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food that seeped up from the floorboards. I was gone before the cold weather came.
    This was in 1992.

Cindee quit her job at the bar and announced that she was moving back out west, to Brandon, where she would study cosmetology.
    She and Lester wrote to one another frequently. She found a job that she liked, Lester learned, and she was pleased that she didn’t have to work nights anymore. In the ensuing years they rarely alluded to the barrel ride, but notwithstanding the troubles the couple had had beforehand, Lester understood Sam’s death to have been Cindee’s great tragedy, her defining event.
    He came to reconsider this point after she called him once late at night, drunk and angry with her current boyfriend. She was sputtering over his many shortcomings when Lester asked if any man for her would ever live up to the one she had lost. She laughed like an accordion, staccato wheezing into the telephone. He had no idea what to make of it.
    Still later they met in Winnipeg, where they were both doing Christmas shopping. They ate supper together in a restaurant that revolved on top of a tower. It was very expensive but the food was quite carefully prepared. They were older and less nervous and sad than they had been. Cindee had moved on from that boyfriend, she said, still sorry about the phone call. They sat until long after the kitchen had closed. When they finally got up from their table, they had to be escorted through security. Outside they hesitated, but then caught separate taxis. Riding home, each thought about the Rushing River Waterfall and that long plunge.

GABRIELLA: PARTS ONE AND TWO
Gabriella (1)
    Gabriella is an even six feet tall, has a nose that could split pack ice, and yearns constantly for her brother Hector. Hector is in the Argentine army, doing his obligatory service on a razor-wire-bordered base near the coast of Patagonia. Gabriella and her mother worry constantly about his catching cold; nineteen years old and surrounded by veterans of the Malvinas war, no doubt he appreciates their concern. It is on the matter of Hector only that Gabriella permits herself sentimentality—on all other topics she affects the cynicism of a big-city cop. When she speaks she leans forward, to put shoulder behind her words. She smokes foul-smelling South American cigarettes and tells bawdyjokes when she drinks pastis. She maybe drinks too much pastis.
    Felicinada is only slightly shorter but much better humoured than Gabriella. She dresses always in yellow and has the largest collection of Xavier Cugat records in the world. When I had chicken pox last year she made me tomato soup every day for a week. They both work around the corner at the Café Kiev. They live above me and make an astonishing amount of noise. Felicinada, I think, wears high heels from the moment she gets up to when she goes to bed again. They are given to vacuuming at three in the morning, and inevitably they are
aficionadas
of the rumba. You can imagine.
    “ ‘So look here, my little
machito,
’ I says to him, ‘you ask me for a Caesar salad. I bring you a Caesar salad. And now you won’t pay for it because I didn’t tell you it had anchovies in it.
Caesar salads have anchovies in them
. I’m sorry if you’re lacto-ovulating these days but you still ordered the such-and-such salad and you’re gonna pay for it.’ ” This is Gabriella. It is two in the afternoon and she is sitting on my couch and reading a fashion magazine. I can just see her through the crack in the bathroom door. Neither of us has seen Felicinada for three days. She has taken a lover and Gabriella is feeling a little abandoned. I can smell coffee brewing. I am in the tub, enveloped in bubbles.
    I met Gabriella the week I moved into this apartment. The first night I slept here I awoke at four in themorning to the sound of running water coming from my bathroom. I sat up among the pillars of cartons all around me and listened. There was water splashing and there was