Fall on Your Knees by Ann-marie Macdonald

Author:Ann-marie Macdonald [Macdonald, Ann-marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Families, Family, Family Life, General, Sagas, Historical, Sisters, Fiction
ISBN: 9780394281780
Google: VYqOPRlgpUEC
Amazon: 0743237188
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 1996-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

I've watched them fade away and die. ...

Book 5

DIARY OF A LOST GIRL

Baby Burlesque

A six-inch panel thwacks open and two brown eyes take aim at her beneath a single eyebrow. Frances holds up a bottle of James's finest. The panel slides closed and after a moment the steel door opens. Standing there is a big man. Wavy black hair, nose like a fist, arms like cannon, would-be olive skin but he obviously doesn't see much sunlight. Young and, Frances has to figure, dopey. He stares down at her blankly, blocking the inner gloom she is so longing to glimpse.

"Close the friggin door, Boutros, it's broad fuckin daylight, b'y."

A small man elbows the younger one aside and, with a glance not at Frances but over her shoulder, grabs her arm. "Get in, get in."

She's in.

The interior of the speakeasy lives down to its exterior. It's the only drab house in The Coke Ovens. Peeling gray paint, boarded windows, you'd have to know what you were looking for to find it because it appears deserted--with the exception of the upper story, where a few tired petunias and chewed marigolds cling to life in a window box overlooking the slag dump of Dominion Iron and Steel. Above is the train bridge. This is Railway Street.

Frances blinks into the dusty shadows and the room takes shape. Benches line the walls. Wallpaper strips with traces of lords and ladies flap from ceiling corners dingy with nicotine and neglect. On the floor, a genuine brass spittoon awash in brown slime, and several rusty tin cans that serve the same purpose. A pile of cigarette butts has been swept to the center of the floorboards. A makeshift bar--sheet of scrap metal on two oil drums--bottles and barrels, not a mirror, not a shot glass, no engravings of ships or trains, no regimental photo, no boxing heroes grace the walls. In the far corner stands a scarred player piano.

Frances looks into the taut sallow face of the

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