Something Fishy by Hilary MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page A

big grin on her face.
    â€œIf she wants a garden, she may have a point. You know nothing grows on the cape.”
    â€œWild strawberries do.”
    â€œYeah, but you can hardly see those even when you’re looking for them. These you can’t miss.”
    â€œYou can say that again.”
    â€œThese you can’t miss.”
    â€œWell, I will, because I won’t be looking out at them.”
    â€œGus, you wouldn’t last a day without checking out the shore.”
    Gus smiled. “S’pose you’re right.” She couldn’t resist one more peek.
    Sticking the last daisy in the ground, Fiona eyed her instant garden. Pansies in front, tulips in the middle and, in back, a neat row of tall daisies, with tiny yellow faces glowing. As she looked down the line of them, she frowned, walked between the rows, straightening here and there, until there wasn’t a flower where it didn’t belong. She turned back again to look at the total effect.
    She smiled. Perfect. She gripped her tiny pudgy hands together and made a squeak of excitement. She was going into business.
    Gladys Fraser was outraged and plenty of others were unhappy about the trailer. As Gus had estimated, it was every bit of fifty years old, its paint scoured flat, with unsightly rust spots, scratches, and a buckled roof. Most of the cottagers were annoyed at this barnacle on the shore, until Fiona began making fudge.
    She stuck out a sign on the Island Way and one on the Shore Lane, declaring:
    â€œFiona’s’s’ Fantas’tic Fudge. By the pound. ” Fiona had long ago given up trying to figure out apostrophes. Whenever she saw an “s,” she put an apostrophe. That way she was covered.
    â€œThat damn sign.” Gus didn’t usually swear, but the sign was obliterating her view of Fiona’s door, so she was unable to see the woman’s comings and goings from any of her windows. All she could see was the sign.
    It was flawed, but it was absolutely true – Fiona’s fudge was fantastic.
    â€œShe should be ashamed of herself.”
    She was complaining to Hy who had just come in from her morning run. “What for? The sign? She certainly should. Overload of apostrophes.”
    Gus shook her head. “I have problems with those pesky things, too. The stores don’t make it easier. They never seem to get it right. No, the shame is I think she puts flour in the fudge, to stretch it out.”
    â€œWhat makes you think that?” Hy had a hidden package of fudge in her jacket pocket. She’d gone the back way, up the cape, to Fiona’s trailer to buy it. She didn’t want Gus – or Moira – to see her.
    â€œI seen her take a big sack of flour into that caravan. The trailer tilted with the weight of it.”
    â€œMore like with the weight of her. Anyway, you buy big bags of flour.”
    â€œI bake.” Gus said in her end-of-conversation tone.
    Villagers and cottagers who’d first objected to Fiona’s downscale presence on the cape were soon sweetened up by her fudge – buying and putting on the pounds.
    â€œYou’d think she’d have made enough money to fix the place up,” one disgruntled tourist spoke for the others – all of whom had purchased more than their share of fudge.
    The locals wasted no time in shaking their heads and tut-tutting about the loss of the tidy beige bungalow on the cape. It had been there since many of them were born. They liked Fiona’s fudge, but they didn’t like change.
    â€œShe dragged that trailer up there and plunked her fat ass down.” That was how Jared put it, sucking on a delicious creamy piece of chocolate.
    Fiona did have a fat ass. Fat arms. Fat face. Fat thighs.
    She’d been a pudgy baby, and never lost the baby fat – just kept adding more. When the family would visit her Uncle Jim on the shore, she’d looked like a beachball in her red bathing suit with