Read Online The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter - Free Book Online

Andy couldn’t see, some jab or lash that immediately swamped Stan’s face with a mix of confusion, helplessness and rage.
    â€œWhat, Pat? What do you expect?”
    Andy continued to see his mother from behind. He saw the hand she calmly reached out to turn off the stove burner and then the oven mitt she wrapped around a pot handle. She removed the pot from the heat and then herself from the kitchen.
    â€œWhat is it
you
would do?” Stan called after her. “What is the solution you can see that I can’t?” Stan had been yelling after Pat, but only Andy was in the room.
    Now Andrew stood at the same kitchen/bathroom doorway, hammer and pry bar in hand. Wham. Wham. The bar bit deeper and deeper with each tap of the hammer. A black seam opened between wall and wood. He had spent years strolling past this cream-coloured wall and its wide moulding and never once thought of them as separable pieces, let alone of the moulding as two strips of wood, not just one. He leaned a shoulder into the sunken bar. The first strip backed away from the wall in two-foot sections, nails hanging like bared teeth. In seconds the entire length of moulding was free, and its straight, sharp nails rode snugly in the dusty air. Looked at individually, each nail appearedefficiently vicious. Secure in the moulding, though, each nail was but a tiny splinter compared with the hard, tooled bar in his hand.
    From: [email protected]
    Definitely an orange door. Drunken orange. Burnt orange. No,
    no — scorched orange.
    When the door frame finally released into his hands, he danced it across the room.
    From: [email protected]
    149 Collingwood. $10 cab. I’ve planned a small Ice Cream Straight From the Carton With Two Spoons. (The fuck-me caramel in Dulce de Leche is decidedly orange.)
    This was more than just a binge clean before a date, more than just shaving the toilet and sandblasting the stovetop.
To Undo:
The giant handles on each side of every door frame.
Wood-filler.
Railings beside the toilets.
More drywall mud
. The shower rails are fine. Do the taps look like handicapped taps? Where do I shut off the water for new taps? Hacksaw for the old pipes? How do I rejoin?
    More than a decade after Andy had watched that half-wordless exchange between his parents in the kitchen, when he had seen Stan’s face but not Pat’s, he finally asked Stan if he remembered that day. What kind of look had she given him that had angered him so much?
    â€œPity,” Stan answered. “Pity and fear.”

19
    In the damp air under the overpass, Richard the motorcyclist shakes his head in exasperation and asks Andrew, “How do you stand going so slowly?” Biker and cyclist are wet and dirty and pleasantly high.
    â€œAny faster hurts too much,” Andrew replies. “And it doesn’t feel slow when it’s yours. You see more.”
    â€œTrees, trees and trees. How much more is there to see?”
    â€œMy dad had two big jokes,” Andrew says by way of explanation.
    â€œTwo bulls — one older, one younger — crest a hill. Below them is a green valley full of grazing cattle. Sweet, the young bull says, let’s run down and fuck some of the cows. No, the old bull says, let’s walk down and fuck them all.”
    Staring down the concrete slope to a bike he’d have abandoned an hour ago, Andrew sees through a pannier to his one book from the family library and thinks of another. On his eighteenth birthday, the most tender of Stan’s gifts had been a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s
A Time of Gifts,
the memoir of an impecunious collegiate youth whose attempted walk across Europe was cut short by World War Two.
Which is the time of gifts, travel or youth?
Stan’s spidery inscription still asks inside a box inside a stuffed storage room in the Kingston house.
    â€œIt’s loaded with recurring questions,” Stan had continued over the birthday dinner. “These