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heard.
Eighty wish
.

chapter     
    I picked up Raphaella at the end of her street late the next morning after having breakfast with Dad at the new house. He was happy as a kid on Christmas morning.
    “You’re late,” she said as she got into the van.
    “Rough night.”
    “Oh?”
    “A combination of too much pizza and a nightmare.”
    “So you’re quoting Shakespeare to make you feel better.”
    “Ummm …”
    “In
Macbeth
. The morning after he murdered Duncan and before Macduff and Lennox discovered the body. They’re talking about storms and stuff, and Macbeth, who was half out of his mind with guilt and fear, says, ‘ ’Twas a rough night.’”
    “Oh.”
    “It’s kind of ironic. Understatement. Get it?”
    “Moronic?”
    “Ho, ho. You were also upset about leaving your old house for the last time.”
    Following Raphaella’s train of thought wasn’t always easy. In the short time we’d been together I had grown used to the feeling that sometimes came over me when I was with her — that she could read my mind. Or, to put it more accurately, she could read my feelings. Raphaella was like an antenna for emotions. I told her it was spooky. She said no, it was
intuitive
, and that people underestimated intuition.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I spent a long time chasing memories from room to room. It’s funny, isn’t it? After all, it’s just a building.”
    “There are buildings and there are buildings,” she said.
    I drove west on Highway 12 where it skirts Orillia to the south. Buses lumbered past in the opposite direction, carrying gamblers to the casino in Rama at ten-thirty in the morning. I turned onto the Old Barrie Road. The sun was directly behind us and we chased our own shadow along the two-lane secondary road.
    Raphaella was wearing loose cotton pantsand a T-shirt that said “Global Ecology Not Global Economy.”
    “Do all your T-shirts have captions on them?” I asked.
    She smiled and pulled her hair back, looping an elastic band around it to make a long ponytail.
    “I prefer them to corporation logos. Anyway, want to tell me about the nightmare?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “Okay.”
    We drove in silence. In the distance the slanting sun illuminated the greening fields and the trees blushing with new buds. The road wound in gentle turns through the low hills.
    Raphaella didn’t press me about the dream. She didn’t pry, ever. And she expected the same from me. There was still a lot I didn’t know about her. Like who or where her father was. Where she and her mother had come from — they’d been in Orillia for only three years. Why she had transfered from Park Street Collegiate in the middle of the semester.
    What I did know was that she lived on Couchiching Point in a house on the canal. Her mother preferred to live on the water, Raphaella had said, typically refusing to elaborate. Hermother owned and operated the Demeter health food store in town, where Raphaella worked in her spare time — which she had lots of, because she was a half-time student. That was about it.
    I was curious, but I didn’t press things. If she wanted me to know she’d tell me, I’d learned. If she didn’t, there was no way to pry anything out of her. That was okay with me. I was in love with her, not her family or her background.
    “So, where’s this trailer park, anyway?” Raphaella asked.
    “Do you mind?” I said in a mock British accent. “One doesn’t say trailer park. One says mobile home estate.” Then, in my normal voice, “It’s on the Third Concession Line.”
    “Ah, yes,” Raphaella intoned. “An enviable address indeed. Just past the bustling metropolis of Edgar, I believe.”
    I laughed. As she spoke, we were passing through Edgar, a four-corner nowhere village with one store.
    “That’s the Third Concession up ahead,” I pointed out. “We go left.”
    A lone building at the crossroads came into view.
    “We’ll, I’ll be —”
    It looked different in bright