Burning the Night by Glen Huser

Author:Glen Huser [Huser, Glen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781774390122
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

WALTER HAD DRIVEN ME TO SCHOOL FOR A couple of years until he was assigned a position in a new junior high across town. I didn’t mind being back on the bus and I knew Walter enjoyed chauffeuring when we did go out after hours. In the year after Aunt Harriet died, he drove me every couple of weeks to visit Jean in the Sunset Arms.

Jean had a tiny room filled with houseplants and dominated by an oversized television tuned relentlessly to the soaps. With Aunt Harriet’s passing, she seemed to allow herself to drift with whatever currents might flow through the course of her days, hyperdramatic strands of the TV shows, the arrival of a dinner tray, the visit of a nurse. Some days she didn’t seem to know us but even on those days Walter discovered ways of engaging her, bringing us into her realm of attention.

“Hey, beautiful,” he would say, bounding into the room ahead of me. “Whatcha up to?”

Generally Jean would look at him somewhat startled and it would take a few seconds for her to be won over by his wide smile.

“Not much,” she’d say, her voice starchy and tiny.

“I don’t believe you,” Walter would tease. “I saw that new male nurse. Giorgio? That’s his name, isn’t it? You been making up to him?”

“Oh, you!” Jean would giggle into one hand while waving him away with the other scrawny claw.

She was failing quickly, though, and one afternoon as we sat with her, sharing tea and some pale, cardboard-like cookies for which she had developed a particular fondness, Walter managed to get her to talk about Phillip Pariston’s journal.

“She’d have me reading it all right. Just about every night. I didn’t think it was proper then—the words of the dead. It wasn’t right somehow …”

“Not right?”

“Being so personal. ‘I’m not reading that, Harriet,’ I’d say. ‘It would embarrass his spirit.’ But then I’d look at her, poor wounded thing, and you couldn’t be denying her.” Jean lost herself for a few minutes in the retrieval of cookie crumbs over the front of her housecoat.

“There were parts you didn’t like to read?” I knew that Aunt Harriet found Jean a reluctant reader, someone who managed to torture the written word, but I hadn’t thought of her reluctance being connected to anything more than a sense that it was something she did poorly.

“I didn’t like to read none of it. Spooky, that’s what I thought. She used to get others to read it aloud sometimes. Just a couple of people though. Them she trusted. At Mrs. Carter’s there was that piano player. I think he was a little bit in love with Harriet. Sometimes he’d come early just so they could have a visit.”

“Early?”

“There’d be him on piano, Harriet with her fiddle and that Russian girl on an accordion. He’d come in the late afternoon, before they’d begin work.”

I remembered Aunt Harriet mentioning having played at one of the boarding houses to help pay her keep. I’m pretty certain her exact words were, “Sometimes the survivors are not very nice people.

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