her legs and felt a burning sensation in her right thigh. Two and a half months before, she had been shot there during a house invasion in Macau. She had flown back to Canada two days later on crutches that had evolved into a cane and then a limp. Most mornings she felt nothing in the leg, only to have the pain reappear randomly, burning and throbbing; it seemed to twitch, to be almost alive.
Ava was a debt collector. It was a job often fraught with peril, and over the ten years she had worked with her Hong Kong partner, Uncle, she had been stabbed, kicked, punched, hit with a tire iron, and whipped with a belt. None of them had left a permanent mark; none of them revisited her like the muscle memory of that bullet.
She pulled down the sheets and glanced at her leg. The doctor in Macau had done a good job getting the bullet out of her thigh and treating the initial wound, but he was no cosmetic surgeon. Her girlfriend, Maria, had gasped when she first saw the raw red scar, which eventually turned into a less ugly long pink worm.
She slid from the bed, slipped on her Adidas training pants, and left the bedroom. She walked softly down the hallway so as not to disturb her mother and went into the kitchen. The hot water Thermos she had brought from her Toronto condo sat ready on the counter. She opened a sachet of Starbucks VIA instant coffee and made her first cup of the morning.
The sun was well over the horizon, but she could still see the last remnants of morning dew glistening on the wooden deck. She opened the kitchen door and felt a slight chill in the air. She put on her Adidas running jacket, slipped her iphone into a pocket, grabbed a dish towel, tucked her laptop under one arm, and, balancing her coffee, walked across the wet grass to the dock.
Ava started every morning on the dock with her coffee and her electronic device. She wiped the dew from the wooden Muskoka chair and eased herself into it. One broad arm held her coffee, the other comfortably accommodated the phone. She turned it on.
It was just past nine o’clock, and the emails from the part of her world that was beginning its day were first in line. Maria had emailed at eight. I have a seat on the Casino Rama bus leaving the city at 4 this afternoon. I should be at Rama by 5:30. Do you want me to take a cab to the cottage?
Ava started to reply and then realized Maria would be at her desk at the Colombian Trade Commission office by now. She called her direct line.
“Hi, honey,” Maria said.
“I’ll pick you up in front of the casino hotel,” Ava said.
“Your mother is staying at the hotel again?”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t like me.”
“That’s not true.”
“She never wants to be in my company, and when she is, the only two things she ever says to me are that I have nice manners and that I look good in bright colours.”
“Those are compliments.”
“I make her uncomfortable.”
“No, we make her uncomfortable. Although we’ve never discussed it, I know she can’t stay in the cottage when you’re here because she wouldn’t be able to stop herself thinking about what’s going on in our bedroom. She’s very Chinese and very Catholic, and as understanding as she tries to be, there are limits to what she can handle. Is your very Colombian, very Catholic mother any different?”
“No,” Maria said softly.
“So I’ll see you tonight. The weather forecast for the weekend is fantastic.”
Ava returned to the emails. Her sister, Marian, had sent one of her typical newsy emails. The girls go back to school on Tuesday. New uniforms for them this year. I bought them over a month ago, and when I did I couldn’t help but remember how Mummy always left doing that until the very last minute, and how we ended up in long lines that took hours to process and were lucky at the end to find uniforms in the right size.
Ava sighed. Her mother and her sister had personalities that didn’t mesh well, and the relationship grew even more contentious when Marian married an uptight gweilo civil servant who was incapable of understanding a woman like Jennie Lee.
And I can’t believe that she actually stayed at the cottage with you for two months, Marian wrote. She came to our cottage in