Suitable Precautions Read Free Page A

enough the first time.
    Ella slipped the letter in the mailbox that afternoon, along with a large donation to the Toronto Humane Society. She returned her new boots and gave the money to Girl Guides selling cookies on the street corner, their cheeks pink and their teeth new and white.
    If the letter came again, she was going to ignore it, Ella decided. Throw it away and that was it. It had nothing to do with her or her new life.
    Ella had told her parents she had landed a job as a ghost-writer for nearly famous people who wanted to write their autobiographies but couldn’t. A lack of time, maybe, or talent, she said. Ella’s father tried to get her to talk about her work when they went out on Sunday afternoons.
    â€œOh, look at this one,” he said, pointing to a glossy hardcover as he and Ella browsed through the Spring Sale section of his favourite bookstore. “I wonder if it’s any good.”

    â€œDad, you know I can’t talk about my work. It’s part of my contract,” Ella said.
    â€œOh, I know, I know. I just wonder.” He walked over to another table and held up a book. “What about this one?”
    Ella shrugged. “It’s too soon for any of mine to be out, Dad.”
    Her dad bought the book anyway and made her sign it: To Dad, Who knows all my secrets.
    Her mother shouted out names at random.
    â€œTom Cruise,” she said.
    â€œNo, Mom. I don’t get paid a Tom Cruise salary.”
    â€œOkay, Anne Murray.”
    â€œMore like Anne Murray, but still no.”
    â€œLeonard Cohen.”
    â€œMom, why would Leonard Cohen need me to write his book?”
    â€œI’m just saying, Ellie, that I wish you got the credit for what you do. Those people you write for are just nobodies pretending to be somebodies. I bet they couldn’t string two words together without you, but it’s their ugly mugs on all those covers.”
    â€œI don’t mind,” Ella said.
    It would have been true. Ella didn’t mind anonymity. While people thought she was writing anonymously, she was living anonymously, cycling through the city on her rusted ten-speed, buying flowers and weaving them into the baskets of other bikes chained outside the flower shop. She bought fruit at the Chinese market. Ripe mangoes, raspberries that stained her lips, her thumb, her forefinger. In the first flush of spring she watched children in yellow rain slickers feeding ducks at the pond with day-old bakery bread. In the autumn she sketched the trees in the park, drawing them thin and
bare with the curves of old women. But life was not meant to be this easy and beautiful, she was sure, and so every day she did something that disgusted her. She touched the severed pigs’ heads at the meat market. She picked a cigarette butt off the ground and smoked it. That is worth some money, when you think about it, she said to herself. That is worth some money.
    She decided she didn’t want to know the story of the money. Good luck should make her thankful, not afraid. She had always been a lucky person, and fortune, so she heard, favoured the brave. In the thick heat of summer she had sewn a few hundreds into the lining of her good wool coat and felt courageous.
    The letter arrived six times that year, the same little envelopes, the same handwriting, but Ella was firm—they went in the garbage, unopened, and she got on with her day. Buying lemonade from the neighbourhood children, tipping them each a dollar as the sour juice made her squint. Raking the leaves for Mrs. Robertson, who had arthritis and poor eyesight. Never leaving anything less than a twenty in the collection plate. Ella made a point of shovelling the fine, dusty powder on the day of the first snowfall. She wanted to bake her mailman cookies to apologize for things from the winter before. She thought about buying him mittens as a Christmas present, maybe red and navy ones to match his Canada Post jacket. His hands had