Free Children in the Morning by Anne Emery Page B

eventually.
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    “Here’s one for two thousand,” Tom said, pointing to an ad in the classified section. “A Honda. It’s ten years old and got rear-ended, but . . .”
    “I think we should be looking for something a little newer, Tom.
    I’ll help you find one.”
    “Yeah, but you know what Mum will say about me getting a car.” In a thick Cape Breton accent, he said: “The arse is out of ’er now, b’ys!”
    Normie and I enjoyed a laugh over Tom’s impersonation of his mother.
    But all the talk about cars and repair shops put me in mind of something that was still missing from the Delaney file. Beau was supposed to provide me with a receipt for the night of Peggy’s death. He said he had stopped for gas on the way home from Annapolis Royal.
    The receipt would show he was still on the highway at the time Peggy went down the stairs. I picked up the phone and gave Beau a call.
    “Hello?”
    “Hi, Beau. How’s it going?”
    “About as you’d expect under the circumstances.”
    “Listen, I was just thinking about that gas receipt. Do you have it?”
    “No, unfortunately, I can’t find it.”
    “You kept your dinner and hotel receipts to be billed against the file you were working on. Why wouldn’t the gas receipt be with the rest of them?”
    “I don’t know, Monty, but it’s not there.”
    “You paid with a credit card, I assume.”
    “Uh, yes, of course.”
    “Maybe we can track it down that way.”
    “Sure. We’ll give it a try.”
    “All right. Talk to you later.”
    The one thing we needed, he just didn’t happen to have.
    (Normie)
    Monday was a really nice day, and Mum came to St. Bernadette’s after school to listen to us singing and playing music at the Four-Four Time program. She walked over with Dominic in his stroller.
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    He looked really cute in a little pair of blue jeans and a bright red sweater and sneakers that had pictures of animals on the bottoms of them, and he gave me a lovely smile and reached up for me to hold him. So I picked him up and gave him a big hug. I was so happy, especially when a bunch of the other kids saw him and came over and gawked at him and went “Awwww!” Then I put him back in the stroller, and sat down at the piano and started to play “The Alley Cat Song,” and Kim and Jenny sang along with me.
    Father Burke came in with a bunch of priests and other people from the grown-ups’ choir school, the schola, and he announced to all of us that the grown-ups would love to hear us play and sing a song. Dominic let out a little squeal when he heard Father’s voice and recognized him, and Father turned around and saw Dominic with a big grin on his face, and he came over. Dominic was laughing and all excited. Father picked him up and held him high in the air and jiggled him, and he laughed even more. I saw the other priests looking at each other, and one made his eyebrows go up. He must have been thinking the priests are really good with youngsters here. Then Father put Dominic back in the stroller, and I pushed it around the room so Dominic could see all the toys and instruments, and the treats, but he wasn’t allowed to eat them because he was too little. I had to leave him because I had to help Richard and Ian organize the kids into a group to sing. We did “Panis Angelicus,” and the adults all clapped.
    When I brought the baby and the stroller back to Mum, she was in a serious conversation with Father Burke. I didn’t hear what they said, because they stopped talking. All they did was stare at Dominic.
    That’s when I looked out the window and saw Jenny, and she had the coolest bike I have ever seen in my whole life. Laurence had his, too, but his was the regular kind. I ran outside. Jenny’s bike looked kind of thick and clunky. The crossbar curved up and then down; it wasn’t just a bar, it was big and heavy, and made the