Free Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story by Barbara Gowdy Page B

mother’s red Toyota on the concession roads, up one road, down the next, pretending that it was a job, a dire responsibility. Day after day she did this. Sometimes she drove at five miles an hour. Sometimes (remembering what the white-haired secretary who brought the rabbit pies said) she hit ninety.
    Twice a week she visited Cory Bates, who had also dropped out of school and who lived with her parents in Garvey, in an apartment above a pet store. After saying, “I don’t get what Bert Kella saw in your mother,” Cory never again made any direct reference to the murder, and the last thing she did was treat Marion as if she were an object of pity. The opposite was true. “At least you’ve got a car,” she said enviously. She said, “At least your parents aren’t at each other’s throats all night.”
    All day, Cory’s parents slept. Occasionally one of them got up and used the toilet or ate something standing in front of the refrigerator. Their light red hair and Mrs. Bates’s tallness and shifty green eyes seemed to discredit Cory’s claim that she was adopted, but as Cory pointed out, paediatric nurses have an edge when it comes to finding a good match. A couple of years ago Mrs. Bates had switched to looking after old people, and now she worked two nights a week in a retirement home. Mr. Bates was on disability. When Marion was there he never said a word, but Mrs. Bates was a complainer.
    “The dishes aren’t done,” she said.
    “I’m going to do them later!” Cory yelled in her amazinglythunderous and infuriated voice. Marion admired Cory for not sleeping all day herself, since she was always saying how tired she was.
    “I’m an insomniac,” Cory said. “It started when I was pregnant.”
    Her baby, a boy, was born a year ago and given to a couple who, by sheer coincidence, was also called Bates. When he grew up Cory said she was going to visit him and tell him what an asshole his father was. Although she didn’t know where he lived she wanted to send him the German shepherd puppy from the pet store downstairs.
    “A boy needs a dog,” she said.
    The puppy was the runt of the litter, the only one left. At night, when Cory’s father and mother were fighting, it barked and cried.
    “Its cage is right below where my bed is,” Cory said. “And I swear to God,” she said, “the minute it starts whimpering, my breast milk starts dripping.”
    Before going out, they usually stopped in to see the puppy. “Don’t you want to just eat it?” Cory said. Marion poked two fingers into the cage and scratched its head. “Don’t you want to just squeeze it to death?” Cory said, getting her entire slim hand through the mesh and wiggling the puppy’s hindquarters.
    They drove to the new Garvey Mall. Twenty-five stores sandwiched between a Woolworth’s and a supermarket. At the Snack Track they ordered Coke sodas and fries and carried them to the mall’s eating area. Most of the tables were occupied by retired farmers who smoked cigarettes and nursed a single cup of coffee all afternoon. Some of the farmers Marion knew, and normally they’d have asked her how she was bearing up, but one look at Cory and they left it at a nod. Cory was theatrically tall and thin, and she wore thigh-high black leather boots and jeans so tight she had to unzip the fly to sit down. When there weren’t any empty tables she said “Fuck” loud enough toturn heads. Marion imagined Mr. Grit, who borrowed her father’s Rototiller every spring, going home and saying to Mrs. Grit, “Bill Judd’s girl is headed for trouble.”
    Marion didn’t care. If anything, it touched her to imagine these decent men quietly grieving for her future. It comforted her. It was one of the mall’s homely comforts, along with the slow, murmuring parade of shoppers and the light-hearted music and the intermittent rumble of the men’s voices. Usually this atmosphere sent her into the same sweet trance that having her hair cut did, and so the