Body and Soul: Short Story Read Free Page A

couldn’t remember. The most startling and depressing news in her life these days was what she was capable of forgetting. Well, she wouldn’t forget the girl’s last name, she could guarantee that. She removed her glasses, wiped them on her blouse and lifted her feet onto the coffee table.
    The report was handwritten, hard to read. Under “Mother” it said either “Sally” or “Sandy” and then “38.” Then there was a short, tragic biography. Sally or Sandy had an honours B.A. in English Literature but she also had a drug habit and a long history of arrests for possession and trafficking. She was currently serving a five- or an eight-year jail sentence. Her only other child had been born addicted to heroin and had lived just a day.
    As she read, Aunt Bea shook her head in pity and amazement. It so happened that she had a cousin named Sally, who used to teach school but who lost her husband and her job due to addiction to alcohol. She died at age forty, a broken old woman.
    “Heaven help her,” Aunt Bea prayed for Julie’s mother.
    Under “Father,” all it said was “Michael, iii .”
    “Good heavens!” Aunt Bea said. He must be a stepfather, she thought. Or maybe he was the mother’s father. But still … III . And then she let out a whoop of laughter as she realized that what it actually said was “Ill.” She laughed and laughed and had to remove her glasses and wipe them again. When she settled down she got a little irritated. What did they mean by“Ill”? Crazy? Dying? Dying from aids, which they didn’t want to say in case people were afraid to take Julie? Aunt Bea clicked her tongue to imagine so much ignorance.
    She turned the page, and there was another coincidence—Julie suffered from epileptic fits. Aunt Bea’s younger sister, dead thirty-four years now, had suffered from epileptic fits. Aunt Bea was handy, therefore, with a pencil. Get the tongue out of the way first, tilt back the head. Nothing to be alarmed about, so long as there were unsharpened pencils all over the house.
    “Prone to temper tantrums,” Aunt Bea read. “Domineering.” She thought of her daughter and felt herself well prepared. “Behavioural and intellectual age,” she read, “five to six.” “Well …,” she said dubiously. She had been very impressed by Julie’s detection of Sweet’n Low.
    She told Terry the news that afternoon, on their walk home from school. It wasn’t until she was actually describing Julie that she recognized what a burden she was asking Terry to share. This wasn’t how she had planned it at all. The braindamaged girl she found herself bracing Terry for was a far cry from the helpful and spirited older sister she’d had in mind. She tried to brighten up the picture. “We’ll have a whale of a time, though,” she said, “the three of us.”
    “Doing what?” Terry asked.
    “Oh, I don’t know …” Aunt Bea thought back to when her daughter was small. “We’ll take the ferry to the island,” she said, although being on boats gave her heart palpitations.
    Terry swept her white cane in scrupulous arcs.
    “And we’ll go to the zoo,” Aunt Bea said, although the zoo was a good fifty miles away, and Aunt Bea no longer drove a car.
    “Where will she sleep?” Terry asked.
    “With you. If that’s all right. It’s a big enough bed.”
    “What if she wets her pants? A boy at school who is five, he wets his pants.”
    “In that department, I’m sure she’s eleven,” Aunt Bea said, although she thought, Good point, and wondered if she shouldn’t lay some plastic garbage bags under the sheet.
    “Will she go to school?”
    “She already goes. That school on Bleeker. You know, where the sidewalk’s all cracked?”
    “Will she go by herself?”
    “No, I don’t think so. We’ll both walk her there, and then I’ll take you to school.”
    Terry came to a stop and lifted her thin face in Aunt Bea’s direction. “Your feet will kill you!” she cried, as if delivering