The Orange Grove by Larry Tremblay Read Free Book Online Page B

too.”
    â€œLet’s get out of here,” Aziz said anxiously.
    Amed put the belt back in the canvas bag he’d hidden under the old tarp. When the two brothers emerged from the shed, the light of day hurt their eyes.
    Â 
    Amed went to join his mother, who was in the kitchen preparing the evening meal, chopping vegetables on a wooden board. She poured rice onto the page of an old newspaper, and asked her son to pick it over. Amed liked helping his mother cook, even if he was a bit ashamed of it. It was unusual for a boy. When he’d first begun offering to help her, Tamara, looking surprised, had refused. He’d asked again, and in the end she’d accepted. Since then, she had cherished and sought out these moments with her son. When Amed went several days without making a little visit to the kitchen, she worried and wondered whether Zahed had spoken to him. She knew that her husband found such behavior inappropriate for a boy.

    Amed was concentrating on his task, pickinglittle stones and pieces of dirt out of the rice. His moves were rapid and precise. Tamara dared not ask the question that was burning her lips. She waited for her son to break the unusual silence that was growing between them. These moments they shared were generally an opportunity for conversations they couldn’t otherwise have. The feeling of complicity between mother and son sometimes had them laughing out loud. Amed also took these opportunities to talk about his aunt Dalimah, whom he missed. Every one of the letters he received from his aunt was special to him. At first, his mother had read them to him. But since he’d learned to make out words, he would reread his aunt’s letters for hours. She told stories about her new life. She described the subway, a train that passed through neighborhoods under the city’s streets and buildings! She talked to him about the snow that, in just a few hours, covered the roofs of houses and brought a woolly silence down from the sky. The few photos she slipped into the envelopes astonished him and made him all the more curious. Amed especially liked the ones where you saw the city lit up at night, or those showing high bridgesand the river they spanned with their steel structures, and the blinking ribbon of automobile headlights. She was careful never to send photos of her husband. His aunt once wrote that she thought of the orange grove every time she ate an orange. She would have loved to see it again, to walk between the rows of trees with her little Amed, breathing in along with him the perfume surrounding their white flowers in the summer.
    â€œIt’s done,” Amed said suddenly to his mother.
    Tamara thought he’d finished sorting the rice. She looked at her son and understood, relieved, that he was talking about the switch.
    â€œDid you ask him?”
    â€œYes, today in the . . .”
    â€œYou didn’t let on that he was sick?”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œYou mustn’t.”
    â€œNo! I did like you said.”
    â€œYou said you were afraid, is that right?”
    â€œYes. I told him I was afraid of dying.”
    â€œMy poor Amed! Forgive me! Forgive me! I know you’re brave, just like your brother. It’s horrible, what I’m asking of you, so horrible . . .”
    â€œDon’t cry, Mama.”
    â€œWhat’s the use of bringing children into the world if it’s just to sacrifice them like poor animals being sent to the slaughterhouse!”
    â€œDon’t cry anymore.”
    â€œNo, I’m not crying anymore. You see, I’ve stopped crying. And we’ve done this for Aziz, you mustn’t forget. Now finish sorting the rice.”
    Tamara dried her tears and lit a fire under the big pot.
    â€œYou have to be careful about one thing, Amed.”
    â€œWhat, Mama?”
    â€œYour brother, since he’s been sick, has grown thinner.”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œBut yes! Haven’t you