Every Time We Say Goodbye Read Online Free

“Leave the dishes for now, Grace. Come and do my hair.” They sat in front of the oak dresser that held an oval mirror between its two curved arms, and Grace brushed her mother’s hair, lifting the dark waves to her face. Her mother’s hair smelled different from her skin—it smelled like lemon tea.
    The doctor brought oranges. No one was to have them except her mother. After they woke from their afternoon sleep, Grace peeled an orange and broke it into segments on the plate. Her mother said, “I can’t eat it all, Grace. You take half.” In the afternoons, they ate orange pieces and rested until Frank came home.
    In the mornings, Frank muttered and moped in the doorway of the bedroom. In the evenings, he called out, “Ma? I’m home now,” and pushed Grace aside on the bed. “He’s mussing the covers,” Grace complained, but her mother said, “Shh, Grace, let him sit.” She put her arms around them and called them her Two Peas because they looked so much alike, with thick reddish-brown hair springing from broad foreheads and the same sharp little chins. Grace was always glad when the other pea left the pod to do his homework.
    On Wednesday afternoons, Mrs. Davies brought loaves of bread and a rhubarb pie. Her mother said, “Grace, go downstairs and play. I want to talk to Mrs. Davies.”
    Grace pounded down the stairs, then crept silently back up to sit outside the bedroom door. She liked the pie, but why couldn’t Mrs. Davies leave it in the kitchen and go home straight away? There was no need to come upstairs and disturb her mother, who needed to rest.
    “You see how my legs are now,” her mother was saying.
    Mrs. Davies said, “Oh, Florence. But you know, they say people can live years with it.”
    When Mrs. Davies left, Grace said, “Ma, do you want a glass of water? Some bread and butter?”
    Her mother shook her head. She only wanted Grace to sit with her. Her mother’s arms were heavy now, even though they had grown thin, and she could not lift them to hug Grace, so Grace put her arms around her mother and laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and said, “Shall I tell you where the motherbird and the baby bird went in their nest today?” Her mother nodded and closed her eyes.
    Frank scolded her. “What do you do all day? Why don’t you help?”
    Grace said, “I do help.”
    Frank said, “Pa’s at work, I’m at school. I can’t do everything around here.”
    But he did. He made breakfast and supper. He washed the dishes and weeded the garden. He washed the clothes and tried to make Grace hang them to dry. She said she would and then slipped upstairs to sit beside her mother, who was asleep.
    Frank said, “Pa, Grace won’t listen to me. She’s big enough to help a little bit, isn’t she?”
    In the kitchen, her father answered quietly. Grace could not hear the words, but he must have said,
Frank, let her be
, because after that, Frank let her be.
    It was the Creeping Paralysis, Frank told her. Some people could live years with it. Her mother lived two. Violet, a fat young woman with a face like pudding, came during the day to wash Grace’s mother and change the sheets and feed her spoonfuls of custard and soft-boiled egg. Violet told Grace to get out from underfoot. She closed the bedroom door when Grace’s mother was sleeping so that Grace wouldn’t wake her. She cut Grace’s mother’s hair into an ugly bob, and then she cut the bob into something worse. “It’ll be easier this way,” Violet said, dumping the dustpan of dark feathers and curls into the compost pile.
    In the end, her mother could not lift her head or speak. She had been turned to stone. But her eyes were not stone. They followed Grace everywhere and talked to her. Her eyes said all the things her voice had once said, before her throat had turned to stone:
Grace, how I love you. You are the dearest girl in the world
to me. I wanted a daughter so badly after three boys. After Eddie and Joey went up to Heaven,