Free Cherry Bites by Alison Preston Page B

Nora’s journal,” I said and sat down in her second chair to watch.
    “No wonder you look as if someone knocked you on the head with a shovel.”
    “It’s hard to read, but I have to do it.”
    “I know you do, hon.”
    “Tell me again why I have to do it?”
    “Because you want to find out what made Nora tick.”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    After she had finished cutting her hair Hermione got out her shaving equipment. “Okay, this is the part where you help me.”
    By the time we were finished, her beautifully shaped head was bare and smooth and her eyes looked enormous.
    “You actually look quite nice,” I said.
    Hermione laughed. “It would take a hell of a lot more than a haircut to destroy these looks, babe.”
    I laughed too.
    “Let’s drink,” she said.
    “Yes, let’s.”
    Hermione poured bourbon into two glasses and we sipped and talked for a half hour or so about the possibilities for tomato sauces. Everyone in our cooking class was taking a turn concocting a sauce and then presenting it with a small amount of pasta for the rest of us to taste. I dreaded my turn. I pictured noses turning up and comments like, what the hell went into this mess?
    The door opened and Hermione’s last customer of the day walked in.
    “Well, look at you!” he said.
    The new look suited her and she has kept it to this day. She still plans to let it grow when it turns completely white.
    She went back to work and I headed home with Spike leading the way.
    I cooked some spaghetti, did a pretty good job of getting it al dente, and stirred it up with butter and salt and pepper. That’s the way I like it best. Sometimes I mix a little olive oil in with the butter but today I couldn’t be bothered. I’m really not much of a cook.
    It was eight o’clock by the time I finished eating, too late to go back to the journal if I was going to stick to my plan of not reading it late in the day. But it turned out I wasn’t sticking to that plan. Maybe it was Hermione’s bourbon that caused me to throw caution to the wind and sit down with it again. Just one more passage:
    She gave me a blanket and a pillow but it was cold down there with the jars and the potatoes. I fell asleep before the men went home but the cold woke me twice. Also, when something crawled across my neck I woke to hear them still at it. It was morning before she came to get me. The stink of Darcy Root was on her. I’ve seen boys in the fields with sheep. I see what they do to the ewes. But Darcy is a girl too. I don’t know what she does to Luce. Something. That’s for sure.
    Aunt Luce was saving Nora from a nightmare of larger proportions than her most frightening stay in the root cellar but my mother didn’t see it yet.
    I let Spike out for a last scramble around the yard and then headed up to bed with a Robert Parker book. I needed to laugh.

CHAPTER 11
    To think that it was only ten years between the summer that Nora smelled the stink of Darcy Root on her aunt and 1949 when I was born. This was my mother who was holed up with spiders on the dirt floor of a pitch-black root cellar.
    I know she was sent into the city after Luce died. It must have been soon after that summer of ’39 because I believe she was just twelve when Mr. Trent had the sense to get rid of her.
    What a handful she must have been for her foster parents—the Kennaughs, they were called—with her messy past and her rough country edges. A major project for them, for sure, and for her teachers. She was a success story though, if immaculate grammar and self-presentation to the outside world were the yardsticks.
    Maybe it had been a source of pride for Nora that I went to university. This had never occurred to me before. I attended the University of Winnipeg.
    Henry Ferris turned up in my second year Twentieth Century History class. His dad had been transferred again. We got back together, but it felt different this time. I wasn’t as interested in kissing him, not like I had been before my Duane