"Deftly explores life's absurdities and losses with a clear voice and engaging characters."
Blue-haired Grace has donated a Thomas Kinkade puzzle of an ivy-covered cottage.
"I'm doing the chimney," Sheila announces after we spill it out on the leisure room puzzle table.
"Of course you are," says Grace, winking at me. Grace doesn't mean anything by the wink, it's her habit.
Sheila expects us to deliver her the chimney pieces she can't reach from her corner. Her walker stands at the table, her greasy fingerprints still grasping its handles. The chrome encumbrance, Harry calls it.
"I married a woman, not a machine," he grumbles to me one day.
I dip my head sweetly at this delicious insensitivity. Harry and I are against the use of walkers at Sunnyvale.
"Either you can walk or you can't."
My daughter Carrie thinks that Harry and I are wrong about the walkers. "Everything's not as black and white as you like to think, Mum."
She tells me she's getting a divorce. Michael will get custody of the children. Children? She is the child. This woman with the drawn face and the awkward lumps of flesh at her hips. She has her father's mouth. How strange to see Ted's mouth painted red.
"Just because you can outrun the woman doesn't mean you should replace her." Carrie shakes her head. She frowns at the portrait of Ted in uniform and I nearly pass wind at the gall of this woman, impugning my love for even him.
"He's still married to her," says Carrie, "even if she is a cyborg."
I tell her she's part of the first generation to betray their parents. "I raised you kids from the ground up. Wiped every snuffling nose."
"I know, I know, and you used to darn our socks over a spare lightbulb."
"In those days we didn't throw everything away that was a little worn."
Her eyes scour the ceiling. "So it's my turn to wipe your nose? Pull on your stockings?"
She makes the idea seem outrageous. Carrie contracts everything out. Someone to hem her pants, someone to colour her roots, someone to scrub her bathtub clean.
"Where's Ted gone?" I ask the leisure room.
"Ted's dead, Ina," Sheila tells me flatly.
"No, no, not Ted," I blush, confused. "I meant Harry."
I look out at the young maple in the courtyard. Today it bears a shiver of snow on its branches.
Grace is trying to jimmy in a piece of the front door.
"Doesn't fit, dear," I tell her.
"It does. You fit it," she demands. Her shaking hand presses the fragment into my palm.
"I'm doing the chimney," Sheila says again loudly.
"Of course you are," says Grace. She winks at me.
Karen Kachra has a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University and lives in Oakville, Ontario with her husband and two young children. She is new to the fiction market.