Small Change Read Online Free Page B

neighbours heard the ambulance. Laura heard it on her way home from the hairdresser’s and told Clara. “She waswearing this sheet and he had his arm around her, and I says to myself, I says, what happened to the baby?”
    It was half past noon on a Friday. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

    We used to sit outside in the evening, Laura, Clara, Cathy and I, under the shadow of Frank. We would hear the sound of the second-floor window being raised behind us, and stiffen. I never looked up. Laura looked up.
    “It’s your husband,” she would say to Cathy. And our talk would die on our lips.
    We stayed out there till early September in a long slow slide from bare arms to sweaters to jackets, as the streetlights came on earlier and earlier and the air cooled down. Frank would come out with his pursed lips and barely perceptible nod, his slicked-back arrogant looks, and stand on
his
stoop whose outer sidewalk we, as tenants, could use. He would walk down the street saving his jocularity for certain men and his smiles for certain young women.
    Last night I dreamt about Frank. We laughed together. He was sitting across the table and reached for my bag of tortilla chips. I nodded, then poked him in the chest. “Now you owe me one,” I said. He laughed, or at least he smiled. How strange that dreams can make such friendliness possible.
    The poinsettia has died but I haven’t pitched it yet. It sits on the table next to the wide window that overlooks the playground (Canadian and glass-free) and the complicated andexpensive play structure that dominates it. A memorial to simple childhood. May it rest.
    Laura’s words whenever she referred to her daughter. “I fed my daughter – may she rest – puddings and cakes and candy all the time. Never did no harm,” and she emptied her pockets of sweets into my daughter’s eager hands. Laura’s daughter died in a diabetic coma at the age of forty-two.
    I tiptoed up the stairs to avoid Laura for one reason and Frank for another. To avoid the punishing excesses of Laura’s company (the mountains of macaroni and gravy she forced upon me) and to avoid any contact with Frank, of whom I had an unreasoning dread. But why unreasoning? It’s too bad I was so afraid of him, but it wasn’t unreasonable. I have never had Ted’s capacity – as natural and pervasive as dew – to ignore people.
    We were sitting in Laura’s kitchen. Laura and I were at the kitchen table, Clara was in the rocking chair talking about her second pregnancy forty years ago. She craved apples, she said. In those days an apple tree grew in Laura’s backyard, but Clara was new to the country, and shy, and didn’t ask. As time went on and she continued to forgo the apple, she became convinced the baby would be “marked” in some way. She gave birth and to her horror the baby’s face – as babies’ faces often are – was streaked with red. She thought it was the apple.
    Eat everything you crave, said Laura. If you don’t, the baby will get marks.
    Yes, she said. My aunt had this longing for wine and she always sat like this (she rested her cheek in the palm of herhand), and my niece was born with a wine hand on her face.
    I was wearing one of Maureen’s pregnancy dresses – a pink sundress with three small buttons at the back, the top one of which kept catching my hair, pulling my head gradually back and reminding me of the Ferris wheel. She was seventeen when it happened. After they extricated her – cutting away long blond hair wound so tightly around the cable that her head arched back – she had a bald spot the size of a fifty-cent piece.
    In her dresses I wore her. Or she wore me? Which? She was covering my body, but I was inside her dress. People confused us with each other. One morning the newspaper vendor gave me a message about a possible babysitter, thinking he was giving a message to her.
    Another morning I showered, then reached into the closet for one of her dresses. The right sleeve had