Scare the Light Away by Vicki Delany Read Free Book Online Page B

managed a full blast. I felt rather pleased with myself, particularly when the big dog rounded the house and climbed up the steps to stand at my feet.
    “What a good girl.” I scratched behind her ears. I had no worries that she would get lost in the woods. She wouldn’t go far. We lived in a condo in Vancouver, a high-rise like so many others, in a very good part of town. Most of her days Sampson lived the life of a city dog, kept inside, walked by a professional dog walking service because my working hours were so long. But we—now just me, me and my dog—owned a vacation home near Whistler. To which, when my husband was alive, we had escaped as often as we could.
    In summers past Ray golfed, and I sat out on the big wooden deck overlooking the rainforest with either a good book or papers from the office. In the winter we skied. Ray on the slopes of Whistler and Blackcomb, me—too afraid of heights to ride the ski lifts—cross-country, often with Sampson somewhere off to one side following tiny animal tracks and sniffing at patches of yellow snow.
    Only once since Ray’s death had we driven back into the mountains. It rained constantly and I spent most of the time staring out the big bay window watching the trees drip water. The place went up for sale the day I arrived back in the city.
    I looked at Sampson’s mud-encrusted feet, legs and belly. At her wagging tail and smiling face. I plucked a dead twig out of her bushy tail. As soon as it reached a reasonable time in Vancouver, I’d call the agent and tell her to take the property off the market. Sampson needed it.
    And so, I now realized, did I.
    Energized a fraction, I reluctantly entered into the simple, emotional, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking task of sorting through my mother’s clothes, as Dad had asked me to do. He’d made the bed, or at least he’d tried. The quilt was so lumpy it obviously had been dragged up over a tumble of sheets. It was a beautiful quilt, lovingly constructed of tiny squares of fabric in myriad shades of blue ranging from almost-white to near-black but blending so slowly from shade to shade that it was almost impossible to determine where one color ended and the next began.
    I opened the cupboard and went through the drawers, making three piles. Things too old, too stained, or too horribly out of,fashion for anyone to want headed for the garbage. Mom had few nice things—a couple of good dresses, a new pair of shoes, two old but serviceable handbags. These would go into a box for the church. And then there were the things to be kept. Of which there was precious little. Shirley might like a few pieces of Mom’s jewelry. None of it was good—she never spent money on herself, and Dad never had a nickel to his name. But some of it had sentimental value. It was nice to see that she still used the wooden jewelry box that I bought her for her birthday a long, long time ago. I picked up a brooch. It was large and perfectly ugly, but she liked it. When I was young, she wore it on her best coat, the one that she wore to church every Sunday in winter. It was silver plate pounded into a hollow circle, rimmed with rhinestones and with a rhinestone tail dangling down. The tail had become partially detached and waved from side to side as I shook it.
    I remembered sitting in church. On the hard wooden seat, the heat in the building turned up way too high. The minister—I forget his name—droning on and relentlessly on. The poor man had not the slightest inflection or emotion in his voice; he might have been reading the yellow pages for all he seemed to care. I was the youngest in my family, so I was always plunked between Mother and Grandmother. Jimmy and Shirley sat on Grandmother’s other side and wriggled as far away as they dared get. On occasion, Shirley tucked a Nancy Drew inside her Bible and read all through the service. I wanted to tell Mom, but the look my sister gave me when she caught me watching was enough to chill my blood.