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inthe old planes. Bottled water had to be paid for and people did. Gerry remembers free double Scotches and being blissfully buzzed by Halifax.
    Gerry and Vivian wait by the arrival gate. She’s craning and stretching in her leather coat to look for Duane and Gretchen and their kids, Joshua and Natalie. Gerry looks at her beside him, hair short and recently gone redder, big hoop earrings and a good scarf tied around the strap of her bag. The snow is still holding off and she’s wearing low, black walking shoes, jeans and a sweater.
    â€œWe look good for breathless grandparents,” he says. He’s being conciliatory. They’d argued over when to leave for the airport. They often argue about when to leave for things. Gerry likes to go early and hang out. Vivian favours a last-minute dash. When they go somewhere together, they both manage to feel rushed and pressured.
    â€œThere they are,” Vivian says, neutrally. A truce has been arrived at. “Wave. You’re taller. They’ll see you.”
    Gerry waves and watches the family come down the steps.
    Vivian had Duane when she was eighteen, so now he doesn’t look all that much younger than the reception committee. He’s a short, square man, with his mother’s snub nose. After Vivian’s divorce from his father and before Gerry came along, Duane had fixed things around the house and kept his mother’s beat-up car running. She’d been clerking in a store then, studying for her real estate licence, and money had been tight. Duane put himself through technical school by joining the militia, where he worked on radios with the communications squadron. Early on, Gerry always thought of him as “Master Corporal Duane,” the rank he achieved before he landed a job in Kanata, just outside of Ottawa, and moved out. That was shortly after Gerry and Vivian got married. He laughed in a guarded way at Gerry’s stories about his unsuccessful year in the navy. He laughed in the right places, but seemed wary of the fact that Gerry had been an officer and that he had failed some courses and emerged again as a civilian. Duane hadn’t the luxury of trying things on. That said, he didn’t socialize with his militia buddies and dropped out entirely when the job in Kanata came along. Gerry grew up in Ottawa and gave Duane some names of people to look up. Duane called on Gerry’s elderly mother a couple of times, but other than that, did little to get in touch with anybody Gerry knew. Instead he got in touch with Jesus.
    Gerry doesn’t remember Ottawa as a born-again kind of town but he supposes it’s changed. He knows, for example, that a building which won a Massey Medal for Architecture when it was a brand-new Chinese restaurant in the ’60s is a “community temple” now. He saw its scruffy hand-painted sign when he went to Ottawa to visit his mother in her retirement home. He supposes that it’s probably no stranger for it to be a church than it was for a Chinese restaurant to go out and hire an architect and win a design medal back when he was in high school. He knows it won the award because he and his buddies, Doc and Mort, were hanging out in the art gallery on the night of the presentations. They were dressed up in sports jackets and skinny ties, trying to look older and cool and not spend any money. They tagged along behind a crowd of people in evening clothes to get free sandwiches and coffee and look at photos of the winning buildings. It occurs to Gerry that Ottawa was a very small town when he lived there. People would put on evening clothes for coffee and sandwiches.
    At any rate, Duane started going to church and met Gretchen and got married. Gretchen sounds German but isn’t. She comes from Trail, B.C., and her parents just liked the sound of the name. She always strikes Gerry as a bit like Duane in drag, not fat but slightly thickened, with thick, shoulder-length hair. She makes