Worn Masks Read Online Free Page B

of the stairs, where they had told her to stay. Even her
mother had gone downstairs. Mary Grace watched as they removed Uncle Paul on a
stretcher from Aunt Maggie’s apartment. She watched the men in white coats
carrying him on a board covered in a white sheet. “Gone for good,” was her
mother’s explanation as the door closed behind the stretcher and the back of a
bald man whose head was white and smooth as his coat.
    Mary Grace ran down the stairs, planning to follow the white
truck, but her mom caught her arm and said, “Upstairs!” Mary Grace pulled away,
and as she passed through the front door, whipped it closed behind her.
    She hesitated for just a moment as the glass
shat tered,
then she ran, ran until she couldn’t run any longer, the stitch in her side
cutting off her breath. She slipped into the park through a hole in the chain
link fence, sat on a swing and proclaimed, “I am going to stay here forever!” 
    Hours later her dad came to get her. His eyes were red and he had
about him the sweet pungent smell of Uncle Paul. For just a moment he looked at
her, pushed the hair back from her eyes. “Oh, bambina mia, your momma is
very upset. You broke the window in Aunt Maggie’s door. You have to pay for the
window.” 
    Mary Grace’s dad took her hand, and they walked home, hand in
hand, without another word.

 
    The Attic and The Porch
    Chapter 6
     
    The Attic
    IT WAS SHORTLY after Uncle Paul died that Mary Grace extended her bathroom to attic visits. The
vis its to the attic consisted of moving from the top step onto the attic
platform, moving to different sections of the floor, where her dad’s tools
where kept, where Aunt Maggie’s trunk was, and finally into Uncle Paul’s room.
    On the rare occasion that she talked with her
moth er,
she still tried to ask questions about Uncle Paul, but the answers remained
cryptic and brief.
    “Was Uncle Paul Daddy’s older brother?”
    “That’s why he got Papa’s pocket watch, and that’s not around
anymore either. Now you mind you p’s and q’s, Maria Graziella . Children
should be seen and not heard,” her mom demanded with bitter saliva escaping at
the corner of her mouth.
    Mary Grace wanted to know, but she didn’t know how to find out
about Uncle Paul. Whatever tidbits she gleaned, she pictured: a pocket watch,
gold, with scrolling carved around the edge, and a chain looped onto it. Yet,
she could not put in words what she wanted to know about Uncle Paul having the
pocket watch. She could only focus on the picture forming in her mind, placing
each detail in order. This was a habit she had of thinking about how something
looked, smelled, felt in her hand. Mary Grace could sit very still and look out
as if to nothing, but the picture would be fully formed in front of her.
    “Such dilly-dally, wake up. Go clean the . . .” her mom would say.
And poof, the image, the thoughts, would be lost, whatever it was; the cracks
in the sidewalk, how a flower squeezed out from the speck of dirt in between the crevices; how the sun made her moth er’s
shadow even bigger, and always overlapping Mary Grace’s. Mary Grace preferred
the shadows though, not to live in the
burning sunshine where ev erything gets unmasked. Isn’t that where the
truths lived about Uncle Paul, in the shadows, not in the open light? To be
seen was to be exposed.
    There was an order to how everything was placed in the attic room.
She saw the shapes and patterns—there was a faded rectangular spot of about
three feet by four feet in the middle of the wooden floor, where a rug used to
be, and under the front corner of the cot; which was covered in wool army
blankets. There was a pair of worn, brown, leather shoes, and one had a broken
lace. But, something was different since Uncle Paul died. Every other time she
had come up, after the first time she dared to ascend the steps; there had been
a picture drawn in charcoal tucked into the side of the mirror. Some of them
were of a cat or