Garden of Eden by Sharon Butala Read Free Book Online

the stairs to take her in his arms, to bury his face against the white hollow of her neck and then against her warm breasts, his mouth open, breathing to her how mistaken he’s been, how he can’t live without her, Iris, his darling, his woman, his one true love.
    The door beside her bangs. Iris is so startled her heart leaps into her throat. She straightens and turns her back to the door, rapidly unbuttoning the rest of her raincoat with fingers that tremble over the stiff, shiny fabric and the plastic buttons.
    “Iris! You scared the wits out of me!” It’s Audrey McCormack, her bleached blonde hair elaborately curled and sprayed into precise place, the collar turned up on her neat black raincoat. The sound the door makes divides itself into the rattling clang of the bar handle, the thud of the door against its wooden frame, the dull echo as the noise pushes out through the hundred feet of empty hall to bounce slowly off the walls and stage, dying away to a muffled sigh against its dusty wine velvet curtains. Audrey stamps her feet on the mat to get the mud off her boots, reaches out over Iris’s head — Audrey is quite a bit taller than Iris, but who isn’t, Iris thinks — and flicks on the restof the lights. “What are you standing in the dark for?” she demands.
    “Hi, Audrey,” Iris says weakly, but Audrey is already whipping off her boots, unbuttoning her raincoat to reveal a flowered pink-and-green dress, turning to say hello to Donna and Irene Meadows, thirtyish sisters-in-law, who’ve entered together, each carrying the obligatory fresh-baked angel food cake. Iris has her coat off now, she’s straightening the skirt of her favourite cherry red suit, chosen because the colour sets off her fair skin and dark hair so well, and fluffing with her fingers her loose-hanging, mid-neck-length hair that, despite her fifty-two years, unaccountably still refuses to show even a trace of grey.
    The cloakroom is filling up with women greeting each other, complaining about the weather, fussing over their clothes, whispering to each other about some commotion in one of their families that Iris doesn’t know anything about, and today finds she doesn’t care to know. She rescues her cake and her purse from the floor and makes her noisy, high-heeled way across the hall’s wooden floor, where she has danced away two dozen or more New Year’s Eves and as many or more wedding celebrations, to the kitchen where she sets the cake on the long table with six or so others already there waiting to be cut.
    Flats of red strawberries, so bright they light up the entire room, march down the length of one counter, scenting the air with their tangy sweetness. Mavis Miller stands at them, looking smart in her pale blue fake-linen dress. She’s past fifty too, but she dyes her short, crisp hair a pale, elegant blonde. Her small diamond earrings flash light as she bends over the radiant berries, picking them up one by one and turning them over, dropping an occasional one that has a spot on it or isn’t ripe enough into a plastic basin she’s balancing with her left hand against the table edge. The ones she hasn’t touched are still resting, smoothly tucked into the individual baskets that make up the flat, but those she has picked over are heaped up in the flat, spilling over the sides and across the table, a few have even fallen off to lie as gay crimson splotches on the floor.
    “Really,” Mavis remarks officiously, without glancing up from her work, her fingers stained ruby red from them. “Half of them aren’t ripe.”
    “What’s the flavour like?” Iris, approaching, asks.
    “The usual.” It’s Audrey who has come up behind Iris again and speaks into her ear. “Like strawberry-flavoured cardboard. They pick them too soon. California’s too far away,” she scolds, taking an apron out of her purse, shaking it, tying it on over her dress, and joining Mavis at the berries. Nobody pays any attention to her; she has