(Wednesday)

Everything in Dunbridge was dead by October. The backyard gardens that had scaled old mop handles and broken hockey sticks throughout the summer, spreading up and out in a green lurch for the sky, now fell back in a withered heap. Leaves left a print of themselves on the sidewalk, looking trapped under ice. Colours everywhere were fading, as if the whole town were painted onto cement.

About a week before winter really hit, a woman walked her dog through a grey morning to the park at the end of her street. Her dog, a German shepherd with a puckered scar over its right hind leg, moved forward with its tongue out, looking like it didn't expect ever to return to the warm house and the warm blanket it had just left. Damp leaves brushed against its side, and it cheered up a little, thinking it was about to be let free to pursue the smells invading its nose – not as vividly as they used to, but still strong enough to start its tail wagging in anticipation. The woman stopped at the park entrance and tightened her grip on the leash. The air was cold and sharp; she would go no further. "Just go, sweetie," she said. "It's freezing; mummy's cold." The jacket she was wearing wouldn't close around her chest. It was her son's – she hadn't yet dug her own out from the basement. She looked at the trees and tried not to think about cigarettes.

"Come on, Diamond, just fucking go."

The time of parks was nearly up – there hadn't been any kids in this one since school started. For weeks she'd seen only other dog owners; they would stamp impatiently and look around as if worried about snipers. Locks were appearing on the doors of the public washrooms. All of a sudden no one believed in summer anymore.

A man appeared without a dog on the arched bridge spanning the creek. He wore a heavy, blue parka with the hood up and was walking fast, sending billows of agitated white breath ahead of him. The woman stepped back and pulled Diamond – who was already going into a squat – between herself and the man. He was wearing wool mittens like a little boy. He stopped when he saw her, then turned around and went quickly back over the bridge and across to the far side of the park. Wind came through after him and got under the woman's jacket. By the time they got home she'd already decided Diamond was going to have to make do with the backyard from now on.

"Watch the park," she told her son later, "there's some freaks hanging around in there."

"Oh yeah?" her son asked.

"Some big retarded guy."

"Oh," he said, disappointed.

The man in the parka sat and rested on a bench covered over in brown leaves, feeling their dampness coming through the seat of his pants. He'd walked nearly the entire length of Dunbridge that morning, tramping through every cold park like Jack Frost in mittens. Now he was feeling hungry, the side of his face was throbbing, and he still had to get ready for work in a few hours. He decided to give himself exactly two more minutes of rest before starting again, and even checked his broad-faced watch to mark the time. Squirrels ran up and sniffed at the shrunken-head apples on the ground all around him. He took off one mitt and got to work on the inside of his nose. More wind came through, bringing the last of the leaves down. The park was naked and waiting. Though it looked like it could, Ken decided it wasn't going to snow that day.

Thursday

Patrick's alarm spoke up in the silence of the bedroom, coming alive in mid-sentence to promise "Hotel California" and classic Billy Joel. Patrick let it all get absorbed into the broken logic of his dreams. It always took him a few minutes to get all the way upright, drag his legs over the side, and let his feet curl unhappily on the bedroom carpet. The pull of the bed was so strong that he didn't reach to turn off the clock radio until his wife started to groan and move beside him. Then, once the world was silent again, another minute of sitting in the dark to gather strength and courage. He tried to clear some of the room's dry air out of his throat.

"Get up," Manda said from under the blanket.

"Sorry."

It was earlier than usual. Patrick wanted to get a start on sorting the mountain of stock sitting in the back of the store. He had been putting it off for days. It wasn't as if he didn't have time – the store was open six days a week and he was alone there all six, from open til close. He couldn't really afford not to be open Sundays, too, but Manda had been ready to walk out after a year of him being there every single day, and he was secretly happy for the excuse not to be.

"You're not like some Chinese guy or whatever," she told him, "with fourteen kids in the back and your grandparents. You don't have to kill yourself."

The store wasn't killing him – not quickly anyway. He'd worked at jobs that had literally torn the skin off his knuckles and singed his eyebrows, that had got into the flat muscles in his back and into his shoulders like rust or dry rot, ruining them, weakening them from the inside out. He'd had jobs that could have been done by animals, that should have been done by animals; no one would ever let animals work under those conditions. A couple of times a year, especially when it was cold out, a serrated cough would settle into his chest, and he would think about clouds of white dust from demolished walls or rooms filling with silver-backed smoke from machines kept alive for too long and fed with syrupy homemade fuels.

Active Sports was his own, at least. There were days when, after standing behind the counter for the entire day, or restocking shelves with shoes or baseball gloves or the rest of it, he'd catch himself vaguely wishing to be sent home early, but mostly the reality that the little store was his sat with him like an animal sidekick: there to help him out and boost his mood when he needed it, but mostly just mocking him and making a mess of things. For a while, his friend Danny had helped him out, but when business died back down, Patrick had been forced to lay him off. That was around Labour Day, more than a month ago. It never used to bother Patrick to be there so much. It had always felt as though he were building something. But after letting Danny go it felt as though he were only there to oversee the place's collapse. Before, there had never been anything to it: the store was an end in itself. Now, when he turned on the lights each morning, he felt as though those lights were drawing their energy directly from him. Draining him. If one was flickering, it was because his exhaustion had seeped so deeply into him he could almost feel his muscles loosening their grip on his bones. Patrick knew he was going to fall apart in that place. It had eliminated all of his savings – Manda's, too, not that she had much to begin with – and dropped them both into a smooth-walled pit of debt that got deeper every month.

The part Patrick had been liking most lately – the part Danny had hated – was doing things like fitting a girl for figure skates or going through a bin of baseball bats with a kid who was just joining his first team. Older kids would come in and stand there talking to Patrick about different kinds of sticks, or all of the stupid new rules that had been brought in at the Junior-A level. At these moments the exhaustion would disappear, the...