Letters in the Attic by Bonnie Shimko

Author:Bonnie Shimko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

“You owe me for this,” Eva says, mean bossy. “You owe me big time. If anybody I know sees me like this I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to kill myself.”

“Good! Kill yourself. See if I care,” I say, sounding as rotten as I can. I’ve just about had it with her moods. She has a dark, ugly place in her heart that has been showing itself a lot lately. “I didn’t exactly have to twist your arm. You wanted to come just as much as I did.”

She mumbles something I can’t make out and pulls ahead of me to show that she will not give up her position. You have to get used to that kind of thing when you’re the younger half of a friendship.

I have never been trick or treating before. Mama and Manny always had to work parties on Halloween and I had to stay in our room, so I’m genuinely excited about the whole thing. I ease up on Eva in case she decides to pull a pout and head home. “It’ll be fun,” I say in a chipper voice. “We won’t see anybody we know way down here.”

We’re walking toward the big houses by the lake where the really rich people live. The ones with maids who wear uniforms, old money my grandfather calls them. Eva’s dressed in her grandmother’s wedding gown. I’m the groom in one of Dr. Singer’s old suits. My hair is tucked into a fedora and a black cardboard mustache is clipped to my nose. It pinches.

It takes forever for the lady in the first house to answer the bell. We can see her peek around the curtain on the window next to the door and then we hear her fiddling with the lock. I can actually taste the chocolate bar she’ll give us—Nestle’s Crunch, probably, or Hershey’s with almonds. Anyone who lives in a house this fancy is sure to give full-size candy bars, not the one-bite kind.

When the woman finally gets the door open, she says, “Well, do tell! I never expected you to stop by.” Then she invites us in. The house smells like Ben Gay. “Now, tell me who you are again,” she says, looking us up and down for a clue. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

After we tell her our names, she asks Eva if her father is Dr. Singer. Then she goes on for ten minutes with the gory details of her gall bladder operation and how he didn’t charge a fortune like most doctors these days. She asks Eva to turn around so she can see her veil and then she tells us the entire story of her daughter’s wedding and how she never gets to see her grandchildren because her son-in-law took a job in California right after the wedding. She’s lucky if she gets to see them every ten years. She’s sure they would walk right by her on the street and not even recognize her.

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