Free Y: A Novel by Marjorie Celona Page A

is, somehow, seductive. She waits for him to
     be drunk enough, then takes him in her arms and whispers, Tell me.

    Four days before she gives birth to me, Yula’s alarm goes off at seven thirty and
     she walks across the lawn and gets her father’s coffee brewed and ready, puts The Globe and Mail on the kitchen table with a stack of brown toast, three pieces buttered, three pieces
     with grape jam, and a pear like a giant green raindrop. What Quinn doesn’t eat she
     gives to the neighbor’s chickens, which run toward her when she calls them and take
     the bits of crust from her hands. The sun is hot on the back of her neck as she bends
     to feed them, one hand on her belly.
    She and Harrison have been fighting lately over how much she looks after her father.
     When Harrison came into Yula’s life she explained herneed to look after Quinn, calmly, over coffee the morning after their first night
     together. Her father was her priority, second only to Eugene. Could he understand
     this? Would he be okay with it? When he moved into the cabin, they discussed it again.
     She told him about the suicide letter. She told him not an hour went by when her heart
     didn’t jolt a little, wondering if this was the day when she would find him.
    But, more so, she likes it here. She hates to leave—she hates the way people claim
     her belly when she’s in public, asking how far along she is, who is the lucky father,
     isn’t she a bit young to be with child, then telling some anecdote about a teenage
     pregnancy, a neighbor, a cousin, someone they met once. When she and Harrison fight,
     he stays out with Dominic. Three, four nights in a row. She can’t leave anyway; someone
     has to make sure her father doesn’t get too lonely; someone has to answer the phone
     when Harrison calls at three in the morning with no way to get home, his hands bloody
     from a fight, his eyes wild and wet with drugs—cocaine now, she’s sure of it; someone
     has to clean her father’s house and make sure he eats. Every month, Quinn slips a
     small envelope of money (her inheritance) under the welcome mat to the cabin, enough
     for all the bills, and sometimes a little extra for Yula to take Eugene to the movies
     or the car for an oil change or to buy Harrison some new Mark’s Work Wearhouse boots.
     It is a terrible, entangled arrangement. They live exclusively off the money from
     Jo’s death. Quinn parcels it out monthly, as stingily as he can, so that there’ll
     be something left over when he goes, too. His pension is gone—eaten by back taxes,
     which he never paid while he was working. And so they live at the edge of reality,
     beholden to no one, isolated and strange.

    In the late afternoon, she goes back to fix Quinn a plate of pasta and do the morning’s
     dishes. Then she’ll dust and vacuum. Tomorrow she’ll clean the windows using a special
     kind of wiper with an extendable handle that Quinn insisted she buy at the hardware
     store. Sometimes, when she’s cleaning Quinn’s bedroom, she takes her mother’s red
     satin jewelry box off the dresser and sits on the bed, her arms around it. Inside
     is her mother’swatch, her parents’ wedding rings, which Quinn no longer wears, love letters from
     when they first met, and a Swiss Army Knife. She sits on the bed and holds the box
     to her heart.
    She puts a pot of water on the stove for the pasta and waves to Harrison as he rides
     by the kitchen window on a lawn mower, listening to his Walkman, Eugene on his lap.
     She rests a minute, her hand on her belly, and notices that the toast she set out
     for Quinn this morning is still on the table, the coffee untouched. She stands in
     the doorway of his bedroom and watches him, listens to the soft rattle as he pours
     the last of his sleeping pills into his hand. She eyes the bedside table—empty bottles
     of sleeping pills and painkillers and antidepressants, even Eugene’s bright-pink children’s
     aspirin. For a moment she is