More in Anger by J. Jill Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

brother Jimmy’s lungs and how they couldn’t hold enough air anymore, and how he’d never be able to make it up this hill, or any hill, ever again, and when she felt these waves of fear and despair, she felt tears welling in her eyes and wished again that Mac had come to get her in the car, especially on such a hot day. He was home from work by now. Didn’t he know it was hard for her? Didn’t he care? Opal stopped. Why did she bother asking? Mac didn’t care about much, except perhaps Mac. And the way he got angry with himself for not landing a fish or for missing a golf shot suggested he didn’t hold himself in the highest regard either. Pearl was her father’s daughter, no doubt about that.
    After she’d caught her breath, Opal stepped forward once again. She was perspiring; the day had been warm. By the time she came in the gate and front door of her own house, she was physically and emotionally exhausted, and she collapsed in a chair in the foyer. Mac would be upstairs, in his study, with the window opened wide and the electric fan going. When themaid—the new one, the one with the cyclone hair—came out of the kitchen, Opal asked for a glass of lemonade. She carried her cold drink out to the summer house, her favourite place, and sat down on the bench, and pushed the stray hairs off her hot, moist face, and sighed as she mopped her forehead and cheeks, and viewed the colourful gladioluses in her garden, all the while thinking about her little brother Jimmy, and Mabel Maude, and the three little boys. How wrong it was that he, the youngest of all the King children, was dying. She would remember him best and most as the dear little baby she had helped her mother with. That’s how she saw him, that’s how she would always see him, not as the grey and wasting man who lay dying in bed, wheezing and trying to cough.
    Opal needed to talk about her brother’s suffering. She needed to talk about his endless and terrible coughing, about the great gobs of black guck that he spat into the basin. She had broached the topic with Mac many times, until he had told her to shut her trap on that particular topic and keep it that way. So sensitive himself, she thought. But not when it came to the feelings of others. He had heard enough, he said peevishly. He had little sympathy for her brother: tobacco was a disgusting habit and anyone who took such poisonous stuff deserved what he caught from it. Mac hadn’t seen his brother-in-law in over six months; he hadn’t set foot in the house since Christmas, when he wouldn’t shut his own trap about how much the house reeked of tobacco smoke. As if that mattered anyhow. The best he would do now was wait in the car out on the street if it was raining and lay on the horn to hurry her up when he was the one who was late.
    So the only ones left to tell were her daughters, who had to stay in the same room with her if she insisted. Pearl sat hard and tense, staring at a spot on the floor while her mother spoke. May, soft and worried, held her hands clasped in her lap and nodded her head sympathetically. May was such good company; what was the matter with Pearl? Opal had never seen anyone so critical. From the word go, no one could do a blessed thing right in her eyes, and Opal wished to goodness she’d get over it, but she doubted she would.
    The air of superiority with which Pearl had departed for McGill had returned with her in spades. Whenever Pearl was in the same room with her mother, everything in Pearl’s body looked as though it wanted to leave, as though she couldn’t get away from her mother fast enough. Everything Opal said was met with a look of contempt, every answer had been dipped in condescension. If looks could wither, Opal would be, she thought, a small pile of dried sage or raspberry leaves under a pestle. If they could kill, she would long be in the ground and forgotten. Compost for her flowers.