Cherry Bites by Alison Preston Read Free Book Online

pot pie into the oven. Spike followed me, his toenails clattering across the floor. He knows if I go into the kitchen chances are good there might be some food involved. He had already eaten his official meal but would have gladly gobbled down another. I gave him a dog biscuit.
    The evening sun poured in the living room window. It was hot for early June and I pulled down the blinds to shut out some of the heat. The trees in my yard did a pretty good job of keeping the main floor of the house cool. The upstairs needed air conditioning. I’d had it installed a few years back during a particularly hot summer.
    I considered phoning Dougwell Jones on the coast to ask him why he had sent me the journal, but I didn’t feel up to it. And really, what difference did it make what his reasons were? I sat back down and read on:
    1962
    Today when the girl asked her a simple question she ignored her completely, acted as though she weren’t there. She finds this easy to do. The girl waited a moment or two and then disappeared. The mother will try it more often. (Perhaps it is she who has no conscience).
    A lot of what Nora wrote hit me hard. I remembered her ignoring me, but was shocked by the planning that went into it.
    It was in the early days after Pete’s first death—which is how I came to think of the fake hanging—that I started up with Henry Ferris. As I remember it, Nora ignored me almost completely that summer when I was fourteen. Henry and I met at the Norwood Community Club, at canteen. That’s what the dances were called. He chose me from a clump of awkward girls milling around pretending we didn’t care. We danced slowly to “You Don’t Own Me” by Lesley Gore. I was terrible at dancing fast so I was glad he picked a slow song. Henry smelled so good that first night. I still don’t know if it was cologne or just plain Henry. He was one year ahead of me at school, one year older.
    Nora was jealous of our youth, our innocence, of how much fun we had; she was probably jealous of our brand new kisses at the back door. I didn’t think about it then, just wondered mildly at her lack of interest, but I know it now. That was why she ignored me to such an extent that summer.
    Henry loved The Beatles as much as Joanne and I did. We sang their songs as we walked along the dark back lanes of our neighbourhood. We did the harmonies and Henry talked about starting a band. His parents bought him a guitar for Christmas.
    “I’d fuck John Lennon,” Henry said.
    That didn’t seem weird to me at all. “I love you, Henry,” I said then.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. I love that you’d fuck John Lennon. And that you’d say so out loud.”
    I also reflected briefly on the possibility of Henry being homosexual, or maybe bisexual, but he wasn’t. He just loved John Lennon.
    We spent a lot of time necking, standing up at the side door of our house, beside the short driveway that led to the garage. Henry wore glasses. To keep them safe he took them off while we kissed and set them down on the flowerbed next to the shallow step. He wasn’t old enough to drive, so when he brought me home we had no proper place to make out, unless Nora wasn’t home. Then we went inside and used the living room floor.
    There was no decent chesterfield, just the Toronto couch, as Nora called it—slippery, backless and horrible: the place where Murray died. And there was a straight-backed wooden bench that looked as though it was built by someone with no interest in comfort. It was as big as a love seat, big enough for two, but hard and sharp-edged.
    “I like it,” Henry said. “It looks like it was built by a Quaker or someone.” He ran his hand over the upright back. “Fine workmanship.”
    “It hurts to sit on,” I said.
    “Yeah. I guess the floor is less painful.”
    I’ve wondered about that in the years since—how a couple of parents trying so hard to be normal could have put such a low value on a comfortable place to sit. There were a few