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Gwen waited.
    “I think you’re intrepid,” he said.
    She ducked her head to hide her pleasure. Her face was warm. “Harry?” Looking at her hands.
    Gwen.
    “That person you pretend you’re talking to when you’re on the air?” She looked up. “Who is it?”
    Harry smiled. “My imaginary listener? He’s a man in his sixties who comes home tired from work and he goes down to the basement to his workbench and builds model boats. And while he’s doing that he listens with rapt attention to me.”
    “So it’s not somebody you know?”
    “Not somebody I’ve met,” he said.
    She nodded slowly, and Harry asked, “Who do you feel comfortable talking to?”
    You, she thought. “Nobody,” she said.
    “My favourite person. Now give him a hat.”
    She thought for a moment. “A fedora.”
    “Fine. What else is he wearing?”
    Into Gwen’s mind came a middle-aged man puttering around a kitchen. He wore a wedding band, but he lived alone. A widower. He cooked for himself. His radio sat on the kitchen table. He had it on whenever he ate—it was always on. Before he went to bed he cleaned up, doing the dishes, settingup his coffee for the morning, sipping a final glass of Scotch. I could talk to someone like that, she thought.

    In the quiet house in Ontario where Gwen grew up, her father used to sit at the head of the table and crack Brazil nuts so painstakingly they came out whole, while her bruised and fractured walnuts whizzed through the air. Nearby was Owen Sound, which gave her the notion that you could be stuck in a certain sound for the whole of your natural life.
    Her mother’s throat music, for instance. Those purring sounds of affection meant to reassure Gwen’s dad. And her soft throat clearing whenever company came and awkward silences fell. It was what “not being able to think of anything to say at the moment” sounds like.
    Gwen had a radio in her room, installed the summer she got poison ivy. 1961. In that little town of woods and rocks, trails and leafiness, it had been her fond habit when small to pull leaves off the mock orange and stuff them as money into her dead grandpa’s old tobacco pouch that closed with a zipper. Her homely, slight, small-bodied grandpa from Manchester, who had wanted to go to China as a missionary but ended up in Canada instead—a spiritual man, an odd duck. One day, out and about with the family dog, Gwen forgot to think—forgot to look out for the three glossy leaves, and besides, where she was they were everywhere. She pulled down her shorts to pee, and her bottom was tickled by the leaves she wasn’t paying attention to. Then, in an excess of affection for the dog, shehugged him, this well-travelled connoisseur of every poison-ivy patch, and rubbed her face against his fur.
    The itching began several hours later and had a visual equivalent. For dinner her mother served sausages, fat fingers with a grease-gagging flavour that brought tears to her eyes. Two halves of one misery. She shifted in her seat, her bottom crawling, but wasn’t allowed to rise until the sausages were gone. (One day, in her late twenties, she would meet someone—her future mother-in-law—who would say, If I knew my kids didn’t like something, I didn’t serve it. Gwen would look at her with the wonder most mortals reserve for sightings of God.)
    From ankles up to and across her bottom, then up to her face and into her eyes, she was soon ablaze and oozing with rash, blisters, torment. Her mother had her lie naked on the bedsheet, where she was too far gone for books or even the ink-induced spasm of excitement that came with the arrival of the
London Free Press
and the ongoing story of Mary Perkins.
    A solution of cool water and baking soda, everywhere but on her private parts, which also raged, since her fingers had wandered there too. Her mother wrapped her hands in strips of flannel and Gwen ran her swathed hands across her chest, and the gentle relief of that light scratch, followed