Sweet Life Read Free

this thing and get the hell out. Let Kayla search the whole place, if she wants. She can’t tell me what to do; she’s not my fucking mother.
    Not that my mom did a great job. Making me live with Alvin Black Sheep for twelve years like there was nothing wrong. Like it was okay he made our lives hell. And when the bastard gets locked up, she expects me to go with her to the pen and visit him? Nope. Not me. If he hadn’t dropped dead, she would’ve taken him back, too. Let the whacked pervert, the rapist , back into our house.
    And all this time I’ve wondered. About the difference between changing your name and changing your DNA. Because it’s not the same thing, right? But after I knock back a few beers or spend time in the dark under the stairs, I quit worrying.
    And now my best friend could be seriously off his nut. Unlike my old man, Greg wouldn’t hurt a fly, but he did let me down by ratting to Kayla.
    And here she is, all happy and waving something at me. “Found the card. In the kitchen.” Then she stops. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
    Oh, she can’t leave it alone, can she? I know what she wants, why she’s been chasing me. Maybe it’s the heat. Or the beer. But when I try to get up and out the door, my legs don’t work. Next thing, my head’s on my knees and I’m bawling. When she touches my hair, I let her.

That Buchanan Woman

    When a battery of treatments failed to halt the cancer creeping like fleshy ivy over Bert Buchanan’s organs, he refused to die at home. His pain increased and so did his aggrieved exasperation whenever he spoke to his wife, Angie. Why me? his tone implied. Why not you?
    He’d accomplished much in his forty-five years; she’d accomplished nothing. Not only hadn’t she provided him with a Bert Jr. to weep at his graveside, she hadn’t managed to mature into loveliness the way her mother once assured Bert she would.
    Whenever he slipped into drug-imposed sleep, Angie took the bag hidden beneath her chair and continued knitting the bed jacket she would donate to the hospital gift shop. She was accustomed to solitary knitting. Like Madame DeFarge hunched over her yarn in
    Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities , and knitted the roll of the doomed, purled their names and sins. Angie, however, decided against bitterness. When the time came, she would bury her resentments.
    Socially Bert had behaved aristocratically, generously giving his time and money to local charities, doing whatever would raise his profile in the neighbourhood. He foresaw the way the market would go and bought up property before land values on Vancouver Island skyrocketed, and then quit his job at the bank to sell real estate from home. This was a two-story house fifty meters from the shoreline where steps led down the cliff side to a rocky shore. There, where waves cast up occasional dead debris and greasy weeds, he presented Angie with an engagement ring. An hour later, he coaxed her into allowing him the attention required for the continuation of the Buchanan clan.
    And now while he suffered, Angie wished she had the courage to lean over his shrinking form and tell him she loved him. What better last gift? Easier to knit I love you across one shoulder of the bed jacket: purl one row, knit the next. She didn’t do that, either.
    She hadn’t fallen for Bert; she’d fallen for the idea of marriage and sank into it with the same languid indifference she entered her bath. During Bert’s courting, her mother asked if Angie had a better alternative than marrying a fine man who would provide well. Angie couldn’t think of anything at the time. She worked at a bowling alley and read voraciously, especially the English classics, but her mother assured her she couldn’t support herself by handing out shoes and reading fiction.
    The only books Bert read were the kind that told you how to pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps and get-rich-quick. Quickly was how he accomplished any task. It was his dying that took