Cherry Bites Read Online Free Page A

all, but she’s the biggest and scares me the most. They played on the vranda because it was so hot. Luce served them whiskey and pikkled eggs. Darcy touched Luce on the behind. Who do you like the best? she said and all the men laughed. Luce turned red as blood.
    Nora would have been nine.
    My thoughts wandered to a morning long ago when I was alone in the kitchen with my parents. I was eating white toast with grape jelly and peanut butter; my dad was eating a soft-boiled egg from an eggcup; Nora was drinking instant coffee. Pete must have been getting washed or dressed, or maybe he was practising card tricks in his room.
    “Who do you like best, Pete or me?” I asked.
    The radio was tuned to CKRC and Ricky Nelson was singing “Poor Little Fool.”
    Murray got up from his chair and put his arms around me. “We more than like you, Cherry. We love you to pieces and we love you both exactly the same amount.”
    Nora got up and threw the dregs of her coffee down the sink. “Of course we do,” she said, as if it went without saying. She didn’t even look at me.
    I’ve come to know that parents are usually lying when they say that they love their kids equally. They have favourites and it’s a lie you can’t blame them for. Anyway, I knew Murray loved me best, though he loved Pete too. I suspected that Nora loved no one. For as long as my dad lasted, I did okay. He took care of all of us.
    Sometimes I think everything would have been different if Murray hadn’t died when he did, if he had lived on.
    And the way it happened was hard on us, Pete and me. We were too young for that kind of shock. I was nine and Pete was six.
    Murray had been looking tired, his features blurry, lost in the greyness of his face. When he came home from school at around 4:30 he would usually lie down on the Toronto couch for a short nap before supper. He always placed a little cushion on his chest. I guess it was his version of a teddy bear.
    One Friday after school I went into the living room to watch my dad sleep. I know it was a Friday because I had Explorers after supper and we were eating early because of me. Explorers was a group at the United Church for girls who weren’t old enough for CGIT —Canadian Girls in Training.
    “In training for what?” our boys asked us, later, when we were in CGIT . We always called the boys from school our boys as though they belonged to us. They did in a way; we were all they had for girls at that young stage of our lives.
    “To be spies,” we said, “in training to be spies, like Mata Hari, only a million times more beautiful.”
    “Hardy har har har,” they shouted and pelted us with snowballs as we ran shrieking down the lane.
    Anyway, that Friday before supper I watched my dad sleep. I admired his snores and the way he could drop off in a matter of seconds. He was an expert napper.
    He didn’t have the cushion on his chest that Friday, so I placed it there for him, as gently as I could. His eyes opened when I did this and he smiled and removed it.
    “Thanks, Cherry, honey, but the cushion feels kind of heavy on my chest these days.”
    That scared me a little, but not too much. I was in grade four by then; Pete was in grade one. Dads of kids that age didn’t die. Sometimes they disappeared. There were two kids at school that I knew of whose dads weren’t around. Joanne and I suspected something sinister, like divorce or desertion.
    But no one I knew then had a dad who died.
    Except us.
    It was one week later exactly, a Friday in early May. The crocuses were up in the yard, but not yet blooming. Spring seemed late in coming that year or maybe I was more impatient than usual.
    I was wearing my Explorer uniform, which I put on before supper so I would be ready to head out as soon as I finished dessert and brushed my teeth.
    Apple crisp was on the menu that night. It was Murray’s favourite, not mine. I preferred blueberry or rhubarb crisp but it was too early in the season for either of