Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

A year after they separated, Patty came to Frank’s house in Montreal. She stood on his doorstep, weeping.

“Take it easy,” Frank said in his doorframe.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She walked past him and lay on the couch they shared as man and wife. She was wearing a wind-breaker, a nightgown and sneakers. She'd lost weight since she moved out. He had wanted to see her, but not like this. He thought of what his father always said, "Y'know, son, one doesn't like to be deceived, but one likes less to be undeceived."

“Are you drunk?” Frank asked.

“Well, you’d know wouldn’t you?”

He had been five years sober earlier that week.

She stumbled and then pushed her head against the leather cushions and lay like a child on her stomach. “I did love you, you know.”

He sat in the space next to her and put his hand on her back.

“I feel sorry for you,” he told her, moving his palm down her spine.

She smelt like liquor. When had she started drinking liquor?

“Don’t be hateful. Please. This is hard enough.”

He moved closer to her again, pushing them against the leather arm of the couch. He felt his sturdy weight against her and wondered if he could crush her into dust.

“I’m being truthful. I feel sorry for you.”


“Why? I left you.”

“It’s not an easy life.”

She cried louder, moving her body against his. He held her like a baby.

“You know, Una blames me for making you a dyke,” he said.
 He hoped she'd appreciate that. She always liked brutality more than honesty.

“Frank, it’s not your fault. You were a good husband.”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t say anything. He was going to say that deceiving others was what the world called romance, but he'd used that on her before. She knew it was Oscar Wilde's, not his, and footnotes were for fags. He searched the room for Sean. He felt his dead friend but he could not see him, and in this moment all he wanted was to see his face, to know he wasn’t alone, but he only captured the feeling in his chest.

"I wasn't a good husband. I fooled around."

As time passed, he couldn’t understand why a year after the fact, he had wanted so desperately to clear his guilty conscience.

“I didn’t like myself while I was doing it.”

“I don’t like myself either,” she told him.

But then, Frank had always believed his life was a miracle of bad luck.

"I guess we both had secrets," she said as she was leaving into the kind night.

The next time he saw her was her funeral.