Apricot brandy Read Online Free Page B

onions and beef, precursors of Mom’s stew.
    It was harder to go upstairs, to those bedrooms and closets. She did little more than look into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and her own, but in Mom’s sewing room she lingered. It echoed with all Mom’s years of patient— maybe desperate— labor, as if she sometimes had to work down her fear of what might be happening to her daughter, stitch that fear down tight and fold it away. She had to have feared, at least… whether or not she’d successfully avoided knowing? All the silence Mom had suffered here. Pity filled Karen’s eyes and she wiped them angrily with her knuckles.
    She went back downstairs. The dining room, the living room, the hallways— all had become Dad’s in the three years since Mom’s death. There were even more hand-guns and rifles showcased on the walls than she remembered. There were other beefy hand-guns in unexpected drawers, like that of the telephone table and the silverware drawer of the dining-room breakfront. And booze of course, even more booze than before. Bottles of quality whiskeys and brandies occupied every sideboard and end-table, occupied the mantel over the big field-stone fireplace.
    And here was the door, the one to the basement. Standing before it, Karen tried for some bravado and declaimed, “That dark-browed, masterful figure, that brooding, elemental man might now be gone forever from this earth, but Karinna Foxxe felt his presence still in the long, echosome halls and chambers of Foxxe Hall!” It fell flat. It didn’t work without booze in her to bring it off.
    She toughed it out and, though cold to the bone, she opened the basement door and stepped down, experiencing that same twinge she’d felt here so long ago as Dad shepherded her past this point: up there was Mom’s kingdom, there in the kitchen with its warmth and good smells. Down here, where Karen had to go, was Dad’s much darker world.
    The basement was unchanged. When she was six, it had been a half-spooky playground, gloomy in the corners with spiders and racks of big weapon-like tools, but basically safe because there was Daddy at his bench, fixing things, making life work right for all three of them. When she turned fourteen it became a true dungeon, where Dad grotesquely punished and shamed her ignorant body with his own.
    Still, one level deeper was a place that was worse than this: the fruit cellar. Its door was at the basement’s far end. Why were the times he’d taken her down there the most frightening?
    Do it and be through the worst.
    She opened the door, switched on the one yellow bulb, then sank down the steep wooden steps into the deepest part of the house. The close air was honeyed with preserves. The shelves of dark jars breathed a complex sweetness just bordering on spoilage. These jars had walled her on either side when she was sprawled beneath Dad’s weight and though it was Mom who had filled them, there was no help from Mom in those moments and her bright jars just blindly stared at Karen, reflecting her fear.
    But there was something else about this place that had made it the worst place of all. Something about its being down at the level of the roots of the orchard. As Dad rooted in her, she felt them all around her, just outside the buried walls, those millions of greedy roots reaching toward her like sharp, hairy fingers… .
    Karen had come all the way home now.
    Hello, again. It’s me.
    When she came outside the sun was already halfway down the sky. It shocked her. Well… night was just going to have to be faced. While the light was good, she’d explore the orchard, for the orchard itself was one of the witnesses to her long-ago destruction. This army of trees in which the house stood, their roots reaching beneath the house. The bigness of their silence had always been a part of the house itself for her, a part of its scariness at night when she was small.
    She got in the truck and set it to rolling slowly down the lanes. The weedy,