The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

Author:Amanda Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2023-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

Nine

Joe

GETTING BETTER WASN’T EASY. MY ENTIRE RIGHT SIDE pained me from the moment I woke in the morning until I laid my head down at night. And even then, it haunted my sleep, sneaking into my dreams, transforming them into nightmares full of screeching tires and the sound of hospital machines. It was a deep-down pain, one that no amount of exercise and medication could cast out. No matter how many pills I fed it or how many of Aunt Lindy’s “thimbles” full of whiskey I drank, I was convinced that pain would haunt me for the rest of my life. I was so sure of this that I did everything I could to prove myself right. A man determined is one thing, and more often than not, a good thing. But a man soured on life at twenty-four and determined to stew in that sourness is never a good thing. The pain only made my anger quicker to ignite. Mom tried to love the anger out of me, Dad and Ben tried to work it out of me by taking me into the woods, and Mae tried to curse it out, but all that came to nothing. I was determined to let that pain and anger ruin me.

In the months after the accident, alone in my tiny room at the rehab centre in Halifax with nothing but books that smelled of mildew for company, I desperately needed someone to blame. And I decided that someone was going to be Mr. Richardson, the poor soul who’d been driving home to dinner when I stepped out of the dark and into the front of his truck.

“You’ve got no reason to be mad at him,” Mom said. She was sitting beside my hospital bed, taking bread out of an old margarine container. “How was he supposed to see you?”

“He should’ve been looking.”

“On a Sunday night? For a boy stepping out of the dark? He was supposed to know that you were gonna walk out in front of him?” She placed the bread on the narrow hospital table and moved it in front of me before she poured molasses over top. “Luski, eat.”

The bread was still warm, and the molasses dripped down the side and pooled around the bottom. I used my finger to slop some of it into my mouth, dripping it on my chin. Mom reached up to wipe it and I slapped her hand away.

“That’s the last time you’ll do that.” She reached up again to wipe the thick brown syrup off my chin and I let her. “You’re not so banged up that I’ll let you get away with slapping your mother.”

On a good day, when the exercises alleviated the pain, and the winter weather lifted and I could go outside and sit in the sun, I could find a little bit of forgiveness for Mr. Richardson. He didn’t require it and I had no right to give it, but I still found it—on the good days. On the

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