A hardworking toothless woman charges seventeen dollars and fifteen cents to store it for me between Septembers. Alongside unclaimed uniforms of security guards, satin gowns of bridesmaids and dancing lovers, and costumes of retired acrobats, my jacket and its accoutrements hang in a polyethylene sleeve behind the steam presses at Nettoyeur Serge Daoust.

“I might retrieve my uniform at the dry cleaner’s,” I told Sophie this morning.

“That’s a start.”

“And I might go into a bookshop and see if I can get my own copy of the poem.”

“You and that poem!”

“The poem has haunted me all my adult life.”

“What’s it called? ‘Whingeing in the Graveyard’?” She started clicking around for it on her phone.

“Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard.’ ”

“From when?”

“From when I was twenty-four.”

“Which twenty-four? Yours or the general’s?”

“Gray wrote the poem in 1751.”

“Nobody’ll stock that in a bookstore anymore.”

“But it’s immortal.”

“I don’t care if it’s got wings and a crown, you won’t even find it in a discard bin. I’ll order it from Amazon and you can pick it up at the Mission…there. AbeBooks, Oshawa. You owe me ninety-nine cents.”

“But mine cost only sixpence!”

“Well now, you don’t have that one anymore, do you?”

“I have discovered that a library in Toronto has confiscated the edition Miss Lowther bequeathed me before I sailed for Quebec,” I say stiffly. I do not want to reveal that I have visited it.

“Poor baby.”

“At least today I can go and retrieve my red coat…”

“What about going to see Madame Blanchard, too? War brides never get over their love for a man in uniform. You’ll be welcomed.”

“Maybe, if there’s time…”

—

AS I NEAR BONAVENTURE STATION my chest tightens at the thought of seeing Madame Blanchard. I no longer take her on outings to Dollarama for no-name laundry bleach or cat food or her dishwashing scrubbers of multicoloured stripes made in Poland. Nor do I accompany her to her annual podiatrist appointment—I was able to help her with these things only as long as she was well. For quite some time I didn’t catch on that her growing imperiousness masked poor health, and even now I find it hard to accept.

Bonaventure Station is cavernous. Automatic ticket-dispensing machines have encroached upon the ticket-seller’s relic of a kiosk. He devours a bun stuffed with turkey and lettuce.

“Might you be able to provide me,” I ask, “with a flexible ticket to the suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux?”

“Non.” He lodges his bun on his packet of cigarettes. “It is not possible.”

Nothing flexible is possible, he insists, unless I fork out a sum that could practically charter a helicopter to land me on Madame Blanchard’s nursing home roof.