Wallflowers by Eliza Robertson Read Free Book Online

to find her morphine button missing and a bronze stilts walker of a man hovering at the door, his neck bent to fit the frame like that giraffe from the Santa Barbara Zoo with a ninety-degree spine.
    â€œBeatrice Cooper?” he said. He wore a snap-button shirt with a rattlesnake stitched above the breast pocket, and he hugged a felt hat under his armpit, his biceps squashing the crown into his ribs, so that she thought it might pop inside out.
    â€œBea,” she said.
    â€œI’m Huck.” He stepped through the frame and straightened his neck. “Parker’s son.” He had a hook nose and eyes like a cat. When she stared at him, he blinked a lot.
    â€œHow old are you?”
    â€œTwenty-four.”
    She had never met him as a boy, though they had sent one or two photographs on Christmas cards. The divorce had been amicable enough for that.
    â€œThe hospital still had my dad as the second contact.” He dropped his eyes to his boots. “You know he moved to the coast ten years ago.”
    â€œI know.”
    Huck didn’t reply right away. Bea could hear the wheels of a stretcher squeak past her door.
    â€œWell, I work in Kelowna now,” he said after a few moments. “So he phoned me.”
    â€œWhere’s my sister? Louise should have been called first.”
    Huck withdrew the hat from his armpit and ironed his palm around the puggaree to re-inflate the crown.
    â€œYour nephew broke his arm,” he said. “Something to do with a tether ball pole.” He laid the hat on his head and hitched his thumbs under his belt. “I’m to stay with you for a few days until she comes. Dad hired me to do some work.”
    â€œWork?”
    â€œSome landscaping.”
    â€œLandscaping.”
    â€œSome landscaping work.”
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    The morphine, turns out, gets cut on day seven. But not without a consolation bag of incontinence briefs, the Worried Woman’s Guide to a Happy Hysterectomy , and a supersized bottle of codeine-coated acetaminophen. The nurse also suggested a panty girdle for post-operation support, but that wasn’t included.
    Huck roved the wheelchair across the lawn to the sunroom steps. During the summer of their second year of marriage, she and Parker painted the cottage walls robin’s egg blue. Two tracts of granite wall cut through the centre of the lawn on either side of a footpath—the only relic of a stone cottage planned by coastal developers before they lost funding. Parker had promised to clear the walls to build a pond, but Bea liked the haphazardry. She lined them with sea-shells from the coast and pretty, dead things like dragonflies and snakeskins, and four springs ago she planted a honeysuckle vine to climb one of the sides.
    Huck strolled from behind with her knapsack over his shoulder. His eyes darted between her and the stairs until he bent his knees and heaved the chair into the air. Bea yelped and lurched forward. He lowered her back to the grass. He stood there again.
    â€œCan you make the steps?” he asked.
    â€œYes,” she said. She pressed the hem of her caftan over her knees again, before she leaned for the stair banister. She found the ground with her sandals and heaved herself up. Huck guided her elbow. Something spasmed in her groin and she froze with a sandal on the first stair. She snatched her arm from Huck and pressed it against her chest as she lifted the other foot. He waited beside her as she attempted the next step.
    â€œKeys are in the zipper pocket,” she said.
    He shifted the sack so it straddled his chest, grabbed the keys from the pocket, and unlocked the door. Bea reached the top step and waddled into the room, pelvis first and bowlegged.
    â€œCan I offer you a glass of iced tea?” she asked him.
    He moved forward as if to beat her to the fridge, then paused and sank onto the loveseat. “That would be fine, ma’am, thank you.”
    â€œYou’ll call me