Liberty Street by Dianne Warren Read Free Book Online

remember everything. What exactly did your mother say? Don’t tell me anything that she didn’t say right out loud. Nothing that might have been just in your head. I want to know only what she said.”
    â€œDon’t look at me like that,” Frances says.
    â€œI’m not,” he says.
    â€œThat’s what she said. Don’t look at me like that. And don’t worry.”
    â€œThat’s it?”
    Frances nods.
    â€œAnd all she took was the overnight case?”
    â€œYes, that’s all. And her sunglasses. Are they a clue?”
    â€œThey’re a clue that the sun was shining,” her father says, even though it hadn’t been. “All right, then. Your mother has gone to Yellowhead for a holiday. The overnight case is just that, for overnight. She’ll be back tomorrow.”
    Then he sends Frances to bed, but he forgets to run the bath for her, so she doesn’t have one. In the middle of the night she leaves her own bed and crawls in with him, and he doesn’t send her back to her room. She knows he’s awake. He’s lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. There’s enough light in the room that she can see that.
    When Frances wakes up in the morning, she can hear her father on the phone. She knows what he’s doing. Calling people. When he gets off the phone, he sits and twirls his cap on his index finger the way he does when he’s thinking, then he puts on his coat and tells Frances not to get into any trouble while he’s in the barn.
    Frances says, “I don’t think anyone else knows about Nashville.”
    Her father stops and looks at her and says, “Why do you keep going on about Nashville?”
    â€œShe’s gone to be a singer,” Frances says. “Like Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells.”
    â€œOh,” he says. “Well, that’s ridiculous, Frances. Your mother has the singing voice of a frog.” Then he puts his cap on his head. “Judas Priest,” he says on his way out the door to finish his chores.
    The voice of a frog? What ?
    It warms up that day, and the skiff of snow that fell the day before melts. The new barn kittens are now big enough to take away from the mother cat, so Frances goes to the hay shed and gets her favourite. She takes the kitten to the bare caragana hedge where she has a tree house (which is really a platform on the ground) and names it Marilyn, and she pretends that she and Marilyn have all kinds of fans wanting autographs. That night she sleeps in her parents’ bed again, and she wakes up in the darkness and her father isn’t there. She hears a sound coming from the living room and realizes it’s her father crying. She puts a pillow over her head and wraps herself up in a blanket like a mummy. Later, she hears him come back to bed, and he unwinds her so he can get under the covers.
    In the morning, they have scrambled eggs. When Frances asks what her mother is having for breakfast, her father says that she’s eating Cheerios somewhere, as usual. Later that afternoon, she comes back. Frances is in the hedge again with Marilyn when she sees her mother’s car come through the trees. She’s about to run to the car, but then she feelssuddenly shy, and she hides in the hedge and watches as her mother stops at the house and gets out. Her father is at the barn and Frances waits for him to come, but he doesn’t. Maybe he hasn’t heard the car. She decides someone has to welcome her mother home, so she steps from the hedge, and as she does her mother turns toward her, still wearing her sunglasses and what must be a new blue scarf. She holds out her arms—“Franny, Franny, come here,” she’s saying—and it’s as if she’s been gone for a month, maybe two, and Frances does run to her. Her mother is carrying the white overnight case and also a shopping bag (which Frances later finds out has new clothes in it), so Frances