Last Night In Twisted River

Joe’s clothes stayed in the closet and in the chest of drawers-even his shoes remained. All the laces were untied, too. Joe had not once taken off a pair of shoes by untying the laces first. He’d kicked off his shoes with the laces tied, and they were always tightly tied, with a double knot, as if Joe were still a little boy whose shoes often came untied. Da

What with Joe’s wrestling and skiing photographs on the walls, the so-called writing room was a virtual shrine to the dead boy. In the cook’s mind, it was masochistic of his son to choose to write there, but a limp like Dominic’s would keep him from investigating that third-floor writing room with any regularity; Dominic rarely ventured there, even when Daniel was away. With the bed gone, no one else would sleep there-apparently, that was what Da

When Joe had been with them in Toronto, both the cook and his son could hear the boy’s kicked-off shoes drop (like two rocks) above them-or the more subtle creaking of the floorboards whenever Joe was walking around (even barefoot, or in his socks). You could also hear that third-floor shower from the three bedrooms on the second floor. Each of the second-floor bedrooms had its own bath, with the cook’s bedroom being at the opposite end of the long hall from his beloved Daniel’s bedroom-hence father and son had some measure of privacy, because the guest room was between them.

That guest room and its bathroom had recently been spruced up-in readiness for Ketchum’s expected arrival, the woodsman’s now-a

Da

“You don’t really believe that,” Da

But the flowers and Lupita were a mystery. The Mexican cleaning woman never put a vase of flowers in the guest room for any other visitor to the Rosedale residence, and that guest room in the house on Cluny Drive was more than occasionally occupied-not only at Christmas. Salman Rushdie, the author with a death threat against him, sometimes stayed there when he was in Toronto; Da

Many of Da

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Da

Lupita was a relatively recent find, but she was visibly moved by these two saddened gentlemen who’d lost, respectively, a son and a grandson. She’d told the cook that she was worried about how Da

“I’ll take your word for it, Lupita,” Da

“¿Enfermo?” Lupita was always inquiring-not of the seventy-six-year-old cook but of his depressed fifty-eight-year-old son.

“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Da

Lupita had lost a child, too; she couldn’t speak of it to Da

Lupita seemed ageless, with her smooth brown skin and long black hair, though Da

Because Lupita had a pretty face, and she was in the habit of leaving her shoes on the ground floor of the house (she crept about the upstairs barefoot, or in her socks), Da

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, when the cook was busy with the di

There was an old-fashioned desk, with drawers, in his dad’s bedroom, and Da

On the bulletin boards, the snapshots were intricately overlapped in a confusing but possibly thematic pattern-either of Dominic’s design or of Lupita’s, because Da