Minique by Anna Maxymiw

Author:Anna Maxymiw [Maxymiw, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

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The first morning Daniel visits, he knocks at the back door while she’s stoking the fire to make a second cup of tea. Minique doesn’t want to go to the door; the only people who ever use that door are dead or gone.

His hands are shoved in the waistband of his pants and his eyes are big; a patchy beard covers his face, and his skin is more tanned than she’s ever seen it. She stares at him like he’s a ghost. They stand there, silent and stunned. They stand there, separated by the doorstep. Minique can see the questions scrawled across his face; she can also, horribly, see some fear.

Daniel, this is Daniel, this is Daniel and he’s finally here, her mind yells with joy. She feels a rush of happiness that she immediately tamps down; the void is filled with anger, then, and bitterness that it’s taken him so long to come see her. She pours that anger into herself. And there is also wistfulness, because he looks like a man even though just a year has passed, and she’s worried that there might be too big a gulf between them now to be anything other than strangers.

She says nothing, because his eyes are big and liquid, and so she pushes the door open and jerks her head to beckon him in.

He shuffles inside as she pours him a cup of too-strong tea. He smells different now: he smells like her father. If she breathes through her mouth she is overwhelmed by flashes of pelts and tobacco and a pipe hanging from a colourful wool belt and the smell of a fire made from damp wood. She tenses, expecting that same terrible note that her father always had, something burnt and mean underneath, but it doesn’t materialize. Daniel’s scent is only full of wonder, like Barbe’s used to be, with a note of sadness and something wary.

When she sits down across the table from him and raises her eyebrows over the rim of her mug, he turns red, and then starts talking in one big blurt of words. First he explains his months in the woods—“I barely had time to say goodbye to anyone, my father was so mad at me, he wants me to take over the bakery”—the trip up to the lake, the weight of a canoe on his back—“Easier than you’d think, actually, I couldn’t believe it”—and what it was like to finally escape the confines of Montréal. “Freedom,” he says, with a dreamy tone in his voice. Minique can barely keep up with him; he’s bouncing from one subject to another frantically, like he’s trying to fill the silence with no room for her to interject. He asks questions without expecting an answer. First it’s how she’s been in his absence (“Papa told me that you took up with the inn witch, watch out there, eh?”), then it’s asking how her aunt is (“Where is she?”) and then it’s what the weather means (“Mild winter means the sap won’t run, bad year for sugaring”).

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