His brother’s marriage had seemed solid enough to him over the years, and it countered somehow his own life, gave him, even, a kind of licence. That it might be coming apart troubled him, and that he was being no help to Frank at all. He climbed the stone steps and twisted the worn key in the lock. A car flew by behind him and honked but he didn’t turn around. Inside, the smells seemed to take hold of him—a touch of fuel from the oil stove, a vegetable odour of apples and cabbages and potatoes, of lingering tobacco smoke—the way a person’s might: Ah, it’s you. His feet found the same creaks in the floor, his hands reached without thinking to straighten a loaf of bread, to flick a light switch, to open the cash drawer, to poke the soil in the window cactus—bone dry, as he expected. He plucked a bad onion from the bin and carried it to the back door, took pleasure in firing it into the trees. From a recent windstorm two thin spruce, almost parallel, lay half fallen in the arms of a big white birch.
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