Free February by Lisa Moore

dropped their coral petals on the dark green deck. It was very still in the backyard and Helen opened the back door and went through the house calling, and then she stopped calling. She could hear water running. Water bashing hard against a deep sink, and a washer was going.
    She came upon Meg with the baby in the laundry room. Meg was holding the baby over the big sink, and she had the baby dressed up in a long white dress that hung down over Meg’s arm and a little beaded cap, and she had her eyes closed and she was praying with the tap running. Meg prayed and took a handful of the water and dropped it over Gabrielle’s forehead, and Helen crept out quietly, unseen, back down the hall, and she opened the back door, careful not to let the spring screech, and ran down the street and around the corner and waited. She came back ten minutes later and Meg had changed Gabrielle back into her sleeper and there was no sign of the baptismal gown. Helen unbuttoned her blouse and Gabrielle latched on fast and her other nipple squirted fine threads of milk all over the kitchen table.
    I’ve got a nice stew, Meg said. I’ll heat you up a bowl in the microwave. It won’t take a minute.
    I’d love a bowl of stew, Helen said.
    That little girl was as good as gold, Meg said.
    Cal had refused to have the children baptized and there had been a fight. He had refused. Meg had been angry and hurt. What harm, she had asked Cal, but he would not relent.
    Gabrielle snuffled in and sucked hard and the other breast was dripping fast and there was a drop of blood, bright red, on her other nipple and it slipped down her breast.
    . . . . .
    Wedding, December 1972
    HELEN THINKS OF Cal’s hands on his coffee cup: big, clumsy hands. Cal was tall, six foot two, and there was a kind of grace in his awkwardness. It was the dumbstruck objects, the things that leapt into the path of his hands and arms and knees, that were entirely without grace. Cal was just moving, just getting through, loose-limbed and unwilling to take into account the corner of the coffee table.
    On their wedding night he broke a full-length mirror in the Newfoundland Hotel.
    He must have touched it, knocked it in some way, but it seemed to spread with cracks all by itself. Helen wasn’t looking, and when she did look there was mirror all over the carpet.
    It broke by itself because Cal had glanced at it and all the bad luck to come was already in place. Everything was in that glance and it smashed the mirror.
    Helen had left the reception in her wedding dress. She and Cal left their friends, and they left Helen’s new motherin-law in a shiny purple dress with a big corsage. Meg with her glasses reflecting the ceiling lights—this was at the Masonic Temple—and Louise smoking on the fire escape out back. Helen had wanted Louise to catch the bouquet. But Louise had been outside smoking.
    They’d done the bride-and-groom dance at the beginning, everybody tapping spoons against their glasses, and they were out there on the dance floor all by themselves and Cal couldn’t waltz himself out of a paper bag; neither of them could. So he just draped his arms over her and they did a couple of shuffling circles, self-conscious as hell, with the lights roving over them, and then he went under her big skirt to get the garter.
    She lifted the front of the skirt, yards of satin, and the place went up with catcalls and clapping and someone pulled a chair out to the centre of the dance floor so she could put her foot up on it. Cal got on his knees, inching the garter down, and the men were clinking beer bottles together, and Helen dropped the skirt over his head. She let the whole thing fall over him and he, like a clown, stayed under a long time, just his shoes sticking out.
    He put his mouth on her. There on the dance floor. His head a lump under her skirt, and she put her hands on that lump, both hands. His fingertips just barely touching the front of her thighs. Stroking her thighs. He