Slights Read Online Free Page B

stopped and had coffee and "a piece of our own spicy, healthy carrot cake". As I walked around the corner to my street, the smell hit me. It really did stink; I had been used to it, but the trip away had cleared my nostrils. No wonder the street people, Rat Traps, I call them, kept meeting in clusters outside their houses. I never did bring that manure in; every now and then I'd have another load dumped on top. When I got back from shopping one Saturday, someone had shovelled all the shit from my nature strip to my front door, a huge mound.
      I just used the back door.
      In the dirt I found a coin holder, a plastic bracelet, a cat collar and a chipped crystal, with the remains of a piece of string.

    The counsellor they made me see told me I needed goals. "Things to work towards, to avoid that sense of purposelessness."
      I hadn't had a sense of purposelessness before that.
      "I want to dig up my backyard and plant jasmine," I told her. "That's my goal."
      She had this habit of nodding her head but at the same time pressing her lips together. "That's a good physical goal," she said, "but how about we come up with something a little more spiritual."
      Honestly, the woman was an idiot. Though she did tell me to sort through Mum's things, and I found out a lot of stuff I had forgotten. Piles of papers I'd never been allowed to look at. Mum would have burnt them, if she'd had warning of her death.
      One paper had yellowed a little, making it harder to read. I realised what I had, though. Dad's last words, scribbled down by Dougie Page, his partner. I stared at the scribble for minutes, knowing it should mean something because it gave me a feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the feeling I got when I thought about Dad and no other time; thinking about Mum didn't produce it.
    "Tell her to promise [pause] never to move
    away from the house. Tell her to make the
    kids promise. I love her. Tell Pete to look after
    his Mum and sister. Tell Stevie she'll make a
    great detective."
      I remembered the pride I felt, hearing those words.
      When I was six, Dad took us into the station for a visit. Peter got all the attention as Dad showed us around. They called him young man and asked him when he'd get his badge. He was allowed to hold the guns and look at some horrible photos which made him sick. They wouldn't have made me sick. I would have loved a look.
      The policemen gave me lollies and said how cute I was. Finally one asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.
      "A mother?" they guessed, "or a movie star?"
      "A detective," I said. They all laughed.
      "You'll have to be a cop first," one man said, thinking even that was impossible. They all laughed, especially Peter. He sat up on someone's desk, with someone's cop hat and someone's cop badge on.
      It didn't matter to me what they said. My Dad said, "Steve can be anything she sets her heart on. Because I say so." That was all I needed.
      Wanting to be a detective – that was because I wanted to be like Dad, not through any inherited instinct. I wasn't born wanting it. I would have been good, though. You need a criminal mind to be a good cop.

    Every time Peter rang up I was digging in the garden. He wanted me to stop; he said Dad would have wanted me to stop. He said I was obsessed and should have a break.
      "You need to get out of the house," he said, as if the house was a disease. He begged me to come stay for a week. The time was specified. There was no chance I was to stay for longer than that. I couldn't anyway; no one would collect my mail.
      And I didn't want to go. Here I felt in control, in command. I sprinkled some grass seeds on the manure out the front to see if they'd sprout. My garden was all I needed.

    I found so many things when digging in the backyard. The pile grew by the back door, then I rinsed each item in the laundry sink. I found an old, squashed bottle top, a broken piece of an LP record, a fabric poppy and a