward to his vacation. Hates the job, loves the house, same as ever. He's a solitary man and this is a good place to be solitary. Whatcha do to your hair?"

"Cut it." She held her breath, but Pete was true to form and didn't ask to touch her crewcut. She found it creepy when people asked to pat her hair. And they did so, surprisingly often.

Instead, Pete said, "How long you here for?"

"About a week."

"Nah, you'll miss him, he's gone for two weeks. You'll be all by yourself."

"That's alright."

"Need to do some thinking?"

"Something like that."

"Heck of a rent-a-car you got there."

The problem, the issue, the question at hand, was mostly irrelevant to the fact that she now hungry. She put her package of Mae Wests on the shelf where Fats kept his Glen Livet, so he'd find them when he came back. She turned the fridge on and placed the gingerale in pristine splendor on the clean center shelf. She examined the cabinet beside the sink and inventoried her uncle's food supplies. There was sugar (white), flour (white), a tin of Fry's cocoa powder, and a red plastic bottle of nutmeg she suspected was the very one she'd bought four years ago and left on this shelf between the half-used canola oil and the red wine vinegar. There was nothing else aside from a package of soda crackers, unopened, which had only expired a month ago. She studied the small black numbers printed there on the crackers, 90-07-07.

She wanted almonds, pistachios, sultanas and seedless Muscatels. She wanted butter and bitter chocolate and cinnamon and icing sugar. She needed these ingredients near to hand to feel at ease. She needed to get some reassuring comfort food into the house, and soda crackers just weren't good enough. They went back onto the shelf. She grabbed the car keys and went outside, pausing to swing the shutters back on their hinges and hooked them against the wall. Some paint flaked off onto her skin, olive green paint. Probably had lead in it. The red trim around the windows wasn't holding up much better, but the wood was still good, no rot there. Despite appearances, her uncle kept the house in shipshape condition, watertight. No leaks. The place was more like a boat than a house, nearly afloat as it was.

At the farmer's market at the intersection of the highway, more of a stripmall supermarket than anything to do with any farmer, she collected butter and eggs, almond slivers and chocolate as if the list would serve as a security blanket. In a nod to actual food, she added vegetables, canned tomatoes, canned tuna, a package of bacon, two giant cartons of milk, and decaf instant coffee. Taster's Choice. All decaf was probably ghastly, it wouldn't matter how much money she spent on it, wasn't going to make it taste any better.

It took forty minutes to fill the tub. Fats was rightly embittered about his water pressure, though it was difficult to feel indignant since he didn't technically pay for any water service at all. She took the toilet paper to the outhouse, kicked an enormous wolf spider off the seat, and contemplated the view across the Slough. There was no door on Fats' outhouse, just the shitter and a view of blackberries and muddy water. She went back to the house and made herself a mug of instant coffee, using bottled water, cursing herself for forgetting to buy drinking water. There was only a gallon or so left in the plastic keg Fats kept balanced on the counter.

She waited for the tub to fill. The bath was the major innovation of her previous visit: her uncle convinced her to help him and Pete haul the claw-foot tub from the front lawn of a condemned farmhouse up into the flatbed of his orange truck, pretty much destroying what was left of the truck's suspension. Using wooden logs as rollers, they got the tub into the cabin, even though Pete was fairly dubious about the destructive potential of the tub's weight once it was filled with water.

"Soon as you step into it, buddy, that whole contraption's going to sink through your rotten floorboards and you're going to be bath-tubbing in good old Slough mud."

"This cabin's got more foundation than you credit," said Fats.

Moira secretly worried that Pete was right, but she helped rig up the hose from the heating tank to the tub, and politely went for a long walk that afternoon, leaving Fats to try an inaugural by himself. The foundation had survived. And now here it was, still solidly set to the side of the main room, under the window, so the bather could stare out at the marsh.

She sank into the hot water and resurfaced, looked along the water at her submerged limbs, her belly, flat. She tried to imagine herself different, as fat as her uncle, pretty near. Her stomach stretched into a strange and useful instrument. She scissored her legs, releasing tiny bubbles caught in her curling pubic hair, and put her feet up on the edge of the tub. "I wonder what sex it is," she said aloud, trying out the idea, hearing how her voice sounded. Her nipples broke the surface of the water. Her breasts hurt, though they felt better buoyed by the bath. She was at seven weeks. There was still time to not have the baby. When the counsellor told her the test was positive, all she did was nod.

"Are you taking pre-natal multivitamins?"

"I'll think about it," she said, and left while the counsellor was suggesting she get fitted for a cervical cap.

A little late for caps, she thought, and sat up enough to take a sip of the decaf coffee. It wasn't so bad. She balanced the mug back on the soap dish.

She'd had sex with one person in the past thirteen months. Once. In her own bed, her best friend kissing her belly, her thighs, her cunt.

She shouldn't have held his hands against her breasts.

It wasn't a question of shouldn't. Whatever brought her here wasn't a question of shouldn't. I did, we did, and I am. She should have telephoned her friend before she left town. But she couldn't decide what to say.

Maybe that was just as well. Har would be supportive. Probably. He'd be surprised, that would be a sure thing. He'd probably laugh, partly from shock and partly because it was funny, that they'd run into this unexpected commitment. No, she had run into an unexpected commitment. She could have said something, afterwards, when she went into the bathroom and wondered if the condom had slipped or broken, or if in fact it was all her, this wetness between her legs. She didn't think it was, but she had washed and put the thought away, filed it under 'forget' in her mind. She'd only remembered last week, when she realized her period wasn't just late. She went to the clinic to get a thoroughly scientific not-just-bought-at-the-drugstore test. She nodded when the counsellor told her.

She lathered up the sliver of Irish Spring soap that nestled beside her coffee mug. She washed her neck and underarms, her breasts, her arms, stood up for her torso, butt, ass, behind her knees, then slid back into the tub, rubbed soap over her face and skull. Her current crewcut made shampoo irrelevant for another week or two.

The clean towel was like sandpaper against her skin. She tried to think of it as revitalizing, the kind of thing you pay extra for in a spa. She was scrubbed red by the time she was dry enough to dress. She felt good. She took the now-cool mug of decaf to the front stoop and sat there.

She wasn't planning to discuss the pregnancy with Fats, but he was the only dependable character in her family and she wanted to see him. Maybe a decision would've come more easily if he'd been here. Now she had five days alone in his cabin. She could just as easily have stayed home, unplugged the phone, ignored the doorbell. Except that Hargrove had keys to her apartment and eventually he'd let himself in to make sure her dead body wasn't being eaten by feral cats. He worried about that sort of thing.

"Alley cats would have to climb three floors and open the skylight with their tiny little paws," she told him.

Har nodded seriously. "Could happen."

"I'm giving you a spare set of keys in case I lock myself out, so I can come over and get my keys. Not so you can check up on whether I've died."

"However you want to justify it," he said.

Usually, when he slept at her apartment, he groaned when her alarm went off for work, and rolled himself into the duvet on her bed until all she could see were his feet. She would stretch and think about possibles. A six minute pause before getting out of bed and starting her day. At least she'll be able to sleep in this week. Her internal clock will wind down a little bit. Though honestly, she didn't mind getting up early. It was pleasantly eerie, going to work when the clubs were emptying their last boys onto the street, bright-eyed to start her day while the city was sleeping. She'd turn the corner on Castro and keep going down until she reached Sam's bakery.

By the time she pushed open the back door, her colleague George was already well into the bread. He worked from 3am until 9am every day but Monday; he liked the schedule, said it suited him. He'd go home, put in earplugs and sleep until six, then go out for dinner, catch a film, go dancing, shower, and turn up for work, tie on his white apron and set the mixer machines to knead the dough. Sourbread. Rye. Dill and cheese soda bread. Nine grain, complete with sesame seeds sprinkled on top of each loaf. The only bread he disliked was baguette, though he made it superbly. "Waste of time. Bloody impractical bread. Typical fucking French."

Sam raised one Gallic eyebrow when he heard this. "It is that you have phallic envy?"

While George pounded the dough and stretched baguettes, slashing them with purposeful strokes of a thin bare razor, she would get her basic cakes started. Every day, petit-fours and sponge cakes, pound cakes and chocolate cakes, cherry strips and Bismarks and Madeiras and stripteases. Cakes of every variety, baking and assembling and icing, until three o'clock in the afternoon. Sam insisted on croissants and French baguette, but luckily for her, he didn't want to French pastries. He'd hired her for "old-fashioned all-American cakes, okay?" She didn't tell him that most of her favourite cake recipes were English and German—it seemed rude to insist on recipes from the traditional enemies of the French.

When she finished her shift she'd take off her white hairnet (which served little purpose over her consistently shorn hair), untie whichever gingham apron she was wearing that day, and change into her public shoes, usually platformed, always brightly-coloured. She would totter briefly out the front to stand with the customers, in front of the bakery's glass display cases. She liked to admire the day's cakes lined up in their minimalist curved glass armour. She felt what she thought must be maternal pleasure, sending her cakes out into the world. Usually, after work, she walked to a coffee shop—maybe the perfect one around the corner, maybe the mom and pop diner a few blocks further away, and felt pleased. Some afternoons, she strolled across to the Golden Gate Park until she reached the water. This involved a lot of walking in high heels, but she didn't mind. She wobbled on her platforms and sipped take-out coffee and liked being outside in the damp San Francisco air.

She didn't exactly eat the traditional cakes she baked, but she tasted, constantly. She tasted butter icing and sampled raw batter to check the balance of flavouring. She could tell when a cake dough was right by consistency. And she ate her experiments—through necessity. She spent most of June eating apricot upside-down cake. She narrowed the results down to seven specific recipes, carefully tasting each one. She left slices of the two best for Sam to decide upon, and took the remaining rejects to the waitress at the mom and pop diner down the street. The woman had four sons; the upside-down apricot cakes would be eaten, not analyzed for their perfection.

She wondered about sons versus daughters. A son would be more work, right? Wasn't that the theory?

She was hungry. She wasn't much of a cook, in fact. She was a baker. She didn't care about the rest of it. When she wasn't testing cakes, she usually ate Chinese takeout. With all the development across the highway from the Slough, she could probably get delivery here at Fats' house, but it seemed wrong. She walked back into the house and lined up some possible ingredients—a can of tomatoes, a zucchini, a shiny aubergine. Eggplant, she thought, chopping up the vegetables and dumping them into a pot with the tomatoes. She was an egg plant. She singed her fingers, struggling to light the old and crotchety gas element, which finally flared up with a flame-throwing whoosh.

"That doesn't look very good," Julie told her while she was eating. The child came up onto the porch and sat on the edge of the top step, her feet hanging into the dried swamp.

"Nice weather," said Moira.

"It hasn't rained for a month," Julie said. "Just this morning, first rain we've had in ages. See's the ground's drinked it up already."

"Drunk."

"Do you?"

Moira frowned. "Do I what?"

"Be drunk. Fats does. But he says I can't. He tells me to go away when he's drunk."

"He doesn't do that often, does he?"

Julie shook her head. "But he's very funny. Makes every different voice and tells us to go away. Kate likes him. Have you met Kate? She was at her friend's house today. She's little. But her birthday is Thursday, she'll be almost as old as me. What do you think of that? She's home now. I can go get her."

"That's okay. I'll meet her tomorrow."

"Okay. Good night. Sleep tight."

I could do that, thought Moira, after Julie had run back through the grass that separates the two houses. I could open up the Glen Livet and with my tolerance, a decent glass would send me reeling to bed. That would be bad for the baby.

To hell with the baby. But she didn't really want a drink. What she would like, honestly, would be to fuck someone. That was much more her distraction of choice—and look at where trying to stay away from that got her. Pregnant in a single fuck. Lord. The injustice of it. She washed out the dish she'd eaten from, dried it and put it back on the shelf. Then she went out again, down the uneven boardwalk. She walked to the far end of the Slough. There were no new houses. The walkway meandered past half-ruined boathouses, around a bend past Pete's former net-drying loft—quite an elegant little cottage he'd made of the place, recycled wood, very Canadian Home & Garden. A few meters past his house, the boardwalk ended in a rickety series of uneven planks, imperfect stairs down to a muddy slip of beach. She squelched along the mudflat that was wide with the low tide. She was pleased to see the wreck of an old fishing boat, the Mermaid III, still beached here. Fats claimed it had washed up during Typhoon Freda in 1962. Right around when Fats himself had moved here. She climbed up onto the grey boat and waited for the sun to set. Tried to think about nothing, watching the grey sky tint slightly orange as it darkened to the colour of baked apricot. A glacé icing would be lovely in that shade.

Probably a recipe for it existed—she'd have to look it up in her favourite cookbook. This was a collection originally published in 1903. She didn't have an original edition, though that remained her dream gift, if she could conjure it up somehow—probably the book was out there in a dusty auction house, but she had never looked for it. She wouldn't be able to afford The Victorian Book of Cakes even if she could locate an original. Her copy was the 1930s reprint. The lists of ingredients delighted her, made her want to experiment, made the whole business very important and historic and scientific. Which it was. She took baking seriously.

Whenever she found sleep sliding away from her into the early night-time round of car alarms and shouting street drunks—why did drunks yell for joy at the wonder of bars and booze and the city itself? Why were they so very loud? When such full-moon nights made her yearn for calm, she sat up in bed in her white bachelorette apartment and reached for The Book of Cakes. She looked at measurements and formal ingredients. Decorated Gateaux illustrated in pastel watercolour. The book was designed for professionals, with advertisements for implements and stoves, the cake recipes accompanied by suggested price lists. Half-penny cakes and Punch fancies.

She sat on the boat and tried to conjure Victorian cakes as sugar-plum visions to be counted like sheep, so she could go back to Fats' cabin and get some sleep. Instead, she remembered of a painting she'd seen in a food magazine, a portrait of the French Queen Marie-Antoinette dressed up as a shepherdess. The Queen had absurdly powdered grey-white hair with an entire pastoral scene decked out in miniature across her head. The magazine article clarified Marie's infamous cake quote. She hadn't suggested that the people get by with only cake. It was an incorrect translation. She apparently said that if there was no bread, the hungry populace should be fed brioche—which is more like challah eggbread, a butter-heavy bread with raisins. Not an unfeeling suggestion, really. If the bakers have no bread, can they give people brioche at least?

But she was misinterpreted. And anyhow, Moira thought, looking at the sky, the Queen was wrong about the brioche. She should have said: let the bakers make a cake for the people and send the bill to me. A free royal gateau, decorated and frivolous, might have assuaged the people's hunger and distracted them however briefly from the woes of their all-too-real life. Cake would have shown that the Queen cared. That's the purpose of cake. To make us feel better, to make us feel loved.

She met Hargrove because he wanted a cake. A typical mid-morning. Sam was dealing with a flour delivery screw-up, swearing in French at the invoice book open on the cash counter. She was putting an elaborately-iced chocolate cake into the display, turning it so the delicate candied violets showed up to their best advantage. A man channeling a 1970s Marlborough Cowboy cigarette ad swaggered in, all five o'clock shadow against mahogany skin. He said, "So do you make all these divine cakes?"

Moira leaned down to made a last adjustment to the cake's glass pedestal. She realized she was eye-level with the guy's rodeo-style belt buckle.

Sam said, "My cake mistress."

She straightened and closed the display case.

"Really?" said Marlborough Man. "Do you make our favourite Frenchman jump through hoops? Do you use very frightening whips?"

She put her hands on her hips. She'd been working at Sweet Sam's for three months and was gradually earning her spurs with the clientele. And then Har smiled, which made her notice the light in his brown eyes, and his absurdly long eyelashes, which didn't go with his macho costume at all.

"I came in to order a cake," he said. "A friend's birthday, Dianna. She needs something very pink, frothy—and not too fattening, if that's possible. All those calories get her depressed."

"Ombre pink swirl," said Moira.

"Ombre?" He repeated the word without any innuendo, unlike every other gay man who'd ever ordered the cake.

She found the photo in her sample book and held it out—a white cake covered in tightly-swirled blue icing, pale at the top and bright Smurf blue at the base of the cake. "Imagine this in pink. You want vanilla for the cake?" She looks at him again. "Or rose flavoured—that would be elegant. I recommend delicately rose-flavoured white cake, four layers, pink icing. Very classic movie star type."

Har's smile grew to Muppet-like proportions. "Perfect."

"And tell your friend that cake isn't fattening. Pastry, that's fattening."

"Really? Can you have the cake for Friday?"

"Pick it up around 3 o'clock. You want her name on it or anything?"

"Dianna with two n's. In girly script if you can." She left him at the counter, didn't glance back while he paid the cake deposit and left his name and phone number with Sam. But that Friday, she finished her shift five minutes early—washed her face, took off her apron, put on her street shoes. She brought out the finished marvellously-pink cake and set it on the counter. And then she lingered. When Sam raised an eyebrow, she muttered, "I was just leaving."

"Ah bon," said Sam. The little bell on the door jingled and Har walked in. She slid the pink swirling-iced cake into its box.

Har watched her tie the ribbon and said, "What are you doing tonight? You should come to the party."

"I'm..."

"Seriously," he said. "Dianna will love this cake. She'll love you. If you don't mind being one of the only women there." He wrote out the address on the back of a club invitation. "Please. The baker should see the cake get 'et, don't you think?"

At the party, the drag queens had better curves than Moira's. She had the shortest hair of anyone there. "You should work that Annie Lennox thing, sweetheart," said a man named Roget.

And Dianna told her. "I can't believe this cake has only five calories per slice..."

Moira smiled sweetly and tracked Har down on the far side of the bar. "The cake has a lot more than five calories per slice."

Hargrove looked sheepish. "You didn't tell Dianna, did you?" He was wearing what looked like a Versace silk suit, an absurdly straight costume in the context of the party. She wondered what he did for a living. He seemed appropriately at ease in business gear.

He took a bite of cake from her plate. "I love this cake. But if the queens think it's fattening, they won't eat it. Which would be criminal. You ought to be plump, you should be a meringue or something, working at a cake shop."

She couldn't see herself as a meringue. "So what do you do?"

Har shrugged. "I'm definitely a meringue. I sing. In drag, most of the time. That's how I met Dianna. She's adopted me, you could say."

"Are you singing tonight?"

He shook his head.

As Dianna's party wound down, Roget ordered her a blue martini and explained that he was Har's roommate. "Really," he said. "He isn't my type at all." He dared her and Hargrove to reveal their worst date stories. She told them about the mortician. Har said he hadn't had a date in seven months.

"But everyone has rogered Roget," said Roget gleefully.

"Except the two of us," said Har. "Or at least, I haven't—I don't know you well enough, Moira, maybe you met Roget in some dark corner years ago. But I'm not his type. I'm the only straight drag queen on the planet."

Roget snorted so hard, Bloody Mary came out his nose, which was followed by shrieking, because the Tabasco made his nostrils burn.

"Probably going to fuck something in the bathroom,," said Har when Roget excused himself.

"Jealous, jealous," said Moira.

"Drag queens get less sex than anyone. And that's alright with me. I'm not like Roget."

"Just because you're not screwing anyone right now doesn't make you straight."

"But I like women."

She shook her head at her blue martini.

"I like you."

She raised her eyebrows at the martini.

"And the drag's—I have a great falsetto and I don't have to lip-synch. I don't like sex, is all."

And when she glanced up with a highly dubious face, he said, "I think I'm happy. Are you?"

With a shiver, Moira had realized that she was. She was happy making cakes and living by herself. She liked her neighbours and she especially liked that she rarely saw them, because of her peculiar work schedule. There were no pets, no children, and no smokers in the building, and she liked living in San Francisco, though it was dirty and dangerous and American, and she still needed to figure out her health coverage.

A while after she'd met Har, she had listed off the good and bad qualities of her job and her life, one night in her apartment. Lying on her bed, she'd explained each point to him. This was fully dressed, this was strictly friendly, this was because Har's apartment was too far across town and Roget had company and he was tired of the noise. "All chains and whips, baby, it gets fatiguing. A person needs beauty sleep." Har stretched and rolled onto his stomach, taking up far too much room on her bed.

Now, the sun now completely set, barely a glow left in the sky. Sitting on the Mermaid III, she wasn't so sure about being happy.

II.

She woke up with a funny taste in her mouth. Comparatively late in the morning—6 am, according to her mother's Mickey Mouse watch carefully balanced on the bedside shelf. She reached over and strapped on her watch. The sun was leaking through the branches that shielded the bedroom window. She marvelled at how quiet it was. She had slept well, despite the heavy indentation in the mattress that didn't match the size of her body. Give her time, she'll be as wide as Fats.

She wondered if that consideration meant that she was going to keep the baby. Have it. Keep it. Not have it. She had no moral qualms about abortions—she had one, five years ago, or six, now. She was never good at remembering dates. There wasn't a choice, really. It was a way of saving her own life. There was a local anesthetic and a female doctor who was nice, if dimly remembered. She had her nose pierced that year. She had a crooked left foot from a car accident shortly after the abortion. Not a very good year, that one. Maybe now was better. Yes, now was definitely better. Now circumstances had changed. Or she had possibly changed. She had figured out a life she liked, where she did what she was good at. She sighed and got out of bed.

She took a mug of instant decaf—hot, black, and smelling like coffee, more or less, even if ersatz—and went out to the porch. A black and white dog growled at her from the boardwalk. She said hello to it and it lowered its head slightly. It was some kind of terrier mongrel, an unspecific kind of breed. When she sat on the edge of the porch, the dog came over to the step and sniffed her bare feet. This seemed to satisfy its curiosity, for it turned and trotted back down the boardwalk, crossing the bridge towards the other houses. Moira assumed it was another of Pete's adopted bastards, gone to report on her whereabouts.

She finished her coffee and went to get shoes and a bowl, to pick enough blackberries to eat and to cook with. She hadn't had blackberries for years. The thought of their sharp heavy taste made her mouth water.

Deep in the brambles, she heard the sounds of people getting up, puttering around, going to their cars, driving off to work.

"You get up early don't you," said the now-familiar child voice, somewhere ahead of her in the blackberry bushes. "It'll be hotter later, so it's smart to pick them now."

"Yes," said Moira, not sure if she should encourage conversation. Not sure if she'd rather be left alone.

"You can meet Kate today. I can bring her over."

"Does Kate want to meet me?"

Julie settled herself on a higher branch. "I didn't ask her. What do you do?"

"What do I do?"

"You don't work here. You're on holiday. Where do you live?"

"California."

Julie shook her head. "My mother says you live in Saint Francisco."

"It's the same thing."

At the bakery, Sam often took orders for commitment ceremony cakes. Three-tiered wedding-style was her favourite. Personally, she preferred the traditional old-fashioned fruit cake for this, heavy on the brandy and carefully iced with entirely edible decorations. Because what was the point of plastic on a cake? Artificial colouring, she was willing to stomach, just, but she preferred to think of cakes as being honestly nourishing. Raisins, for example. Chocolate—because everyone knows chocolate is orgasmic. Butter, which is good for your skin, and eggs, which are nature's perfect food, especially when baked. She could reel off the ingredients of a basic wedding cake with out even thinking. Once baked, the traditional fruit cake kept well, mellowing.

"So you mean ideally," said Har, "they imitate a good marriage."

"Most relationships are like baguettes," she said.

"Unfortunately," said Har.

"I think it's better that way."

"You're as bad as Roget."

"I wish."

"I'm a baker," she told Julie as they headed back to Fats' house.

The girl thought about this for a minute. "You could make Kate a cake."

"I could."

"It's her birthday on Thursday."

"Yes, you told me."

"Come meet her. My mother will give you lunch."

"It's barely past breakfast."

The morning after, when they woke up with their legs tangled together, the sheets a mess, they had been politely formal until both of them were dressed. She should have felt like Sally Bowles. But she didn't. They went out to breakfast. It was Monday, their mutual day off. They ate fried eggs and sausages, grits and potatoes. They drank orange juice and coffee. "I need an extra order of bacon," said Moira.

"We're pretending this didn't happen, right?"

"I think so."

"Alright."

He ate the bacon off her plate when it arrived. "Will you be at Roget's party?"

"Are you uninviting me? You're still paying for that rainbow cake you ordered."

"No, idiot." He finished the bacon. "Do you mean you don't want to be there?"

"Of course I'll be there. With the cake."

"Will you come shoe shopping with me this afternoon?" Because this was a major feature of their friendship. Once a month they went to indulge in their common footwear fetish—women's shoe shops, menswear, the flea market, vintage shops. Moira's feet were a practical size 8B, and Har's were 13C—just on this side of possible for women's shoes, in the drag queen world.

The orange rubber boot platforms she had brought to the Slough were the very things she bought that day.

"We aren't pretending it didn't happen," she told him while he examined the boots. "We're pretending it won't affect anything."

"Then maybe it won't," he said.

"What do you bake?" asked Julie. "Bread? Cookies?

"No, I only do cakes."

"Just cakes?"

Moira nodded.

"Hurry up. You want to meet Kate."

"Wouldn't want to miss her." She wonders if children appreciate sarcasm, or at what age that seems understandable. She changed from a sweatshirt to a t-shirt with the words "Disco Slut" in rainbow letters across the front. She wondered if it would offend Julie's mother, Ed. Probably not.

She followed Julie through the grass. There was a small girl balancing, standing up unsteadily on a board and rope swing hanging from a tree on the far side of the white house.

"You're going to fall, Kate," shouted Julie.

And just at that moment, she did, landing squarely on her bum on the ground.

"Your fault," said Kate.

"This is Moira. She lives in Fats' house and she will bake your birthday cake."

Kate looked at her, apparently unimpressed. She got back on the swing, this time sitting on it instead of standing. She folded her legs back, then forward, to get some momentum.

"Do you want a push?"

She shook her head. "My mummy is out."

Julie said, "No, Moira came to meet you, not Mummy. I told you."

Kate put her head back and looked at the tree. "I want chocolate cake. You can't make it."

"I can make chocolate cake."

The best chocolate cake, in Moira's opinion, was a chocolate Bismarck. She liked the name, the sound of it, very heavy and Prussian and probably politically incorrect. Her least favourite chocolate cake was made with stone-ground rice flour, for gluten-intolerant people with nut allergies. Because the obvious best gluten-free cake was made with almond or walnuts, ground fine, and either turned into Italian meringue cloud cookies or the heavier orange-soaked almond cake that was perfect for English teatime. Stone-ground rice flour just didn't come out right as a cake, no matter how much chocolate you put into it. Maybe she should learn how to make Japanese sweets for the anti-gluten brigade—something entirely different, red bean, or sesame and plum.

A Bismarck was like a Japanese sweet in that it was small, individually-sized and cooked in forms like small shells. It had a higher-than-normal egg content. Once baked, she filled each Bismarck with chocolate-flavoured meringue and covered the individual cakes with chocolate fondant until they looked like rows of tiny bombs. This is what she offered whenever a friend was ill or depressed. This is what she took Har, the one time he caught a cold. "Because you need to feed a cold," she told him. "Better than chicken soup."

She considered calling him. It had started to rain and she was inside, sitting at Fats' table with Kate and Julie, playing Go Fish.

"You're not very good at this," said Julie. After that she started playing seriously.

Kate won, clearly pleased with herself, and Julie talked, and Moira considered calling Har and leaving a message. As in, I found out I'm pregnant. Or, guess what, we're pregnant. Or, we should really go out for a coffee as soon as I get back. None of these seemed right.

"I want milk," said Kate. So she poured two glasses of milk and when requested, opened a bottle of ginger ale for Julie. She tasted the milk. Weren't pregnant people supposed to drink milk? She corrected herself—pregnant women. Only women do this. Forget equality. She did want children, in the long run, in the general scheme. She just hadn't considered the likelihood of having one now. And if she did have it, she didn't want to deal with Har on a regular basis. Surely he would pull true to male tradition and disappear as soon as she made the announcement. She would watch him fade away like the Cheshire Cat, leaving only his wide smile hanging over the bakery's display case. It would be quite trick, telling him the news without having him disappear right in front of her. She wondered if she would be kicked out of her apartment. She had been there almost two years; surely she had some leverage.

"You're not paying attention." Julie dealt another round of cards, crazy eights this time, and went over the rules, looking at Moira intently.

Kate concentrated intensely on the card games. She was good at them, her small hands holding the cards in a tidy fan position, her face barely level with the table, eyes intent on the patterns in front of her.

"I'd hate to play poker with you, ten years from now," said Moira. For high and holy days, she got together with a couple of people she knew from cooking school. They played for feeble stakes. She wasn't any good. But she liked playing cards—poker or fish or crazy eights, the games seemed equal to her.

"Are you hungry?" she asked.

"Of course we're hungry. We're always hungry," said Julie.

"Not hungry," piped up Kate.

"It's not like it's a life-time choice, this job," said Har one afternoon when they were shoe shopping. "But at least it's singing."

He was trying on a pair of high heels, orange suede. In heels, he was easily six foot six. He stalked across the store, the top of his head just missing the light fixtures.

"Lethal," said Moira.

"Do you take AMEX?" he asked the saleswoman.

After the shoes were bagged, they adjourned to a nearby bar, one that had British pretentions and imported beer. They ordered pints and Moira tried not to skid on the peanut shells littering the floor. They clinked glasses and sat in silence, thinking private and separate things. How separate was made apparent when Har finally spoke. "Does it bother you?"

"What?"

"Me. That I'm fake. I don't have the total lifestyle."

"Has Roget been on your case lately?"

He shrugged.

"Are you Catholic? Maybe Catholic guilt is getting to you."

He shook his head. "I always have the feeling I'm doing something wrong."

She said something flippant that made him laugh, but she can't remember what it was. Then she beat him playing darts in the back of the bar.

But he didn't do anything wrong. Not as far as she was concerned. What did this baby look like? What sort of DNA was it busily replicating? Did it have plans for the future? Did it have genes for brown hair or blond? What colour eyes will it have? Don't most babies have blue eyes to begin with? What kind of skin will it have—some version of Hargrove's year-round suntan? Babies don't really look like anyone at first, anyhow. They're just wrinkled little aliens, squinting out at the world.

She went and got the Glenlivet and poured a tablespoon worth into the bottom of a glass. She added water and went out to sit on the stoop.

She was watching the rain clouds recede over the opposite shore when three mongrels came down the path towards her—the black and white terrier dog she'd already seen, and two larger dogs, sleek and wet-looking, one black, one yellow. She waited, and a minute later, Pete came into sight. He nodded to her. She raised her glass slightly.

"Solitary drink?"

"Yeah. Can I offer you one.?

He shook his head. "Haven't touched the stuff in seventeen years. Too tempting to just keep going." He sat down on the edge of the porch beside her. The pair of sleek mongrels disappeared into the grass, heading for the river. "Can't keep those buggers out of the water." He rubbed the ears of the terrier.

"What did you name these ones?" She remembered that this was the right question for him. He had too many dogs not to be interested in their labels.

"This runt's the Queen of Sheba. Real pretentions to glamour, this one. The big one's Joe, he's the son of Shirley, you met her last time. She was the limping one, you know, what got hit on the road and abandoned. People are right fuckers. She was a hell of a dog once she was back on her feet. Joe's just like her. Smart. And the gold one, I don't know. He turned up last week. He's got a temporary name. Arnie. I don't know if he's staying. He's an action hero by the looks of his head. He might take off again." Pete paused. He studied Moira out of the corner of his eyes, and she was briefly worried that he was going to suggest a new name for her. Or maybe offer to name the baby. But he said, "You look a little brighter than yesterday." He slapped the terrier happily on the rump and it sat down on the bottom step, leaning into Pete's knees.

"I've got halibut for the hibachi. God that's a beauty of a word, hibachi. I should name a dog that."

"Sounds good. The halibut, I mean."

"Come by in a couple of hours and I'll feed you dinner." He got to his feet and whistled. The larger dogs hurtled out of the grass, shaking muddy water, and headed out ahead of him down the path. The terrier stood slowly and looked back at Moira before following them.

She went in and sat staring at Fats' telephone. She could call her mother. Hello, she thought, why'd you have a kid? I know I was a mistake, but did you consider the consequences of having me? Did you consider giving me up for adoption? Did you have me because you were pregnant and there were no other options? I turned out okay, though, right? I'm not so bad. And you got your life together eventually. Married my father, finished school. Her parents baffled her, though surely that was normal. Your parents fuck you up, isn't that the line, they don't mean to but they do?

She wondered what her father'd really thought, when he found out he had to get married. "I didn't have to," he told her once. "I wanted to. I was curious about how you'd turn out. You came out pretty good, that's why we had your sister too."

She thinks about her mother's stomach, its lumpy washboard surface, the red ridges that have faded but which she remembers as searing bright after her sister's birth. She didn't want to become a stretched out sack of a thing, her skin pulled into a new shape by a separate life. She'd had enough trouble with her own life, getting hold of a life that made sense at all. She liked the idea that her body was hers. She liked her belly as it was, pale and smooth. She liked stripping off her clothes and sunbathing. She never really got tan, but the feeling of the sun against her skin was marvellous, a physical pleasure. And she liked her breasts where they were, high up on her chest. She didn't want to be drunk like a chapped glass of water. That relinquishing of self. She didn't want to be someone else's mother. She'd only just gotten comfortable with looking after herself. There was too big a long-term section in her memory that she ignored most of the time. She knew it was there, but she winced every time she probed it. Everyone has fucked up at least once, she told herself. Har asked if she'd always been a swinging single, it seemed to suit her so well. "Ever tried living with someone?" he asked.

"I like living alone."

She didn't see any reason to discuss her former marriage. It wasn't an entertaining bar story that she could tell to make friends laugh. She had been married, and a boringly predictable mess it was, and if she thought about it too much, she was disgusted with herself for ever getting into such a thing. Getting out wasn't even that difficult, once she decided to go. She'd left before any bones had been broken—putting aside the drunken car accident. At least there had been no casualties apart from her optimism. Her parents had given her money when she asked for it. She had a good marketing job, solid prospects, why would she need money? But they didn't say that. They gave her the money to go to cooking school. They didn't express too much surprise when cooking school somehow involved crossing the border and changing her name.

She had resolved not to be person she had been. She had turned her back on her wrong decisions. She had quietly given notice to her job. She had left Toronto in the middle of the day. She packed a small suitcase with clothes and a large navy suitcase with photos, knickknacks, her diary from high school, and her already-beloved Victorian recipe book, The Book of Cakes. She'd found the book in a second-hand bookshop on Queen Street. Probably the only good thing Toronto gave her. She left her set of keys to the apartment with rent money for the upcoming month, no note, and she took a cab to the airport. It wasn't an elegant departure but it was the only one she could invent for herself.

The moment she liked to remember was the phenomenally freed feeling she had, waking up in California, alone in a sleazy hotel room on the edge of Chinatown, with no view of anything beautiful. But the alleyway that the dirty window gave onto looked like the most wonderful place imaginable. Because it was new and she could be different. She bought a brand new, highly impractical pair of shoes that day. She took her first step away from her sloughed-off former skin wearing purple feathered mules from a thrift shop. Her practical businesslike clothes no longer mattered. It was her hands and feet she was putting her faith in. She showed up for her first class at the cooking school the next morning. Everything before that moment was a secret history. There was no reason to tell Har any of it.

She didn't want another long-term relationship. Not now, possibly not ever. She was straight, and she liked sex, but she was clearly ill-suited to the whole couple experience. She liked being alone. She didn't want a relationship with a baby, either. She wanted friendships. People she could see and spend time with but who had lives entirely separate from hers. Lives that didn't depend on her, didn't restrict her, didn't set boundaries and trigger arguments. Friendship seemed to be a pleasurable commitment. She was pretty sure that being somebody's mother was an entirely different kettle of fish. A different variety of puff pastry. A whole other flavour.

There was such a quietness in her apartment. She had no television or computer or stereo. Her clock radio woke her up every morning with a small beeping noise and static-distorted club music. She listened to the radio all day at the bakery—the channel depending on who was working the counter. Outside, the streets of San Francisco were full of noise, and when she was at home, she valued the sound of her own breathing. She liked to lie on the floor of her one room and stare up at the ceiling's design of central swirls around the light fixture. The moulding was like Viennese cake icing, inversed above her. A baby wouldn't value that silence.

Why should she have this thing? Only that she had vaguely planned to have children. And isn't it the unexpected that she enjoys most about her current life? So isn't this a loverly unexpected surprise. An unexpected chance. An unexpected curse, she thought. This bun in the oven. Har would think of slews of bad baking-related metaphors, if she gave him any chance. Though maybe he wouldn't, if he realized the baby was his. Maybe he'd want nothing to do with the whole recipe, metaphors included.

She decided to make a cake for Pete for dinner. A contribution. Something excessively easy. She lit the pilot light in the stove and set it to high—she remembered that Fats' stove had only two settings: vaguely warm and instantly-roasting. She'd have to watch it carefully. The kitchen had limited baking implements, so she used the deep cast-iron frying pan as a baking dish. She got out the essential basic ingredients and mixed them up. She'd done this the last time she visited Fats, and he'd told her the impressive pancake her mother had made as a first birthday cake. "For you, girlie. She put in the sugar, the baking soda, the flavouring, y'know, the whole thing. But no flour. She forgot the flour. Got distracted. Cake came out looking like flat baked toffee with a bunch of candles stuck in it."

She taps the metal spoon against the edge of the bowl. Mixing a single cake was soothing. At the bakery, she used a variety of electric mixers, different varieties depending on the batter.

"I don't need a course like that," she told Sam when he offered to sign her up for a free trial course in holistic mental centering.

"But it's fantastic," he said. "I feel so whole."

"I don't feel too fragmented right now," she said.

"So this is a good time to tell you. That wedding? They called yesterday, they've changed their mind from the single big cake, now they want seventy-two individual Bismarks."

She hummed along with the radio at her end of the professional kitchen. She thought usually about what the cake was expected to accomplish, why it was ordered. She liked taking specialty orders herself, coming out from the back, brushing her hands off on the apron, taking a pencil from the counter & making a sketch, finding the binder filled with photographs. Studying the person ordering the cake, observing their anxiety or determination.

She was happy to make cakes for celebrations—birthdays and commitments and new jobs, coming out parties, breakups and divorces, even funerals. She could make a really splendid cake celebrating a life well-lived, because surely a good Irish wake needed at least one solid cake, respectful or flamboyant depending on the deceased. Generally well-soaked with booze. And Sam knew everyone in the Castro. He was good at making suggestions as to what kind of cake they might like. She was happy to bake whatever people wanted. She did a pirate cake last month. "He's been a man for three years now, I was thinking maybe a rum cake? Could you do one of those candied parrots on top, I know you do those..."

For Pete, she went with simplicity. She baked a medium-sized butter cake. When its hour in the oven was up, she set the cast-iron frying pan outside on the stoop for ten minutes to cool, then carefully eased the cake onto a plate and glazed it with lemon and almond slivers, the warmth of the cake melting the glaze to perfection. It was the ideal single-living cake—it would keep about a week, losing moisture but retaining flavour, good for dessert, equally acceptable for breakfast. Not the kind of cake you get tired of after just one piece.

She went to sleep that night full of halibut and potatoes and conversation. She liked men like Pete, liked the smell of them and the way they talk tangent-wise around subjects, not touching their emotions until a careful pattern had been worked out, like a bird's mating dance. She dreamt of herons, which were Pete's photo subject of choice. He'd shown her about two dozen slides, not on a projector, just holding them up to the setting sun. He discussed each wing span, the colouring, the closeness of the shot. "They're not liking the development up river. Puts them off their fish. I don't know if they're eating somewhere else or if they're just languishing. I'm considering a calendar offer some environment guy made me, you know, twelve of the birds with some habitat information..."

She heard wings flapping through her sleep, rustling like leaves that she knew were feathers, and she was lying comfortable in the swamp below them, a high tide, heavy water. She was lying face down in the mud in the swamp, cool, with a flock of herons flying overhead, one after another, very silent except for the sound of their wings.

III.

She woke up around four, to the almost-dawn, light rain beating down on the roof. She got up and edged the door open. The air was wonderful, smelling of everything, brambles, river, swamp, beach, the rain carried everything. She pulled back inside and got herself a glass of water. She was so thirsty these days. She wondered if that was important, her body sending her a message. She wondered when this would start being obvious, when she would no longer have an easy choice to make. She ran a hand over her abdomen, frowning, and convinced herself to go back to sleep, listening to the rain.

When she was sitting on the hide-a-bed sofa, wrapped in a plaid mohair, drinking her breakfast of instant decaf coffee, Julie came in followed by Kate.

"Kate sleep-walked."

"No I don't," said Kate.

"I used to sleep-walk," said Moira. "I used to sleep-walk down to the kitchen and out into the backyard when I was a kid. Haven't done it for years. Used to freak my parents out."

"Kate can't open the doorknob so she stays in the bedroom."

"Yes I can," said Kate.

"She's lucky I'm on the top bunk or she'd fall out." Julie tiptoed across the main room as if she were on a tightrope, her arms outstretched.

"I don't fall out," said Kate, still at the open front door.

Julie said, "What are you doing today?"

Moira shrugged.

"It's raining, my dad'll be pleased."

"Is it true that fishing's better in the rain?"

"Everyone knows that." Julie put her head on the table. "Drive us downtown in your rent-a-car."

"I don't really feel like driving in the rain."

"Are the windshield wipers broken?"

"No."

"That's what happened to the windshield wipers in Fats' truck, so he didn't drive us in the rain. But he fixed them."

"That's good."

"Nanny went downtown without us and Mum's preparing her class. School starts in a week. So you can do stuff."

"Do you like to cook?"

"I can make spaghetti. Kate can't do anything."

"I can do some things," said Kate.

She showed them how to make a cake that was mixed right in the pan it baked in—which meant mixing and baking the cake in the cast-iron frying pan. Flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, oil, vinegar and vanilla. And a pinch of salt. By the end of the mixing process, both girls had flour in their hair, which seemed a sign of a successful cake. They sprinkled icing sugar across the top when it had cooled and they cut squares of it and ate them on the stoop, under the overhang of the roof, just out of the rain. Moira cut up what was left and sent them back to Ed's house.

She looked sidelong at Fats' telephone. If she were interested in being responsible, she would have telephoned Har by now. She would have telephoned her parents and received a parental curse or benediction. More likely, she'd have talked to the answering machine which would ask her to leave a message. She didn't want to talk to a machine. She didn't want to talk to a person, either. Someone might convince her to make a decision, and then she'd be having a baby because of someone else. This seemed like the wrong reason. She could have the baby for itself. There shouldn't be other factors, really.

She got up at three o'clock to make a fresh attempt at the day. It was still raining, now with a little more gusto, making a satisfying noise on the roof. The black and white terrier mongrel sat on the porch, tidily arranged under the overhang of the eave. She wondered if Pete had sent it to check up on her. She lit one of the elements on the stove and fried herself some eggs and bacon. What she wanted was a romance novel, something to turn her mind off. What she needed was television. But Fats didn't have any more technology than she did, from that point of view.

She poured the bacon fat into a bowl and set it aside to cool, to give to the dog. She ate directly out of the cast iron frying pan, standing at the window. There was a fog coming down the river, settling in over the grass. She put the bowl of bacon fat out when it was cool, and the dog appeared pleased. She put on jeans and sweatshirt, pulled on her orange rubber boots, and rummaged through Fats' clothes until she found a red k-way. She couldn't imagine it fitting her uncle.

Walking over the bridge to the main road, she recited cake colours to herself in a low sing-song. The list was one she had memorized in The Book of Cakes, long before she went to cooking school. Cherry Red, Apple Green, Lemon Yellow, Cochineal. She had never seen anything that used the scarlet red, roughly the shade of the k-way she was wearing. The original cochineal came from insects reared on Central American cacti. Only female insect bodies were used. She regretted the choice of the red k-way.

The rented Buick was where she'd left it. She had no desire to drive anywhere and anyhow, she'd forgotten the key back in Fats' cabin. She walked down the road that had been empty five years ago. Now, some unseemly development was going up, two shades of stucco, both pastel, with concrete bunkers for balconies and bare earth surroundings that would soon be coloured in, following the lines, all tasteful rhododendrons and smoothly-mown lawns. The evolution of the Slough's edges into suburban condominium projects—no wonder Fats was bitter.

At this moment, Har was probably at home, reading a self-help book. He read all of them. Seven steps to improving everything from his multiple personalities, even though he only seemed to have one personality, to losing weight, which he didn't need to do. "Were you ever over-weight? Or is this a just-in-case scenario, planning for the future?" she asked.

"It's good to be prepared," he said. "You never know what you might need. And I haven't found a book called Seven Steps to Being a Happy Asexual yet."

"I'm sure it's out there."

Roget was sure his roommate was one of those pathetic creatures that didn't like fucking without emotional attachment. "Which means you are definitely gay," said Roget. And secretly, she agreed with Roget. Odds were that Har just hadn't met the right human yet—male or female.

But Hargrove threw What Colour Is Your Parachute at his roommate. The book careened off the slippery red leather sofa and Moira picked it up. "Parachutes?"

"A lot of use you two are. I need a new approach. I can't keep doing drag. It's good for now but..."

"So go back to school."

"We can't all be pastry chefs."

"You wear enough pancake," said Roget.

She wasn't sure what Har was looking for, but it wasn't a baby, that's for sure. She bought him self-help books, though. What harm was there in them? Books about how to deal with too much emotion and not enough emotion. Loving the wrong people and not loving anyone. Having sex with people, or too many people, or with yourself. How to accept your cross-dressing desires. How to revive your inner elf. Why you should bang on drums in the woods. Whenever she opened these books, she didn't see much by way of useful advice. Too often, it looked to her more like shifting of blame. What's wrong with responsibility? she thought. "Not that guilt is great, but shouldn't you stand up and acknowledge what's yours to claim?"

"You're as bad as Roget." Har was dressed for work, in a sequined sheath and Diana Ross wig. His own hair had grown almost long enough, but he went with a glorious afro wig.

Roget sometimes got on his case, said he should just come out properly and get his virgin ass into gear.

"My ass is not virginal," said Har with his hands on his hips.

Roget lit a cigarette and went out to the balcony.

"Why isn't there asexual pride, I ask you?" said Har. "I'm not one of the great bi-fucking-legends."

"True, you're not exactly Freddie Mercury," said Roget from outside.

"Well you're not quite celibate either," said Moira.

Har glanced at her. "I thought you said we weren't talking about that."

Roget said, "About what?"

The next morning, around five-thirty, Har called her at work. "Fund-raiser. Ha. Maybe three people were paying attention to me on stage, and the fucking pig kept putting his hand down my bra to guarantee that I wasn't real. What women put up with is beyond me. If I hadn't been wearing my white sheath lame gown I'd have kneed him in the balls."

"Go home and get some sleep."

"I need a job with less drama," said Har, and hung up.

She had a life without drama, and she liked it. Except now she had an all-too-predictable drama. When the rain got too strong, she turned back, her rubber platforms squelching in the muddy shoulder of the road. The rain ran off the peak of the k-way, down each side of her face, and into her sweatshirt. She liked rain. She liked the way dampness crept into her nose and mouth and lingered there, almost a taste. She was quite thoroughly wet by the time she got to the bridge. A worn Rabbit pulled in behind her, parked, and Ed called out from the driver's seat. "Help me carry these and I'll make you tea."

They brought in a box each of groceries. Ed banged the food into the fridge and into the crooked armoire by the stove. "Mum must've taken the girls for a walk. Red Rose okay?"

"Whatever you're having." She tried to remember if Red Rose was a brand name. Soon she was holding another cup of luke-warm milky tea.

"Sugar?"

She shook her head.

"Thanks for the chocolate cake. I didn't mean for them to adopt you the way they're at your uncle all the time—sorry about that."

"They're sweet."

"Sometimes. And then the curl on Julie's forehead goes the other way and she is very very unsweet. But they think you're an extension of your uncle, being in his house while he's away. He'll be so sorry he's missing you. You can't stay 'til he gets back?"

She shook her head. She wondered what kind of revelations Ed might give her on the subject of child-bearing. She wished there were a way to broach the question without being obviously pregnant. But she couldn't think of how to discuss the problem. It occurred to her that she could tell Har about being pregnant without mentioning that it was his. Except that he would ask who in the world she'd found to fuck without any of their friends finding out about it.

When she got back to Fats' cabin, she called her answering machine back in San Francisco and checked her messages. After the usual beeping noises, there was her mother's voice. "I'm not going out to the Gatineaus this weekend. You won't believe who's shown up. Give us a call." Next there was a message from the shoemaker, telling here that her clogs were reheeled and waiting. And a message from her boss, Sam, asking her to pick up some maple syrup. Wrong season and wrong side of the country for maple syrup, she thought, but how would he know that?

And then, Har's voice, which surprised her even though she was expecting it. "What's up that you left so fast and didn't call? Sam said you had a family emergency. Like what? I hope you're doing fine, baby. Let me know, okay?"

She erased the messages, waiting for the gurgly rewind noise of the answering machine and its ear-piercing reset beep, then hung up. She lay down on the sofa. When she'd visited five years ago, she'd slept here. The hide-a-bed was long past its prime, a worn orange and brown tweed affair that had long abandoned its original shape.

A mental list, she thought. She didn't trust her mind, so she found a pencil and an old phone company envelope in the odds and ends of paper and bills and Bic pens that Fats kept near the telephone. She drew a line down the middle of the envelope to set up the traditional pro and con. I am (she wrote) healthy. At least she thought she was healthy. She hadn't seen a doctor since moving to the States. It was too expensive. Now that she had a year down at the bakery, she was eligible for some sort of insurance through the pastry alliance or some damn thing. That might cover obstetricians. Did breathing classes cost money? Should she stay here and have the baby in Canada, where it wouldn't cost anything? Then she'd have a baby and no job. No, she couldn't stay here. She didn't want to.

I am out of debt. If she ignored her VISA bill, which had pursued her after her move west. She loathed the interest she was being charged, but realistically, that bill was going to wait until the end of the century to get completely paid off. And it could jolly well wait. But that was bill to put on the 'con' side of the envelope. She added, I am living in a most impractical country. But she liked San Francisco, and the bakery, and her life. All of which would change if she had the baby. Or maybe it was just her life that would change. Maybe she could keep San Francisco and the bakery, somehow.

She wrote, I am living alone. Maybe that wasn't a bad thing. She crossed it off and rewrote it in the 'pro' column. She wondered if she wanted the baby. Maybe this was as good a time as any.

"You hesitate too much," said Har. And then he pushed her off the cliff into the water. It wasn't a very high drop, as cliffs go, but she wouldn't have jumped by herself. She screamed all the way down and hit the water feet first, narrow, her arms straight over her head. Her bikini top didn't survive the fall and she resurfaced scrambling for the frilly pink ties of her bathing suit. Har must have jumped right after her, because he surfaced just as she did. She did a dead-man's float until Har was close enough to take a swing at. Roget lay on the beach with his latest conquest; against the sand, their oiled suntans competed for perfection.

She was already pregnant at that point, by at least a month. She was surprised the shock of falling into the icy water didn't solve the issue before it was even an issue. That seed hooked into her inner flesh. But the test three weeks later proved its presence. "You don't seem very surprised," said the councilor. "You should consider..."

She walked home from the clinic. She was wearing a blue miniskirt and a grey t-shirt and blue canvas espadrilles with laces that wound up her ankles and calves to finish in complicated knots just below her knees. She noticed a dust of flour along the hem of her skirt. At the corner, she bought some wonton soup, but she didn't eat it. The styrofoam container was probably still in the fridge, congealing. Maybe her neighbour had gone in to water the plans—she'd left a scribbled post-it note on her door. A week wouldn't make much of a difference. She wondered if babies were anything like cats. Did they eat your plants? She supposed anything was fair game once the creatures started walking.

She woke up at about midnight. The rain had stopped. She unfolded herself stiffly from the hide-a-bed. The crumpled envelope was still in her hand with its pro and con list, but the pen had rolled into a dusty no man's land and after a desultory search, she gave up. She was hungry. The air was stale. She propped open the door and got herself some crackers and tuna fish. Not the most nutritious of meals, but she didn't feel like cooking. To be honest, the only food she enjoyed preparing was fanciful. Baking seemed marvellously different from the daily grind of feeding oneself. She had barely survived the more practical elements of baking school—savory soufflés and suchlike. Thank god she was out of school and would never need to make a carrot soufflé again as long as she lived. She wondered if a child would ever need carrot soufflé. Surely she could get by with omelettes and take-away wonton.

The moon was dragging its disk out from the clouds. She walked along the boardwalk. There were no lights on in the little houses, no street lights, and it was peacefully dark when the trees blocked the moonlight. An occasional bat whipped erratically past, chasing marsh insects. The only sound was the water moving up the ditch that separated the spit of land from the main shore. It really was almost a swamp. It was a Slough. Slew. Sloo. Slow. The houses were built first by fishermen, though now barely half the people living here worked on the water. Some, like Ed's invisible husband, worked down the highway at the fish-processing factory. The other houses had changed hands. Fats liked his new neighbours—good variety, he'd said, last time she visited.

Approaching Pete's place, two slinking shapes materialized out of the grass to her left. His mutts were on nocturnal guard, one of them the bitch she had fed earlier in the day. A large black dog stood in her way for a moment, then faded back, letting the Queen of Sheba take the lead. The terrier dog glanced back, to monitor her movements, as Moira went down the narrow bridge to the stairs that led to the beach. The terrier raced to keep in the avant-garde, just beating her down the stairs. She was still hungry. She tried to concentrate on the water, the reflection of the moon in the river, the boats moored on the far side. She sat on the Mermaid III. Maybe she could borrow Pete's rowboat tomorrow and go out on the water. She hadn't been in a boat since the tourist ferry to Alcatraz with Hargrove and some friends. One of the friends was in formal mourning, three loud sheets to the wind, in drag. The other was merely drunk. The men scattered ashes over the side, when the ferry staff wasn't looking. She had stood guard while they said good-bye to a man she'd never met. Then she'd helped them polish off a bottle of mescal. She spent the return trip throwing up over the side of the ferry.

"I'm not usually like this," she remembers trying to explain.

"Baby, we've seen it all before, believe me."

"Not what I mean," said Moira. And then she threw up again over the side. "You're a terrible influence," she said to Har, who patted her shoulders.

His friend opened his Louis Vuitton purse and rummaged through the contents with a perfectly-manicured hand. "Chewing gum?"

"Thank you."

"Louis always said that to be prepared, a lady needed lipstick, peppermint chewing gum, and a roll of cherry-flavoured condoms." Then he wiped his carefully-made-up eyes with a mauve handkerchief. "God rest his soul."

Since moving to San Francisco, Moira had learned how to mix a perfect dry martini, the olive thrown in at the last moment with panache. She had learned to dance until dawn and stagger to work without missing a beat. She did neither of these things very often. The point was that she could. And a baby would mean suddenly that she couldn't.

Har painted her toenails into rainbows in honour of the Pride parade.

"Don't move your left toes."

She looked at the nail polish in fascination. "I've never been this cool before," she said archly.

"Look at that photo of you on the wall, all Mary Tyler Moore hair—you had that retro-cool thing going."

"That's a photo of my mother. I never did retro-cool. My ex wouldn't have stood for it."

"Your ex? Which one of the thousands?"

She didn't answer, thinking unpleasantly of her ex-husband. Her face must have looked sour, because Har said, "You have nice feet, even if you have no taste in men."

"Had. My feet will be ruined by standing, all those hours at the bakery. I'm going to get fallen arches or something. And I have no men. So I had awful taste but I don't anymore. I just don't have any."

She wore transparent Docs for the parade and she sweated disgustingly. No one cared. They were all sweating. The city was egg-cooking temperatures, even in the shade. And there was no shade on the roof of her apartment building, where she stood with neighbours she hadn't met before and they cheered and laughed and threw confetti and condoms on everyone passing by.

That week at the bakery, she'd made a special series of petit-fours shaped as rainbows and triangles—in French Pink icing, and Salmon, Primrose and Ruby Pink, and plain Blue. This final colour was her own devising—not sickly pale blue nor Smurf artificiality. It was almost purple, a plum-type blue, made of natural food dyes. "It sounds like a pretty colour," said her mother, long-distance, when she described it. "But is there much of a market for blue cakes?" Her father suggested patenting the colour for house paint, because he remembered the postcard of the row painted ladies, elegant Victorian houses, that she'd sent them, to describe where she was living. Back when she first got to San Francisco.

The enormous black dog reappeared from the edge of the water and came over to shake beside Moira. The moon did a disappearing act into a deep cloud bank, and she stood up, brushed off her damp butt and thighs, and climbed back up the stairs. The dog went home to Pete's house, and she continued along the darkened boardwalk to Fats' house. It was nice to walk alone at night without worrying about being mugged or assaulted. Maybe there was something to be said for moving out of San Francisco after all. Maybe in the further future. It would be something to consider.

IV.

It was Wednesday when she woke up. She peered at her watch. Seven am, and she felt violently sick. In the outhouse, she threw up, nothing much in her guts but liquid. It was an experience made even less pleasant because she had the feeling she was being watched. When she emerged, she saw no on. She skipped the instant coffee and voted instead for a glass of ginger ale, which she took down to uneven boards at the end of the boardwalk. She wanted to see Pete, to borrow his boat.

She was almost never sick, not with the flu or common cold, at any rate. She'd gotten chicken pox in her early twenties, which was the worst thing she had experienced lately, and occasionally she felt a twinge of pain in her crooked foot, and in her left hip—she'd broken that skiing, when she was fourteen. She thought it had healed perfectly, but obviously her body had left some memory of its fracture. I won't let my kid ski, she thought, and caught herself. I guess I'm going to have it. I should stop thinking of it as IT, as if she were Doctor Frankenstein, inventing a monster.

Pete came down the boards to the mudflat, trailing a tripod and various dogs. He nodded to Moira and set up the tripod at the water's edge. He sent the dogs away with a gesture and they dispersed into the grass, free for the morning.

"How are you this morning?"

"Alright."

"Looking a little peaky. Not sleep well?"

She suddenly remembered what she'd been dreaming about. She was chasing someone in the fog. She wasn't wearing shoes. It wasn't unpleasant, particularly, in that her feet didn't hurt and she knew she would eventually catch up with the person ahead of her, but she didn't know who she was chasing, or where she was. "Dreamt strangely."

"Full moon last night. The dogs have been restless too."

"Do you still have a rowboat?"

"I'd live here without a boat?"

"Can I borrow it? I'd like to paddle around a bit. Or do you need it?"

"Not using it this morning." He took another moment to set up his camera. "Heron flight patterns across the river. One of their prime feeding times, with the tide on its way down."

She followed him back along the boardwalk to where he kept the rowboat tied up. The boat was old and unfashionable, but freshly painted in mint green. He insisted she take the Queen of Sheba with her. "Dog has excellent water sense," he said. "I'll feel better if you take her. Lie down," he said to the mutt, and it did as it was told, curling up in the prow of the boat, its head propped up on the wood edge to see forwards.

Maybe (she pulled against the oars) Har liked children. She had never asked him. He didn't wince when he saw them in cafés. She knew he was an only child, raised by a single mom. Did that affect one's affinity for children? She wasn't sure. I know fuck all about this, she thought.

She had never touched her sister as a child. Her sister was almost four years younger and when she was born, Moira was too small to be trusted to hold the baby, let alone change its diapers. Then, later, she had never baby-sat for anyone, preferring to do odd jobs for the neighbours: rake the leaves, shovel the walk (though when she started, she was so little the drifts were taller than she was). Apparently she had good wide hips for child-bearing, or at least, so her ex-husband delighted in telling her. He said she'd get fatter and fatter as she aged, just like her mother. So he obsessively monitored her food intake. She marvelled that she wasn't fat now. Maybe it was sheer defiance, that once she left her ex, and gone to cooking school to bake with butter all day long, she'd lost twenty pounds in the first school term.

She pulled at the oars, then rested, then pulled again. "What do you think about children?" she asked the Queen of Sheba. "Ever have puppies? How'd it go for you?"

The dog's ears flicked slightly and then flattened again. "No comment?" The view was lovely from the river. The houses were almost hidden in the tangled trees by the shoreline. A great patch of blackberry brambles seemed about to swallow Fats' house. The second floor of the white house was just visible towards the east end of the spit.

A motorboat whipped past, sending rocking waves towards the shore. She rested in the bouncing boat while they subsided. From here, she could see where this tributary connected with the Fraser. She wondered if there were still long raft-like trails of lumber being moved up and down along the river.

If she had a boy, would he be a cross-dresser? Was that genetic? That might bother her. Which didn't make sense. Har's drag didn't bother her, so why did she have different standards for a child? Occasionally, her Ottawa private school background tightened its mental hold. She made a personal mental apology to Har and to all his friends.

"I might rather have a boy, actually. Whatever he wants to wear," she said. Tried it out, as a sentence, in the air around her. It sounded alright. She wasn't sure she'd want to know in advance, either way, girl or boy. The ultra-sound could keep its own counsel. The baby could be whatever it wanted, a cross-dressing pierced tattoo artist of any gender, as long as it was healthy and cheerful. She wanted to telephone her sister and ask if she felt they were maladjusted adults because of their upbringing. She didn't feel particularly maladjusted but she wanted a second opinion.

To be pregnant at all was some kind of cosmic joke. This, after she hadn't had sex for over a year except for that once—not because she was trying to give it up, but because she didn't feel like the complications that sex seemed to involve. Emotional repercussions—not hers. She didn't have too many extra emotions to give people. What she missed was the physical, the actual fucking, not the cuddling. She got cuddling from her gay friends. She could hold Roget's hand, or Har's, and go to scary movies, and go home happily to bed by herself. For competitive energy, she played poker, badly, and appreciated the silence of her apartment after everyone had left. She cleared the table of glasses and cards and reveled in the calm emptiness. She had the occasional cup of evening coffee with her next-door-neighbour. They discussed politics and the disastrous state of world finances and their changing views of feminism. Along with Har and his crowded circle, this was the full extent of her social routine, and she enjoyed its plainness. Coming by herself, in her bed, before going to sleep or upon waking up in the morning, she liked the feel of her skin, the rough hair she no longer felt obligated to bikini wax, and she didn't miss anyone. Though Har had spent the night often, it was only one night, both of them sober, that they'd wrapped their hands against each other with more than affection, an inexplicable urgency between them. The other nights they curled up pleasantly, each on one side of her bed, their feet and backs touching, and Moira at least slept soundly.

When she rowed back to the half-rotted pier at the end of the spit and tied up the boat, the Queen of Sheba jumped out and turned to make sure Moira got out safely. Then the mutt took off home to Pete's house. Moira went down the beach, but Pete was no longer there. Neither was the tripod. She tromped up the boards and went home to change her clothes. She felt cold and wanted a dry pair of socks.

Back at the house, she pulled open the fridge door and took out ingredients for an omelette. She ran a bath. She was sitting in the bath, eating the omelette, when Julie walked in.

"Excuse me."

Julie said, "Are you shy?"

"I'm eating breakfast. You should knock."

"It's lunchtime," said Julie. She sat on the hide-a-bed and fidgeted with the mohair. "I came to tell you that it's Kate's birthday tomorrow. You have to make a cake. Can I help? Can we drive to get the ingredients now?"

"I have the ingredients already."

"Oh." Julie moved up to the shapeless upper cushion of the hide-a-bed, bouncing. "So you will make the cake? Because my mother said you already made us a cake and Granma said that she can make a cake and not to bother you."

"Go tell them I'll make the cake. I'll be happy to. Come back at three o'clock, we'll bake it."

"It has to be chocolate," said Julie, jumping down.

"Understood." She had her last bite of omelette, put the plate on the window ledge, and leaned back, relieved to be alone again. That was going to be a problem: a baby did not leave you alone. And she didn't like having constant company. That was a unresolveable difficulty, seemed like.

They began with the most standard Genoese, spread evenly on a baking sheet that Julie obediently brought over from her mother's. They lined the baking sheet with brown paper. Kate arrived half-way through the baking process to decide on the shape of the cake.

"I want a butterfly."

"She can't do that," said Julie.

"Of course you can have a butterfly. What colour would you like?"

"We'll surprise you," said Julie. "Go away."

"It's my cake," said Kate. "I am going for a drive with Granma."

When the cake was cool, Moira cut out two half-circles and a long strip, which would be the butterfly body. There was enough icing sugar to make four different colours of icing, though Moira wasn't entirely happy with the colours Julie chose—pale pink, dark pink, bright green, and chocolate brown. She convinced Julie to come back to ice the cake in the morning, so crumbs won't ruin the icing. "You're sure?" said Julie.

"I have experience with this," she said.

She rarely baked at home; why should she? But she kept small amounts of basic ingredients in her apartment's kitchenette, just in case. The possibility reassured her. Maybe I am obsessed, she thought. The only way I can relax involves sugar and ground almonds. She wondered if that's what her dreams meant, really. That she wasn't very relaxed, even if she was happy.

Roget had analyzed her dreams for her, mid-way through the summer. She brought a pile of macaroons she'd made specially—Roget had rhapsodized about the macaroons he'd bought at Sam's bakery. "Those are mine," she said.

"Marry me."

The three of them sat on the floor of the living room." You're very concerned with inner balance," Roget told her. "Totally different problem from Har, who has dreams about exposure."

"Yeah, my boobs might fall off."

"No, it's a deep-rooted fear of your mother's discovering what you do."

"Your mother doesn't know you're gay?" said Moira.

"Or whatever I am," said Har.

"His mother knows nothing. His mother tried to set me—me—up with a friend's daughter."

"It just didn't occur to her. She's very religious," said Har.

"As if that lets you off the hook."

"She doesn't have any issues about converting anyone to anything, don't worry."

"Right," said Roget, and went back to his dream book. "Your diner dream..."

"Diner?" said Moira.

Har shrugged. "I had this dream I was working as a waitress in one of those old-school fifties diners, I had a blond beehive, and all my clients looked like Tom Waits. I don't think that was aspirational, I think it was inspired by the late-night movie I fell asleep in front of..."

"Everything has meaning," said Roget. He ate another macaroon.

She sat up in bed and looked at The Book of Cakes, puzzling over the advertisements for "the Kitchen Oracle" and for bun dividers, which in the illustration looked like obscure medieval torture instruments. But even the bun dividers couldn't distract her. She wondered if it was essential to have two parents. If there was a usefulness to having two people, of any kind. Because maybe otherwise babies were just too tiring. Too demanding. And didn't everyone need a male role model? Maybe Har wanted children. Maybe he'd be the most amazing dad ever, a fantastic male role model. Maybe he'd want to be there for this baby. Maybe some of his drag queen friends could help with the female role model thing—Dianna, particularly, trailing pressed powder and feathers and maternal concern. Dianna would be a better mom than Moira ever could be.

Definitely, she was going about this all wrong. She got up and put on her green Fluevogs and walked back along the boardwalk to Pete's house. Fortunately, he was outside. He was working on an outboard motor, in pieces on his front porch. He adjusted something and the motor made a feeble noise and sputtered into aggravated yelps, then back into silence. The Queen of Sheba stood up and another mongrel came out of the shrubs to stand beside her.

"Sorry, what?" said Pete, turning. "Go ahead inside and put on the kettle. There are coffee filters in the cabinet over the sink."

The mongrels slipped in the door just ahead of her, to establish themselves on a sheepskin spread in the corner. The filters were where he'd said they were. The coffee was in the freezer.

"I take it black," said Pete, coming inside.

Moira poured two identical mugs of coffee, then sighed and dumped half of hers into the sink. She needed a coffee, though. God did she need a coffee. She brought the two mugs to the table and slid the full mug over to Pete.

"This is going to seem too personal," she said, sitting down opposite him.

He shrugged.

"I might be pregnant," she said, and immediately all her skin went sweaty with regret. But Pete just nodded and blew on his coffee to cool it down."

"You might be?" he said.

She looked out the window at the river. Pete's house was built from an old net-loft, lodged solidly in the mud of the marsh. The view was lovely. It was almost time for the sun to set.

"I am pregnant," she said. "I just don't know what to do about it."

"Why not?" He didn't say this with any surprise in his voice. He sounded as if he were discussing her rented Buick.

"Not sure what's the right thing."

He laughed. "Nothing is ever the right thing. You have to do what you want, it's the only way not to have regrets."

She had nothing to say so she drank the coffee. Pete glanced at the kitchen clock, stood up and got a bowl of water for the dogs. He took a separate bowl, cracked three eggs into it, and added a pile of scraps from the fridge. He opened a metal garbage bin where he kept the dry dog food, which he served into a number of aluminum plates, divided the scraps over, and took outside.

When he came back, he said. "Dinner time for the dogs. They appreciate predictable routine." He sat back down at the table. "Have you eaten?"

She nodded, though she hadn't. She didn't want Pete to make dinner for her again. It didn't seem fair. She wondered how many dogs he had at this point. Six? Seven? She couldn't keep track. She may as well be another stray he was taking in.

"I have a son in Saskatchewan," he said. "I don't have much contact with him. I didn't even know he existed until he looked me up a few years back."

"I'm sorry," she said.

He rubbed his fingers along his ear and into his noodle-ish hair. "Well, I wasn't at my best when his mother had him, so she didn't really owe me anything. To tell me, I mean. I wish she had, but I don't know it would have made any difference to me at the time. What I remember of myself at that moment in my life's not real flattering." He reached for his tobacco and rolled himself a thin cigarette and lit it. "I'm not bitter about it, but I might have done better. You're going to do fine. Just do what you want. If you keep the kid, you might tell the father, though. Just to save the kid that trouble, later on. Who knows." He searched for his ashtray, which was in the shape of a trout. "Are you going to Kate's birthday party? It's at noon tomorrow. Very exactly at noon, Julie's already been over twice to make sure I'm going. And you made the cake, I hear."

"So I have to show up."

Cakes were cool when a tester inserted in the middle came out clean. The top should spring back when touched. Some varieties pulled away form the baking tin when they were ready. Meringues were cooked when they turned pale fawn and were no longer white. So, she thought, I am cooked.

"You're sure you've eaten?" said Pete.

She nodded and finished the coffee.

She was going to have to call Har. Of course, when she dialed the number and waited through a long series of rings, it was Roget who picked up the receiver. "Where've you been, darling? Have you gone back to your mysterious past life and moved in with a Canadian lumberjack?" He hummed the Monty Python tune.

"Not exactly."

"Har's already gone tonight, another fucking fundraiser he's raising his skirt for."

"Can he call me when he gets in? I'll give you the..."

"Let me find a pencil, you know the mess in here, hang on..."

She hung on, but by the time he came back to the receiver, she said, "You know, why don't you just tell him I'm fine. I'll be back Friday evening, maybe if he's free he can meet me at the airport bus."

"Sure sweetheart. You'll be in by..."

"6 pm."

"He'll be there, darling. A one-man personal welcome committee, I guarantee it. He's off on Saturday. I on the other hand will be suffering through Dianna's costume parade..."

She made a more or less edible stir-fry for supper, which she was eating when Mrs. Halko appeared at the open door. "You're coming tomorrow right, Julie told you, it's at noon?"

"Of course."

Mrs. Halko nodded. She was wearing a purple shell suit with green piping. She looked like a petit-four. "Have a good night, then."

She walked to the edge of the path with Mrs. Halko, because it seemed the polite thing to do. Lots of bats had come out with the twilight. Moira went back and closed the front door, then sat on the front step to watch them. She had never been afraid of their acrobatic swoops and high-pitched squeaking. There were thousands along the cliffs of some of the beaches she'd visited. Cliff swallows in daytime and bats at night.

In a Castro goth shop, she'd seen little plastic bats on strings, arranged like a baby's mobile. She could buy a crib at the Salvation Army. Her parents could probably be convinced into a cash contribution for the raising of their first grandchild—possibly their only one, unless her sister emerged from her current punk period with a desire to reproduce instead of annihilate. Stranger things have happened, she thought. Look at me.

When the bats were no longer visible in the darkness, she went inside and curled up on the hide-a-bed, under the mohair blanket. She dreamed of birds, this time from up on a hill, overlooking a vast green plantation. Groups of hummingbirds hovered in the air over the trees, like jewels, shimmering in the sun. She felt the sun against her body and looking down she saw that the hummingbirds were coming from her, pouring from her navel and opened veins. This wasn't painful, it was ordinary and unsurprising. The birds were flying away from her and diminishing further and further down the valley that the plantation occupied. Their backs and wings were green and gold and blue.

She woke up with a start, to the ringing of the telephone.

"Hello?"

"Who's that?" It was a elderly man's voice, cigarette rough.

"Why?"

"Where's Fats?"

"He's away on holiday. This is his niece."

"Oh. I'll call when he gets back. When's that?"

"About ten days, more or less. Maybe two weeks."

"Oh. He'll miss this weekend's horse race."

"Can't be helped," she said. She hung up the receiver and stood up. Stretching, she snooped through the cabin looking for a book to read, but found only the sorts of odds and ends she'd expect Fats to keep—balls of string and fishing wire, extra lures, an oil-stained blanket, the innards of at least two radios. Nothing for her to do. She took out the cards and tried to remember the rules for solitaire.

She wondered if children inherit taste from their parents. Her sweet tooth, for instance. Har's predilection for breakfast food. They mutually agreed that the best restaurants in the city had a twenty-four brunch menu, with bacon and pancakes and grits and eggs over-easy. "There's nothing better for the soul," he said. "It's my mother's fault: this is the only type of food she cooks well. I ought to visit her."

"What does she think you do for a living?"

"She knows I sing in nightclubs. I just haven't described what I wear."

Moira frowned. "Maybe she'd be cool with your wardrobe."

"You don't know my mother. She'd have to pray over it. Cool isn't a word that fits into her vision of the world. Trust me on this." He did visit her, though, took three days and a plane ticket and came back buoyant, with an autographed program from a lounge show by Abbey Lincoln.

"She was great."

"What was Abbey Lincoln doing in Mississippi?"

"She was on tour. My mother loved it. We had an amazing time. And she's not coming to San Francisco for at least a year."

Moira wasn't sure if he meant his mother or Abbey Lincoln.

She wondered if having a baby would qualify her for meeting Har's mother, and if she would have to be prayed over. Did the baby need multiple sets of grandparents? Surely one pair was enough. Dianna could impersonate a grandparent, if asked, anyhow. She had convinced her parents to visit her in November—the flights were already booked. Now she would be ballooned when they arrived. Twice her normal size. She wondered what they would think of her. Of course, she wondered what they thought of anything. Maybe they'd end of meeting Har, though she couldn't imagine how that would happen. What kind of evening would that turn out to be? She should telephone her parents, but she couldn't think of a good way of phrasing the situation, not on the phone, not long-distance. Stop worrying, she told herself, which was ineffectual. She wanted a glass of scotch before going to sleep. She ate some crumbs of the chocolate Genoese instead, left-over from the butterfly-cutting process. She stripped out of her clothes and crawled into the sheets, leaning an arm out at the last minute to turn off the light.

V.

She woke up expecting to feel sick, but she was fine. She poured herself a glass of ginger-ale and went back to bed. It was raining, it was seven in the morning, and she wondered if the telephone cord would stretch into the bedroom. It did, so she propped herself up in bed, surrounded by pillows, and dialed her sister's number. The three-hour time different stood her in good stead, but her sister was out. She left a non-committal message. Her parents' line was busy, unsurprisingly. She hung up on their answering service. She wondered if there was anyone else she could telephone, whose number she knew by heart. She called her own machine, but there was only a message from Har, saying he would be at the airport bus stop with bells on. "I cut my hair," he said, before hanging up. She replayed the message and wondered if the haircut indicated anything drastic. But he sounded absolutely the same. She'd know soon enough. Did she think he'd figure out she was pregnant, just be osmosis and brain waves? Fat chance.

She lay back down and closed her eyes, her mind filled with the sound of the rain against the corrugated roof. She nearly dreamed, water, movement, waves sliding down across a surface like a window. She opened her eyes slowly. She was hungry and there weren't many possible ingredients. She didn't feel like making a crepe for herself. Instead, she opened a tin of tuna fish—another gourmet meal. She got dressed, trying to decide if her stomach was any fatter. Her shorts didn't feel any different. She wondered if she'd be forced to buy hideous nursing bras advertised in the Sear's catalogue. She wasn't fussy about her underwear, but those bras had always horrified her, so needlessly utilitarian and beige. They weren't anybody's flesh tone. She usually wore bright-coloured bras, because of washing everything in the same machine load. Her clothes turned grey if they didn't have a proper colour of their own. Today she put on heliotrope satin, a variety of purple dye that could be used for petit fours fondant, the perfect colour for a bra. Sometimes she thought of her bras as crème fillings: cassis, cinnamon, lemon, ginger, pistachio, orange, and peppermint. Vanilla filling didn't feature in her garment selection.

Shortly before she'd left town, Har had brought her a box of Indian sweets. "Because you shouldn't always have to make your own dessert."

Condensed milk and rose water; she thought maybe she could duplicate the taste and use it somehow. Har carefully cut up each dessert and lined the tiny halves up in front of her. "You have to make a wish for every one that you eat."

"What are you wishing for?"

"A bigger apartment."

"No, really."

"If I could have anything?" He ate an orange triangular sweet. "That one's weird," he said. He licked his fingers. "I'd like a huge house overlooking the ocean, or maybe the Gulf of Mexico. I'd have a café on the ground floor, and I'd invite people to spend a couple of months with me, like a rotation of long-term guests. You'd be invited. I would serve first rate espresso and healthy soup every day, and in the evening there would be one or two classy mixed drinks and an even classier lounge singer."

"I'll definitely visit."

"Would you come and make desserts?" He passed her an electric green sweet, half of a circle. It tasted the same as the other ones, despite its supernatural colour.

With Julie's help, the butterfly was completed in twice the time it would normally have taken, but it was truly iced to amazing proportions. The body was chocolate with green peppermint stripes. There were sugar antennae. The wings were chocolate with pink and orange patterns and one green polka-dot. It wasn't exactly realistic but Julie said that was alright.

"It's a fantastical bug," she said. "Kate will like it. Can I come work for you?"

"You're very good." Moira stacked the icing bowls in the sink.

"You have to do the dishes now," said Julie. "You can't stack them like that. Run the water. I'll dry. You can trust me. I never drop things."

Despite this assertion, Moira took the precaution of carrying the cake over to the white house herself when they had finished the dishes. It was still raining and the party was being held inside. Julie disappeared into her bedroom. Ed was making peanut butter and honey and banana sandwiches. A turned-out carrot Jell-O salad wobbled on a leaf-shaped platter on the table.

"Kate chose the menu," explained Ed. "She wanted us to have grape juice to drink, but I negotiated with her and she's allowing the adults to have wine."

There were Ninja Turtle paper plates and a pile of deflated balloons beside the Jell-O salad mould. Feeling reasonably full of hot air, Moira blew them up, tying them carefully to the bits of ribbon provided and attaching them to the light fixture over the table.

Julie called her into the bedroom. The room was off the kitchen, with narrow bunk beds and two bureaus with small swing-down tables.

"I'm wrapping Kate's present," she said. "Help me."

The gift was a wind-up dinosaur with glowing eyes. "Nice," said Moira.

"No, it's very scary. But Kate likes dinosaurs. I don't know why. We weren't allowed to see Jurassic Park, we're too little."

Moira helped wind down the dinosaur so it stopped making noise, and held the creature while Julie wrapped it thoroughly with brightly-patterned paper and scotch tape. Ed came to get Julie dressed and Moira went out to sit on their front porch. The air was cool, and the grey of the sky matched the colour of the water. She watched the raindrops fall into the river, making regular circular patterns, up and then down again. She imagined that she could see the tide was moving, see the change, though really it was too slow to see with the naked eye.

"What would you choose?"

"What?"

"If you could have any wish you wanted?" He ate a toasted rose water sphere giving her half of it.

"I think," she said, licking her fingers, "apart from World Peace and a cure for AIDS, I think I'd like more money. Boring, huh?"

Har shook his head. "That's not good enough. You've got to decide what you'd do with more money. Buy Manolo Blahnik footwear? Go study the Indonesian tree sloth?"

"I'd go to Mexico for two weeks. Send my sister a ticket so she could visit me, I never see her. Nothing very exciting. Small changes. I'm happy. I'm boring, but I'm happy."

"It suits you."

They planned to get together for the turn of the century's new year's eve. She promised she would wear platforms no matter how out-of-fashion they might be by then. "So I'll be able to see you eye-to-eye," said Har. "By then, I'll be respectable."

"You're already respectable."

"I'll be the union rep for drag queens of Northern California."

Now there would be a kid at the party. She? He? Would be eight years old. What an odd thought. A bit older than Julie.

I wonder what I'll name it, thought Moira. Carmine, after the food colouring? Jericho, after Fats? No, probably better to choose a name that wasn't quite so personal. The baby needed its own name. She'd choose one when it was born. Presumably she'd think of something in the heat of the moment. Or else she'll end up with a baby named after a pain killer.

Two dogs she hadn't seen before appeared on the path, followed by Pete, who was wearing a proper collared shirt. The dogs sat beside her on the porch.

"After you my dear." He held the door open and they went in, leaving the dogs outside.

Kate was in the kitchen showing off her puff-sleeved white dress, which already featured a grass stain on the chest. Mrs. Halko had changed into a sweater which matched the pastel trim on her lime green shell pants. Children shrieked from another room.

As they were demolishing the cake, the telephone rang. "Hi Fats," said Ed. "Moira's here. Yeah. You're going to miss her, she only had a short holiday. I don't know. I'll put her on after Kate."

"He called to say Happy Birthday to Kate," said Julie knowingly.

Moira said, "Ed, ask him to call me later, at his place, okay?"

After Kate hung up the receiver, there were presents.

Moira threw up after the party. Serves me right, she thought. Cake, Jell-O mould, and grape juice. Ick. The phone was ringing when she got back inside.

"Yes?"

"Moira! What in hell are you doing there while I'm back East?"

"I decided to take a holiday."

"Yeah, same here. I'm in Ottawa at your parents' place. Your parents look great."

Fats hadn't seen her parents in eighteen years, so she wasn't sure what he'd be comparing them to.

"How're you doing?"

"Good." She hesitated and took a breath. "I mean, really good. I'm pregnant."

"You're what?"

"Pregnant."

There was a pause. "Great!" said her uncle. "Is it great?"

"Can you tell my parents for me? I don't feel like announcing it by phone."

"Sure. My pleasure." There was a longer pause, then Fats' voice surfaced again, as if he suddenly remembered another appropriate question. "When's it due?"

"I'm not going to have it in your cabin, don't worry. Seven months from now."

"Okay. That's, what, March sometime. Good. I was born in March. Good season. Spring. Make yourself at home at my place. If I'd known, I'd have waited to see you, girl. Take care of yourself."

If he'd known I was pregnant, she wondered, or if he'd known she was here. She hung up the phone. That's one thing she was reasonably good—taking care of herself. She had developed the knack for it over the past couple of years. She wasn't sure though if that would extend to taking care of anyone else, least of all someone as dependent as a baby. Maybe there was some kind of daycare solution? She appreciated that Fats hadn't asked any questions at all—like, who's the father, or, I didn't know you had a boyfriend, or anything. I like being single, she reminded herself. She had nothing to be embarrassed about.

Har was an excellent friend. He was good at being her friend. She just couldn't imagine wanting to see him constantly, every day. She also wasn't sure she wanted to make love with him again. It would be complicated at this point. Even having him in her bed would be awkward, with this. Could he be a father and participate one way or another, without being her boyfriend? Probably there was a self-help book with eight steps to answering all such questions. She thought about her routine. She was going to have to make some changes. She rummaged up a red Bic pen and another of Fats' salvaged envelopes.

4am, she wrote. Wake up and get ready for work. What do I do with the baby. 10am, lunch break. Where is the baby? Has she already been fed at 4am, or at 10? How often do babies eat? All the time, or at least, at inconvenient times, she was fairly sure. And how long was she expected to breast-feed the creature? She needed an instruction manual. There must be thousands on the market. She'd have to go back to the Women's Health Clinic. Immediately.

3pm, she wrote. Finish work. Find daycare where I left the baby? Were there daycares for small babies? Somewhere in her memory was a magazine article detailing the statistically increased likelihood for colds and flu and chicken pox... She shuddered remembering her own magnificent experience with the pox. She wasn't sure there even was a daycare, let alone a good one. The theory was excellent, but did San Francisco actually have any affordable ones? Philosophy is so much easier than living, she thought.

7pm, I will be too exhausted to ever go to the movies again.

Would she go out at all? Who would look after the baby? If this was going to entail a move back to Ottawa, she wasn't going to have it. Except that I've decided to have you, she thought. You aren't making things easier for either of us.

She resolved to be a perfect, uncomplaining mother. She'd find a manual on how to do that, too. Har might have a self-help book about that already. He'd bought How to Be Your Own Jewish Mother just a month ago—and Roget had offered to find him a sugar daddy who'd do just as well. "How about a Baptist sugar daddy? Whatever denomination feels good for you."

She could read fairy tales to the baby, take her to the beach. And keep her from eating sand. Okay, maybe they could go to the park. Keep the baby from eating dirt. Isn't that more or less what her mother had done with her? There are almost no photos from when Moira was a baby. Everyone was too busy being shocked, maybe. There were slides from when she was three and four years old, where her mother is hugely pregnant, then there is her sister. She remembers one shot very clearly. The colours are slightly yellow-ed technicolour in the slide. She is maybe four years old and sitting under green tree branches, obviously recently sawn from a tree that needed trimming. She was sitting in a fort of branches, the leaves hanging down like she is inside a tent, and she is laughing. Her mother is out of focus in the background, also under the branches. Thinking of the picture, she can hear the branches brush together and hear voices and laughing. But maybe that's just an invented memory, imagined.

Once the baby started crawling, what would she do? Would the baby crawl towards her or away from her? She'd never felt any need for psychoanalysis, but what if she had the baby and he turned out to be a crazy child? That would mean she'd made someone crazy. She sighed. She felt guilty already and she was only two months' pregnant.

On the envelope, she wrote, 10:30pm. Sleep.

What if the baby doesn't sleep? She was already so tired, she wasn't sure how many extra hours of sleep would ever make her feel awake again. Maybe the baby would enjoy naps. Lots of naps. But she remembered her mother joking about spooning Scotch into her sister, to make her sleep. At the time, she thought her mother was joking, but maybe she wasn't. She doodled a couple of dancing stick figures along the edge of the envelope and considered the likely price of disposable diapers. She was beginning to see why none of her friends had children. Well, also her friends in San Francisco were almost all young gay men who didn't get knocked up particularly often.

She tried to see Ed as an example, but she lived in the Slough, she was at least five years older than Moira, and she was married, apparently, although no one except Julie ever referred to the man, and she had yet to see him at the house.

Life is complicated for everybody, thought Moira. She drew a stick figure in the shape of an enormous D on legs. She tried to visualize herself that way, at the bakery, wearing Dr. Scholl's shoes. It wasn't as unbelievable an image as she'd expected.

"Visualization," said Har, "seems to be the crux of at least half these self-help books."

"Visualizing what exactly?" One of her cooking school friends was cutting her hair—well, buzzing her head with electric clippers, running the razor back and forth until she had an even blond 1-inch stubble over her head.

"Whatever your ambition is," said Har. "For example, you're supposed to be able to solve insomnia by imagining a sleeping child.

The friend ran the clipper too hard against Moira's neck. Moira yelped.

"Sorry, not a calming image for me," said the friend.

"That one doesn't work," said Har. "I tried it. At least I had insomnia. Made it easier to try out the solution."

"It's difficult to try out positive visualization if you're not actually suffering from the problem."

"But I have to read something."

"Read a novel."

"There are like murder mysteries only better. I know it's going to turn out okay, the problem gets solved by the end of the book. Everything works out. The emotionally crippled walk again. It's like reading the lives of the saints."

"As long as you don't get converted."

"You should start reading how-to books. It's more fun that self-help," said the friend. She turned off the razor. "How to cut hair, how to build a sun-deck, how to home renovate..."

"God help me with a power saw," said Har. "Ages ago I nearly killed myself with a lawnmower. Chainsaw would be worse."

The friend rolled her eyes. "You have to figure out what your talents are. Besides the fact that you can walk in high heels." She brushed her hand across Moira's hair. "Whatcha think?"

Moira wasn't sure.

"It's super-cute," said Har. "You need to make it a bit shorter behind the ears here."

The friend adjusted the gage on the clipper and fixed the style around Moira's ears.

There was a gentle knock on the door.

"Come in."

"Stay." She heard Pete's voice admonishing the dogs, before he pushed open the door. "That one," he said, "constantly trying to get inside. I don't understand his obsession. I'd rather be outside, myself."

"Maybe the dog doesn't like the rain."

Pete sat on the sagging sofabed.

"If the rain lightens up, I'd like to get another hour rowing around in your boat, this evening. That okay?"

He nodded. "You really leaving tomorrow? I'll tell Fats he has to invite you back."

"I'll bring the baby."

"You tell Fats that?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I'd give you a dog, it'd help you look after the kid. But I don't think one of my mutts would thrive in San Francisco."

"Probably not. But thank you."

She had a sudden image of the Queen of Sheba, sitting on the sidewalk outside Sam's bakery. It kind of pleased her.

She took the rowboat out when Pete left. There was a light drizzle, but nothing the red k-way couldn't handle. The Queen of Sheba was waiting near the pier and jumped into the boat ahead of her.

Rowing slowly to the other side, she admired the row of little houses, nestled in the increasing gloom of the evening. Enormous clouds waited beyond over the mountains. She could understand the temptation to live here, far from what was considered normal. She liked the sound of the oars against the water. In the distance, the engines of a much larger boat, out of sight, subsided as it moved further out into the Strait. She leaned back and watched the night come down. She expected stars, though it was cloudy. After a while, with the rain falling in her eyes, she sat up and rowed back to the pier.

They had gone to a movie, Chronos, and it had finished later than they expected. They walked as far as her apartment, and she felt nothing, no premonition, when she asked him if he wanted to stay the night.

"D'you mind? Roget's met another noisy one. After that last session, the neighbours asked if we were making videos. I mean, Roget could be a porn star, but seriously, as if he'd make smut videos in his bedroom. Lord. We live in a nice building."

It was Sunday night, reasonably peaceful on the street. When they got upstairs, she poured them each a glass of wine, all that was left from a bottle that had been open for over a week. "It should still be okay," she said.

"Every time I stop talking I think about vampires," he said. "How much would you be willing to give up?"

She took a sip of the acrid wine. "For eternal life?"

He nodded.

"Not much. Though I'm not big on the idea of dying, either."

Har stretched out, tipping back his chair. "Can I have a bath? My skin is crawling after that movie."

This was not an unusual request. Several of Moira's friends lusted after her bathtub. She was blessed with a bathroom three times the size of her kitchenette—one of the original green-tiled bathrooms of the house before it was subdivided into apartments. Her bathroom came complete with antique cut-glass light sconces and a huge claw-footed Edwardian bathtub. She did all her reading in the tub. The library hated her. She kept a slew of magazines and dessert recipe books in a tottering pile within easy reach of the tub. She had a selection of bath oils and bubble baths. It was the only part of the apartment that she'd lavished much effort on, décor-wise. Since everyone always admired the bathroom, she kept it amazingly clean.

She curled up in bed with the remains of the weekend newspaper while Har disappeared into the bathroom. She could smell the juniper bath salts. She was almost asleep when he came to bed. She had turned off the light and left only a candle, and when he sat on the bed beside her, she wasn't sure what seemed different. Nothing. Nothing was different. He was still a friend, and she wasn't going to analyze why the rest had happened. She wasn't sure why they had kissed, except that his mouth tasted like silk must taste, and their arms folded around each other as hinges bend doors into rooms. She didn't regret the night. There was a calmness to the movements they'd made against each other, with each other. She wondered if sex was just an inevitable experiment. She had hoped it wouldn't alter anything she valued.

This baby might conceivably alter something.

She wished that Fats' cabin had a fireplace. She heated up a packet of instant chicken soup mix that was in the cupboard. It wasn't delicious, but it was fine. An enormous daddy-long-legs stared up at her from the sink. She delicately picked it up by one squirming leg and threw it outside. She sat on the sofabed with her bowl of soup and flipped open the only book she had brought with her. She ate and read about the how to pipe flowers with icing—forget-me-knots, pansies, primroses, and maidenhair fern. The rain banged with increasing vigor against the corrugated roof.

Marzipan was the next entry. She was in the cake-decorating section. She wasn't as good with marzipan as she might be. "Almond paste," she read. "No amount of description can ready the craftsman more than constant practice and a consideration of nature." This seemed entirely appropriate as directions for a pregnancy.

VI.

She dreamt of oranges and tangerines. The scent filled her nose and mouth and she fought to breathe against it. She scrambled her way outside, only to find herself in a fog that smelled of fire, though she could see nothing burning. She asked the people she passed if there was a house on fire, but they all shook their faceless heads and walked away from her. They were wearing dark clothes, and she was naked. Suddenly the fog broke, shattered like a window, and she was in a garden, carrying oranges on a tray, trying to balance them, but they kept rolling away into the long grass.

She woke thrashing in the blanket, trying to gather up the oranges she had lost. She threw herself out of bed and went to the outhouse. This must be morning sickness. How long did it last? She would have to ask her mother. She didn't remember her mother's throwing up when pregnant with her sister, but she wasn't sure it was the kind of detail a child would remember. She was four, old enough to be confused by the process and squeamish about the details. She remembered going to visit her mother in the hospital afterwards. Her father had admonished her to be very quiet, that her mother was very tired and if she was very good she would be able to meet her new sister. She didn't remember seeing her sister at all. The hospital smelled strange to her, and her mother's face didn't fit with her body on the bed, with her normal skin colour. Everything was yellow. Maybe she hadn't been good and wasn't allowed to meet her baby sister until later. She couldn't remember.

When she came back from the outhouse, Julie and Kate were sitting on the sofabed. They had taken off their muddy boots and lined them up just inside the door. She was impressed.

"Are you leaving now?" said Julie.

"Can we play Go Fish?" said Kate.

"Sure." She got herself a ginger ale, the last one. She gave the girls small glasses of milk. It was eight-thirty in the morning and her flight only left at noon.

Julie dealt, dropping the occasional card, complaining when Moira took too long to call her choice. She kept up a running commentary on the game's progress until Kate won. "Can we help you pack?" said Julie. She was probably used to being beaten at cards by her younger sister.

"There isn't much." She changed into a clean shirt, threw her clothes and Fluevogs, The Victorian Book of Cakes and her toothbrush into her shapeless shoulder bag. "There, now I'm packed. We can wash the dishes." Julie dried while Kate sorted the cards into suits and stacked them up and put them. Then they went along to the white house and she said good-bye to Ed.

"It was good to be here. I needed some headspace."

"Have the girls given you any space? I hadn't noticed."

Outside, Kate went to stand on the swing. Julie held out her hand. "It was nice to meet you," said Julie.

"I'll be back again soon." Moira shook her hand solemnly.

"Fats will be home soon too," said Julie.

"Good-bye," said Kate. She fell off the swing.

The Queen of Sheba was on the porch. The mutt wagged her tail when Moira rubbed her ears. "Nothing left to eat here, mongrel-queen." She walked the dog back to Pete's place but the man was nowhere in evidence. The tiny beach was empty. I don't need a camera, she thought, for this place to stay in my head. This Slough.

Trailed by the dog, she went home and made herself a last cup of instant decaf coffee and wrote a note to Fats to leave in the house, thanking him for his hospitality in absentia. She carefully wrapped up the ingredients she had left over, so that the mice wouldn't get into them before her uncle got home. Then she picked up her bag, turned off the electricity, and swung the door shut behind her. She clicked the lock back onto the shutters—picking it open hadn't harmed the mechanism at all. And there, the house looked just the same as it had when she'd arrived. The Queen of Sheba remained on the porch when she walked away.

The Buick drove her back to the airport as if it knew the route. It was funny to drive while wearing platform rubber boots. Normally, all her shoes had to do was stay on her feet and allow her to walk. Her heels didn't have to fit neatly onto the gas pedal of a Buick. Would she need to get a car for the baby? Was it necessary? She hoped she could get by with one of those backpack carrier things, hauling the baby around like a marsupial. She was going to have to decide on the baby's pronoun. He? She? She took the airport exit and parked in the rent-a-car lot.

Checked in, she went through the metal detector and wondered if the machine was harmful for pregnant women. Surely there would be a sign? She remembered a lawsuit a couple of years earlier, here at this airport, involving a papoose that some security guard had run through the baggage x-ray. The baby's parents were understandable outraged. The baby seemed okay, though.

The flight was only slightly delayed. She had a window seat, but she fell into a doze as the plane began taxiing down the Vancouver runway. She dreamt of the coast, though in her mind's eye it was more like a tropical sea. A flight attendant woke her up briefly to offer her a repulsive cherry Danish. Looking at it with surprise, Moira shook her head. She could make a more edible Danish out of plasticine. She closed her eyes and thought she was in a rowboat, though she wasn't working the oars. She was being pulled by a current down the coast. There were birds overhead, herons probably. They were flying above her and around her, outpacing the current. The sound of this air rushed over and down on top of her, and then the plane was landing in San Francisco and they were being given smog warnings.

She got lost at the airport terminal, trying to find the bus to go downtown. She always landed slightly confused, distracted. She paused at a pay phone and checked her answering machine messages, to see if Har had changed his mind about meeting her. There were no messages. In line for the bus, there was a surge of Spanish conversation which made her smile. She was back in her alien city, in her temporary home. She was glad. The baby would have to learn to love this city, at least for a while, because she wasn't ready to leave yet.

Har's hair was cut much shorter than she expected. He stood on the corner opposite the bus depot, waiting for the light to change. He was wearing a plain red t-shirt and the Marlborough jeans and flip-flops. He was carrying a white plastic bag of groceries. This will be fine, she thought, trying to believe it. This will be fine. I'm not asking anything of him. Except that she knew she was.

He gave her a hug when she got off the bus. "How's the family? Where were you? Wasn't bad news was it?"

"No," she said. She stood on the sidewalk, momentarily dazed by the noise of the street, by all the people and voices around her.

He shifted the grocery sack into his other hand and slid her shoulder bag off her arm so he could carry it. "I'm not working tonight. So I thought maybe I'd make you some dinner, and I got a bottle of wine, and you can tell me about your trip. Unless you feel antisocial—family, you know, that's cool too. If you want some time alone, I'll go home and drink the wine by myself."

She looked at him from the corner of her eye. He never drank much. "How are you?" she said. "Nice haircut."

He smiled. "I wanted a change." They waited at the corner for the light.

"I've spent the week alone a lot," she said. "Dinner would be good. Great." She paused as the light turned green. "I've decided to have a baby."

"Seriously?" And then he got it. He didn't budge from the corner but turned to face her. He said something she didn't expect. He said, "That's amazing."

She tried to nod.

"Can I help look after him? Or her? I mean, without living with you, but helping? I can help, right?"

The light turned amber, and then red.

He said, "What are you going to name our baby?"

###

About the Author

Lisa Pasold is a Canadian writer and journalist. Her most recent book is ANY BRIGHT HORSE, which was nominated for the 2012 Governor General's Award. Her first book of poetry WEAVE, was hailed as a masterpiece by Geist. Her second book of poetry, A BAD YEAR FOR JOURNALISTS, was nominated for an Alberta Book Award. The Globe and Mail called this new poetry collection "critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical." Her debut novel, RATS OF LAS VEGAS, was described as "enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker" by The Winnipeg Free Press. And Freefall described the book as "the incredible experience of being told a story rather than reading a book. As if reading a fairy tale, you are pulled into Millard's world, and it is a world so compelling that you can't bring yourself to leave."

About RATS OF LAS VEGAS, Lisa's 2009 published novel:

"Lisa Pasold's debut novel is as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker." —Kathryne Kouk, The Winnipeg Free Press

"I cannot recommend the book enough. Poker, boxing, Las Vegas, those Depression-era details captured so well... What's not to love, I tell you? Nothing. It's all good. You ought to buy a copy, or steal one, or get it at the library, or go camp outside Lisa's house and buy a copy from her personally. Really, you should." —Craig Davidson, author of Rust and Bone

"The incredible experience of being told a story rather than reading a book...as if reading a fairy tale, you are pulled into Millard's world, and it is a world so compelling that you can't bring yourself to leave." —Kate Marlow, FREEFALL

"A high-stakes poker game on a train through the Rockies, a beautiful bad boy with a broken eyetooth, a near-death by strangling, a fast 40s car, a landlord in marabou feathered mules, mobsters, showgirls, a card-playing monkey: how could Lisa Pasold's first novel be anything other than a feast? As compulsive as a gambler, as propulsive as a transcontinental train, Rats of Las Vegas is an irresistible read." —Ellis Avery, author of The Last Nude

As a thank-you for reading The Book of Cakes. I've included a free bonus: the first thirty pages of my novel, Rats of Las Vegas.

free bonus: the first chapter of Lisa's gambling novel RATS OF LAS VEGAS

Copyright © 2009 Lisa Pasold

A print edition of this book is available through Enfield & Wizenty (an imprint of Great Plains Publications). 345-955 Portage Avenue Winnipeg, MB R3G 0P9 www.enfieldandwizenty.ca All rights reserved.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pasold, Lisa

Rats of Las Vegas / Lisa Pasold.

ISBN 978-1-894283-92-2

free bonus: RATS OF LAS VEGAS – Chapter One

by Lisa Pasold

I came to luck naturally. It's an ability, like playing piano or shooting pool. I have an affinity for cards. It 's innate, instinctive: you can work it up, but if you're not born with it, there's only so far to go. The cards arrange themselves botanically, as leaves on a particular tree. As each one appears, I place it in my mind along its branch and look at what remains—the gaps, the holes in the foliage, the sky—what is begging to be found. This is the way the world comes to me, something more automatic than chosen. I have no choice.

I looked down at the brown oilcloth of the table, thinking about what cards had been discarded. Dermot coughed; he owned the beer hall and the backroom where we were playing, and he had a cold. He leaned on the door that led to the bar, watching the end of the game. There were three of us left at the table, there were the cards, and there was a collection of empty whiskey glasses alongside my cup of tea, ladylike in pale yellow china. At seventeen, I had no interest in liquor, though I was often frustrated by how quickly my tea went cold. There was almost always a poker game in the backroom of Dermot McMann's Gastown bar. Nothing high stake, just a simple game in a plain room with three painted white walls and one stained wall of once-red wallpaper, the whole décor suffering from more than a decade of tobacco and neglectful housekeeping. Dermot kept the bare light bulb shaded with green paper, his one concession to atmosphere.

I held a nine of Clubs, barely useful in relation to the other cards in this poker game. If I were a gypsy fortune-teller, I could have held this nine and pronounced it a fortunate card, coupled with its dark suit of Clubs—a number representing strong will, great reserves of fortitude. But I held fortune differently. I discarded the nine. Dermot coughed again, trying to smother the sound in his black beard. His beard threatened to take over his head, it grew so far out on either side of his face, but above the beard what you noticed were his kindly suspicious eyes. He wasn't suspicious of me. The long arms which allowed him to deal cards across a wide round table or thwack miscreants on the far side of the smooth wooden bar, those same long arms had picked me up and set me on a bar stool when I was too small to see past the edge of the oilcloth. He said he was just doing himself a favour, taking advantage of local talent, but he was always kinder than he claimed.

I'd played for Dermot for seven years—he introduced me to the game when I was ten. I picked up the rudiments of cards from my mother's upstairs neighbour, but Dermot was the one who gave me a chance at poker, little stick of a thing that I was, and I felt a certain loyalty to him. He was the one who encouraged me to listen to what the cards had to say, and during most games, the cards offered me quite the serenade. The player opposite me, Kevin, almost as short as me, and round like Humpty-Dumpty, had been playing at Dermot's pretty much since I started there. He looked at his cards, bending the slightest corners back from his not-quite-new striped vest, so he could see what he held. Then he folded, because he was tired of bluffing and more important, he had to get home in time for dinner or his wife would tan the skin off his knuckles. In the seven years that I'd played at Dermot's, I'd grown to appreciate players like Kevin. The man didn't know much about poker, but he knew a great deal about life, and every now and then he enlightened me on some subject I hadn't any experience with: traditional marital relations for example. My mother's household was no shining example and I needed whatever education I could find.

When Dermot first sat me on a barstool and handed me a pack of cards, he taught me the different hands of poker, showed me how to figure the simplest odds for a flush based on what had already gone by in the game, and he taught me the need for secrecy, to keep that so-called poker face no matter what my hand revealed. I can't explain why the cards were my perfect key, a password to the world around me. All I know is that I recognized them as my saving grace, from the first moment I held them in my hands. And I might not have known this was unusual, except that Dermot seemed so delighted by my prowess. I soon discovered that the men who played poker in the backroom of Dermot's bar had no feel for cards. They had no idea. I mean, they hadn't the foggiest notion of how to listen to the game. Winning money from them was almost too easy, except that I was a child. Can't imagine that grown men would easily agree to play with a mere girl? You have to imagine Vancouver back then, through the dirty black Thirties.

It was 1938, that spring which was so unseasonably hot, before the War, before so many things. Cars still had running boards. Their hooded shapes cruised along the grand streets of Hastings and Burrard, paperboys running alongside selling headlines for a nickel.

And my nickels, from Dermot's games? Oh, I saved a few coins; the rest, I spent at the movies. On Granville Street I went to see Top Hat at the Orpheum

Cinema and dreamed about finding such a fantastical world, where women wore dresses covered in ostrich feathers, where music played and Fred Astaire danced. The mythic pair of Fred and Ginger swirled through a brightly-lit dream, while around Vancouver, men lived in cardboard encampments along the beaches, and lumber mills churned the stench of pulp through downtown. The city was a wild and strange place, with mud where roads later were, and in that harsh last year of the Depression, anything was possible—even a girl winning at cards, day after day, winning every game for a whole month that March.

That was the month a man actually managed to kill himself by jumping off the Burrard Bridge. A number of enterprising depressives had tried, but despite their enthusiastic leaps from the bridge, they were dredged still breathing from the water by fishermen, who wrapped them in blankets and gave them warm toddies. The fishermen had better things to do than fish for men who'd failed to kill themselves, but what else could they do? There was practically a traffic jam of people waiting to throw themselves from that bridge.

The men who didn't want to kill themselves came down to drink and gamble in Gastown, the rough old part of the city near the port, where Dermot had his beer hall. It wasn't a glamorous establishment. From the sawdust-covered floor to the old pressed-tin ceiling, the room's atmosphere consisted of smoke and beer fumes, but there were fewer fights under Dermot's watch than in other bars. His beady Irish eyes kept even the meanest men in line, and if patrons didn't obey his dark glare, there was always his vast beard, bristling off his chin like his very own bear. Dermot managed to keep the bar going despite the general downward slide of the neighbourhood. Some months, the backroom games kept him afloat.

I put my two cards face-down on the table; I knew what I had. Face-up on the table, to complete my hand, were two eights (Clubs and Hearts), the Queen of Spades, and the ten of Hearts. Not a pretty show, such cards added up to nothing on their own, except that I was holding both the Queen and Jack of Hearts. I had played the game tight, folding often, but my opponents at Dermot's weren't very good at paying attention. So now they overlooked the fact that I was betting hard—I could use the pair of Queens, if nothing else. The remaining player glanced at Kevin, who shrugged as he raised me. A man who worked for the railway was dealing, he'd been cleaned out a little while back. He burned the top card by turning it over and putting it to the side, as one does, and turned up the next card. To my delight, it was the nine of Hearts. That was that.

The more games that went through my hands, the more fascinating poker seemed. It was a kind of love affair, an infatuation that grew into a more serious emotion. Instead of being one-sided, this love seemed mutual. I knew even as a child that I was a plain girl, and men would never fall in love with me for my looks. I had squared myself with that. But the cards liked me, and Dermot was surprisingly honest with the cash he won when I played for him, splitting our winnings 20/80 exactly, keeping the greater part for himself. This was fair—I was learning, and that backroom was my apprenticeship. The good grace in playing was mine, but I'd never have gotten to play at all without Dermot. Because of his belief in me, I'd moved up from merely dealing the game to running the table for him. I played in the back while he ran the bar, a division of labour based on skill.

At Dermot's I learned about tells, the series of motions and notions betrayed by men's gestures. Tells reveal what you need to know about anyone's game. There are simple tells—you should always call a man who has a hand to his mouth when he places a bet. You'll be right more often than not. I always watched the way a man reacted, after I'd placed my bet—if he had a strong hand, his shoulders would invariably relax, just the tiniest bit, seeing that I was still in the game. Of course it's not that easy with life in general. Get me away from a table and I make mistakes. But I'm convinced that even in real life, there's always a telltale, giveaway moment. The trick is finding the tell.

As Kevin cleared out, a woman came in from the street, looking for a man she knew, or looking for someone to buy her a drink, or maybe looking for someone to buy her, quite directly. Dermot was up at the front of the bar within seconds, taking her politely by the elbow and escorting her out, assuring his patrons that there were no women allowed. "Keeps the bar clean, " he said, and the men drinking his watery beer laughed.

When he returned to the doorway of the backroom, I said, "Don't you think that you're lying?"

"What would I be lying about?"

"That there aren't any women in your bar. There's me."

"You're only a kid, Millard. And you're not in the bar, so to speak."

I frowned at him. "I'll be eighteen next year."

"If it'll please the lady, I'll call you Miss Millard." I rolled my eyes and put away my take.

"I wish your mother could spare you the whole night."

He meant nothing unseemly. It was just the occasional midnight game, when a gambler passed through town or when someone had gotten lucky at something else. The stakes played at night were larger than the ones at his afternoon games.

"You know I'd like to." Oh, I wanted to try my hand at a different kind of game, to look around the table and study the hands and watch new faces give themselves away. But I didn't see how I'd ever get out of the house—even asleep, my mother had razor-sharp hearing, probably because her men always left her sudden-like. I didn't need to explain this to Dermot. He seemed preoccupied.

"What is it?"

"If I call you Miss Millard and up your share to half, will you do it?"

"Half? Truly fifty-fifty?" I narrowed my eyes at Dermot, who looked at the stained ceiling. "Are you short this month?"

"Joycie's upping his fees."

Joyce worked for the police force; he made a nice sideline off the bar owners, turning a blind eye to their misdemeanours in return for a bit of pocket money. I rested my hands on the oilcloth and spread out my long fingers. Each of my knuckles was chafed, every nail broken down to the quick. I didn't care. I turned my palms over, the skin crisscrossed by innumerable lines; my hands looked old enough to be reliable when I held a hand of cards.

"Fifty-fifty," said Dermot, reading my pause as a near-acceptance. "Joycie's gone and recommended our game here to a man from Seattle that I don't rightly know and I don't rightly trust. He's coming tonight. I think you'd be a pretty distraction."

"Mr. McMann, I'm not anything like..."

"We're starting at ten o'clock. "

"Dermot, " I said, using his Christian name as I never did, to make him look at me. I even put the right sort of Irish tilt to it. The surprise fixed his eyes on my face. "I'm nothing like a pretty distraction."

"You can play cards against him. That's pretty. Fifty-fifty, just for tonight." I thought about the money. The only kind of accounting I've ever been good at is the kind you do with cash when it's in front of you on the table. I could visualize it there. I could do any kind of sum at all with cash on the table. I did this sort of accounting for a little while as Dermot waited, but then I shook my head. Dermot wrinkled his forehead; he must have wondered how he was going to pay off Joyce and I felt badly for him. He was a sort of father to me, I never had any other to speak of. Playing this nighttime game wasn't really much to ask of me—I would gain from it, I'd be able to play a more difficult, more challenging game. My heart, as the expression goes, ought to leap at the chance. I stood up and brushed my hands as if I were dusting them off.

"I'll see what I can do," I said.

From the very beginning, my mother disapproved of my poker-playing. When I was fourteen, in an effort to keep me away from Dermot's, she got me an after-school job in the hotel where she worked—a shift in the laundry. So I spent the afternoons at Dermot's, when I was supposed to be at school, and I worked evenings at the basement laundry. Then the chief laundress took sick, everyone in the laundry moved up a rung, and I washed up in a morning shift, which left me time for Dermot's, but I could no longer go to school at all.

My mother made no protest about my education; by then I was nearly sixteen, and the better wage of the longer morning shift was worth it. I gave my mother all my laundry earnings. No one at the school missed me and I didn't miss them. I had taken what I wanted. I could add, subtract, do percentages, I could read and write. No one felt it necessary for me to stay in school, not even Dermot, who'd at least taken some pride in my occasional good grade. So I worked full-time at the hotel laundry. The smell of bleach made me nauseous, every shift leaving the taste of bile in my mouth. I don't mean that as a metaphor. We used so much bleach, I really did feel sick to my stomach from it. Towels, sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins, aprons, all boiled white. Just thinking about those sheets, now, the smell drifts towards me and I feel queasy. I don't like white things around, it's such a false cleanliness—you can be clean and not bleached white. And you can be filthy and covered up with some ghostly white sheet, blue-white, it's so clean.

I laundered from five in the morning until four in the afternoon, Monday through Saturday. Then I departed the Hotel Vancouver basement, I took off my damp white apron and left it hanging in the basement staff room, and I walked down the street to join whoever was playing in Dermot McMann's backroom. I played poker until my mother finished her shift at the hotel; I made sure I always got home before she did.

My mother worked every day of the week in the Hotel Vancouver as a cook. She was never a chef, simply a cook. Only men were allowed to be chefs. My mother cooked the hotel guests' lunch and then she cooked them dinner. She worked until eight at night. Her favourite menu was the huge roast beef done up on Sundays, because the meat was carved in the dining room and she had fewer things to do in the kitchen. A good thing, because by Sunday night she was usually exhausted; on weekends she worked breakfast as well and sleep was a figment she imagined. No wonder she was right irritable if I woke her up.

I didn't see how I could slip back to Dermot's by ten at night without my mother suspecting there was a poker game involved. My mother was a decent woman, not God-fearing; intelligent, not educated; a brooder not a drinker. Well, not exactly. She had black hair and dark eyes and about all that made us look related was a certain similar intensity to our expression. When she was in her darkest moods, I used to make her tea, very strong. She would sit in the only armchair in our living room, wrapped in a red and black mohair afghan. I used to think it was the afghan that cajoled her into a better mood—I knew it wasn't my loyal company. Eventually I decided tea was the essential element.

If I went out for the night, maybe I could convince the boy who lived upstairs from us to lie for me. Teddy was my best friend, and when he smiled just the right way, my mother believed anything he told her. If I bought him a chocolate bar, Teddy would say anything. From the backroom, I went out into the alley. A guy was going through the rubbish outside the building. He was the colour of the empty tins he'd lined up around his feet—who knows what he planned to build with them. I was practiced in slipping around these rag-pickers, skilled at dodging the rest of the flotsam-jetsam that washed in from the port, the ex-sailors, injured loggers, idlers and rare family men who populated the tangle of streets that led up from the docks.

Coming onto Cambie Street, I skirted around a man delivering seltzer bottles, the glass necks clanking against one another as he brought the dolly over the curb. Main Street clamoured with people coming home from work. Hawkers and peddlers elbowed through the crowd, trying to interest passers-by with shiny buttons and shoelaces, bits of lace and scavenged hardware. I traipsed through the mob to Oppenheimer Park. All along the far side of the baseball diamond, herb sellers and fishmongers weighed out their wares. I passed the Japanese market on Powell that offered five types of bean curd in cakes, lined up in tidy rows—not my chosen treat. No, I stopped at the ice cream cart on the far corner.

Money made a difference for the smallest of things. The cash I earned from my usual cut of winnings at Dermot's gave me the freedom to eat ice cream every day of the week, if I wanted. I spent some of those coins on socks and stockings—eventually I wanted to buy a new pair of shoes. I spent the coins I earned and stored the bills away, neatly filed in the pages of the novels I read. I only owned a few books, but they served me well, storing my money for the future. I hadn't quite decided what that future was going to be.

The rain was starting by the time I chose my ice cream flavour. The vendor scooped the vanilla I'd selected as large blops of water splattered down. The rain made everyone look polka-dotted but the weather didn't change how much I liked the walk, ice cream on my tongue, cone in my hand. The shops here had their old outfitter signboards alongside new neon signs, three different colours of blinking green-pink-white right next door to carefully-cut letters advertising brands of food and cigarettes. I couldn't read the varnished boards painted with hand-brushed calligraphy, written for the Chinese who lived on the far side of Hastings Street. The Chinese had come to Canada to work on the railway and hadn't ever gone home. Maybe they couldn't get home. Maybe they were stuck here, same as me, planning an escape but not quite clear how to do it. Somehow I imagined that China must be very much like the interior of British Columbia—mountains and lakes and dry cool landscape. I passed the Chinese boy selling firecrackers. He stood on the lid of the box and yelled as you passed his corner, and if you gave him a penny for a firecracker, he'd jump off his box, open the lid, and fish out a thin stick wrapped in red paper.

I turned onto my block of East Pender Street, all off-kilter houses and ill-kept gardens. I don't think East Pender was ever an elegant road. It sprang up fully-formed and crooked, with a ditch running in front of some of the stoops and nothing good to be said for some of its inhabitants. Our house was more or less identical to all the others, nothing to be proud of, though my mother was. Our house was painted a middling shade of blue, with peeling white trim and a verandah that gave straight out onto the sidewalk in three sharp steps, no intervening flowers or decoration.

We rented the ground floor, two and a half rooms, my bedroom being the half. It was designed as a pantry, cold as stink in winter, but it was private, it had a door and a window, so from the moment we moved in, I adopted it as my private room while my mother took over the real bedroom. The main room, the biggest part of the ground floor, served as living room, kitchen, homework room, dining room and bath, all at once and with serviceable furnishings.

As I approached the house, I wondered if Teddy was likely to be home. He was the most reliable person I knew. I didn't know then how he would change, I still believed in him, partly because he'd kindly kept the school bullies from breaking my skull, during the uneven years of my education—I was a small and solitary girl, and what's more, I liked to read, which made me entirely too attractive a target. I used to read aloud to Teddy before we went to sleep. I was indiscriminate—newspapers, advertisements for hair oil, any kind of book appealed to me—but Teddy preferred adventures like Treasure Island.

I read to him while our mothers were out working. I tried to teach him cards, but he hadn't the patience to read them, so I went back to telling him stories.

Teddy was three years younger than me, but he was tall for his age. He could charm his way out of most arguments, but he always had a handy fist to back up his smile. Teddy looked older than he was, and he looked darn good. Something smooth and charming in his walk, an indefinable quality that made everyone turn and stare when he went by. I suppose we were the Mutt and Jeff of friendships. We grew up together in that crooked blue house.

As I got closer to our house, I saw him lying across our front steps, poking something with a twig. I finished the last of my ice cream cone as I reached our stoop, and kicked Teddy's leg with my shoe.

"Look't this," he said. He glanced up at me, pushing his black hair out of his eyes. He poked two beetles with the twig—he was trying to get them to fight, I suppose.

I stepped over the bugs. "Do you have a shirt you can lend me?"

He rolled onto his side. "Why?"

"And can I borrow your jacket?"

Teddy sat up, his brown eyes cagey. "What d'you want with my clothes?"

"I want to walk to Gastown at ten tonight with no one bothering me. Do you mind helping me, please. "

"Why're you going out? You got a boyfriend?"

"Why would I want your castoff clothes for a date?"

"Oh, it's a card game..." He laid off torturing the beetles and threw himself through the door that led upstairs to his mother's apartment.

I went straight into my mother's part of the house, the screen door clattering behind me. My plan wasn't very original—if I didn't look like a girl, no one would be able to say they'd seen me walking through the neighbourhood late at night, on my way to Dermot's. And for the game itself, it didn't matter what I wore. I didn't care what the poker players thought of my appearance.

No one ever looked at me and thought isn't she easy on the eyes. When a man looked at me in those days, he probably thought isn't she a strange little shifty-eyed thing. Fortunately, cards don't give a darn what you look like.

The only trick with the game tonight was keeping my mother in the dark.

If she believed that I had gone to bed in a bad mood, she might leave me alone until the morning. She sympathized with bad moods, being queen of such things herself.

Teddy's steps tumbled on the stairs, then he pushed open the screen door of our part of the house, holding a jacket and a shirt for me, along with an old pair of shoes.

"Is Mary Ellen home?" I asked.

"Ma's out."

An even-featured woman with abnormally long eyelashes, her face polished by the sun, she spent hours outside, finding the right ingredients for her remedies. I could have trusted Mary Ellen with the truth of where I was going. She was good with secrets, and she knew truth could be complicated. Teddy was her spitting image. I've never understood that expression: did it mean they were so alike they might spit at each other? Though that wasn't quite true—where Mary Ellen's face was even-featured, Teddy's had a hint of unease. His eyebrows were ever so slightly crooked, his upper lip a bit too full, curved too much to one side, with a just-so tilt to his cheek— his features were the same as Mary Ellen's, same eyes, eyelashes, nose, yet rakishly set the tiniest bit off-balance. You felt trust, looking at Mary Ellen. You felt something different, looking at Teddy.

If Mary Ellen was out, it was because she was birthing a baby, or collecting plants to perform the kind of miracles people needed in those days. The kind of miracles we've come to believe only happen in doctors' offices and hospitals, which back then seemed to happen upstairs in Mary Ellen's very clean front room, where there was a table that wasn't used for dinner and where the curtains were kept closed. Everyone knew what Mary Ellen did in her house and no one thought less of her for it. Every woman in the district had gone up those stairs one time or another.

"Your mother would understand," I said, taking the clothes from Teddy and retreating into my pantry-bedroom to change.

My bedroom had once been painted an ill-chosen medicinal shade of blue that had faded to a more personable pale turquoise. There was space only for my neatly-made bed, with a well-organized bookshelf above my pillow and a row of hooks for my clothes, below the window. I sloughed off my usual dress and sweater, folding them and squaring them to the edge of the bed so they hid the hole in my beige blanket. I hated that hole, but I didn't have the skill to mend it properly, or the nerve to tell my mother that I'd torn it—a nail caught the blanket as I made the bed one morning, too carelessly, too quickly. So now I was stuck with the hole, ugly as it was. I reminded myself that summer was coming and soon I wouldn't need the blanket.

Teddy's clothes were too big for me, but I rolled up the trousers and hitched in the belt he'd brought me. The shoes were much too wide. I tried lacing them up with extra socks, sitting in the living room, but it was no use. I put on my mud boots instead. Teddy watched me silently.

"You have to tell my mother I've gone to bed in a mood," I said. "Be convincing so she won't bother checking on me."

"What do I get out of it?"

"A Snickers bar."

Teddy smiled. "One Snickers bar for lying to your ma, another for lying to mine."

"You don't have to tell Mary Ellen anything one way or the other, and you certainly don't have to lie to her, " I said. "One Snickers bar, that's the offer."

He tilted his head to consider my outfit. "You look like that sorry git Plotznick at school."

Teddy was suspended, for the third time, forbidden now to finish the school year, for he had broken another boy's nose. The boy was the local bully, Gerald Avison, who was picking on sorry git Plotznick. Teddy never liked an uneven fight. He respected other people's physical frailties. Intellectual frailty, well, he figured he was born to take you in any con available. He stomped across the schoolyard and stood in front of sniveling poor git Plotznick, careful not to step on the broken shards of the boy's knocked-off eyeglasses. He picked bullying Gerald Avison up by the hair, broke his nose with a clean punch of a loosely-balled fist, and left him bawling in the schoolyard. Plotznick didn't know what had happened. His glasses smashed on the ground, he couldn't see past his own unharmed nose. I easily imagined Teddy sauntering from the schoolyard, leaving a grateful Plotznick to retrieve the pieces of his broken spectacles.

I had my own reasons for disliking Gerald Avison—when I was fifteen, he'd cornered me at school, beside the janitorial closet. "Are you even a girl?" he'd said. "You don't look like a girl. Let's see." He rammed a mop handle between my legs and forced me into the cupboard. But before he could close the door, the recess bell rang and a torrent of children swarmed into the hallway. Teddy's class rushed past, and Teddy stopped. He took hold of Gerald Avison—before he'd even seen for sure that it was me, trapped there—and in the resulting tussle, he kicked Gerald in the head. Which meant I caused Teddy's first suspension. And Gerald's ear wasn't the same afterwards.

I adjusted the jacket and tried to look fierce. Teddy collapsed in laughter.

"I don't look convincing?"

"I hope the game's at Dermot's."

"None of your business."

"What am I supposed to tell your mother again?"

"Bad mood. I've gone to bed in a bad mood and don't want to be disturbed. If she believes you, I'll buy you a Snickers bar, but if she doesn't, no candy," I bartered. "Of course the game's at Dermot's, where else would I play cards?"

"Give it time, Mill. You'll play against the best of them. How about I get a cut for helping you get out to play?" That was Teddy all over—fourteen years old and working the angles.

"Fat chance."

"Then I want a dollar. No, two dollars. As well as the candy bar."

"You're a rat."

He grinned. And I agreed to his terms—he was too old to bribe with chocolate. I wished I had some other friend I could lure into helping me, but Teddy was my only ally—the neighbourhood girls my age had crummy jobs and worse boyfriends, and they had no time for me. Our interests were too different.

I believed that cards offered me everything I needed to understand the world. My mother was at fault for this conviction—first, because she offered no alternate beliefs, and second, because it was through her I discovered cards. Not directly. But I came to cards through Teddy's father, a soft-spoken man who spent too much time in my mother's company. Teddy's father was a gambler, the first I ever knew. He kept a pack of cards in his satchel, which is how I discovered those bits of cardboard that have made such a life for me. And make no mistake, I am forever grateful to him.

When we first arrived in Vancouver, my mother chose to play around with the only person we knew in the city—a gambling man who lived on East Pender Street, in Mary Ellen's house. We came down from the Interior, and my mother looked him up, for she was practical in affairs of the heart. We came to Vancouver and moved into the ground floor apartment of Mary Ellen's house.

My mother spent a few weeks in bed, when we first arrived. She was unwell, and despite whatever history lingered with Teddy's father, Mary Ellen looked after her. That's what Mary Ellen did, as a midwife—she looked after people, and sometimes she brought babies into the world. Other times, she sent babies away.

I'd seen Mary Ellen, a few months before Teddy's birth, helping a woman who'd come to her big with a child. I went upstairs after, to see the baby. No one was there, but a wrapped package sat at the top of the stairs. I know I shouldn't have opened it, but that's how I found out what happened to babies Mary Ellen didn't want around. I know I cried out—maybe in horror, but probably only in surprise. Children aren't naturally squeamish, or at least, I wasn't. The dead child in that package, wrapped up, curled as it was, poor thing, obviously the tiny bloody body had come out of the pregnant woman who'd been at the house—I knew that much about where babies came from. Such things weren't so mysterious back then. By the time I got to Vancouver, I'd seen a dead rabbit's stomach full of tiny unborn rabbits, which didn't scare me so much as surprise me, how they were packed up in there.

It must have been a terrible job for Mary Ellen, herself well into her sixth month, to help someone else lose a child—knowing as I do now, how losing things isn't easy. But that dead baby was a tiny bloody thing, wrapped in a piece of cloth. I suppose Mary Ellen was planning to bury it later, after helping the woman home. I wrapped the aborted child up as it had been before, not horrified by its squashed shape, only disturbed that it was so obviously dead. I hadn't expected it to be dead—I thought maybe it would be waiting for Mary Ellen to breathe life into it. Mind you, it looked more like a kitten than a baby and I'd seen kittens born dead; all that licking did nothing for them.

It must have been about the same time, one of those evenings, that Teddy's card-playing father came downstairs to talk with my mother. I used to think that's what they did in her room, they talked, while I was sent out to play on the veranda. On one of those evenings, while Teddy's father sat in the living room, smoking, waiting for my mother to come back from work, I crouched on the floor, looking through his bag. I discovered a patterned box with pretty pieces of paper flattened inside. I liked these cards immediately, I took them out without any trouble at all and laid them on the floor in front of me. Teddy's father noticed what I was doing. But instead of telling me to put the cards back, instead of scolding me for snooping, he explained the suits, the symbols, the face cards. What he noticed was my dexterity.

"You've not played with cards before?" he said after a bit.

I shook my head and shuffled the deck. "Like this?" I asked him.

He demonstrated a more elaborate waterfall shuffle and I imitated him.

He tried the same thing left-handed, a little awkward, and I smoothly did the same.

"Dear God," he said. I remember wondering what it was that concerned him religiously at that moment. I generally only heard the Lord's name used at times of mystery, upstairs at Mary Ellen's.

I was immediately taken with this new pretty toy, the wonderful sound of the cards rustling through my small hands. I was much seized with the colours, blue-patterned on one side and a firm red or black against white on the other. The medieval face cards, double-headed, always partly upside-down, I understood instinctively. Isn't something always turned over or hidden or peering at the world from another angle?

Teddy's father spent that afternoon teaching me Go Fish. When he put the cards away, he explained that they were fragile, these paper things, and expensive, and I wasn't to touch them without permission.

"Yes, sir," I said. One of the few times I listened quite seriously and didn't think of disobeying.

I wouldn't say I knew my future was in those cards, but I had seen something that filled me with awe. Something that was not of the Interior, not part of the bush, not a tomboy's toy, not a dead rabbit's bloodied belly. I hadn't thought about being a girl—I was satisfied with being a tiny tomboy—but I wasn't sure how to get on in this new city. All the children seemed so much bigger than I was. So I recognized those cards. I saw they could explain the world to me, they could offer a bigger future than I had understood before, from the moment I held those pieces of coloured paper and felt the way they fit in my hands.

"Your daughter's got a funny skill with cards," he said to my mother when she came home from work.

She prepared some dinner for me, and I didn't think she was going to deign to answer him. Often she didn't speak to me, I was used to it—better to have silence than shouting. But when the soup was in the bowl and set in front of me, she looked at him quite specifically.

"At cards," she said, "and how would you know that?"

He ran a finger along his mustache.

"I'd rather you didn't teach her your gaming trade," she said.

He shook his head fast. "Not at all, I wasn't...."

"Games? " I said, "You play games?"

My mother looked severe. "Most men," she said, "play games. And this one plays particular ones."

"With cards?" I said, delighted.

###

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