Come See About Me by C. K. Kelly Martin Read Free Book Online

of frost coating her voice and making me bow my head apologetically.
“Leah.” She planted her hands on my shoulders. “You’re looking so thin. Are you
eating?” She threw her arms around me, crunching my bones.
    My clothes had grown
loose so I must’ve already lost weight, but Bastien and I didn’t own a scale.
“I’m fine,” I rasped, hugging her back. “But what are you doing here?” I was
repeating myself, panicking. “You didn’t need to come all this way.”
    “What am I
supposed to do when we don’t hear from you?” my mom asked. “I should have come
earlier. Every time we talked on the phone, I could hear in your voice how
unhappy you were.” I winced and folded my arms in front of me, my fingers
(nails bitten to the quick) pinching at towel fibers. “Having to do your course
work after what happened with Bastien—and now, locate a new apartment by
yourself—it’s too much. I want to help. And I wanted to see you.”
    She was staying
four days, she said, and during that time we’d do whatever I wanted. She told
me she’d sleep on the couch and, of course, didn’t want to be any trouble. “I
know you have to work at the museum,” she added. “I don’t want to interrupt
your schedule. Just work around me.”
    Standing there
in front of my mother, still dripping wet, I racked my brain for the
appropriate way to handle her sudden appearance. I couldn’t tell her I wasn’t
at the museum anymore. She’d see it as further evidence that I needed to go
home with her. And I wasn’t going anywhere. But I didn’t want to fight about
it; I didn’t want her to worry more than she had to.
    I said she was
lucky that I happened to have the day off, and later I let her take me out for
a pasta dinner, during which I listened to updates on my father, aunt, uncle
and cousins. As a legal assistant my mother always has a collection of
depressing tales of down and out people to trot out, yet they never seem to
weigh her down. Those stories I heard over dinner too: a woman with previous
prostitution charges fighting for custody of her thirteen-year-old son, two
brothers with gambling addictions who had taken to robbing banks together, an
elderly man with a bad heart who had his house sold from under him as part of
an identity theft scheme. I told my mother she should pick one of the more dramatic
cases and write a book about it (a suggestion she never gets tired of hearing).
    “I should,” she
agreed. “I really should. Legal fiction sells like hotcakes, doesn’t it?”
    Talkative as she
was, I could feel her heavy stare on me, wanting me to be the Leah I used to
be, or at least some kind of assurance that I would one day be that person
again.
    I thought things
would go easier if I obliged her and played the part the best I could, so the
following day I pretended to go to work at the museum. For hours I sat in the
Toronto Reference Library with Bastien’s iPod and Johnny Yang sketchbook. I intended to repeat my deceit the day after as well but couldn’t
bring myself to get out of bed on time and then had to fake a case of stomach
flu.
    My mother went
out to the grocery store to buy me soup and by the time she’d returned I’d
fallen asleep again, exhausted by my recent efforts to be Leah-like. While I
was sleeping the phone rang and my mother answered it and had a revealing
conversation with Yunhee. When I crept into the kitchen an hour later my mom
was stirring a pot of minestrone soup, looking a million miles away.
    She flinched
when she saw me. “I spoke to your friend,” she said, turning the burner down
and leaving the wooden spoon sitting in the pot. “When I mentioned about your
birthday she seemed confused and said she hadn’t seen you in weeks.”
    I slumped
against the counter and dropped my gaze, feeling genuinely nauseous.
    “Why would you
lie?” my mom asked in a pained voice. “Yunhee says she’s been so worried about
you—that you never return her calls, never see her or your