Scare the Light Away Read Free

entrance to her house, hands resting firmly on her flat, bony hips. Her bitter, pinched face was as familiar to me as if I’d last seen it this morning. But the combined effects of weather and hard work had beaten the skin into leather, and the brittle brown eyes were collapsing into bags on her cheeks. Her hair was the same shade of fake blond as always, but the lush, thick locks were now only a memory, and patches of pink scalp shone through the thin, bleached hair.
    Underneath the stiffly ironed apron, she wore a proper suit with pantyhose and pumps. A tiny string of cheap, fake pearls was wrapped around her crepe-paper neck. She was eleven years older than I.
    “Why didn’t you tell Dad I was coming?”
    “I did. He must have forgotten.”
    “Right.”
    I was afraid I was going to have to push her aside and elbow my way into her house, but then my father bustled up, brimming with platitudes about how wonderful to have his two daughters together again, and Shirley stepped aside to allow me entry.
    I hadn’t been to this house before. It wasn’t the hovel she and Al lived in when they had finally moved out of his parents’ place, but a neat, although tiny, modern bungalow not far from the center of Hope River.
    The screen door leading off the living room opened and Al stepped through, carrying a vicious-looking barbecue fork. The scent of burning flesh drifted in behind him. He smiled broadly and wrapped me in a fierce hug.
    “Rebecca. Look at you now. Still the beauty of the family after all these years. Doesn’t she look great, Shirl? Just great.”
    “I’ll finish setting the table,” my sister said.
    “It’s nice to see you, Al.”
    In our youth he’d been painfully thin and cursed with the greasiest hair any of us had ever seen. Everyone knows an Al Smithers. So nerdy that even the mention of his last name would instantly have the “in” crowd in giggles. Every small town has a loser, and Al personified it for Hope River. But nerdy Al Smithers managed to knock up my sister (not that a McKenzie amounted to any great catch), and thus here he was, all these years later, the scrawny frame replaced by a substantial beer belly, bowing and scraping in his tiny living room.
    “Let me get you a drink? What’ll you have?”
    “A glass of white wine?”
    “Sure, sure. And a beer for you, Bob?”
    We settled into sagging chairs while Al fetched the drinks.
    “To family.” My dad offered a toast. Mom had told me that Dad now had “control over” his drinking. I could slap Al for offering him a beer. But it wasn’t my business—I was only here for a couple of days, and then I’d be well out of it.
    Al and I nodded and raised our glasses. “To family,” he said. I swallowed heavily.
    “Our first barbecue of the year,” Al announced proudly, hurrying back to attend to his duties. “With the weather being so nice after all that rain we’ve been having.”
    Living on the West Coast, making rivers of money and having no children, my husband Ray and I had become accustomed to eating only the freshest of foods usually prepared in one of the city’s best restaurants. I have become quite the “foodie.” So much so that I had forgotten what bad food tasted like. Al’s steak was thin, cooked to the consistency of shoe leather, and drowned in commercial barbecue sauce, the potato salad slimy with bottled mayonnaise. Shirley stared sullenly into her lap, merely pushing her food around her plate although Al chowed down enough for the both of them. I forced myself to keep on eating although the food stuck in my throat. Dad babbled on as cheerfully as he always did, even in far tenser situations than this.
    But one thing was certainly different from the old days: Although Al offered another round, Dad refused and made that one drink last right through the meal.
    And my mother was missing. Her calm, caring presence wasn’t here to cast a loving blanket over the troubled undercurrents.
    But no torment lasts