Body and Soul: Short Story Read Free

things!” she said, reading the girl’s sweatshirt.
    “Believe me,” the social worker said. “It was not
my
idea that she wear that.” She took the girl’s arm and turned her around.
    “Pet the sweaty things,” Aunt Bea read. She didn’t get it.
    “It belonged to her mother,” the social worker said, giving Aunt Bea a confidential look.
    “Oh?” Aunt Bea said.
    “Come on, Julie, don’t do that,” the social worker said. The girl was bunching up the shirt with her fists, revealing a belly like a mound of virgin snow.
    Julie? Aunt Bea thought.
    “Should we take off our shoes?” the social worker asked.
    “No, no,” Aunt Bea said, blinking herself back into action. “Sit down anywhere. I’ve got shortbreads and chocolate milk, and coffee’s made. Would you like some chocolate milk?” she asked. She looked at the girl and added, “Julie?”
    “Coffee,” Julie said loudly.
    “Julie’s been drinking coffee for years,” the social worker said, falling into a chair. “And beer,
and
I shudder to think what else.” The social worker was a homely, frizzy-haired woman in dungarees and work boots. “Actually
I
wouldn’t mind a glass of chocolate milk,” she said.
    Don’t sweat the petty things, Aunt Bea said to herself as she poured the coffee. Pet the sweaty things. Speaking of sweat, her body was soaked in it. “Everything’s fine,” she told herself. “Everything’s just fine and dandy.” She hummed a hymn:
    “A charge to keep I have,
    A God to glorify,
    A never-dying soul to save
    And fit it for the sky.”
    The first thing she would do was give that crazy jailbird hair a perm.
    Coming out of the kitchen, she asked Julie how old she was. Fifteen was her guess.
    “Five,” Julie answered.
    “Five?” Aunt Bea looked at the social worker.
    “Eleven,” the social worker said with mild exasperation.
    Aunt Bea nodded. At least Children’s Aid had got
that
right. She handed Julie her coffee, and Julie immediately gulped half of it down.
    “There isn’t sugar in here,” Julie said, holding up her mug.
    Aunt Bea was startled. She cast back to a moment ago. “No, there’s sugar.”
    “It’s
not
sugar,” Julie said. She looked infuriated.
    “Oh!” Aunt Bea laughed. “Yes, you’re right! It’s Sweet’n Low!” She beamed at the social worker. “I can’t tell the difference.”
    “Just drink it,” the social worker said.
    “No, no. I’ve got sugar.” Aunt Bea hurried over to retrieve Julie’s mug. She smiled into Julie’s suddenly blank eyes. Pale, pale pupils, almost white. Aunt Bea had never seen eyes like that.
    The social worker seemed to assume that everything was settled. “I’ll bring her back Monday morning,” she said after Aunt Bea had given Julie a tour of the apartment, showing her the bed she’d share with Terry, the empty dresser drawers where her clothes would go, the chair that would be hers at the dining-room table. Julie exposed her belly and rolled her eyes.
    At the front door the social worker handed over a file, saying, “You might as well keep this.”
    “Oh, good,” Aunt Bea said, as if the contents were familiar but she’d better have them just in case. When she was alone, she sat on the couch with a cup of coffee and the rest of the cookies and opened the file. How she would end up explaining Julie to people (to her daughter) was that she was floored by the coincidences, especially the coincidence of Julie’s last name—Norman. “That was the clincher,” Aunt Bea would say.
    To see or hear her husband’s name still threw weight on Aunt Bea’s heart, but to see his name written next to that poor, forsaken girl’s fogged up Aunt Bea’s glasses. She touched under one eye, and she was crying all right. Before Norman died she wouldn’t have believed it was possible to cry unbeknownst to yourself. Before Norman died she wouldn’t have said that her glasses fogged from crying, although she didn’t doubt that they had and she just