Harrowing by S.E. Amadis Read Free Book Online

and white. She’s certainly not brown.”
    Lindsay grinned sheepishly.
    “Well, I couldn’t help calling her gato all the time,” she explained in a squeaky voice.
    “What’s that?”
    “ Gato. You know I’m learning French, Spanish and Arabic at the local community centre. And gato was the word of the week when you gave her to me.”
    “And what’s gato? ”
    “A cat,” Lindsay clarified helpfully.
    I rolled my eyes.
    “So. Why didn’t you just stick to gato? How did it go from gato to Chocolate Cake?”
    Lindsay shrugged.
    “The next week the word of the week in French class was gâteau. So I couldn’t help getting them mixed up.”
    It beat me what relationship there could possibly be between gato, gâteau and Chocolate Cake.
    “Well, you know gâteau is a cake,” Lindsay cut in even more defensively than before.
    “Yeah, okay, Linds. But, chocolate?”
    Lindsay giggled.
    “My favourite kind of cake.”
    I thought about it for a minute.
    “Okay. So what was the word of the week in Arabic class that week? Why didn’t you call my lovely cat that instead?”
    “The word of the week that week was arba. And I wasn’t going to walk around calling my new cat ‘four’.” She chuckled.
    I examined my fingernails. The garish, tinny black polish I had treated them to this week grated on my nerves.
    “Well, she’s got four paws. You could’ve called her Four Paws or something. Better than Chocolate Cake. Now you’ll probably want to eat her every time you see her.”
    Lindsay shook her head emphatically.
    “I do not want to eat my cat. She’s black-and-white. Not chocolate brown.”
    Romeo tugged at my arm as he gaped at a streetcar passing us for about the umpteenth time.
    “Mimi. Mimi. Do you know how many streetcars we’ve missed?” he cried in alarm.
    “Don’t worry, hon. They go by the whole day long.” I stroked his hair.
    Romeo squinted at the sky.
    “Well the day’s passing by real fast, Mimi. If we don’t get on one real soon they’re going to be all closed up.”
    I pulled my mobile out of my purse and glanced at the hour.
    “It’s not even noon yet,” I said.
    Lindsay made a face.
    “Well, Chocolate Cake’s not any worse than your son calling you Mimi all the time,” she goaded at me. “How did that get started anyways?”
    At our side, Calvin burst out laughing.
    “Mimi? Yeah, I wondered about that too.”
    I hugged Romeo’s wiggling form.
    “He used to call me Mami all the time when he was a baby. Not Mama or Momma. It had to be Mami. So I used to tease him and say Mimi Mami Momi Moo, or something silly like that. And for some reason, it was the Mimi that stuck.”
    Calvin stopped at a streetcar sign and planted his feet on the sidewalk there.
    “This looks like as good a place as any to get on,” he said.
    “Yeah! Yeah! And we’ll ride all the way to the end, then get back on and ride all the way to the other end.” Romeo started jumping up and down.
    “Let’s make it fast,” Lindsay said. “I’m starved.”
    I ground my foot against the floor.
    “Well, hang on, Linds. You won’t get to see any food for over an hour.”
    “Hey, girls. There’s an Indian down at the East End...” Calvin began while Lindsay started rocking her head about from side to side.
    “Not in my neighbourhood,” she said. “I want something downtown and cosmopolitan. Something that’s not so in my face every day. That Indian place is just around the corner from mine. How about—”
    At that instant I saw him.
    I started shaking hard. I nearly lost it. My whole being was just screaming at me to run from there as fast as my legs would take me.
    “What’s wrong, Annie?”
    Lindsay’s voice seemed to drift over me from a thousand miles away. Calvin studied me and followed my gaze towards the towering man dressed in khaki greens, carrying a styrofoam cup of coffee and idling along down Queen Street as happy as you pleased, as if he owned the world. He even dared to