Childgrave by Ken Greenhall

Author:Ken Greenhall [Greenhall, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

“The man who asks me about Miss Coleridge. Can I have some Chinese noodles, please?”

Joanne liked chow mein noodles—the wide, flat kind. I got some out of the cupboard and waited for her to go through her little ritual of putting them into her mouth one at a time and sucking them until they were soggy—something I found hard to understand, since for me their only attraction was their crispness. But I was more concerned with the inquisitive man—a reporter, I supposed—than I was with the noodles. I asked Joanne what she had told the man about Sara.

“That she’s a nice lady and she plays the harp and she knows about Colnee and she is going to be my new mother.” Joanne put a noodle into her mouth and let it marinate for a few seconds, but then she began to gag, and she spit it out.

“Are you all right?” I asked. “Did it go down the wrong way?”

Joanne shook her head. “It tastes wrong.”

I took her in my arms. “What do you mean, it tastes wrong?”

“It looks right, but it tastes wrong.”

I tried one, and it tasted the way chow mein noodles always taste. Then I remembered Nanny Joy mentioning the day before that Joanne hadn’t been eating enough lately. I raised the sleeves of Joanne’s pajama jacket and looked at her arms. She had never been what you would call a pudgy child, but I was sure that her arms were thinner than usual. “You’re just tired, sweetie,” I said. It didn’t do me much good to see my daughter wasting away or to hear about obnoxious reporters following her around. And I decided that maybe it was time for us to get out of town for a while. I put Joanne to bed and telephoned Harry. I knew he would still be at the gallery, but I thought I would leave a message with his answering machine and see if he knew of a place where Joanne and I could spend the summer.

But Lee answered the phone. Neither she nor Harry had been willing to give up their own apartments, and they now lived alternately in the two places, according to some sort of schedule I didn’t understand. Since having her abortion, Lee seemed to be as gabby and energetic as ever, but once in a while you would find her staring at the floor, looking as though her tongue had just discovered a hole in one of her teeth.

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