I get another beer and slump on the couch, unable to think what I was hoping for. My heart is still beating from her touch, from her body, but my brain is in neutral. Elaine’s car leaves, and I turn off the lights in my house, and sit in the dark. I let one small sob squeeze its way out, and then I shut it down, all of it. It was there for me, and I didn’t go through with it, so I mustn’t have wanted it. End of story.

I think of Sarah, and the stupidity of mentioning her name. She would be embarrassed for me. She would ask me not to mention her, and certainly not think of her, especially when I am with someone else. After James died, Sarah and I hardly even touched each other except for desperate supportive hugs that could have been between any two strangers. And yet, even now, when I think of sex, I think of Sarah. When I think of the female body, I think of Sarah. All this is made even more pathetic by Sarah’s new orientation. It’s pretty obvious, no matter what I feel about Elaine, that Sarah’s dominance in my imagination has to stop. I’ve got to admit that my suspicions about Elaine have not entirely disappeared, and they are an ingredient in this muddled mix. My head is a pudding. Beer is the only answer I have found for that.

In the morning, I wake with the remnants of embarrassment and an idea of asking the post office where the boxes might have come from. I can’t find a postage mark on any of them, but I’m not certain that postmarks still exist anyway. I call Cooper at the post office in Waterglen, but he can’t recall anything about the boxes. He remembers some that came from China a few weeks back, but has no knowledge of more recent deliveries. I ring the post office in Stony Creek, which is a shop as well as the sorting house for my mail run. Marg, who is some sort of distant cousin, is amused by my question. She says if I’m getting boxes that aren’t from cheap-machinery wholesalers in Asia, then she doesn’t know a thing about it. And then she laughingly suggests I must be up to something else. Maybe drug smuggling? I laugh along with her, and ask if she saw the boxes arrive on a batch of dates I supply her with, but I have the words ‘drug smuggling’ tumbling over in my head.