The Onion Girl by Charles de Lint

Author:Charles de Lint
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

For an old woman who distanced herself from her trashy neighbors the way Mrs. Sweeney always did, she turns out to know an awful lot about our private lives. Sitting in her kitchen, drinking iced tea and eating the cheese sandwiches she makes for us, we hear the whole sorry story of my family—or at least up until the last of them moved away.

It’s funny how, when you leave home, you expect everything to stand still while you’re gone. Not when you think about it, of course, but subconsciously that idea’s still sitting there in the back of your head. Or at least it was in mine. But life goes on for those you left behind, the same as it does for you, and it’s only when you return that the shock of it hits you. Everything’s changed.

I already knew from the empty house we found sitting cross the road from Mrs. Sweeney’s place that things had changed, but it isn’t until she starts to tell me what happened to my family that the truth of it hits home. I listen to what she has to say with a growing numbness.

There’s the litany of my brothers’ arrests—it turns out Del wasn’t the only bad apple in the family. His was only the most bitter fruit in our sorry little orchard.

Raylene left home, but instead of following in my footsteps, she waited until school was done. No one knew where she’d gone, just that she was with Pinky Miller. “I heard they moved into a boardinghouse in Stokesville,” Mrs. Sweeney says when I ask for more, “but that didn’t last. Those girls always wanted more. Then the word was they moved into Tyson proper, but I’ve no idea how they were making a living. Could be they followed your lead and upped and gone themselves.

“It wouldn’t surprise me none if they ended up on one or the other of the coasts—New York City or Hollywood. They had those stars in their eyes, leastwise Pinky Miller always did. Hard to tell what your sister ever wanted, or what she was thinking.”

“So you don’t know where she is?”

Mrs. Sweeney shook her head. “The last time I saw her was ’bout a month ago, standing there in the middle of the road with her friend Pinky, just looking at that old house for a time. Like she was saying good-bye, maybe.”

Our father was dead. Of a stroke. He died in March, just three months ago.

Jimmy was dead, too, gunned down in a fight only a week or so after our father had died.

No one knew what had happened to Robbie.

Del ended up in prison—no surprise there—and our mother moved near the penitentiary to be close to him.

“Is he still in jail?” I ask.

Mrs. Sweeney gives me a nod.

“But he won’t be troubling you for a whiles,” she says.

I look at her, wondering how much she knows about what went on in that house across the road from hers. And if she did know, why

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