Scare the Light Away Read Free Page B

day early from his conference to take the funeral,” my father said, slathering strawberry jam onto his toast. “We coulda had the visiting Reverend, but your mom, she and Mr. Wyatt were real close these past few years. He knows she’d want him to be there.”
    I poured hot water into the old brown betty. The handle was cracked, the lid broken into several pieces and badly glued back together. It wasn’t one of the procession of traditional brown teapots I remembered from my youth, but it seemed like an old friend nonetheless. My mom, English to her core, loved her teapots. Earlier, scrounging through the unfamiliar cupboards searching for breakfast ingredients and utensils, I had uncovered the gift I sent her for her birthday a few years ago: a replica of an English cottage, cast in the mould of a teapot. Unwrapped, it lay abandoned in the dark recesses of the cupboard. In other circumstances my feelings might have been hurt, but they weren’t. I should have known that she would discard it as a modern frivolity. I smiled as I imagined her steeping her afternoon cup of tea in the chipped brown betty while she contemplated what she would do with this monstrosity of a gift.
    If she had known I was coming, it would have been laid out in pride of place.
    I haven’t eaten bacon and fried eggs for more years than I can count, but there was no granola, yogurt, or even bagels in my mother’s kitchen. I like a big breakfast, so along with Dad’s meal I prepared a serving for myself. I tentatively lifted a slice of crispy bacon to my lips, telling my inner diet cop to ignore the fat and calorie content. It tasted rather good. I took another bite.
    “I’m so glad you’re home, Rebecca.” Dad smiled at me through a mouthful of fried egg. “I trust you can stay a while.”
    “I’ve taken time off work, Dad.” An extended leave of absence, in fact. After the hours I’d put in since Ray’s death, they owed me something. (Of course, I’d left my father’s phone number with my secretary and brought my laptop computer so that I could dial into the office every day.)
    “Good.” He turned his attention to his breakfast, scooping up a bit of runny egg yolk with a thin slice of toast. What my mother called a “soldier.” Sampson thumped her tail on the floor and watched the food with wide eyes.
    “Always liked a cup of coffee in the morning,” he said finally, placing his knife and fork neatly in the center of the scraped-clean plate. “When I was a young man. But your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Insisted on making tea. Every day of her life, ’cepting when she were in hospital having you kids.”
    “You could have made your own coffee.”
    He looked genuinely astonished. “Now why would I have done that?”
    I shrugged and tossed Sampson a piece of toast. She would have preferred bacon, but she accepted the toast with an air of offended grace.
    “She didn’t much cling to her English ways, your mom. She tried to fit in real well to how we do things here. But she wouldn’t give up that tea.” His old eyes clouded over with sorrow. I walked over to him and placed one hand on his shoulder. It was all I had in me to give him.
    He gripped my hand with his own, worn by work and lined by age. “Don’t know how I’m gonna manage without her, girl.”
    “I know, Dad. I know. I’ll make coffee tomorrow. More bacon?”
    “Don’t mind if I do.” Embarrassed, he rubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to wipe away the traces of emotion. My dad had certainly not been raised to show his feelings. Exactly the opposite. “Too bad Jimmy didn’t make it to Watson’s last night. He should be by this morning.”
    I sat back down and the cracked vinyl squeaked under my weight. I stirred milk into my tea. “Where’s Jimmy living?”
    “In the big house.”
    “Mom didn’t tell me that. I assumed you sold it years ago. It’s bigger than this place. If you didn’t sell it, why didn’t you move in there when Grandpa