The Circle by Katherena Vermette

Author:Katherena Vermette [Vermette, Katherena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

ANGIE

Angie walks into her beautiful home and the air conditioning deliciously hits her face in instant relief. Angie loves this old house. She loves the little table at the entryway with the small blue dish for keys. No one ever uses it but it looks nice. She had seen it in a magazine and amazingly the dish has survived her kids so far. She loves the painting above the little table. A Norval Morrisseau print. The colours are perfect. She takes a deep breath in.

Her kids are in the living room. Alexandra’s face lit up by the big screen of the TV, and the calming sounds of Minecraft fill the small room. Tristan’s face is blocked out by his mini-player. The rest of him stretches out impossibly long on the couch. So tall already at five.

“Hi, guys,” Angie says, taking her purse strap from where it sat criss-crossed on her body as she walked from the bus.

“Hi, Mom,” they chime off-unison, not looking up.

She breathes again, but it’s more of a sigh. She hopes they had gone out today. She equally hopes they had eaten something halfway nutritious.

She walks down the hallway painted a dusty greige, into her Chadbury green kitchen. Her partner, ’Ship—everyone calls him ’Ship but the old people—hated the colour but humoured her choice. The table is a light pine. The print on the wall an Alex Janvier.

Angie can tell something is wrong by the way he holds his body. She can always tell when something is wrong with ’Ship. Not like a sixth sense or anything, he makes it pretty obvious by pacing around the kitchen, reeking like he’d been smoking all day. Angie measures her movements carefully before speaking, hangs her purse on the kitchen chair, drapes her sweater over top, long sigh before beginning, calmly, “What’s up?”

He slows his circle but doesn’t stop, hand to his mouth. “Phoenix.” He knows that’s all he has to say.

Angie sighs again. It’d been a long time since they’d had some Phoenix drama. One of the benefits of her being locked up. “What’d she do now?”

“Gone. She’s, fuck, no one knows where she is. It’s been days of this shit.” His hands go up and down and all around, his body in constant movement.

“How can she cause this much trouble already? She’s only been out five minutes.”

“Exactly.” He looks out the window, then to his phone. Thinking. No, planning.

“What do you think?” She wants to sit down, but doesn’t. She might have to do something, he might need her to do something, so she grips the back of her perfectly light pine chair instead.

“They think that…she went to see her kid…and they saw her there with this kid. This uppity young kid who works at the drop-in. Kyle found out. Who it was.” He parses out the information like he does, leaving out details about how he hears stuff, how he knows, who told Kyle. The things she told him she never wanted to know. The things ’Ship always seemed to know and she didn’t ask about.

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