THE NATURAL ELEMENTS.

Cal's daughter was always telling him what he could and couldn't say. She kept reminding him that he was retired - unlike every single one of her friends' fathers - therefore unacceptably old, therefore doddering around in a kind of anachronistic limbo that was deeply mortifying for those forced to live in close proximity to him. One thing he wasn't allowed to do, she'd informed him, was to say that his tenant had a silly name. Rain was his name.

"How is that spelled?" Cal asked, when he met with Rain's wife to have her sign the lease. He couldn't remember the wife's name because he'd been so bowled over, when they met, by the fact that her husband's name was Rain.

"Rain," said the wife. "R-A-I-N."

"Like rain from the sky," said Cal.

"Yes," agreed the wife.

Cal thought she looked a bit embarra.s.sed.

Cal had never met Rain. In July the couple moved into the tiny post-war house he owned (bought in 1989 for $30,000 and now with a market value, everyone kept shrieking at him, of at least $300,000). Rain had just been hired by the political science department at the university, and was never home. Cal only ever dealt with the wife.

"She's a stay-at-home wife?" demanded his daughter, Terry.

"Yes," said Cal. This new term: stay-at-home wife. How was it different from housewife? Who had found it necessary to make the change? This was something else he was not allowed to say.

"But she must do some kind of work," insisted Terry.

"Well, I don't know," said Cal. "Maybe she's looking."

He stood up from the table to find the HP Sauce and paused to pet his daughter's head a couple of times. He didn't know how else to show affection anymore. Anyway, it was instinctive with him. Her hair was so straight and smooth; it invited hands. Sometimes, petting her head, he would sigh dreamily, "I wish we had a dog," and leap out of reach as Terry whirled to punch him. Soon she would move away from home. She wanted to go to an elite arts college in Montana to study dance. The only reason he'd held on to the house near the university for so long was so that she could live in it while she attended school in the city.

"Whatareya gonna do with the house?" everybody s...o...b..red at him. Big money! Big payoff! To own property that close to the university was, this past year, like sitting in your backyard and having the ground suddenly start to rumble and spew oil like on The Beverly Hillbillies. It was a city of Beverly Hillbillies lately - everyone cashing in. But Terry still could change her mind. Surely someone out there - not him, but someone at school, some adult she actually looked up to, her band teacher maybe - would talk her out of studying dance. He'd made the mistake of calling it dancing once, in front of some relatives who'd been pa.s.sing through town. "Terry thinks she'd like to study dancing." The thinks had been bad enough. Calling it dancing, however, he still hadn't lived down.

Cal had a knack for tenants. As a rule, he didn't rent to undergraduates. Not that he had the instinctive loathing and distrust of them that some of his property-owning neighbours did, but just because he knew that if he wanted to keep the place in decent shape for Terry, he couldn't have kids in their early twenties living there. He rented to graduate students - most often couples - or sessional instructors, or new professors like Rain. People in training for home ownership and the middle cla.s.s. Good tenants appreciated reasonable rent at a time when everyone living near the university was being milked like cattle, so when they moved out they recommended equally good tenants, who would appreciate it in turn. If you treated people fairly, they returned the favour. You didn't just gouge people because you could - because it happened to be the thing to do.

Cal would never forget his first landlord. He'd gone up north on a construction job and rented a bas.e.m.e.nt from one of the managers. The manager had stipulated no smoking and no drinking.

"Fine," said Cal.

"No visitors," added the manager about a month after Cal had moved in.

"Pardon?" said Cal.

"No visitors."

"Oh, okay," said Cal, who didn't know anybody anyway.

"No music," added the landlord shortly thereafter.

"I'm sorry," said Cal. "Was I playing the radio too loud? I can turn it down."

"No," said the landlord. "You don't turn it down. You turn it off."

Three months into the rental, Cal realized he was brooding about the landlord almost every waking moment. Whispering outraged comments to himself on his way down the hill to the site, gritting his teeth over the circular saw, breaking into a frustrated sweat at the thought of going home in the evenings.

I hate going home, he kept thinking to himself. He has made it so I can't stand to go home.

So Cal started staying out.

"No staying out past ten," the landlord said to him one morning when Cal was on his way down the walk.

Cal stopped and turned around. The landlord was standing by his Honda, key in hand. He had offered to drive Cal to work every morning, but Cal had made excuses about enjoying the walk - the site was just down the hill. It was what had made the rental so attractive in the first place.

Cal walked over and stood on the other side of the landlord's Honda as if he had changed his mind about the drive and was about to climb into the pa.s.senger's side.

"Pardon?" he said.

"No staying out past ten," repeated the landlord. "We can't have you waking us up at all hours."

"That's ridiculous," said Cal.

"Well, that's the rule, I'm afraid."

"You can't treat people like this," said Cal. His armpits blasted sudden heat.

The landlord looked astonished. "I own this property," he told Cal, gesturing at the house behind him. "This is my property."

The way he made these statements - as if they were even pertinent, as if they answered for everything - stayed with Cal for years. When Cal built his own home - and then, on a whim, purchased the house near the university - he made a vow to himself with his first landlord in mind.

"I'm here to pull some snow off the roof," he said to Rain's wife.

"You're here to . . . ?" she repeated, looking worried.

I should have called first, thought Cal. "I'm sorry," he said, "I should have called. It's just that it's not good for all that snow to be piled up there."

"Oh!" said Rain's wife. Now she looked guilty.

"It's my job to look after this sort of thing," Cal a.s.sured her. It wasn't really. But Rain and his wife, Cal knew, were from somewhere unspeakably cruel, considering the deep-freeze they had moved to. Santa Cruz, California. Terry had been excited by this. It was the reason she wouldn't leave him alone about the tenants. That magic word: California.

So Rain and his wife couldn't be expected to understand the culture of cold and all it required. Moments ago when he approached the house, for example, he'd almost dislocated a hip slipping on a frozen sediment of snow that had caked up on the second step. They hadn't shovelled, and there had been some melt, and the snow had solidified into ice.

"Maybe I'll just clear your steps for you while I'm here," said Cal.

"Oh," said Rain's wife a second time. "You don't have to do that."

"Well," said Cal, and stopped himself from finishing: somebody does. "You could hurt yourself."

Cal asked her about the salt and the chipper in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and once it was clear she had no idea what he was talking about, he asked if he could retrieve them himself. She backed into the foyer, saying, "Of course, of course." Californians, thought Cal, bending over to pull off his Sorels. You'd think Californians would be - I don't know. More sure of themselves. Rain's wife seemed so timid and deferential. Terry would be disappointed, to say the least. He took off his boots in the foyer and saw there was no mat nearby. Salt and grit from previous outings had discoloured the hardwood floor.

"Cal," said Rain's wife. "Now that you're here, could you do me a favour? Could you check out the furnace?"

Cal stood there noticing two things simultaneously. The floor was cold. It was so cold, the chill was already seeping through his thermal socks. And Rain's wife was wearing a fleece jacket over a thick wool sweater. As Cal registered this, she wiped her nose - twitchy and pink, like a rat's - on the sleeve of it.

He picked up his boots and carried them with him to the bas.e.m.e.nt.

It was only when he returned to deliver the s.p.a.ce heater that she told him Rain had gone. He was leaning over, after plugging the thing in, holding his hand in front of it to make sure it worked. She leaned over to do the same. They stood there, leaning together, feeling for heat.

"There it is," said Cal after a moment. He wiggled his fingers. "It doesn't feel like much right now, but these things are great. We used to use them on construction sites."

"It's just," said Rain's wife, "that Rain is gone."

Cal straightened up a bit creakily. His hands went to the small of his back. Rain's wife was rubbing her nose on her sleeve again.

"He's not here?"

"You're -" said Rain's wife. "I've been meaning to tell you. I mean, you're the landlord. It's just me living here now."

"Oh, I see," said Cal.

He drove home troubled.

"About how old is she, Dad?" Terry wanted to know.

Cal guessed about thirty-five, unaware of the trap he'd just stepped into.

"Thirty-five, Dad? A thirty-five-year-old girl?"

Cal rolled his eyes. He mentioned that Rain's wife had struck him as "a nice girl." This was something else he couldn't say.

"Well, what's she going to do?" asked his wife, Lana, as Terry guffawed over her spaghetti. "Is she moving out?"

"She didn't say," said Cal. "She just said she's by herself now."

"What happened to the husband?"

"I don't - Terry, will you stop?" Terry was making a big production of pounding her fist on the table, convulsed with mirth. She was at the age where she took everything too far. Actually, it seemed to Cal that she should have pa.s.sed through this phase long ago.

It snowed again and didn't stop for three days. He thought of her, alone in the house. He picked up his address book and dialled the number he'd scrawled beneath the word Rain.

"h.e.l.lo there," he said when she picked up. He was calling her "there" because he didn't know her name. "It's Cal. How are you getting along in all the snow?"

"Oh," she said, "I keep thinking I should shovel, but there doesn't seem to be any point!"

You should shovel anyway, thought Cal. The neighbours. And she seemed to have no idea it was also her responsibility to clear the sidewalk in front of the house. But he said, "No, I know. It's, ah - it seems like an, an exercise in futility."

"That's exactly it," she said. "It's like an insult."

"Insult to injury," replied Cal.

"Yes," she answered faintly.

Cal pictured her rubbing her twitchy rodent's nose on the sleeve of her fleece, saying, It's just me now.

"Not like California!" he crowed, suddenly hearty.

She laughed like a sob down the wire.

Terry, home from school because of the snow and still in pajamas at two in the afternoon, stood in the living room window watching him plow the walk on his ride-on. Then he trundled down the sidewalk, clearing that, and finally cleared the walks of the neighbours on either side. It took no time at all and was an easy enough courtesy.

"You looked so happy," Terry told him when he came in. "You looked like you would've cleared every driveway on the block if you could get away with it. That's so sad, Dad. You are such a sad, sad man." She flounced away with her hot chocolate.

When the snow stopped, he loaded his plow into the back of the truck, drove north toward the university and thanked G.o.d for four-wheel drive when he turned onto the apocalyptic side streets. City hall was being bombarded with complaints, because it contracted snow removal out to private companies, and the private companies answered to no one. They were too busy, they claimed. There was the Costco parking lot to be cleared, the Best Buy. Cal bounced over Himalayas of ice and packed drifts. Past buried cars. It was like with construction these days - too much work, too few companies. There were always bigger, more lucrative jobs. Workmen tore holes in people's walls, went away, and never returned.

What was the good of all this money? If it made no one responsible to anyone else? If it made life not easier, but in some cases impossible? He thought this as he pulled up to the non-existent sidewalk of Rain's wife's house; buried, like everything, in snow. There she stood, up to her kneecaps in it, stabbing wildly at the second step with the ice chipper. It made an awful, echoing clang every time it hit concrete. When it didn't hit concrete, when it just bounced uselessly off the unyielding ice, it made an unsatisfying thuck. The sound of her helplessness dully resonating. Another insult.

The furnace man had not come. Cal was incredulous.

"You're kidding."

"They're probably so busy this time of year."

"Yes but - Jesus Christ," said Cal. "I called three weeks ago."

"The s.p.a.ce heater works fine," she a.s.sured him.

Cal frowned at it. She was responsible for the electricity bill. It would be through the roof by month's end.

"Listen, dear," he said. Terry would castrate him for calling a grown woman "dear," but he had to call her something. "Take a hundred dollars off the rent this month."

She blinked at him. She was wearing the same fleece over a thick turtleneck. Over the fleece she had draped the knitted throw that, during his last visit, had adorned her shabby ottoman. The ottoman, he noticed, was nowhere in sight. The place was only semi-furnished now. Rain had subtracted his things, presumably, and the room stood half nude, throwing weird echoes now that there was less furniture to absorb human voices.

"Cal," she said, softly, because she wasn't so stupid as to dig in her heels about the rent. "There's no -"

"No, no," he shouted, causing her to cringe a little. He just wanted the conversation with its hollow echoes to end. "It's absurd. It's just absurd," he said. And went outside to finish de-icing her step, forgetting to say goodbye. Then he changed the blade on his snowplow and annihilated the layers of tramped-down snow that had caked up where the sidewalk used to be.

He sat in his truck and took out his phone in order to yell at the furnace man - a man he knew, a man named Mike - but all he got was a recorded, vaguely seductive female voice, which informed him Mike's inbox was full.

He looked up at the house and Rain's wife was staring out her window at him, just standing there, not looking off or turning away as he gazed back, as if she wasn't aware she was doing it.

"Why don't you go home?" he said out loud.

The wife was a web consultant, she'd mentioned back in July. What did that mean? Terry had told him that anything having to do with the internet meant p.o.r.nography. The only people who made any money via the internet, she said, were p.o.r.nographers. They were legitimate business people now, she proclaimed, not sleazy pervert types. They had BlackBerrys and took meetings and it was good business, just like anything, just like oil and gas. Some of them were even women. (Oh good, thought Cal. Terry is considering this. This is her fallback if dancing doesn't work out.) So Cal could only a.s.sume that Rain's wife made no money. He imagined her work as a "web consultant" to be one of those nominal jobs that stay-at-home wives sometimes had. A job that wasn't actually meant to furnish any income other than what his mother used to call "pin money." That was why she didn't go back to California. Rain's wife was trapped.

"Terry is too confident," Cal told Lana one night.

Lana laughed at him.