Everyone agreed.

“Great,” she said. “I’ll take the information home and give out a contact sheet next Tuesday.”

Rice entered the backroom just then, and Cass was right behind him. This time, everyone sat and pushed back their chairs and fell silent while Rice played his jazz guitar. Something recognizably Django-like. Soft and mellow, but at the same time, plunky and fast. The melody was a favourite of Hazzley’s and had been a favourite of Cassie’s mom’s. Both Cass and Hazzley were thinking of that.

Ways of Listening

TOM

In the afternoon, Tom carried the bronze sculpture of the geese into his store. He set it in a prominent place, with no plans to sell. He liked the piece and wanted to be around it during the workday. It reminded him of his early days with Ida in their first apartment. The surface was sleek and smooth, with an attractive brown patina. Tom positioned the sculpture to face the entrance, hoping to create the illusion that the pair were about to take flight, through the door and up into the sky.

Allam arrived and expressed appreciation. “This is beautiful,” he told Tom. “For me, it is also symbolic of my new country.”

The two men walked around to the shed behind Rigmarole and opened the double doors. Tom flattened the rear seats of the Jeep and they began to load: bedside table, desk lamp, chair, child’s dresser, storage baskets, radio, collapsible shelving unit, two cast-iron frying pans, a box of dishes and a hall runner. Everything crammed in tightly. The men had two stops to make.

At the first intersection, Tom paused for a red light. A man holding an empty Tim Hortons cup in his left hand, a sign in his right, ran into the road with determined agility and threaded his way between two lanes of cars, cup extended. He was wearing a white hoodie with a fifties peace symbol painted across his back. The hood, more grey than white, was pulled up, and a single brown antler jutted out horizontally above his forehead. The stuffed cloth antler was held in place by the hood itself, or perhaps by an out-of-sight headband. His printed sign read: Help a Dear in Your Headlights. Tom wondered what Allam thought of this, but Allam, though always observant, remained silent. As they drove on, he continued to point the way until Tom pulled up to a small warehouse, nothing on the outside to indicate that people were within.

Tom was somewhat familiar with the area because he’d once purchased items stored in a locker along the same stretch. A woman in her nineties had hired a mover to store some of her furniture in the locker when she downsized, sold her house and moved to a retirement home. After a year and a half, she faced reality and admitted to herself that the extra furniture was never going to fit into her new quarters. She offered Tom first choice of the stored belongings. He purchased six or seven items: a lap desk she had used in her youth, a smoker table with a hinged door, an elegant nineteenth-century mirror. The woman had told him how difficult it was to part with these items, even though she hadn’t laid eyes on them for some time. She added, with sly humour, “But not one of my friends has towed a U-Haul behind their hearse, and I guess I won’t, either.” She and Tom had a great laugh over that. He remembered her well; he remembered her spirit, her energy, her dose of reality.