Free Martin Sloane by Michael Redhill Page B

the light off. I stepped back so he could close the door. Then he turned to me sharply in the doorframe. I don’t mind if you come in here when I’m gone, he said. But if you break something, tell me so I can fix it.
    Oh …, I said.
    We stepped out of the verge and he clicked the lock shut. I’m not angry.
    Okay.
    But you can’t just replace a broken thing with an unbroken thing like you’re changing a lightbulb.
    I’m sorry, I said, and I linked my arm in his, but he surprised me by slipping his out.
    Just have a little more respect, okay? He continued across the grass to the house, and I followed him, knowing (in the way we tend to know things that are, if fact, just the way we’ve chosen to see the world) that there was no point in trying to make it right. At least not today, a day that had gotten away from me. I went in behind him and shut the kitchen door. It seemed to me that there were two darknesses that night, the one outside and the one in the house, and there was no difference, as if the door were a plate of glass dropped into the sea at night. I pulled the lock up. I had the image of that book of holy secrets, heavy with earth and rain and dust.
    When I was a little girl, my parents had kept a layer of their wedding cake in the chest freezer downstairs. It was the top tier of a white cake with silver icing, the bride and groom wrapped in wax paper and tucked down beside it. All throughout my childhood, I’d go downstairs and scoop out some of the frozen cake from the underside with a teaspoon and eat it in perfect secrecy in the dark of the coldroom. It was furred with ice, but if I warmed the little hunks of cake in my mouth, the slightly sour taste of marzipan thawed out of it, and it was delicious. When I went down there, I’d have to fight the contradictory feelings of curiosity and shame. I was taking something from my mother that she obviously cared so much about. But there are certain feelings that you can’t fight, and the urge to be connected to certain people is one of them. When I sat in the coldroom, dissolving the cake in my mouth, I would become my mother. I’d absorb her into my body, and I believed I knew what it felt like to be her. To be pregnant with my brother, to sleep beside my father, to hold
me
to her chest. I could not resist these small tastes.
    The plastic bride and groom that she’d saved accurately showed the height difference between my parents, my mother being the taller. My father had always claimed he was tall for a Greek, that at five foot nine (he’d rounded up from seven and a half inches) he towered over his contemporaries. One of his few recurring jokes — he wasn’t known for his sense of humour — was that he was the starting forward of the best basketball team in Greece, the Lesbos Rockets. My mother would revert to a stone face whenever this joke was told, and then look from him to us, as if such a thing could corrupt us.
    The bride on the cake resembled my mother in more than height. It had her long, graceful features, her slender piano-playing hands (a regret of hers, that her piano remained in Albany in her mother’s house), her Modigliani neck, her long black hair. Of course, in all of this she was much like Molly, who had the same New England roots, that British rose beauty sustained through generations of tennis-playing, book-reading, buttermilk-biscuit-baking decendants of the pilgrim ships. My father always said that he’d married the American Constitution, my mother that she was the bride of Orpheus (my father had a beautiful singing voice, and my mother obviously didn’t know that much about Greek myth, although she got the ending right). My brother, Dale, won the genetic lottery and got my mother’s delicate features. I got a mix — mermaid on top, milkmaid on the bottom. Surf’n’ turf, as Molly used to call me. But by college, I’d come to like my odd dimensions and never took offence at Molly’s nicknames. I grew into them. I had a