The Note by Carly Schabowski

Author:Carly Schabowski [Schabowski, Carly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800199576
Published: 2022-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

ALICE

Jozef stopped and stared at me, blinking once, twice, three times—it was as though he could not see me at all.

I leaned forward and placed my hand gently on his knee. “Jozef,” I said quietly.

He flinched under the touch of my hand and quickly stood. “That’s enough for today,” he said, collecting the empty glasses on the table. “You can go now.”

“But the leaves,” I said stupidly. “I haven’t cleared them.”

He looked at the glasses in his hands and scrunched up his brow as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them now. He placed them back on the table and said, “The leaves can wait.”

His abrupt change in mood worried me. All the other times he had spoken about his life he had been a little odd, sure, but this time it was as if he wasn’t himself and couldn’t look at me properly.

“I can stay awhile if you like,” I suggested, thinking of Gammy when she had one of her turns and needed someone to watch her in case she decided to cook something on the stove and then forgot about it, burning down the house.

He shook his head, then patted his pocket where I had seen him place some papers earlier. Noticing they were gone, he swiveled his head left and right, panic in his eyes.

“Here.” I stood and bent down to where they had fallen in their tightly folded square next to his chair. “They fell out of your pocket.”

He snatched them from me, looked at the papers then at me. “I haven’t read them,” I said.

He shoved them back into his pocket and his face relaxed. “I’m just tired, Alice. You can go now. Please. We’ll talk again soon.”

I nodded. There was no use asking him whether he was still going to fix my bike for me, not today anyway, so I wheeled my bike home and decided I would bug Billy to do it, even though he was still refusing to come out of his room for longer than a few minutes at a time.

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