Suitable Precautions Read Free

checkers-playing women at the community centre thought, but no, definitely no children. Matilda had died after a long battle with cancer, according to her obituary, and Ella’s neighbours were going to miss her at the street party this year—she made such tasty lemon tarts.
    Not sure what else to do, Ella started going to church again. She lit a candle for the eternal soul of Matilda Giacoma and said prayers of apology. Several times she considered going to confession. It wasn’t a sin to be lucky, she told herself. She wasn’t a graveyard ghoul—the money came to her. Ella spent a lot of time counting, wondering if she was blessed or cursed.
    After a few months, Ella started to feel comfortable with the money. She bought herself a new pair of boots without feeling like she was going to throw up, and from there she felt strong enough to buy a silver necklace and a matching bracelet, then a mahogany bookshelf from an antique market and two reading chairs, one for the sunny front bedroom and the other for the living room, to go with the new bookcase. She repaired the hole in the roof and hired a pest removal service to deal with the animals in the attic. Raccoons, it turned out. The lanky man arrived wearing thick,
industrial gloves, carrying a trap that looked hardly large enough for a well-fed house cat. She paid cash upfront and then tipped the man forty dollars when he came back with a whimpering raccoon, its fur poking wildly out of the cage bars. “Can you take good care of him?” Ella asked.
    â€œDon’t worry, lady. They always get taken care of,” he said, putting the cash in his shirt pocket and bashing the cage against the door frame, his shoes leaving a filthy dance pattern on Ella’s linoleum hallway as he stepped around yesterday’s mail. It was a pile of mostly junk flyers, even though she had repeatedly told the mailman not to deliver them. “Your junk, your problem, lady,” he said, and no amount of nasty looks from Ella or complaints to his supervisor had made a difference.
    â€œSorry about that,” Ella said as she picked up the stack, her hands recognizing the heavyweight paper a moment before she read the name, the words stopping the air in her lungs: M. Giacoma. Postmarked in Rome.
    Ella quietly shut the door behind the exterminator and locked it. She closed the blinds in the living room and sat in her new reading chair, her blood thudding in her cheeks and her fingers cold and raspy against the smoothness of the cream envelope. It didn’t mean anything. There was nothing to mean. It was just a letter, a mistake. Someone who didn’t know that Matilda had died. It was sad, that’s what it was. Sad and that was all. Why was she worried? What was there to worry about? This was her house and she had lived in it for months. She hadn’t done anything wrong. No one had blinked twice at the antique store when she paid cash for the bookshelf. She had been downright honest, telling the salesman he had undercharged her by sixty dollars when he rang up the bill. And who was to say the letter had anything to do
with the money? Imagine an old woman with a body full of cancer hauling bags of money up those rickety attic stairs and prying up the floorboards with hammers and crowbars. It was ridiculous. She was being ridiculous.
    Ella took a deep breath and looked at the envelope. The penmanship was strong and dynamic: thin, hard, written with urgency, Ella could tell. The return address on the back was carefully scripted. No smudges. Each letter clear and precise, but spiky, impatient for an answer. Whatever was inside was important. Beautiful, maybe. Sad, almost definitely. Nothing at all to do with Ella or the money. A coincidence of address, just like the hydro bills that still came to her house addressed to M. Giacoma.
    Ella took her pen out of her purse. “Recipient deceased,” she wrote on the envelope. She just hadn’t been clear