Free The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver

Bea looked like her—the same mild gray eyes and broad shoulders, the same capable hands. As long as she had her mother, everything was fine, for her mother got up clear-eyed each morning and made the tea and chatted steadily though rarely complained, and while Bea was not a spectacular student nor a beauty nor anyone of significance, her mother loved her and told her so often. You’re my best girl, her mum would say (no matter that Bea was her only living one), and sometimes it felt as if it was just the two of them, something sisterly about it. Underneath it all was the assumption that eventually Bea would end up with a husband, but they were in no hurry; their arrangement suited them. Her mother did not primp or preen her, did not send her out, except to dancing classes, which were, anyway, all girls.
    Her mother’s sickness began in her privates and spread to the rest of her, taking over two years to do her in. At first she talked right through her pain (though rarely of it) but as she grew sicker, her words grew scarce. Sometimes Bea would come home from work and stand on the stairs for a good five minutes, wanting to hear a sentence pass between her parents or come from her mother, who had always carried on a wandering patter, even when she was alone. Finally, Bea stepped inside with the food she had brought for her mother: strained cheese, pears for compote, chicken livers for blood strength.
    For her father and brother, nothing. For herself, nothing. She didn’t notice; her appetite was gone, and theirs meant nothing to her at the time. The stairs were dirty; it was her family’s week to clean them, and her mother would never have let them get that way. For the first time in her life, Bea had grown irresponsible, so focused on the task at hand—to force life back. Three times that month she scorched goods at Pearl and had her pay docked, and she couldn’t be bothered to cook for her father or Callum, whose two lives she would have traded for her mother’s one in a flash.
    Like farm hands, the men ate porridge for every meal, letting it harden on the counter and cutting a clammy slice to fill them up. Her father did not complain. He seemed in his own daze, doing nothing for her mother for weeks at a time, then coming home having spent a day’s wages on flowers, or on sweets that Bea ate when he wasn’t looking—so that he would think her mother had eaten them, she told herself. Never did he offer one to her. Callum had met Kate, his wife-to-be, by then and often ate with her family on the other side of town. Without Bea quite noticing, he had become a man, large and meaty, nearly as silent as their father. Where had he gone to? How? Tired though she was from so much tending, Bea would have preferred he’d stayed a little boy for her to tend.
    Every day for a time, she found a moment to stop at St. Margaret’s and pray, if only for five minutes, though by near the end, when it grew clear that prayer would not work, she gave up even that (Pray for peace for her soul, her mother’s friend had told her, but Bea prayed singularly for one thing—and more to her own mother than to God: Stay ). In the final months, her mother lost words entirely and developed a noxious swelling in her belly, though they had already removed parts of it. She died wordless in hospital while Bea held her hand and Bea’s father paced. After she died, her mouth relaxed, her belly too. The nurse detached Bea gently but firmly, one finger at a time, but as soon as she was cut loose, Bea knelt again and took her mother’s hand. This time the nurse let her sit for a moment, and then she said her name— Beatrice —commandingly and with the greatest tenderness, as a mother might. Fueled by a strange and momentary hope, Bea dropped her mother’s hand and stood. By the time she turned around, a sheet was covering her mother’s face.
    “Over,” said her father as he led her from the building—just that, “Over,” as if he were