Brown Dwarf by K.D. Miller

Author:K.D. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2011-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Rae

I wonder what Mrs. Pasquale’s daughter is doing these days. I haven’t thought about her in years. Mrs. Pasquale must be dead by now – she was a lot older than Annie Bray when they were roommates in the Home.

I never even knew her daughter’s name. Dark-haired woman. Thin. Muscled. Fierce bird-of-prey eyes. Stuffing her mother’s dirty underwear into a plastic bag. Saying, “If I didn’t have to work, she’d be home with me.” She spent all of Saturday and all of Sunday with her mother. This after putting in a full work week. Probably had a passel of kids, too. She did everything. Combed her mother’s few strands of hair. Fed lunch to her, one spoonful at a time. Swabbed her mouth and hands with a damp face cloth. Helped her into the bathroom, got her onto the toilet, then wiped her afterwards.

Meanwhile, I’d be glancing at my watch every two minutes during the token twenty-five per week I spent in the Home. This after an hour on the GO bus, then half an hour rattling up the Mountain. Then the whole thing in reverse, back to Toronto. Three hours of travel, half an hour of visit. And every week, an almost obscene surge of joy when I heard the Home’s door click shut behind me and took the first of seventy-three steps to the bus stop.

I’m in another Starbucks, Jori. This one’s at the corner of Wentworth and Queensdale. I actually can’t stand these places. But it’s a table and a chair and a toilet, and I needed all three. I’d been walking for an hour, zigzagging up and down the side streets the way Brenda used to. Trying to stretch time. Push back the moment when she’d have to confront Annie Bray.

It all came back. That non-stop gnawing in the belly that Brenda tried to soothe with food. Like no fear I’ve felt since. Not even being questioned by the police after you disappeared could compare to it.

“All right, Brenda. Let’s go over it again. You and Marjorie Clement stopped in at Boone’s Hobbies, Solly’s Variety, Slaine’s Notions and Dry Goods and the public library. We have spoken to the proprietors of the stores, and to the librarian, and they do remember seeing you. Then you say that once you were outside the library, you had an argument with Marjorie and parted company. What was that argument about again, Brenda?”

“She wanted us to do something we weren’t supposed to do.”

“And what was that again?”

I can still feel Annie Bray’s skinny little arm tight across my plump shoulders. She snarled up at those policemen like a mother tiger. “My daughter has told you and told you what they argued about! That girl Jori, as she called herself, came up with some hare-brained scheme to go after Clarence Frayne! Clarence Frayne! If she’d listened to my daughter and done the right thing, she’d be safe at home now instead of dead or worse than dead. So why aren’t you

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