Friend of My Youth

damn
fuck
!” Karin was upstairs with nothing to eat but half a package of Rice Krispies with no milk, and a can of yellow beans. She had thought of phoning somebody to come with a ladder, but she was too mad and stubborn. If Brent wanted to starve her, she would show him. She would starve.
    That time was really the beginning of the end, the change. Brent went around to see Morris Fordyce to beat him up and tell him about how he was going to have the shit sued out of him, and Morris talked to him in a reasonable, sobering way until Brent decided not to sue or beat up Morris but to commit suicide instead. Morris called Austin Cobbett then, because Austin had a reputation for knowing how to deal with people who were in a desperate way. Austin didn’t talk Brent out of drinking then, or into the church, but he talked him out of suicide. Then, a couple of years later when the baby died, Austin was the only minister they knew to call. By the time he came to see them, to talk about the funeral, Brent had drunk everything in the house and gone out looking for more. Austin went after him and spent the next five days—with a brief time out for burying the baby—just staying with him on a bender. Then he spent the next week nursing him out of it, and the next month talking to him or sitting with him until Brent decided he would not drink anymore, he had been put in touch with God. Austin said that Brent meant by that that he had been put in touch with the fullness of his own life and the power of his innermost self. Brent said it was not for one minute himself; it was God.
    Karin went to Austin’s church with Brent for a while; she didn’t mind that. She could see, though, that it wasn’t going to be enough to hold Brent. She saw him bouncing up to sing the hymns, swinging his arms and clenching his fists, his whole bodyprimed up. It was the same as he was after three or four beers when there was no way he could stop himself going for more. He was bursting. And soon enough he burst out of Austin’s hold and took a good part of the church with him. A lot of people had wanted that loosening, more noise and praying and singing and not so much quiet persuading talking; they’d been wanting it for a long while.
    None of it surprised her. It didn’t surprise her that Brent learned to fill out papers and make the right impression and get government money; that he took over Turnaround House, which Austin had got him into, and kicked Austin out. He’d always been full of possibilities. It didn’t really surprise her that he got as mad at her now for drinking one beer and smoking one cigarette as he used to do when she wanted to stop partying and go to bed at two o’clock. He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking, no more smoking, Christ as her Saviour. One week. Karin said don’t bother with the week. After Brent was gone, she quit smoking, she almost quit drinking, she also quit going to Austin’s church. She gave up on nearly everything but a slow, smoldering grudge against Brent, which grew and grew. One day Austin stopped her on the street and she thought he was going to say some gentle, personal, condemning thing to her, for her grudge or her quitting church, but all he did was ask her to come and help him look after his wife, who was getting home from the hospital that week.
    Austin is talking on the phone to his daughter in Montreal. Her name is Megan. She is around thirty, unmarried, a television producer.
    “Life has a lot of surprises up its sleeve,” Austin says. “You know this has nothing to do with your mother. This is a new life entirely. But I regret … No, no. I just mean there’s more than one way to love God, and taking pleasure in the world is surely one of them. That’s a revelation that’s come on me rather late.Too late to be of any use to your mother.… No. Guilt is a sin and a seduction. I’ve said that to many a poor soul that liked to wallow in it. Regret’s another matter. How could you get through a long life and escape it?”
    I was right, Karin is thinking; Megan does want something. But after a little more talk—Austin says that he might take up golf, don’t laugh, and that Sheila belongs to a play-reading club, he expects he’ll be a star at that, after all his pulpit haranguing—the conversation comes to an end. Austin comes out to the kitchen—the phone is in the front hall; this is an old-fashioned house—and looks up at Karin, who is cleaning out