Free Downhill Chance by Donna Morrissey Page B

people are saying.”
    “Ohh, they’re not saying nothing,” said Clair, her tone becoming contrite. “You want me to make you some tea—I’ll make you some tea.”
    “If you wants,” said Sare. Sinking tiredly onto her chair, she turned to the window.
    “Where’s Missy?” asked Clair, taking two cups down from the cupboard.
    “Up to the grandmother’s, I expect.”
    “She’s going up there a lot, isn’t she?”
    “Since her father left, she has. I suppose it’s a good thing—the grandmother don’t get much company, poor old soul.” Sare turned to her. “There’s a bit of stew left in the pot—why don’t you have some?”
    “You want some, too?”
    “No. Just the tea.”
    “I’m not hungry, either.”
    Laying a cup before her mother, Clair sat aside her, wrapping her hands around her cup, absorbing its heat as she watched her mother do the same. “Soon be summer,” she said. “You want to plant more flowers?”
    “Your father was the gardener.”
    “It was you that was raised on a farm.”
    “So I was,” said Sare, turning back to the muddied patch outside her window. “But it weren’t planting that I learned.”
    “Tell me agin—about when you met Daddy,” Clair begged, knowing how her mother liked to talk about such things.
    “Oh, Clair,” sighed Sare, her eyes that usually danced with merriment when flooded with such memories now dulled, emptied, beggared by grief.
    “You were a girl, not much bigger than me,” prodded Clair.
    “Just a girl.”
    “And he was a dear, handsome man,” whispered Clair with an exaggeration that had often merited her kisses on the nose in the past, or a playful pinch on the cheek as her mother snuggled into such beloved memories with a warble in her voice, and her father sat across the table from her, interrupting her story with saucy grins and winks. A piteous look befell her mother’s face now as she allowed her eyes to fall onto his chair, emptied and pushed tight against the table since he had gone, his canvas bag stuffed with dirty clothes she hadn’t had a chance to wash. Yet, it was the scent of him she wanted, and despite her reluctance to graze such tender fodder, she pried her tongue from the roof of her mouth.
    “Yes, he was—” she began.
    “He took you from your house, he did.”
    “Yes—”
    “And it was a hard house.”
    “Oh, Clair—”
    “And you won’t ever say why.”
    “I said so to him.”
    “Was it haunted and that’s why it was hard?”
    “Lord, you do go on.”
    “But why won’t you ever say?”
    “It’s because they were hard,” cried Sare, her eyes clinging to Job’s chair, her mouth trembling as her words spilled forth. And unwilling to quell an insurrection that so aided her now in her misery, she stared hard at her girl. “The backs of their hands was how they taught us,” she cried bitterly, “and the sharpness of their tongues. They near killed us they did, with their hands and their tongues. And when they weren’t swiping at us with those, they lashed out with their belts and their buckles and—and whatever else lay close by.” She grimaced, her face turning ghastly, but her grief, finding vengeance in past laid injustices, lent fuel to her outpouring, and her words fell more wildly. “They were all bigger, they were, and wont to strike out at whatever didn’t strike back. And I was the smallest. A split-arse girl, they called me. And there was always reason to strike—the cold, or the soggy wood, or the storm door that slammed with every gust of wind, or every damn bird that shat on the house as it flew overhead. Ooh!” She stopped, clutching her fist to her mouth, her eyes widening in shock. “Blessed child, now look what you’ve done. And I promised Father I’d never be hurt by their lashings, again.”
    And Clair, aghast at her mother’s revelations, recoiled as she tried to imagine the horror of a daddy hitting his little girl and calling her vile names, and that little girl