What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey Read Free Book Online Page A

longer in Cooney Arm. The soft darkness of Gran’s firelit corners was blasted by garish electrical lights that lit Mother’s house on the wharf, leaving me—along with Gran, Father, the boys, and sometimes even Mother—blinking like nocturnal creatures, flitting about the house like bats searching for a rayless niche in which to roost. How disoriented I’d felt those first months in Mother’s crowded household, with all the attention constantly heaped upon me by Mother, the boys. Times I’d run, looking for Father and finding him equally disoriented, hunched over the wharf, looking back to Cooney Arm, gutted by the loss of his stage, his flakes. Home from a day’s work in the woods, he’d sit carefully amongst Mother’s new, brightly patterned cushions on the sofa and watch, confused by my resistance to Chris and Kyle’s overzealous attention to my every move, confused by my defiance with Mother over some small thing, confused by my new math and the queer gawddamned way of mixing letters and numbers.
    My most favoured imprint was the day of my first birthday living in Mother’s house. Father had bought a watch from the store in Hampden and hung it on the outside knob of my room door because he was too shy to give it to me and wanted to make a joke out of it. It hung there all day—nobody else saw it, and I refused to see it, fearful of its not being mine and that he’d see the want in my eyes. Gran finally spotted it, and brought it to the supper table and gave it to me, chiding him for his foolishness. I felt too shy beneath his gaze to properly hook it around my wrist. And so Mother, looking a mite shy herself in her new dress that she was wearing just for my birthday, leaned close, helping me hook the watch strap, she too chiding Father for his foolishness—all of us hiding our shyness behind his foolishness.
    So why had Mother looked shy, I pondered now, but then pushed the thought away as I drove past Father’s woodshed and pulled up to the wharf. Turning off the headlights, I sat for a minute, staring at the house, at the smoke pouring from the chimney, the windows yet unlit in the growing dusk. A wooden cubbyhole was built to the side of the house, Father’s chainsaw, his bucksaw, his handsaw laid inside, along with a box full of jiggers and bits of fishing gear. Other stuff, his barrels, puncheons, nets, was stored in the woodshed or rotting into the ground in Cooney Arm.
    Wrapped in canvas at the end of the wharf lay an anchor, an old motor, some boat parts. Poor Father. He hadn’t the heart to build another stage here on the wharf. Why bother when fishing had become more of a fun thing than a mainstay? And now everything he owned was all scattered about—like Father himself, his soul wandering the emptied fishing grounds of Cooney Arm, his heart fighting for resurgence in some hospital room in the city.

TWO

    “W HERE’S THE NEW TRUCK ?” I asked Chris.
    “You passed it, back by the woodshed. Tucked a bit behind.” He got out of the car and headed towards the boat tied to the wharf. I climbed out behind him, a stout breeze gusting my hair across my face.
    “I don’t want you going,” I called out, then cursed as his step didn’t falter.
    The house door flung open and Gran appeared, clutching the front of her woolly green sweater and clinging to the doorjamb like a withering old vine.
    I ran to her, wrapping my arms tight about her shrinking, knobby shoulders, scolding her for being out in the cold.
    “Much odds, this old bag of bones,” said Gran, her voice quavering. “Did you see him?”
    I nodded, kissing her soft, powdery cheek. “Yes. Yes, I seen him.” We held each other tighter in the face of this new thing. Taking my hand, Gran led me inside, her grip not as strong as I remembered, her voice more brittle, shaky as she asked about Mother.
    “She’s fine, worrying more about you than herself.”
    “Ahh, she worries for nothing. Sit. Tell me about your father, I makes