Cherry Bites Read Online Free Page B

those. Nora never put enough topping on the dessert, enough brown sugar and butter. That was the best part. I told her a thousand times. It seemed to me her heart was never in her cooking.
    She was in the kitchen, pulling a salmon loaf out of the oven when she told me to wake up my dad and tell Pete to wash his hands. I was tempted just to yell out their names from where I stood next to her, there by the stove, but I knew that would infuriate her. Sometimes that was what I wanted more than anything, but not on that particular day. I didn’t always feel strong enough for Nora’s furies.
    When I entered the living room Pete was on the rug in the middle of the floor playing with his Tinkertoys. He was building a space ship. He should have been on bare floor. The brown rug with its soft worms interfered with his progress.
    This was before shag carpets. We had what must have been the precursor: a thin rug with inch long protuberances throughout. There was space between them and they were limp, like night crawlers. Nothing held the rug in place; there was no underlay like at Joanne’s house where everything seemed more civilized, more modern. I would take runs at the rug early on Saturday mornings and slide from one end of the living room to the other. I had to move a coffee table and a stool to do this and it drove Nora to distraction but it was one of my favourite games. It would have been more fun if my brother had joined in, but that was next to impossible considering the state of our relationship.
    “Wash your hands, Pete,” I said.
    He could hear me; he just appeared not to see me and seldom spoke in my presence. So far he had never spoken directly to me.
    Carefully, he fastened one more piece to the space ship and then he stood up and left the room.
    I moved to touch my dad’s arm. The first thing I noticed was that once again, he napped without his cushion. It lay propped up between him and the wall. His right arm reached across his chest touching his left one.
    Then I noticed the smell of pee. I wondered if Pete had taken a leak in amongst the worms of the rug or even if I had wet my pants inside my crisp Explorer uniform. Wild thoughts: we were both long past that. And then I saw that my dad’s eyelids were part way open, but that he wasn’t awake.
    When I touched his skin it was warm. I knelt beside him, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I looked, see the rise and fall of his chest.
    “Dad?” I whispered.
    I didn’t tell him that supper was ready.
    “Mum!” I screamed and a terrible clatter exploded from the kitchen.
    He wasn’t dead when I first walked in the room. The life left him in the few seconds that I stood there looking at my brother. I know that. For a long time I tortured myself with the thought that if I’d come sooner, I could have saved him somehow.
    Pete didn’t seem to have noticed anything. He was focussed on his Tinkertoys. It was hard for me, to think that my dad couldn’t warn me with something, a soft cry or a moan before those last quiet moments. He would have, if he could have.
    There was no funeral. Nora said she didn’t feel up to it. Maybe later, she said.
    A man with very red lips delivered Murray’s ashes to us in a golden urn. Nora placed them on the mantel above the fireplace.
    I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. It scared me at first, the idea of my dad in an urn in the living room. I wouldn’t look inside it, in case there was something there that I couldn’t bear to see, a recognizable fingernail or a part of his baby toe.
    No one else had a dad in a jar; how would I explain it to my friends? I was also terrified that the urn would get knocked over and Murray would scatter. Parts of him would disappear. So I found myself guarding the ashes, sitting in front of the mantel in a chair I carried in from the dining room. No living room chair was close enough. I pretended to read while on guard, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the urn.
    When I came home