When Melanie was really honest with herself, she admitted that she had probably loved Jacque’s acreage more than she loved him. He picked her up after work. She watched for the shiny pale blue sixties Buick he had inherited from his father and fixed up. He drove it with a flourish around the circular driveway of the hospital where all the nurses, on a smoking break, and the three vice-presidents gazing out their big picture windows, could see. She wished he would get out of the car and open the door for her. All the way to the acreage he held her hand and said how much he had missed her. She hadn’t expected passion so late in life. She was used to going to Christmas parties unaccompanied, or warning her women friends, all of them single, that her birthday was coming. For some reason, she felt as if she didn’t deserve his attention, but that his love had come to her anyway, through some kind of miraculous divine grace.
Usually, he dropped into the supermarket for groceries. He made an exotic shrimp wok dinner. Shopping together was fun, not hectic and tiring as it was with her two kids. She loved the drive to his acreage most of all. Once they had left the city and gone out on highway 14, she felt like she used to as a child when her mother took her to toy land to see Santa. She rode a little train through a magical village replete with elves, candy canes and coloured giant snowflakes. In the middle of the scene stood stuffed animals, spotted fawns, reindeer and camels that swayed their heads from side to side. Sitting beside Jacques as they drove out of the city, she watched the landscape open up into flat white squares like a giant chessboard.
At one spot in their journey, Llamas surprised her. They stood in a farmer’s field like the exotic stuffed of the magical village she remembered. Huddled under a tree, they braced themselves against the cold. The gentle contours of their backs blackened against the bright colours of the prairie sunset. As it receded over the horizon, the sun seemed to get bigger and brighter us if to make up for its sinking. The white snow banked around the llamas’ slender legs turned orange.
“He breed ‘em,” Jacques sai. “Sells ‘em to the zoo. They eat a lot less than cows.”