Read Online Happiness of Fish by Fred Armstrong - Free Book Online Page B

large medium or smallish large. Duane is large and Darren is medium. Vivian offered to size the kids too, but Gerry has a personal rule against clothes for Christmas for little kids. Because Vivian has already shopped for all the grandkids once, he can relax in the knowledge he’s doing extras.
    For Joshua he finds a little radio-controlled car. It’s not much bigger than the Matchbox toys he played with in the ’50s. It sits on a little battery pack to charge itself and costs less than forty dollars. Radio-controlled stuff has got a lot cheaper. Gerry anticipates getting to play with the car himself when the kids are in bed. He buys a big economy-size box of spare double-A batteries.
    AA batteries from Grampa in AA.
    Natalie and Diana both get do-it-yourself jewellery kits. They’re cheaper than the car but Vivian had told him she had only got Joshua a sweater so he could go a bit wild on boy-toys to even things out.
    Despite the warnings from the police about stowing stuff in your car, Gerry shuttles bags out to his Honda and conceals them under seats and under the roll-out cover for the boot.
    Trotting back inside, he hits Eddie Bauer and buys sweaters for the girls and shirts for Duane and Darren. That exhausts his mall shopping. When the Christmas range-hood project fell through, Vivian said she could use new winter boots and he’ll have to go downtown to get what she has said she wants. He takes himself to a Second Cup for an espresso and a chocolate croissant to celebrate his efficiency.
    With only the expensive trendy stores left, the downtown at Christmas seems unnaturally quiet to Gerry these days. In late afternoon he watches the streets clear. Vivian has taken the kids to the mall and they plan to stay and have supper and go to a movie. Gerry is back in the old street canyon of thirty years ago, watching the traffic thin out.
    He remembers early Christmases, when he and Patricia finished up their shopping on foot, zigzagging between Duckworth and Water Streets. They’d bought each other’s big presents at a war-surplus store in the east-end. He got her a submariner’s roll-neck jersey and a gas-mask pack for a purse. She bought him a long-skirted trench coat with bottomless pockets and a 1950 date tag sewed into it.
    For their families on the mainland, they bought presents at her store, The Vales of Har, and at places that sold homemade trigger mitts and itchy toques and little souvenir killicks made out of twigs and beach pebbles. Some of this stuff drifts around Gerry and Vivian’s house now. It came home to roost when he cleared out his mother’s house and she went into an old-age home.
    â€œYou gave us that,” she’d say. “I won’t have room for it. Take it home with you.”
    Accordingly, the stuff that was supposed to evoke Newfoundland as exotic in Ontario drifted home to occupy odd corners of bookshelves or spare-room dressers, a sort of underlining of some mythical subtext of the everyday.
    Gerry gets Vivian’s Christmas boots in a store that was once a restaurant. They went there to eat when they were dating in the ’80s. It still has some of the ’80s brass and glass, but now it frames expensive shoes. The light is still restaurant dim. The leathers look roasted, glazed and edible.
    â€œWhat would you recommend as a good, middle-of-the-road wine to go with those?” Gerry asks the clerk, looking around at the brick and stained glass as he puts the boots on his bank card.
    â€œA nice Cabernet Sauvignon,” the clerk says without missing a beat. This is an upscale store.
    Gerry meets his friend Philip in the street as he heads back to the wagon with the boots. Philip has just got off the bus, heading home from a shift at the call centre where he works. He’s wearing enormoustroll-foot snow boots with felt liners spilling over the tops and a big shapeless parka. He’s carrying a plastic shopping bag full of books,