“I said I did. I was watching George, who was pulling his toy horse toward his house. It was nearly our dinner-time and my tummy was rumbling. Betty was making rhubarb and custard, my favourite.”

“Jesus, Jimmy,” moans Sophie. “What am I gonna do with you?”

“ ‘Well,’ the blue man said, ‘even the churches, with their love of God, really underneath it all know about money and are always thinking about it all the time. You can’t go anywhere or do anything big or grand or even good, without it. So don’t forget that, it’s the second thing. Now, what do you think the third thing is?’

“ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. Remember, I was only a child.

“He bent close to me and said, ‘You have to go back in time, not just forward. Do you know how to do that?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘It’s easy. Remember the first thing I told you, about making a goal and doing something, some little change, an incremental change, each and every day towards it? Say incremental.’

“ ‘Incremental.’

“ ‘Good. Well, you have to cast your imagination forward now, to the point you’re envisioning in five years, ten years, or however long it will be until that future day when your goal is within reach. Can you imagine you’re there?’

“ ‘I think so.’

“I was getting tired of him and I couldn’t really imagine it, but I wanted to let him get to the end of his lesson so I could go home and play with my dogs and have rabbit pie and then some pudding.

“ ‘Place yourself there,’ he said, ‘with your goal plucked and in your hand, in the future, and now, using that same imagination, look back in time and see what you must have in place a year before the goal is reached, then two years, and so on, so that you can see the steps from your future goal, back in time, until now. Once you have done that, you will know what to do along your way to get the life you really want. Now that’s it. Now go, and have your good life.’

“And with an abrupt hand-wave like a magician completing his enchantment, the man in blue dismissed me. I wasn’t dreaming, I saw it all clearly, and I remember him and his words better than I remember many other things from when I was very young—and I could smell Betty’s pie and custard. He was gone, and I didn’t think of him again except for a few fleeting moments today, when I guess I was thinking of someone or something that reminded me of him.”

“Someone passing by on the street?” Sophie demands.

“Something or someone…it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh,” says Sophie, “it does matter. I think it matters very much.”

Part III: Red Man

16 Madame Blanchard

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8.

AFTERNOON.

A suburb. Montreal, Quebec