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her own clothes and wears a lot of denim. Tonight she’s wearing winter boots with thick light-coloured sponge soles. They have a ’70s, bargain-basement look to them. Gerry suspects Duane and Gretchen don’t waste much money on shoe leather. She and Duane and the kids don’t actually live in Kanata. They’ve bought a place somewhere in the country beyond Richmond, and Duane commutes. They have a horse and are thinking about getting some sheep. Gretchen looks after the horse and a big vegetable garden.
    The kids are quiet and big-eyed, half hiding behind their parents. Gerry wonders what they’ve overheard about Vivian and him. Are they the grandparents from hell?
    Joshua is ten, delicate featured. Natalie is eight and carved more like her parents, round cheeks, a Cabbage-Patch-Kids look to her. Vivian wades in with hugs. Gerry grins but hangs back a little.
    â€œHow are you doing, guys?” he asks.
    He wishes he could do an
Exorcist
head rotation for them and thenwink to show that demonic possession isn’t really so bad. He shakes hands with Duane and kisses Gretchen on the cheek. She smells of oatmeal and airplane. Gerry wonders if economy airlines can possibly serve porridge, or did she bring her own?
    Tanya is making her way down the stairs now. She is the child Gerry had the most to do with. Duane and Melanie, her older sister, moved out fairly early on in his and Vivian’s life together. Tanya, now twenty-five, was only eight or so when Gerry appeared on the scene.
    â€œYou raised her,” Vivian will say. Gerry wonders how true that is, but she arguably is raised. A couple of years ago she went to work in a hotel in Banff. Later she stayed for a while with Vivian’s sister in Calgary and got interested in a wildlife technology course that was being offered there. She took it and now she’s back in Banff counting elk. When she calls or e-mails she says how much better she likes it than the business courses she started at the university at home.
    â€œHey kid,” Gerry gives her a hug. Tanya’s lean and blonde. She has become the type of woman Gerry associates with patting a whippet, fine bones just under the surface. She’s wearing a Michelin Man down ski-jacket and jeans and her old air cadet boots. She’d e-mailed to have the boots found and shipped out.
    In case I decide to have a formal wedding, she wrote, followed by: Joke, ha ha!
    She hardly feels there when Gerry hugs her in her marshmallow coat.
    â€œStill wrestling elk there, Hulk?”
    â€œOh yeah. Bears too, except they’re all asleep now.”
    Gerry tries to picture Tanya doing anything with a bear and gives up. When they lived in a townhouse in an outlying suburb he used to have to walk in front of her to the bus stop on windy snowy days. He broke trail in the snow and cut the wind that held her back in the long pink parka Vivian had bought her that year.
    Gerry had been puzzled about being a late-blooming surrogate parent to Tanya. He never knew how much he was supposed to give or expect. Before her teens they had mostly been pals, co-conspirators. He had told her to call him Gerry, reasoning that she already had a father, whether or not he was still around. He sometimes wonders now if heshould have left well-enough alone and let her decide what she wanted to call him.
    How he and Tanya got along was often an irritant between him and Vivian. He tried to be what he hoped was reasonable, supportive, civil. Vivian was louder, more bloody-minded. She acknowledged no need to be consistent.
    â€œGo! Get! Get upstairs before I smack you!” Vivian could shout. She also invoked unspecified threats. “You’re in trouble now, maid! Just you wait!”
    Gerry felt he couldn’t threaten because he didn’t know what he could realistically carry out. He was pretty sure smacking other people’s kids wasn’t an option.
    â€œYou leave all the discipline up to