Beth stops for a red light on Whyte Avenue, the city’s scene for the young and trendy. She could have taken a different route, but like visiting a grave, driving here reminds her of what she missed. A gaggle of girls in Flashdanceable long tunics, leggings, and Gravity Pope wedge heels laugh with their mouths wide open. Even though it’s a Tuesday, later they will command a table at a bar and young men will buy them drinks. Exchanging cellphones to read the latest text message as they cross in front of Beth’s Corolla, they juggle their handbags and logo-branded lattes.

The girls look at her when she cranks the volume on the radio, sings to Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’, now louder than before, Oooh oooh ooh OOOhhh. The lead girl dismisses Beth with a hair toss. Beth turns down the volume, subdued as she considers that maybe her fringy bob and glossy lips no longer disguise the truth: Beth is a middle-aged mother with a trunk full of groceries and a Visa bill with Home Depot and Save-On Foods as her hot shopping spots.

The light turns green, Beth shifts through first, second and third, cruises past bars with swank names: Fluid, Suede, and Velvet. It’s true that she doesn’t know if girls drink Long Island Ice Teas anymore. She turns towards home, acknowledges one thing she knows is that 15 percent off day is the first Tuesday of every month. Along Saskatchewan Drive, the river valley repeats an invitation to wander the trails, get lost in your thoughts, but she’s got frozen foods in the trunk and two dozen cupcakes to bake for her son’s classroom. This day, like all days, is a programmed guide of family management, essential for contentment.

Just as she’s ready to give herself the luxury of a repeat of Steve Perry’s vocals, she notices a mini-van parked in front of her garage. Again. The vanity plate, ESTEE, identifies it as her neighbor’s. Now what? Estee’s van is crookedly parked ­– an inch farther forward and she would have crashed into the rock retaining wall. Luxury forgotten, Beth pops the trunk. Fourteen enviro-friendly bags gape at her; their contents mirror Cook’s Illustrated “staples for a functioning kitchen” list, except for the boxes of Kraft dinner. Beth considers the bags and the walk to the house, at least 25 more steps to the garage door, each way. She drops the trunk lid.

She pounds up Estee’s sidewalk, turns left at the planter overflowing with pink and purple petunias, avoids whacking her head against the massive hanging basket of orange impatiens and blue lobelia. She rings the doorbell. Through the glass she sees the fireplace mantel Estee showed her years ago. “I had our names carved into it. Stephen on one side of me and Brandon on the other.” Beth wondered, again, if they assumed that Estee would always be taking care of them so that was the spot she deserved.

Estee didn’t knock the one time she’d shown up at Beth’s door to deliver a plate of whole-wheat carob chip cookies for Beth’s 10 year-old son. Beth, 10 days overdue with a child from her second marriage, was furiously cleaning, hoping to induce labour and didn’t hear Estee’s footsteps.

“Hello?” Estee stepped through the patio doors before Beth had time to warn her. “Beth? I’ve got something for your little boy.” She set the plate on the kitchen table, and then she looked up.

Goosebumps prickled Beth’s skin even though it was nearly 40 degrees. Her nipples contracted into puckered bulls eyes.

Estee squinted, a moment passed before her brain adjusted to the unexpected:  naked breasts with alerted nipples, a bulging pregnant belly, and pubic hair.

The kitchen scrub brush was decidedly insufficient, no matter where Beth held it. “I’m cleaning the counters.” Beth had no choice but to walk even closer to Estee to retrieve her bathrobe. “I didn’t want to get bleach on my…I’ve ruined more t-shirts.”

Estee reeled back, held one hand over her eyes, the other over her gaping mouth.

When Beth came out of the bedroom, Estee was gone.

Bitumen

Excerpt:

Fort McMurray is the end of the road. You can’t drive farther north from here. Ten years ago we were trapped by a fire from the south that formed a comma around us. I was in my condo, my fans blowing smoky air around my kitchen. I didn’t open the windows. I didn’t go outside. I thought my shortness of breath was asthma. Then the panic attacks started and the next winter I needed the light machine for seasonal affect disorder. I turn it on when I read The Globe and Mail’s articles about things that matter or people or people that matter.

It’s crowded in Fort McMurray. That’s part of the problem. You have traffic here. A town built for maybe 20,000 people has four times that many in it.  Highway 63 brings you into town, past the airport. You gear down the long hill in your Toyota Celica, merge with trucks and cars emptying out from Gregoire, Beacon Hill and Abasand subdivisions. And now it’s a race to get to the stoplight downtown. You’re forced to brake there, consider whether you want a Tim Horton’s or something from the Walmart. And then it’s across the bridge where traffic stalls to a halt the first sign of spring break up and no matter what day it is you’re fighting for space between the buses, dozens of buses, that take 63 north to the plants. All day long buses travel that road. Some of them grind up the hills into Thickwood and Timberlea, too, haul more guys out to their jobs. Buses full of stinking guys. Maybe they’re not, but I think they must be because of the bitumen and the tar and the crap job and don’t forget they’re doing seven 12 hour shifts in a row and probably eating crap food, too and you know how that is when it goes through your system. It makes you stink. I drive past them, all the guys lined up at the bus stops on my way to my quiet job.