Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free Page A

upstairs. She turned on the little lamp that was on the breakfast table and sat in her chair there, waiting for Helen. She saw dog hairs on the floor, gathering together, drifting across the floor.
    Helen felt sick but she would drag herself to school. Her throat was sore. She heated up honey in a pan and sipped it with a spoon.
    “I’m going to just stay put today,” Lenore said.
    “That’s good, Mom, just take it easy. You’ve been doing toomuch.” Helen’s forehead shone with sweat. She buttoned up her sweater with trembling fingers.
    “Do you have a cold?” her mother said. “Where did you get a cold? Stay home. The nurse who’s coming this afternoon, she can take a look at you and write a prescription. Look at you, you’re sweating. You’ve probably got a fever.” She wanted to weep for her little Helen.
    “I have a test today, Mom,” Helen said.
    “A test,” Lenore marveled. She laughed. “Take them now but don’t take them later, they don’t do you any good later.”
    Helen wiped at her face with a dish towel.
    “My god, a dish towel!” Lenore said. “What’s wrong with you? My god, what’s to become of you!”
    Startled, Helen dropped the towel. She expected to see her face on it almost. That was what had alarmed her mother so, that Helen had wiped off her own face. Anyone knew better than to do that… She felt faint. She was thinking of the test, of taking it in a few hours. She took a fresh dish towel from a drawer and put it on the rack.
    “What if I die today?” Lenore said suddenly. “I want you to be with me. My god, I don’t want to be alone.”
    “All this week there are tests,” Helen said.
    “Why don’t I wait then?” Lenore said.
    Tears ran down Helen’s cheeks. She stood there stubbornly, looking at her mother.
    “You were always able to turn them on and off,” Lenore said, “just like a faucet. Crocodile tears.” But with a moan she clutched her. Then she pulled away. “We have to wash these things,” she said. “We can’t just leave them in the sink.” She seized the smudged glass she’d used to swallow her pills andrinsed it in running water. She held it up to the window and it slipped from her fingers and smashed against the sill. It was dirty and whole, she thought, and now it is clean and broken. This seemed to her, profound.
    “Don’t touch it!” she screamed. “Leave it for Barbara. Is that her name, Barbara?” Strangers, they were all strangers. “She never knows what to do when she comes.”
    “I have to go, Mom,” Helen said.
    “You do, of course you do,” her mother said. She patted Helen’s cheeks clumsily. “You’re so hot, you’re sick.”
    “I love you,” Helen said.
    “I love you too,” Lenore said. Then she watched her walk down the street toward the corner. The day was growing lighter. The mornings kept coming, she didn’t like it.
    On the bus, the driver said to Helen, “I lost my mother when I was your age. You’ve just got to hang in there.”
    Helen walked toward the rear of the bus and sat down. She shut her eyes. A girl behind her snapped her gum and said, “‘Hang in there.’ What an idiot.”
    The bus pounded down the snow-packed streets.
    The girl with the gum had been the one who told Helen how ashes came back. Her uncle had died and his ashes had come in a red shellacked box. It looked cheap but it had cost fifty-five dollars and there was an envelope taped to the box with his name typed on it beneath a glassine window as though he was being addressed to himself. This girl considered herself to be somewhat of an authority on the way these things were handled, for she had also lost a couple of godparents and knew how things were done as far south as Boston.

CONGRESS
     
    M IRIAM WAS LIVING with a man named Jack Dewayne who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state’s university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew,