She had taken up attending Mass at an old cathedral. It felt good to fall back into Catholicism. No having to lift your hands. No having to scream out praises to a God that no one has ever seen. No having to confess to the answers to prayer or send the begging prayers for this and that out into the Western spirit world. All Annie had to do was sit in an old church and look at the stained-glass windows and look at the people around her. She had found a favourite pew. The Pew for One. When she sat there, she didn’t have to mingle with the others. She didn’t have to shake the “Peace be with you” salutation that every Mass asked for.

Annie always kept her Sunday appointment with her boy. The time when he talked of his week and kept certain subjects off-limits. She never spoke to him about his dad or the people back home. She never spoke to him about the past. Her contributions to each conversation were small and she kept her inner thoughts of life on an island to herself.

Instead she talked of the hummingbirds and seagulls and crows that filled her sky. Annie loved the hummingbirds best. Her balcony was on their route. There were certain flowers that they visited on her balcony every day. She knew to look for them at ten o’clock and again at two in the afternoon. She found a local store that specialized in pens and paper, and she started to draw it all. Drawings of her life in the new small town, filled with brilliant colours and soft blues.

Her days of freedom from the North. Her days of being released from Moses Henry. Her days without him, and yet she longed for the company of a man. Not a woman. Women were terrible creatures. She had never had a woman friend that she could completely trust, and she knew she never would.

When she sat in the park, countless people and their dogs were everywhere. She never talked to the dogs, because if you talked to the dogs, you would have to talk to the people who owned the dogs, and that was too much involvement. She had to remember to remain a stranger in a small town. But that one hot August day, she did something she had not done in so many years. She walked into a British-style pub and ordered a Chardonnay.

There were six large screens playing various sports, and the long counter at the bar was lined with the same people that frequented every bar she’d ever seen in real life and on TV. The old men who were somehow nailed to their stools and stuck in the same place every day by three in the afternoon. The same men who had lived their lives inside of the same bar since their teens.