The Fifth Part of Chapter 13: We Will Remember

Mario’s work was busy, and considering work was a grocery store, Eunice tasked him with purchasing the Halloween candy and cocktail mixes; it was convenient in this way, and Mario did most of the grocery shopping; she simply purchased milk and eggs on occasion when they were out. That he worked at Food Basics, known for its cheap food, provided the additional advantage of a cheap grocery bill.

Unlike Eunice, however, Mario had left the purchase of a costume to the last minute; there was no planning weeks in advance about what he was about to wear; he simply went to Value Village and picked a costume off the rack.


Ryan and Patricia left the funeral home and chose to walk down McLeod Street with Clarissa and her parents, while Clarissa’s brother, sister and their spouses left for their homes in Mississauga and Kitchener.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Ryan,” said Margaret.

“I think the sorrow should be left for the living; I’m so sorry, Clarie,” said Hyram.

“Thank you for coming to this sad chapter of our lives,” said Patricia. “I still can’t believe it was a heart attack; one shouldn’t get them that young.”

“I know; the only other person younger than me who had a heart attack was some writer we published five years ago; that got a load of free publicity for us, not that we wanted it of course,”

The rest of the walk to Clarissa’s house, which took ten minutes, passed in silence from the five of them. When they entered the brick house on McLeod Street, they could see that Clarissa had set up a sort of shrine on top of a small shelf, complete with fresh flowers. It seemed to Patricia that nothing else had been touched since October 15th, the day James collapsed in the front hallway and died. She noted a few things about the living room: there was a novel, Agatha Christie’s Third Girl, on the coffee table.

“Good night, Clarissa,” said Ryan. “We had better head home and cook dinner, now,”

Margaret thought that it was a very nice house, but was tactful and said nothing about it; such would imply that she was covetous of the house, which would leave an extremely bad impression with the Millers, so she looked around in silence.

“Well, we had better get going too, if we want to get home at any sort of reasonable time; I think we’ll have dinner on the highway somewhere,”

“Let’s take the Seven home,” said Hyram. “There are no bridges that way,”

“Hyram thinks the Highway 401 bridges annoying by their endless repetition; he finds them monotonous, I believe,”

“Yeah; once you’ve seen one bridge on that highway, you’ve seen them all,”


When the elder Millers arrived home, Patricia said to Ryan, “I think we should put the honeymoon photos of James and Clarissa in frames, like we did with the wedding photos, and take them off the mantel,” she glanced at the pictures in question, and James’s smiling face nearly made her cry again. However, she forgot about this soon after she said that, and started thinking about dinner; while memories were important, having dinner was paramount.

Over dinner, Ryan wanted to get his mind off sad thoughts, so he talked about work. “Helena Perari’s supposed to be visiting our studio on Monday. I have an hour-long interview with her,”

“That should be interesting,”

“She has a huge morality complex,” said Ryan.

“Virtually the whole country knows,”

This much was true, as Ryan remembered: the last time she visited, she vented about the American President’s broken promises, relentlessly ranting about lies, endless untruths and assorted falsehoods. Such a moralistic and unkind disposition was not likely to result in returned calls, and thus Ryan assumed that her veneer of journalistic professionalism was kept up very well and carefully; she simply felt safe to drop those pretences in front of other journalists; there was only one infamous incident when her mask was broken. That was in 2006 in an interview with the President of the Canadian Auto Workers Union that turned out, after ten minutes, to be disastrous.

“We’ll be talking about her journalistic career; she’s planning a memoir,”

“One in which she’ll air all of her dirty laundry, I expect,”

“I’m guessing there’s a pretty big part of herself; I feel there’s just so much she doesn’t make public, and she has a very public persona. The mask of politeness she puts on for interviews is very well known; she thinks it’s a dishonesty; she told me as much,”

“I’ll bet that’s eating her up,”

“She told me a lot of other things on Friday,”The remainder of dinner was spent discussing Helena Perari, who had a reputation as a feared pundit, demanding honesty. She was also known for hard, though polite interviews, and scathing columns.

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