What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George Read Free Book Online

was.
    “Why’d you run off?” Kendra asked her. “Why’d you not wait for me to get home, like your brothers?”
    Ness shrugged—she was to do that so often that Kendra would grow to desire nailing her shoulders into place—and she picked up the packet of cigarettes.
    “I didn’t tell you to help yourself, Vanessa.”
    Ness took her hand off the packet and replied, “Whatever.” And then she said, “Sorry.”
    The apology prompted Kendra to ask her if she’d run off because of her gran. “Her leaving you here. Jamaica. All that. You’ve a right to be—”
    “Jamaica?” Ness said with a snort. “Di’n’t want to go to no bloody Jamaica, did I. Gettin a job an’ my own place, innit. I was tired of dat old cow anyways. C’n I get a smoke off you or wha’?”
    Having spent her formative years with Glory and Glory’s English, Kendra wasn’t about to listen to this version of their language. She said, “Don’t talk like that, Vanessa. You know how to speak properly.
    Do so.”
    Ness rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. “Can. I. Have. A. Cigarette. Then?” She enunciated each letter precisely.
    Kendra nodded. She let go any further questions about Ness’s whereabouts and the reasons behind them as the girl lit up in the same manner Kendra had done on the previous night: on a burner of the stove. She inspected Ness as Ness inspected her. Each of them saw an opportunity on offer. For Kendra it was a fleeting moment of invitation to a form of motherhood previously denied her. For Ness it was an equally fleeting glimpse of a model of who she could become. The two of them dangled there for an instant in a limbo of possibility. Then Kendra remembered everything she was attempting to balance on the tray of her life, and Ness remembered everything she wanted so much to forget. They turned from each other. Kendra told the boys to hurry their breakfast. Ness took a hit from her cigarette and moved to the window to look at the grey winter day outside.
    What followed was, first of all, disabusing Ness of the idea that she would be finding a job and a place of her own. At her age, no one was going to employ her, and the law required her to be in school. Ness took this news better than Kendra expected although in a manner that she also anticipated. The signature shrug. The signature statement:
    “Whatever, Ken.”
    “Aunt Kendra, Vanessa.”
    “What
ev
er.”
    Then began the tedious process of getting all three of the children into school, a jumping through hoops made even more difficult by the fact that Kendra’s place of employment—the charity shop in the Harrow Road—would give her only an hour off at the end of each day to tend to this problem and the myriad other problems that went with the advent of three children into her life. She had the choice of quitting the charity shop, which she could not afford to do, or coping with the restriction placed upon her, so she chose the latter. That she also had a third choice was a thought she dwelt on more than once as she struggled with everything from finding inexpensive but appropriate furni-ture for the spare bedroom to heaving four people’s clothes to the launderette instead of having just her own to deal with.
    Care was the other choice she had. Making the phone call. Declaring herself wildly out of her depth. Gavin was the reason Kendra couldn’t do this. Gavin her brother, father to the children, and everything Gavin had put himself through. Not only that, but everything that
life
had put Gavin through, even to his untimely and unnecessary death.
    Settling the kids into her home and seeing to their placement in school ate up ten days. During this time, they remained at home while she went to work, with Ness in charge and only the television for entertainment. Ness was under strict instructions to stay on the premises and, as far as Kendra knew, the girl cooperated, since she was always there in the morning when Kendra left and there in the late