Free Year After Henry by Cathie Pelletier

of patience. I catch you sneaking beers again, you’re out the door for good. Got it?” But Chad was already headed for the pinball machine.
    ...
    By the time Evie got home, she was too tired to shower or even eat. She rolled her last joint of the day and took it with her up the stairs. Lying back on her bed, pillows propping her head at the angle she liked, one that would help release the tension in her neck muscles, she watched the light from the street flicker across her ceiling. It always reminded her of the northern lights she saw as an eight-year-old child, that Christmas her parents had rented a small cabin in northern Vermont. A full, cold week of lights cutting up the night sky as she and her father stood outside, bundled in thick coats, noses cold at the tips, watching. She had been so overcome with emotion that it was difficult for her to put it into words. But she knew then, even so young, that she would always be a kind of replacement for Rosemary Ann, that little girl with the dark and perfect ringlets, the one who had been sitting on the plush seat of the Kaiser Manhattan just a year earlier. Evie had already figured it out. That week in Vermont had been like the week in Nova Scotia, just another attempt to make Evie happy, to pretend there was nothing missing from their lives but the seashells they might find along the beach. In fact, her mother had spent both of those weeks, and all the many other vacations over the years, inside whatever house or camp or cottage they had rented, in the shadows, as if Rosemary Ann might visit her there instead of in bright sunshine. Finally, just Evie’s father kept up the charade of being a parent. That wintry night in Vermont, with strings of blue and white lights zigzagging the sky like lightning, Evie had stood close to him, grateful as a child is for any kindness from the adult world. She wanted desperately to tell him that she understood his grief, that it was all right if he couldn’t give himself completely to her. It was okay if a good part of him, a big piece of his heart, would always belong to Rosemary Ann. But she couldn’t. Instead, she had whispered, “I love you,” into the cold night. She had watched the warm puff of breath form in the chilly air and then drift away, taking those three words with it, taking them away from her father’s ears. Over the years she had even wondered if the puff had come to earth somewhere. Perhaps it had floated out to sea. Maybe it was still drifting, waiting for someone to burst it with a pin so that ears could hear the frozen words. I love you. One thing was sure. Evie never spoke those words again until she finally said them to Larry Munroe, that night he got up out of her bed, put on his pants in a hurry, and left. I love you . Funny, but they are such tender, sweet words, bringing with them such promise. And yet, they can cause so much damage. Or, in Larry’s case, fear.
    Evie released her breath and let the last of the joint out in a thin stream of smoke. She put the small butt into the bowl she kept up by her bed, next to the other roaches that were already there. The Roach Garden, she called it. She sat up and took off her blouse, then threw it onto a chair by the side of her bed. She unhooked her bra but left it on. She wanted to loosen the thing so that her breasts could fall free. “My breasts need to breathe,” she liked to say. If it weren’t for the looks she was always getting at the tavern, she would never wear a bra to work. On impulse, which was now part of her life, she turned to look at herself in the mirror. But all she saw was what she always saw: an older woman who looked like the young woman she knew herself to still be. An older Evie with thick brown hair trickling down her back. An Evie tired from a long day and a long night’s work. Tired of wondering where it was that Larry Munroe had gone. Where, and why. That’s all she saw, a woman almost fifty