The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder Read Free Book Online

wishes to run after her and explain, but there is nothing to be untangled by explanation, nor are Juliet’s silent pleas addressed to Bianca. Bianca is a thief, this is true. The diapers are gone, this is true. But Bianca’s baby will get to wear them; but you should see her house, Mom; but she made you soup. You got better.
    Gloria grips the back of a chair, the eloquently carved wood under her fingers dark with vines. She is thinking, hard. She goes to the cupboard and swings the door.
    “The dollars,” she says.
    Juliet opens her mouth, closes it.
    “She stole the dollars too.”
    Juliet studies the unmopped tiles, identifies a print that matches her own foot. She is trying to remember what happened to the leftover bills. Were there any? Stealthily she feels in the pockets of her shorts, the same pair she’s worn for days, and removes her hand as if it’s touched fire.
    She licks her lips.
    “It wasn’t much,” says Gloria. Petals sink to earth. Stillness settles in the breezeless room. “It wasn’t much, but I should have known better. I’ll speak to the director.”
    “Mom?”
    “Not right now, Juliet. I need to think.”
    Juliet senses a deeply sad ending, one she feels unable to bear, yet craves. She begins weeping while there is still hope, and staunches her tears with pages of the book.
    “What on earth?” says Gloria with irritation, not interest. She claps Emmanuel to her hip; she’s made her decision, and while she’s out, Juliet must be in charge of Keith.
    “I’m in charge of me!” Keith yells from the bedroom, but Gloria is gone.
    Juliet runs to the cupboard and stuffs the roll of bills into the plastic cup. It takes only a few seconds and she thinks, There , as if everything has been put right again, and for a flash it seems so. She returns to the book, picks it up, but an empty restlessness chokes her at the hollow of her neck, where she wants to swallow but cannot. The sensation unspins itself like a cape whirling around her body, envelops her; thins the words on the page, wrings from her the ability to feel.
    When she’s older she’ll know the word for it: desolation .
    She lays the book on the table, pages spread, cracking the spine.
    Gloria charges back into the apartment. Confrontation has had a medicinal effect, flushing her skin with colour, thickening her hair, plumping her lips.
    “Done,” she says, setting Emmanuel on the floor. She goes to the cupboard for a glass and continues, swishing open the rotted door, “The director has promised me swift action. I actually feel bilingual today. I felt like I could really and honestly speak Spanish. I wish your father had been there to see —”
    In her hand is the cup with the wad of American dollar bills. She tips it and the money falls onto the counter. “But . . .” She cannot believe what she is seeing, and spreads the money flat, counts it.
    “Six dollars missing . . . but . . .”
    Juliet blinks.
    “But I didn’t see it before? But it wasn’t there? She took it. She took it, didn’t she? She took it.”
    Gloria turns to ask Juliet, but only because Juliet is there to ask, not because Gloria expects an answer.
    “He’s going to fire her,” Gloria says, almost to herself.
    “But then,” she says after a moment, “she did take the blouse. And the diapers.”
    Emmanuel yanks on the beads hung across the bedroom door, and in his hands, in one smooth movement, they come apart. Their hanging patterns disintegrate and pour like tropical rain on the floor, each jewelled ball landing with a tinkle, a splash, rolling the tiles to the far corners of the room, under the apartment door, down the stairs, beyond.
    It is the sound of calamity, and then of quiet. It is the sound of that which cannot be unsaid, or undone; and the silence afterwards, the immediacy of what seems not so terrible after all.
    “Let’s go to the library,” offers Gloria.
    “Now? Today?” Juliet is incredulous.
    “Why not?” With her