A Complicated Kindness Read Online Free Page A

inch closer and closer to the wall or barricade in front of her until the hood of the car bumped against it. She called it Montreal parking. She’d never been to Montreal but she liked to say Montreal whenever she could so that everything, parking, hairstyles, sandwiches, were all, according to her, Montreal-style.
    She believed in one-hundred-percent cotton. “It wrinkles badly but at least it breathes.”
    She loved the girliness of my dad’s eyelashes and his smile (oh, Ray’s smile!) and the way his arms got dark brown in the summer. One time she and my dad were talking together in the kitchen and Tash and I heard her say, god DAMN I love your sense of humour.
    She occasionally plucked hairs from her chin, which I couldn’t watch.
    She spoke to strangers whenever she had the opportunity to, mostly tourists here to see the village, and would usually get very excited about the various aspects of these strangers’ lives.
    In the winter she’d warm up my bed for me by lying in it for twenty minutes while I had my Saturday-night bath.
    She cried every single time she watched The Waltons.
    She made a lot of trips to the pencil sharpener in the basement because it said BOSTON on it.
    At one point in her life she thought about running for mayor of the town, but didn’t want to embarrass Ray.
    She sang hymns loudly, which embarrassed me.
    She was an expert on drawing horses, especially their rear ends. She’d doodle horses’ asses all over the phone book.
    She approached life happily, with her arms open. Which could have been a mistake.
    She loved white frilly curtains, or yellow ones if they were super bright.
    My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit right back out of him and filled the silent parts of their lives with books and coffee and other things.
    I have a recurring mental image of her. When I was about twelve Trudie decided to learn how to ride my first, second and third cousin Jerry’s motorcycle. He brought it over to our place and he showed her how to sit on it and start it and rev it up and where the brakes were and all that stuff and she said okay, yup, got it, got it, got it. She told me and Tash not to tell Ray because he’d worry. We sat in the grass next to the driveway eating home-made popsicles and watching. Sunlight was flashing off the chrome of the motorcycle and my mom was laughing. She was wearing fake denim pedal pushers and apink terry-towel T-shirt. She’d wave to us and make faces while Jerry was giving her instructions. So then finally Jerry said okay, time to put this on. He plopped this giant helmet onto her head and she gave us this fake helpless look. Then it was time for her to ride.
    She kicked the stand back and then she slowly turned the motorcycle around so that she was facing the highway. She looked at Jerry and he nodded, huge grin on his face, and she took off. She shot off. I mean, she went from zero to sixty in about a second and then she careened off the driveway and onto the grass, hit a flowerpot and went flying over the handlebars. The thing that I keep remembering, though, is how she looked as she flew through the air. She stayed in the exact same sitting position that she’d been in on the motorcycle. Her legs were curved and spread a bit as though she were still straddling the thing and her arms and hands, the entire time that she was flying through the air, looked like they were still holding on to the handlebars. She looked like Evel Knievel jumping twenty cars or whatever but with an invisible motorcycle. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. It seemed to last forever.
    And then we were all up and running over to her where she lay in the grass, still laughing, and moaning, and Jerry felt awful and Trudie made us promise not to tell Ray which was difficult later on when he came home and wondered how she got that cast on her arm. She told him she’d fallen down the stairs running for the rinse cycle with a