“Monsieur.” The man appears disgusted—perhaps my attire is not as smart as I have imagined. “There will be no chairs. There will be no audience.”

With that, he stuffs the paper in his pocket and disappears to a back office through whose doorway I spy a whining photocopy machine and a tantalizing pot of coffee. Disheartened and repressing a wish to protest, I exit the museum and the plains themselves and head down Avenue George-VI and zigzag the descending alleys to Dépanneur Bonenfant to see Harold.

—

HAROLD ATTACKS A HOT DOG, all-dressed with the condiments peculiar to New France, his needles and wool parked tenderly beside his plate. I order an eau-de-vaisselle coffee and ask how he slept.

“Like a baby! And you?”

“I was troubled…there was fog. I slept under a tree that reminded me of my childhood. I kept veering between…here…and…”

I place my dew-damp papers from Madame Blanchard’s nursing home on the Formica. The cheque made out in my name for the little bit of money she had in the bank—$754.57. Her list of medications and so on. Receipts from the nursing home outlining what they did with the rest of her bank account. Her letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs, so similar to the one Henrietta Wolfe wrote to the prime minister of England, asking for justice regarding her son’s military pension—then the papers pertaining to Madame Blanchard’s guardianship of me.

I show Harold a document dated 1987. “Here’s the one with my birth mother’s name on it after they found her stoned at a tavern on the beach in a town whose name they’ve obliterated with a black marker.” I first saw this document just before Christmas at the age of eleven, searching Madame Blanchard’s bedroom to find out if she was hiding a Sears guitar.

“Your birth mother?”

“They found her turning her purse inside out for the lotto machine while I screamed alone in the bedsit with my foot caught in the crib slats. The social worker omitted all the names of people or places, leaving only the name of the bar: La Taverne…”

“That narrows the field!” Harold resumes his knitting.

“And the first name of my birth mother: Noémie.”

Harold focuses on twirling together strands of yarn where his wool has split.

“I know I told you my mother’s name is Henrietta Wolfe….”

“And so it is.” Harold calmly peruses his stitches and runs the yarn through his fingers. “Henrietta. Yes….It’s a lovely name.”

He still sports his yellow shirt, very clean, much cleaner than my red coat. I wonder if he has a habit of visiting laundromats, and how he manages to live rough as I do yet remain fresh as a chrysanthemum, such a light yellow.

“You believe my mother’s name is Henrietta?”

“It most certainly is.”

“Though this paper plainly states that I’m Jimmy Blanchard?”