Free Kit's Law by Donna Morrissey Page A

always be a part of her right here with you. Believe that.” He paused, then, “I talked to Josie about angels. I don’t think Lizzy was big on angels.”
    “She—didn’t like feathers.”
    “Apparently. So, I talked to her about spirits instead, and how they are soft and warm, and not easily seen, and how Lizzy is a spirit now, and even though we can’t see her, she’s listening and watching us all the time, and lying down with us at night to help keep us warm while we sleep.” He tightened his grip on my hand. “I don’t know how much of it she understood. Perhaps you might want to reassure her of that sometimes.”
    I nodded.
    “Kit, you can come live with Elsie and me.”
    “I want to stay here,” I said, my eyes widening in alarm.
    “Shh, you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to. I’m asking Drucie if she’ll oversee things, here—cook, clean. Sleep over, if that’s what you want. She’ll be good company for you, help with things.” He paused, then, “I understand how Josie wouldn’t take well to moving. But, it’s different with you, Kit. You’re growing up fast, and there’s things you’ll need. I know Elsie’s not that well, but you might be good for each other … ”
    “I won’t leave,” I said, my voice rising.
    He smiled and little crinkles ran off from the corners of his eyes like ripples on a quiet pond.
    “Don’t worry, Kittens. I promised Lizzy a long time ago that I would see to you, and that you would never have to leave your home. And you won’t. You have my word.”
    Something of my doubts must’ve been written in my eyes, for he tightened his grip on my hand again, and added gruffly, “You’re going to be fine. Anything you need, I’ll see to it that you get. You just come to me. Will you promise me that?”
    I nodded and he stroked the back of my hand with the pad of his thumb, the same as Nan when she was stroking the down off a turr’s breast—all careful and tender like, so’s to not rip the skin and sap the oil from its meat.
    “Perhaps you should go see how Josie’s making out with Drucie,” he said, laying my hand back on my lap and giving it a little pat. “Lizzy won’t like it if I’m late getting her girls to her funeral.”
    I walked down the hall to Josie’s room, thinking Nan wouldn’t be liking any of it if she was here, most specifically being laid out in church and with the Reverend Ropson looking over her corpse. And it was a dirty deed the reverend done her, when halfway through the service he went into his sermon on sin with such a vengeance that I could feel Nan’s toenails uncurling as she lay there, muted in her coffin. And once, when the reverend pointed his finger somewheres in Josie’s direction while calling the congregation sinners, I thought the coffin shifted. Shrinking closer to Doctor Hodgins, I half expected the lid to pop open any second and Nan along with it, pointing a finger of blasphemy at the reverend and blasting his hypocritic soul to hell.
    Just what the reverend’s hypocrisies were, except trying to take me away from Nan and sending me off to an orphanage the day I was born, I didn’t know. Yet, aside from the scant few who took tea with him, everyone else in Haire’s Hollow felt the same as Nan, although they were all equally pressed to say why. For the most part, the reverend walked amongst everyone and talked their talk, and was always taking their fight to St. John’s when the fishers was getting a low cut on a quintal of fish, or the loggers being gypped on a cord of wood.
    “It’s in the way he goes about it,” Old Joe said to Nan, once. “He’s worse than Lucy Gale; gives you a piece of boiled cake just so’s she can show off her new plate, then begrudges you every crumb that goes into your mouth.”
    “Be the Jesus, it ain’t the cake he’s begrudging ye,” Nan had replied. “For he loves to flick his arse off to St. John’s every chance he can get. It’s havin’ to talk with ye