Happiness of Fish by Fred Armstrong

of red wine on a filing cabinet. Gerry makes himself a coffee in his heat-saving thermal aluminium cup and gets on the phone.
    There’s a little secret society of people working on Christmas. Gerry’s only a sort of honorary member because he has just dropped in for an hour or two. Still, the people on the other ends of the phone don’t know that. He wishes Merry Christmas to the Constabulary and the Coast Guard search-and-rescue duty people and to the woman on the RCMP switchboard for the province. She’s a familiar voice.
    â€œMerry Christmas. Is that Stacey?”
    â€œYes it is. Merry Christmas to you too.”
    Gerry checks to make sure that he’s not missing any of the faxed news releases that have come in. It appears that he hasn’t, so he thanks Stacey and settles down at the computer to write the terse little stories that will fit tomorrow’s short holiday newscasts.
    A forty-three-year-old man from Berry Cove is dead as the result of a single-car accident on Christmas Eve
... Gerry taps the final little formulae of distant despair onto the screen.
Police believe alcohol was a factor
, he types. Carve that on his monument or mine.
    He’s been doing this for thirty years. It comes easily and it’s almost relaxing. He writes the stories of the untended chip pan that burnt down the house and the robbers who stole the Christmas presents in a laconic, almost comforting way. It’s the journalistic equivalent of the pilot’s voice: “Good morning, folks. This is the captain speaking. We’re experiencing a little wing-falling-off difficulty here, but nothing to be alarmed about.”
    It will make people at an early breakfast tomorrow quietly glad that these tragic clichés didn’t happen to them. Perhaps they’ll even feel a little proud that, through superior care or foresight, they’ve avoided being the protagonists in one of Gerry’s trite little two-finger-typed summations.
    It’s a mild night, with patches of starry sky showing, when Gerry leaves to go home. A few taxis prowl the streets now, and cars, moving slowly, wear invisible banners that proclaim they are on official family visit business.
    He goes to bed early because he has to be up early in the morning. Melanie, Darren and Diana have gone home. Tanya, Duane and Gretchen are watching
Miracle on 34th Street
on TV. Vivian is sitting at the desk in the kitchen with a glass of white wine. She’s talking to her brothers and sisters around the province and the country. He kisses her on the top of the head as he heads off to bed. Sometime late that night he feels her settle beside him with a tired little grunt. He leans back against her and sleeps.

five
JANUARY 2004
    On a cold, bright Saturday morning, Gerry is up and doing odd jobs. The project for this morning is taking the Christmas tree to the pile in the park where the city mulches them. Vivian took the tree down the day after Old Christmas, but then it snowed and now Gerry has to pull the snow-clotted tree out of its drift by the front walk. This isn’t a bad thing. He’s dressed for the cold, and the snow that falls on him as he heaves the tree onto the roof rack of the Honda is a diamond shower. There’s something vaguely satisfying about the boatswain work of throwing ratchet tie-downs over the tree and cinching it down tight to the roof. Gerry believes the ratchet tie-down is right up there with the opposable thumb in humankind’s ascent from the swamp.
    The world seems a comfortably loose fit to Gerry this morning. The kids have gone home, leaving Vivian and him alone. This morning he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom naked, something he couldn’t do for the two weeks of Christmas. One morning, Gretchen had found him in the kitchen in his underwear, making coffee. He’s used to being the earliest riser and had thought everybody was still asleep. She gave a startled herbivore squeak and ducked