Greenmantle Read Free Page A

two hands. If anyone had told her that she’d be here now, even a day before the Wintario draw…
    She found herself grinning foolishly. It was still hard to believe that she’d won. $200,000. Even after the $26,000 she’d paid for what was left of the house and its land, and the $60,000 or so she’d had to put out for renovations, she still had over $100,000 in the bank. Any day she expected someone to come up to her and tell her it was all a mistake, that she had to give it all back, but it wasn’t going to happen. She wouldn’t allow it to happen. Not now.
    She made her way slowly back to the house. Opening the front door, she almost ran into her daughter, who was carrying a stack of empty boxes down the stairs.
    “Watch where you’re going, kiddo,” she said.
    Ali poked her head around the boxes. “Are the movers gone?”
    “Yup. We’re on our own now, out in the backwoods of Lanark County where few men dare to go.”
    “Oh, Mom!”
    Frankie laughed and took the boxes from her. Ali had her curly blond hair but wore it short instead of in a long spill down her back as Frankie did. She also had Frankie’s strong Teutonic features—the broad nose and brow, the wide mouth—and eyes such a dark blue that the pupils sometimes got lost in them. They were often mistaken for sisters, which delighted Frankie, who was thirty-four, at the same time as it embarrassed her fourteen-year-old daughter.
    “Are you finished with your room?” Frankie asked.
    “For now. I thought I’d give you a hand in the kitchen and then maybe we could explore a bit.”
    Frankie tossed the boxes into the big screened-in porch that led off from the kitchen’s back door. “Tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you let me finish up in here and you go ahead exploring. Then when I’m done, we can have a bite to eat and you can show me all the hot spots.
    “You sure you don’t mind?” Ali asked, obviously torn between wanting to get out into the sun and feeling it unfair to leave her mother working alone.
    “Trust me.”
    “Okay.” She gave Frankie a quick kiss, then scurried out the back door before either of them could change their minds.
    Frankie leaned against the sink and watched her daughter go swinging through the knee-high weeds in the backyard. She’d found a stick and was whacking the heads off of dandelions, stirring up clouds of parachuting seeds in her wake. She looked happy. Frankie just hoped it would last.
    When they’d driven out for the first time, Ali’s only comment about the house had been “Gross-o.” But she seemed to enjoy sitting in when Frankie went over the blueprints with the contractor, and it wasn’t as though she wasn’t used to moving. Poor kid. They’d been in a different apartment for almost every one of Ali’s years. They were both looking forward to some stability.
    When Ali moved out of sight behind a screen of trees, Frankie turned back to the kitchen, chose a box and began to arrange its contents in a cupboard.
     
    * * *
     
    Ali was happy, just walking along and swinging her stick. Whack. She watched the seeds explode at the impact, then slowly drift toward the ground. Some made it. Some got tangled up in the weeds and grass. Some caught the wind just right and went floating off. Whack. She knew her mother was worrying and she wished she wouldn’t. Moving out here was the first good thing to happen to them in a long time.
    Not that the fourteen years of her life had been bad. It was just that living out here, away from other kids her own age, she didn’t have to go on pretending that she was into all the things that they were. Whack. If her mother knew how she really felt, she’d have some justification to worry, but Ali wasn’t about to let that cat out of the bag.
    How was she supposed to explain that she didn’t like her peers, that she wasn’t into hanging around, drinking, smoking cigarettes or dope, running after boys, groping in some backseat or on a living room couch