After River Read Free Page A

the foreign object was for. As my mother pocketed the wayward rubber in her apron along with the buttons, coins and other orphans of washday shesaid, ‘Just wishful thinking, Natalie. That’s all this is. Just wishful thinking.’
    After all the laundry was pegged out on the clothes lines and flying in the wind, Mom opened the door at the bottom of the stairs in the kitchen. It was unusual for her to go upstairs except to change the sheets and we’d already done that. I waited a few minutes then followed her up. I slipped into my own bedroom. After she had gone back downstairs I peeked into my brothers’ room. There, in the middle of the fresh pillow on Morgan’s bed, was the condom.
    I never heard Mom say a word to him about her discovery. Morgan was quieter than usual at dinner that evening. He left the table before dessert and headed down to the barn even before Boyer.
    I’m sure Mom read my laundry as easily as she read my brothers’.
    She knew whenever I had been up in the hayloft in the summer. Our mother had a morbid fear of fire, and even though she agreed with Dad that her fears were unwarranted, she paid attention to her instincts. Everyone did. So in the hot days of August, after all the hay was in, and the loft was full, we were forbidden to play up there. It was one of her few rules.
    She knew it was me who had sneaked into the root cellar and polished off three jars of canned cherries when I was seven years old. She knew I almost drowned a piglet trying to make it swim in the water trough. And she knew when, at thirteen, I was about to start my monthly period. I paid no attention to the pink streaks in my cotton underpants. But she did. Before I knew I needed them, a large blue box and an elastic belt with metal tabs appeared on my bed one Saturday afternoon. When I realized what they were for, I thought she had read it in my tea leaves.
    My mother read tea leaves for her women friends when they visited. Sometimes, in the afternoons, when Dad and my brotherswere off haying or cutting firewood, she would say, ‘Come on Nat, let’s have a tea party.’
    She would take out the good tea cups, her mother’s china, from the glass-fronted cabinet in the parlour. I only call it a parlour because she did; it was really just a long room off the kitchen that served as both dining room and living room. She’d set our tea cups and cookies at the corner of the huge oak table and we ‘girls’ had our stolen afternoon while the ‘men’ worked. After I finished my cup of milked-down tea, she would have me flip the cup upside down in the saucer and turn it three times. Then she’d read my future and my secrets in the leaves.
    Years later, when I had a daughter of my own, I realized it was really the laundry she read. The laundry gave away all our secrets.
    So, when I think of everything that happened after that summer day, I wonder, how could she not have known?

Chapter Three
    October 2003
    M Y MOTHER IS dying. She’s been threatening to die for the last five years. This time I think she means it. I hear it in Boyer’s words. ‘She’s asking for you, Natalie.’
    Still half asleep, I am unprepared for the quiet gentleness of my brother’s voice. I can’t remember the last time we spoke on the phone. It takes a moment to relate voice and message. An uncomfortable silence fills the line while I search for a reply.
    That’s how it is with Boyer and me. Our conversations are stilted, stop and go, static. They’ve been that way for years. On the rare occasions when we’re together, we constantly cut off each other’s sentences. It’s as if we fear any attempt to repair the damage; damage of wounds so old, scars so smooth, so healed over, that to pick at them would be like taking a knife to new flesh. So, whenever Boyer and I find ourselves together during my hit-and-run visits to Atwood, we fumble with safe words; we