Soul Catcher by Katia Lief Read Free Book Online

silence. She pulled a chair out from the table very slowly, and it scraped like fingernails on a chalkboard. Dad cringed but Mom didn’t even blink. She sat on the chair and rode it back under the table with two thuds.
    ‘Something’s burning!’ Gwen said, hurrying to the stove. It was the sausages. They had sizzled nearly into oblivion.
    ‘I like my sausages well done,’ Dad said.
    ‘Mom?’
    ‘Just coffee for now, dear.’
    Gwen stacked toast on a plate and put it in the middle of the table, and I served up the sausages and eggs.
    ‘What are your plans for the day?’ Mom asked me.
    ‘I guess we’ll go downtown.’
    ‘We’ll have dinner at about seven.’
    She usually went to the office on Saturdays and worked. Dinner would be pizza and chocolate cake, a meal I looked forward to.
    ‘That’s okay, Mom, you don’t have to cook.’
    ‘I want to. I’m staying home today anyway.’ She looked directly at Dad. ‘I thought I’d go through the attic, get rid of some old junk.’
    ‘Moll?’ Dad said softly.
    ‘It’s just too cluttered around here.’ Her voice was arctic-cold.
    Gwen and I wandered around town. The sky was overcast and it was starting to get chilly. We ducked into stores for warmth: CVS, Toy Town, the florist, Woolworths. Gwen bought a red plastic ashtray, because no one in my parents’ house smoked, and a box of catnip for Betty. I bought a small frame for a photo I had of Patrick in a striped sweater, smiling and waving at me. I called it the ‘Hello Goodbye’ picture. When I first had it developed, I would look at it andfeel he was greeting me. Now when I looked at it, I felt a sharp pang of loss. I tried to tell myself that things were much harder for him than for me, that my suffering over him was nothing compared to his suffering over himself. If he was an addict, I could handle it; our love would heal him if only we had the chance. I kissed his photo and slipped it into the frame while we were standing on line. The price tag — $1.10 — covered half his face. I peeled it off before the cashier rang up the sale.
    When we went back outside, it was raining. ‘Bummer!’ Gwen said. ‘So, like, what do you want to do now?’
    ‘Go home, I guess. I want to call Patrick. Rates go down after five.’
    ‘Is it safe to go back yet?’
    ‘Safe?’
    ‘Yeah, you know, safe as in we won’t get electrocuted by bolts of marital lightning.’
    I wanted to say nothing is wrong at home! But I knew that wasn’t true.
    When we got back to the house, all was quiet. Mom was still upstairs in the attic. Dad was still out. Gwen sat on the living room couch and rubbed catnip into her sock. I called Patrick’s mother’s house. As the phone rang and rang, I watched Betty stalk Gwen’s wiggling toes as if they were a litter of baby mice nestled under a blanket. Betty got wackier each time she sniffed the catnip, until eventually she hopped around in a frenzy. Meanwhile the phone rang twenty-seven times. I counted.
    ‘No answer.’
    ‘I’m not surprised.’
    ‘He’s probably at work.’
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘Well, you don’t know where he is, either,’ I said. ‘Does a person have to be home all the time for you to believe they’re telling the truth?’
    Gwen believed that ‘once a junkie, always a junkie’. She liked Patrick, but thought I was fooling myself by believingin him at all. I was tired of her cynicism. The way I saw it, faith was half the battle. The one time I said that to her, she responded that too much faith was just the mountain before the valley, the high before the crash. Though that wasn’t how she put it. What she said was: ‘Fuck that shit.’
    Mom came downstairs in a pair of old bluejeans and a plaid shirt. Her hair was in a long braid down her back. I thought she looked great that way, like a girl, and told her so.
    ‘Well, I’m not exactly young anymore,’ she said, smiling. ‘Come on, girls, give me a hand with dinner.’
    We followed her to the kitchen.
    ‘Just