February Read Online Free

More than once, and Louise didn’t have extra either. Louise just showed up and started unloading the car and she didn’t want to hear thank you. A week’s worth of groceries.
    Louise wouldn’t hear thank you. It was a terse business between two sisters, putting those groceries away in the cupboards. Louise had gone into nursing and she was just getting started and didn’t make much money then and she had two children of her own.
    This is, Louise said. Don’t mention it.
    Thank you, Louise, Helen said.
    Do me a favour and shut up.
    Helen folded laundry. Matching socks was an act that looked very much like matching socks. She looked exactly as though she were in the world, engaged in the small work of Here is one sock, now where could that other sock be ? And when she was done there would be an actual pile of socks.
    She had the radio on all the time. Or she turned it off.
    That’s one mouth we can shut, she’d say. And snap the radio off.
    The more time passed, the more convincing Helen became. There was the smell of chicken nuggets; there were bread crumbs under the toaster. She made lunches and had the oil company fill the tank and she went to the children’s Christmas concerts. Her lowest point ever was when the pipes froze. Down in the basement with its earthen floor, low ceiling, and damp stone walls, going at the pipes with a blowtorch. The hawking sputter as the flame shot out, strange blue, and the hiss. It frightened the life out of her. She couldn’t afford a plumber.
    Louise did not miss one of Helen’s children’s Christmas concerts. Husbands and wives sit together at Christmas concerts, so Louise went with Helen. There was a program that went on for three hours, and there were costumes, and silver snowflakes hanging from the rafters, and the exuberant, insistent piano, and the dramatic gestures of the music teacher with her baton directing the overly animated, deadserious kindergarten choir, and now, and now , and the children enunciating the syllables. Louise dying for a smoke. Louise falling asleep. Louise crying when Lulu played her solo on the violin.
    But the girls became sophisticated fast, and harder to fool. So Helen took another job, she started sewing again, and she went to yoga. Nobody said, Have you thought about meeting somebody else? For a long time nobody dared.
    . . . . .
    John Likes to Phone Her, November 2008
    HELEN SLEEPS WITH an eye mask to block the light. The phone: Singapore. She thought for a minute that it was Thailand, but it was not Thailand. Singapore was China. Or was it Hong Kong? It was a stopover. John was on his way to New York. He said about the sun. We’re just touching down, he said. Getting fuel.
    I’m having a little espresso, Johnny said.
    The phone had rung and it might have been Louise with a heart attack, or God knows. Helen lifted the eye mask and saw how different the two kinds of darkness were. She could believe the world was made of atoms that buzzed and jostled, and if she wanted to, she could put her hand through the dresser, murky and insubstantial, and rub her nylons between her fingers, rub them away like fog on a mirror.
    Her black cardigan hanging on the closet door. Always there is that high-pitched terror when the phone rings at night: Is someone hurt? Louise has had a few scares with angina. An ambulance last winter. Helen is frightened of the phone.
    Her cardigan looked like a presence, a ghost. She was old, after all, and yes, years had passed. The bed flying over the edge of a cliff and a siren ringing out across the water and her body seemed to fall at a slower rate than the bed and she felt the bed hit with a plosh and then she hit the bed and began to sink, but it was just the phone, not a siren. The phone. Answer the phone. I’m certainly not old, she thought, snatching the receiver before she missed the call.
    It was just the phone; it was just her cardigan.
    Where are you, John, she said.
    Mom, you’re screaming in my ear. John could