

One More Chance

The Stories

J.T. STYLES

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2014 Janni Styles

All rights reserved.

BISAC: Fiction / Short Stories

TO MY PARENTS WHO MADE ME

Which made this, and everything I write, possible.

Love you Mom and Dad and always will.

~ Author's Note ~

The characters in this novel are entirely fictitious. But some of the settings are not, especially those from childhood camping trips or spending time at home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Earth Angels everywhere in the form of friends, editors and helpers who gave freely of themselves and their time to help me get this story collection out there. Special thanks to Open House Editing, to Cheer Leader Brenda and to all who helped make publishing this collection possible.

Thank you for your unwavering support, professional expertise and most of all for your kind friendship.

_ASHES TO ASHES_

_For years after they gave me those electric shock treatments up at the mental hospital ashes came out both of my ears._

_That never happened_ , I told Aunt Marguerite who was only eight years my senior, half giggling to myself that her stories were the same as when she was in her twenties before she met Wanda.

After that, my aunt's chaotic life changed. She finally belonged somewhere, and meeting Wanda was undeniably the single best thing that ever happened to her since Chunky Marlow left her at the altar. Actually, he never even made it to the altar. Aunt Marguerite immediately began suffering nervous breakdowns that escalated in both frequency and duration until Wanda.

Known as the Larsen Ladies, they lived over forty years together in a benign neighborhood of charming bungalows originally built as army homes. Everyone outside of relations assumed them sisters until Wanda died of a heart attack and Aunt Marguerite came right unglued at the funeral. Nobody would even care about it today but back then, it was as good as having an unwed pregnancy. All I know for sure and will attest to is their love for me, giving me safe haven from the havoc of drunken parents arguing yet again or handing me a birthday gift when no one else appeared to even remember my birth. Looking out for my beloved remaining auntie was the least I could do out of respect for both of them.

_How would you know? You weren't even born yet when I was poisoned by all those rotten smells in that drafty old boarding house._

Marguerite's words peeled me back from the layers of memories to her room where dust motes danced in the air, brought to life by her expressive hands to play in the sun for a few seconds more. Her eyes were focused on me so sharply I remembered her telling me once, "I am the hawk, I see everything."

Her hands rested on the book she was reading when I entered. I read the spine as it lay on her lap "The Last of the Crazy People - Timothy Findley." I smiled and looked at my aunt's outfit, her heather grey skirt her favorite garment in winter months.

Aunt Marguerite wore dresses all her life, always looked nicely put together even if she was only going to fetch some turnip from the root cellar for one of her aromatic soups or stews. Even now where no one but myself and the nurses would see her, her hair was bobby-pinned tidily back above each ear, her silvery tresses wound into a bun above that. Her earrings matched her bright red sweater, and her knee-high stockings bared their tops below the hem of her wool skirt. When you stopped to think about it, it was really a wonder she had held herself together so well all these years.

Her brother Carter had been allowed to just be himself all his life. He put Granddad in the hospital once when Granddad questioned his "doings." Carter drove Granddad's head right into the radio gram and he had to have thirty stitches to his head. Nobody questioned Carter about anything after that. He did what he had always done, whatever he pleased no matter if children or elderly were present. I never knew Carter except to see him and after he died in a car wreck due to his own speeding ways, nobody seemed to miss him much or speak of him anymore. He probably wouldn't have liked being in a nursing home like his sister. He probably would have broken out, but Aunt Marguerite just seemed to quietly accept the world now on its own terms.

_You were the only one affected by those bad smells in that rooming house, remember?_ I said to my aunt, pouring some water into a glass and taking a long cool swallow. Water is the only thing people can't fool with, I thought, it always tastes so good. I held a glass out to my aunt who shook her head no at me.

_The rest were a hardened bunch, that's why it didn't affect anybody else in that boarding house_ , she said, her eyes daring me again.

My mind was hijacked by her past descriptions of her "hardened" brother Carter again, told and re-told to emphasize her childhood experience of a situation madly beyond her control: Carter's boyfriend Joe and him would go straight upstairs as soon as Joe got to the house, she said, didn't waste a minute of their time on any of us. Straight upstairs to make such a racket that all the way downstairs from his attic bedroom, it sounded like they were building a bed up there." I once asked Aunt Marguerite how old she was. "Oh, I was about ten. The same age I was when I used to watch from behind the lace curtains; to see my mommy going out all dressed up again for some man without me."

When we were little, my two siblings and I, Aunt Marguerite would tell us to sit up straight, don't chew with your mouth open and respect your elders. Yet, looking back on her life and world as it was today, I couldn't help wondering how much of that was just programming and how much of it she actually listened to herself.

Visiting with her was one of my pleasures in life now that my own four children were older and had long since flown the coop to live their own lives, go their own ways. My kids were all good kids, but none of them could get along with Great Aunt Marguerite. They just didn't have the patience for someone who had to live her life another way in another time and never stopped talking about it.

She's crazy, the boys would say, you waste your time visiting her and she probably doesn't even know who you are anymore. They were wrong. In my auntie's eyes, I was present and recognized. I could see that she may not know my name, but she knew me alright. My mind rested a beat before looking back at her sitting in her chair by the window; a few strands of her long grey hair had freed themselves from her bun so that I longed to have enough talent to paint her just as she was right then, all soft and beautiful.

_Listen to the planes overhead, they go all the time now_ , she continued, calmer, _I can hear them crashing right through the sound barrier._

I thought of all the things I could say. It wouldn't matter what I said really. Wanda was gone. My aunt would never be the same again. Death changes you. It leaves you double bound. You don't want to go on without those you love. And yet you know you must. Somehow.

_I can hear the planes too_ , I said softly, though her care home was a good two hour drive from any airport. When she smiled up at me her eyes went from being small and fearful to become huge orbs of violet love just for me.

_Aunt Marguerite, I'll see you next week, okay?_

I said this while kissing the top of her soft, fine hair, the fragrance of roses wafting up to me.

_Don't let me detain you_ , she said, her nose already back in her book.

© Janni Styles

CAMP MURMUR

Gallivanting through the campground with my prized Christmas ice skates slung around my neck seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We four kids were allowed to bring only one treasure apiece to the camp ground.

"Dette, come help me lift the water back to our campsite," my mother called out as I passed by her standing at the communal spigot where everyone got their daily water.

She was always calling me Dette, even though she was the one who had named me Bernadette after her own maternal Grandmother she had adored. I never used to mind it at all, mostly her pet names made me feel special but these days I hated pretty much everything equally. I ignored her for a few more strides.

"Bernadette! Are you ignoring me?"

Never could get one past our mother. I went and grabbed the second handle on the big collapsible water jug. Mom had filled it at the tap and stood there, her lace less canvas sneakers all soaked and ready to retire.

"Why don't you put those skates away and go play with the other kids once we get this water back?" Mom asked.

"Somebody might steal them," I said, carrying them with my free hand so the blades wouldn't hit the ground because I didn't have any skate guards. My navy blue canvas sneakers didn't show the wear mom's white ones did but my laces were getting quite dingy looking, I noticed.

"Love a duck, Dette, who on God's green earth would want to steal a pair of ice skates in the dead of summer."

It wasn't a real question. It was the way Mom said a lot of things that put a lid on the situation as smartly as if she'd thought it all out. Still, I wouldn't leave the skates in the car like her and Dad told me to every time they saw me. Mom was sweating and puffing as though she'd run a marathon. But then, that's how I mostly remember her from that summer.

Fitting all six of us into the station wagon with all our camping gear was a challenge alright. Us in our sandy wet shoes, bedding down nightly in grass fragranced sleeping bags, savouring fire-charred wieners and daylily friendships that bloom in morning light only to wither by sundown.

Every night Dad strummed us to the stars his idol, Hank Snow, reached not long before him, with my twin older brothers' breaking voices harmonizing along whenever their moods were lighter. We kids grew up on country music and some rock, but the truth is, when you grow up on music, it doesn't matter what kind it is. You develop an ear for a good song as though it was a natural part of you and really, it is.

Every second day my Mom, my little sister and me trudged down the hill together with our towels, shampoo and Jergens soap in hand to the mildewed shower house. Mom would lead the song and Sissy joined in, "You ain't woman enough to take my man... no, you ain't woman enough to take my man..." or "Our D I V O R C E becomes final today... "No matter what country song they sang, they laughed at the end together as thought they'd just performed onstage together.

Silent throughout, I just wanted to get it over with, get into my pyjamas and go back to our camp to sleep, hoping we'd wake up with a real bathroom again.

That first day in the showers was something with my sister was spouting pure as the clear water about the row of cubicles as if we'd won a lottery: "Hey! This is fun! We can talk to each other while we shower!"

Behind that, bewildered quiet was all I heard from my little sister's stall when we stood there side by side that first night soaping ourselves and washing our hair, separated only by grotty painted plywood, the yellow layer peeling off to reveal old, wet wood. I hollered her shut: _Who cares, just shut up, wouldja, shut up, shut up, shut up!_

I never said it again. I never said anything about the showers or their singing again. Letting them sing their hearts out and letting her six-year-old baby babble course over me along with the warm water every time we needed a shower again, somehow, made everything seem better.

Our parents' claim that some kids hadn't a crust of bread between them fast lost ground. We stopped complaining of missing our friends and Sunday pot roast in the few short weeks it took my father's whiskers to become a beard.

I watched my brothers' arms curl around their plates of beans, the aroma of grilling steak tormenting us, their spoons shoveling like prisoners in a sad movie. They swam in the lake and re-read faded comic books and even helped us stage plays or talent shows in the sheltered picnic platform by the lake. Mostly, they were sullen, quiet as their Beatles albums and record player, the treasures they each chose to bring.

My penchant for studying was never quelled. I missed being in my grade five class room and wondered what school would be like for me in grade six. I studied the lake often, equally dreading and dreaming of the surface icing over.

Morrison Lake was considered the best place to go camping, one of the biggest lakes up in the Muskoka region of Ontario. All I could think about was getting away from it and all the people keeping me fastened to the shores.

Envious of the cabin people, I wanted us to have one of those; we could live there year-round just fine, but it wasn't to be. The sun burned my skin, the shore lapping water taunted me, and the moments between fretting forward were so pronounced, I did not yet know the startling clarity with which I would recall it all when I grew older, even the transparent lake water bugs my brothers both said were actually larvae waiting to become dragonflies.

Newcomers revived us all, some joining our father to play guitar around the campfire while we all sang loud and playful, our Mom carefree on summer vacation like all the other mothers laughing boisterously about the challenges of running make-do households.

Some of my time was spent befriending girls with bikes who made me believe myself when I said I, too, loved camping so much I could camp forever and never go home. My brothers teamed up with new pals to play volleyball or lounged on the dock to drool over bikinied girls or shiny boats.

What changed everything for all of us was seeing those same friendly faces alter when they took another look at us and our campsite, erected since June with school soon starting. The awkwardness suspended every single one of us in the unfair breath of life, even those free to return home to a life they no longer wished to share.

This collective breath-holding always happened just as though God ordered it up for us all, a long held breath where I felt sick to my stomach. Mostly I feared the new people clamming up, taking away all the hope they'd given us, right along with them back to their houses with soft beds, lemon-scented polish and frilly white curtains.

Then, like every time before, we would all suddenly be frozen in place save for the breath we finally knew we were safe to take upon hearing the solitary voice of an angel.

The angelic voice staved off every murmur in the stiff, uncertain air. My little sisters face was solemn and steady against the flickering firelight, her one doll safely in hand while she piped up, showing the way, uniting us all in laughter night after night by announcing with a genuine pride no one dared argue: _this is our real house_.

© Janni Styles

DANCE LESSONS

To this day nobody knows why our mother flew into what many in our family, with a note of pride that did not belong there, declared "The Watson Temper." Aunt Frances just tippy-toed around Mom's moods like a dancer in a music box, her knee up and ready to lift at every turn. Our aunt had such a charming manner about her, bustling into a room, arms laden with treats and gifts, ready to sit for a good long spell over tea and talk. Of course, it didn't always work out the way she wanted thanks to her sister, our mother.

Happy as a clam one minute, and then suddenly, it was tornado alley right inside our house when Mom's wrath unleashed itself in verbal lashings. Not always directed at us in particular, she wasn't fussy. A fully brewed storm, she could roar over anyone in her path just like the freight trains that shook our house passing through town on the tracks a block away from our home.

My twin sister, Ardette, and I would avoid Mom when she was whirling madly, even when we could see she wasn't happy or might turn any second. Ardette's nerves are bad, they've always been bad. She bites her nails down to the pink, and when Mom goes tornado on us she fusses at her hair, too, taking the pony-tail out and then putting it back in, but it never looks any different to me from the first position she had her hair in. Sometimes Ardette starts coughing, a gaspy cough that sounds like she isn't breathing in enough air.

Our little brother, Ronny, just runs to some hiding place or other and doesn't come out until he hears Mom is back to normal. "Save me! Save me!" he said once as he scurried past me with Mom following a close second, blistering mad that he had broken one of the salt and pepper sets she loved to collect. He didn't know the bluebirds were her favorite or he probably wouldn't have played with them. He also didn't know there were some times when there was just no saving anybody from anything.

Mom's face mostly shone love at us but sometimes the stormy expressions she took on made her dark, curly hair seem like a cloud of fury around her head. Our aunt's visits were a mixed blessing. We knew there was a price to pay but we adored her and looked forward to her visits all the same.

Aunt Frances would just stick her head in around our kitchen door to test the tide, "How are you today, Ann?" she would ask my mother, her heady perfume already wafting into the house ahead of her.

Mother's tongue lashed out viciously at Aunt Frances in some familiar variation or other of: Who the hell does she think she is parading about the country side with her charity handouts meant to spoil children's proper meals – she never even had any kids, what could she know about it!

Often Frances would still come inside; her look of resignation toward us kids telling the tale as she plopped the treats down on the laminated counter top. You could hear her sigh and see her shoulders slump forward despite the fashion of the times; shoulder pads sewn into every garment women wore. Despite the heft of those pads, you could see our aunt's face cloud, the hounds-tooth pattern of her favorite blazer not quite so toothy that day.

Still, on her way back out the door she would cheerily sing out to my mother, "Well, I can see you're not feeling well today, I'll call back another day when you feel more like visiting. Enjoy the things I brought, kiddies!"

With that, she'd blow us kisses from between her neatly polished fingernails and be gone again, leaving us to navigate the eggshell mines on our own. Ardette and I were only twelve, but we were already witnessing the best coping technique for difficult personalities that we could ever hope to put into practice. Ardette wasn't as outspoken as I was, but we both realized the power in that coping technique Aunt Frances had honed on our mother the first time I used it on a teacher when we were in the seventh grade together.

This teacher was always picking on me in some way or another; it was like my presence just grated on her nerves. Back then it was hard for me to understand. Since then I, myself, have met several people who have rubbed me the wrong way and while I can't explain why at all they do, I can understand the teacher better. It's not really something explainable, in fact the very opposite. It's just an instant dislike for certain people as though they project a distasteful aura that smacks you right in the lookers before your brain can even fully engage to discern what you are feeling.

Miss Ross had picked at me many, many times, and one day I decided that I wasn't going to keep taking it. Maybe if I had let her know that she would have stopped it. It didn't occur to me to just go talk to her as I would now in a similar situation.

She was standing there all proper and teacherly like in front of the chalk smudged blackboard, her pearly handmade lanyard a necklace of wisdom beads keeping her eyeglasses safe while Miss Ross kept insisting I knew the meaning of a word that I did not know.

I asked if I could look it up and she said," Emma, I know you know it. Stop playing games and answer me this instant."

She had been at me for a couple of minutes. I could see she wasn't going to let go of it just yet. Her glasses had slipped, as they often did, down her freckled nose to sit where her eyes had no benefit of them, just looking out at us above the lenses with no help at all. For some reason, all I could smell at that moment was pink Gum erasers and I wished I could erase what Miss Ross just said, have her say something kinder to me, perhaps, it's okay, I'll ask someone else.

Instead, mustering up all the cheerfulness I so admired in Aunt Frances, I calmly looked Miss Ross in the eye and said, "Well, I can see you're not feeling well today, maybe that's why you think I know the answer, but I'll be happy to look it up and give you the answer when you are feeling better tomorrow, Miss Ross."

Ardette snickered right out loud and some of the other kids shuffled things around trying to stifle their snickers too. Ardette wasn't even supposed to be in my class, they'd wanted to separate us, but Mom fought the school and won to keep us together. Being a bit of a tomboy, Ardette would be able to "take care of you," Mom said.

The truth is I was the leader of the pair of us despite my frilly dresses and pretty hair bands. It was me who incited Ardette to action most of the time and even that day in Miss Ross's class room, I knew she would defend me if necessary. I didn't really want her to anymore – sometimes I even wished Mom hadn't won that argument with the school - but that day I felt glad Ardette was there, her reliable pony tail swinging whenever she moved.

Redness crept up Miss Ross's neck from her neatly ironed paisley print blouse, spreading over her face from chin to forehead, and I could see she had lost her mental footing.

She backed away from me, pushed her glasses back into place, took a long look at me from head to toe, and I began to panic, I thought I was really in for it. You could've heard a feather fall, the class was that quiet.

I was ready to say, "I'm sorry," but I didn't get that chance. When Miss Ross spoke I realized her reddening was the result of humiliation. I was able to take a breath of air, which, up to then, I had not realized I had not been taking.

Miss Ross looked right into my face and said, "You're right Emma, I'm not feeling well today. Don't worry about giving me the answer tomorrow. It isn't that important."

Then as she turned, in an almighty hurry to flee the classroom, she said, "Class, please carry on with your chapter reading, I'll be back shortly."

I watched her hurrying out the class room door, heard her sensible teacher shoes sounding out a hurried rhythm on the floor, saw the purposeful walking split in the back of her long brown skirt showing the soft backs of her kneecaps as she left.

Weak with relief, I slumped into my seat with the feeling that I had just witnessed a grand sea faring ship having the wind taken out of its sails. Lester Reid loudly cut wind just as I sat down. He was always doing that whenever the teacher left the room, setting the girls off saying, "Ugh, Pee-ugh!" in unison while the boys would laugh their heads off and try to compete with him doing their "armpit" farts. That day I didn't join in. I just couldn't be bothered.

Oddly, I even began to feel a great wave of sympathy for Miss Ross. She wasn't so bad really, I reasoned, she picked on other kids, too, putting them on the spot sometimes. It wasn't like I was the only one.

I didn't feel badly for too much longer because the bell shrilled for us to go home and I joined my friends in the hall for our trek home. They were all laughing about the way I'd put Miss Ross in her place.

The funny thing is, I wasn't trying to put her in her place; I was trying to get myself out of an awkward position. Much later I realized I had succeeded with such finality, Miss Ross would never bother me again.

That was the first time I really saw the impact of those innocent sounding little words Aunt Frances had said so often to my mother. It finally dawned on me why my mother, without fail on the days Aunt Frances said, "I can see you're not feeling well today," would throw the treats Aunt Frances had left for us clear across the room.

Sometimes Mom would then proceed to jump up and down on them, flattening the donuts or crumbling the cookies, breaking the dime store toys, making everything unfit for human pleasure or consumption. Then she would hurl them into the trash can saying, "Damn her! She never even had any kids! What does she know about raising kids? Now, that's the end of that." We knew it wasn't.

Although we never told Aunt Frances what Mother did until many years later, Aunt Frances said she knew. Once when Mom wasn't home with us, Aunt Frances explained why our mother was the way she was.

"She had a rough childhood, being the oldest of us and all. Your granddaddy was not kind to her and expected as much out of her as he would a son. She had to leave school to go to work when she was awfully young just to help feed the rest of us, and I don't think she ever got over that. She loved school. She loved being the first one there every day to light the wood stove. She loved learning. You can see by her pretty penmanship how much she invested in it all."

Aunt Frances went quiet, her face a soft, gentle orb of love, her eyes wandering far back in her mind to times that would never again be.

"We're not allowed to miss school or the truant officer will come for us. Why did they let her leave school?"

Our brother Ronny asked this. He'd just turned eight years old, but he was a pretty wise person as eight year olds go. His blue eyes looked twice their size through the glasses he'd had to wear since he was just two years old. He listened to everyone and everything and watched everyone and everything with the eyes of an eagle, taking in every drop of life as though his own depended on it.

"Back then the school went by whatever your parents said you had to do. Daddy never gave her much chance. I think she could have been a teacher herself. If she'd really wanted to," Aunt Frances said.

She ran her hands through her hair, pulling out a bobby pin here and there and refastening them so the hair on the sides of her head was all neat and tidy, not a stray to be found.

Ronny was shoveling in potato chips from the bag of goodies Aunt Frances had brought today. The crunch usually got on my nerves, but I could see he was enjoying himself so I didn't tell him to keep his mouth shut when he chews like I usually did.

"Your mother suffered something awful. The only thing anybody thought she was any good at was dancing. She was a good tap dancer, and once at the hall in a competition some boys started booing her, and I jumped up to defend her because I knew what it meant to her. Eventually, she had to let go of that, too. Then you three started coming along and she never looked back. Or maybe she does and that's why she can't settle with her lot today."

Aunt Frances was drifting again, her wide hazel eyes gone to the nether regions of her thoughts while I sat with my elbows on the table, hands cupping my chin, waiting to hear more of my mother's fascinating life before us. That would have to wait.

Mom arrived home, wrestling in through the door with a brown paper bag full of groceries. We all snapped to at once. Though she appeared flustered and tired from working at the hospital kitchen, delivering covered meals to the patients and telling us how everything had to be just so that even a pat of butter was placed carefully so it wouldn't melt before the meal reached its destiny, Mom still had enough beans left in her to shoot Aunt Frances a look equivalent to her vitriolic tongue.

"I suppose you are here trying to buy my kids off again," she said. Her curls were pony-tailed back off her face, the way she had to wear it for work, making her lean features seem even leaner.

Aunt Frances said she had to go, and we three kids dispersed in our separate directions away from the solid oak pedestal table we were gathered around. No more story telling for us that day.

I watched our mother putting away the groceries and then putting some hotdogs on to boil for our supper. She always tried to do the right thing by us kids, anybody could see that. She didn't even like hotdogs herself. Still, she never let us just have Aunt Frances to ourselves. It was as though she was afraid Aunt Frances could remove our love for her or stop us from loving her. I tried to tell her we didn't care about the stuff Aunt Frances brought, we just liked her stories, but it didn't change anything.

Watching our mother set out the hotdog rolls and ketchup, I thought about how those hands had once done such fine penmanship that she won contests in school for her writing. And about how those hands had split kindling to light a fire for the school stove in the winter. And about how those hands would sometimes just clutch herself about the head, her curls spilling between her fingers, warning us away before the cloud burst.

As I watched Mom making a hotdog for Ronny – ketchup only, no relish or mustard - and passing it to him, I knew I would likely never fully understand why she was always so mad at Aunt Frances. Aunt Frances didn't even have any kids; it was true; she was just trying to share her own love for us. And for our mother. I felt like we were in a spot we shouldn't even have to be in. Why couldn't we enjoy our Auntie and have our own relationship with her like my friends did with their aunts and uncles... why couldn't we receive the things she brought us as other kids did from their relatives? Why was a question I would never get the answer to, I knew that much for sure.

Though I did try my best to go easier on both my mother and Miss Ross after that.

© Janni Styles

FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

You could never tell Aunt Rita anything. She was Mommy's sister, but she was nothing like Mommy. They didn't even look much alike except for their faint freckles and fair complexions. Rita was always the first person to let the cat out of the bag, and the first person to criticize you even if it wasn't warranted.

"Why don't you do something about that big old orange hair of yours?" she'd say when Mommy went to work cleaning houses in town.

She never dared pick at me like that if Mommy was home. Dad wouldn't let her do it either; he would say to her, "I don't know why I let you come live with us. I thought it was the right thing to do." Dad was one of those kinds of men who always tried to do the right thing in life. Sometimes I felt sorry for him because the more a person tried to do the right thing, I noticed, the more they got trampled down like a flattened sea grass path. I know he did it for Mommy, but having Rita live with us wasn't something Mommy seemed to like any better than the rest of us.

"I like my hair," I'd say to Rita for the hundredth time that year. I couldn't wait to finish my final year of high school in June and get a job so I could move out, away from Rita's nagging.

"But it's so kinky and frizzy, and there's so much of it," she'd say. "You'll never get a man looking like that. I'm only telling you this for your own good."

"Maybe I don't want a man, anyway. They don't seem to make you very happy. I'm the only one to get Mommy's hair in the whole family, and she found daddy just fine."

I surprised myself by saying this because I only thought of it in that very moment, but it was true. I was the only child to inherit my mother's hair, and she was so pretty people always teased her in a complimentary fashion, calling her Marilyn Monroe the second.

Aunt Rita was not at all like Mommy. Mommy was soft and curvy just like her personality. Rita was all sharp and bony just like her personality, too. She went through men like some women go through underwear. She had many boyfriends, but nobody ever lasted with her. Her way of making it right with herself was to joke and tell everyone, I burnt them all out. Today, she was trying again to burn me out, grinding me down about my hair yet again.

I told her, "Everybody tells me they love my hair just the way it is."

This was true. My hair was like Janis Joplin's and Carole King's and all the kids in my senior high school thought my hair was "right on." Some of the girls even tried to curl theirs with rags, rollers or whatever they could do to try to set waves in their long, straight hair.

"Oh, shore, shore. They've got to say that to ya. Or you'll git upset. But they just don't want to tell you the truth about how bad you look."

Rita would turn the screw as tightly as she could and sit back to watch, her skinny limbs like elongated claws just waiting for the next prey to snatch and sully.

She'd rock smugly, back and forth in the solid maple rocker ordered all the way from Quebec. Rita was slighter and shorter than Mommy and sometimes she looked comical in the chair, like a bony little kid. Before she died, Granny used to sit there telling Rita to shut up all the time. Granny was soft, her perfect plumpness a welcome pillow for a good long hug and safety from Rita's acerbic tongue. "Don't you listen to a thing she says," Granny told me, "she's just full of vinegar because she's so miserable no man ever wanted to marry her, but you can see why." Granny was right, and her words still rang clearly in my mind whenever Rita was chewing away on me.

"I don't knock you just because I don't like your old-lady hair-dos," I'd say, "why would you want me to feel bad about myself? Why don't you just accept me and love me as I am?"

"Well, don't git me wrong," she'd say, fixing her crow eyes on mine, "but you got to git it cut, and I'm only telling you this for your own good. I'm not telling you it to hurt you. You don't know how cute you'd look with it cut right off short. Ask the hairdresser next time we go to town, she'll tell you."

"The hairdresser said it suits me just the way it is. She calls me Goldilocks," I said once.

"Oh, shore, the hairdresser would tell you what you want to hear, too," she'd throw her head back, her wiry grey locks shorn fair to scalping, cackling to herself as if I were stupid.

With over thirty years between us, I tried my best not to defy her. She was my aunt, after all, but even aunts can only push you so far. At sixteen, I just didn't have the patience for her relentless heckling.

"Well," I told her the last time she dug a hole for herself, "this is a pretty big universe, and yours is just one lonesome opinion. Everywhere I go, everyone tells me how beautiful my hair is and how it suits me and my personality so you're all alone in your opinion."

She threw her head back and let fly a report of bitter laughter that resounds in my ears still, a pitiable echo of a life that could have been happy.

"Oh, shore. They all tell you what you want to hear, but I bet if you could hear what they're all saying behind your back, you'd be runnin' to the hairdresser to git it fixed."

"This is a dead-end," I said, "I will never agree with you, and I am growing my hair past my butt and keeping it there until I die. Just so you know, my goal in life is to die an old hippie."

She stared at me with her black eyes full of venom she couldn't translate into words to strike me with. Then she just rolled her eyes with the melodrama of a thousand fainting heroines and opened her book to pretend she was reading while sneaking peeks at me over the top of the pages to see if I had caved yet.

Winters got that way. Everybody on everybody else's nerves from the cabin fever snow settled on every household. But we lived further up the mountain than most.

Rita got tired of looking to see if I'd cave that day.

"I'm going for a walk," she said, "you wanna' come with me, kid?"

"No."

It was out of me just like that. The last word I ever spoke to her.

It was my turn to peek out the corners of my eyes, away from the jeans I was embroidering butterflies on, but she never looked back. I saw the sun glaring off the snow when she went out the door and almost went with her just because I knew I could go sliding on a tire tube with the snow all crisp and hard like it was.

Nobody saw her alive again.

After three days of looking, they called all the searches off and said there was no way even a frosty old bird like her could make it three days in 30 below mountains.

We found her up by the waterfall when the spring thaw started.

It was her boot in the air we saw first, next to the icicles of the waterfall, some bigger around than a human limb. She must have broken her leg somehow because the rest of her was still frozen under the icy shield of winter, her eyes stuck wide open at us.

Daddy warned her not to go trudging alone through the woods, especially in the winter time. She hollered at him and said, "I'll do as I damn well please when I damn well please. I don't need your say so for anything, Mister. Just because you married into a family better than yours doesn't mean you are anybody at all. You might'a married my sister but you're still nobody."

"I don't care if you think I'm nobody, I'm only telling you for your own good," Daddy said. He meant it; Daddy was about the kindest man to ever walk the earth. He went out of his way to help people, and you'd almost think he was a minister the way he cared about people even when they didn't deserve his love, but he didn't even go to church. None of us did. Except Rita, but even then she wasn't a regular. I think she only went to ask forgiveness once in a while so she could get away with being so mean all the time.

Sometimes I still wonder if she died remembering Daddy's words: I'm only telling you for your own good.

Sometimes when I wear my John Lennon sunglasses and my hair blows in the wind, I feel so beautiful, so free and so happy, I whisper to Aunt Rita and tell her how sorry I am that she never felt good in her life here, that I hope things are better for her now that she's crossed over.

Sometimes the wind stops dead still, just sucked out of the trees like breath out of a person who just suffered a fright, startling the fields to such sudden peacefulness, I believe it's Rita showing me her heart is finally quiet now.

© Janni Styles

KARAOKE

Annual company parties could be awkward enough without the wild card of the potentially drunk table top dancer or the karaoke wanna-be who, uninvited, takes over the vocalist's microphone. Marvin's company party was no different.

Most just paid their quiet respects out of loyalty to job retention and went home before the final tone sounded. Others simply didn't know any better. Morale in this company of refrigerated food services was something bandied about for newbies and junior hires, long since dead to the front line working stiffs who kept the upstairs office suits in style.

Ushered in on the aroma of barbecuing salmon and prime rib over open fire pits, guests were greeted by Christmas music roaring full volume, a classic rock band hired to rev up festivities in the room overlooking the softly lit Halfmoon Bay.

Marvin knew that they, he and his date Sonja, stood out when they walked through the double doors of the ball-room on-board the yacht. He knew it wasn't their flashiness. It was more that they appeared to want to hide, curving toward one another like infants seeking familiarity, safety and shelter from the world. Marvin suppressed an urge to turn away - to run away.

Dean approached the discomfited pair, his hand extended toward Marvin despite Sonja's nose already raised in indignance before it was even necessary. Marvin seemed grateful and extracted his arm from Sonja's grasp to reach out with both hands to his long time co-worker.

"Hey, man, how's it going?" Dean asked, his relaxed way of being welcome to Marvin.

Dean nodded Sonja's way, but that was enough for that short woman. Dean's wife April knew Marvin's ex-wife Laura very well. In fact, she, Sonja and Laura had attended a few concerts together, their musical interests aligned but their morals clearly not.

"Good, good. Good to see you, buddy," Marvin meant it though he was panicked already, perspiration shining from the permanent furrows drinking wrote on his forehead.

Sonja had insisted they attend. Everyone saw for themselves her control just in the brutal way Marvin had treated Laura after Sonja had inserted herself in the mix. Everyone knew why the couple clung together, the lies they protected and told one another, their mutual agreement invisible glue long cracked transparently in the eyes of all concerned. Except themselves.

Laura and Marvin were separated nearly five years when Laura's best friend Sonja, the very friend she had confided all the vile reasons why she had to leave her marriage, secretly began bedding Marvin. They made themselves feel it was okay to do what they were doing, that Laura was the crazy one. All while pressing her parts where Laura's had once been, and, if she had her way, Sonja would be keeping them pressed there, no matter who else it destroyed. Marvin appeared to be the worse for wear from it all.

His hair was nearly all grayed; he was thinner than ever and you could see he was paying a toll for something alright.

"Looks like a good party going on. Where's the bar?" Marvin asked this while simultaneously patting the flask of vodka inside his navy blue jacket, his constant reassurance policy right where it always was.

"Follow me," Dean said as he turned on his heel to lead them.

Dean was young looking for his age but the past few years had not been kind to Marvin and they looked at least a decade apart although they were the exact same age.

Sonja's ash-washed skin spoke of women in candlelit rooms, voodoo halls and dolls in the dead of winter, hidden away from sight until business picked up when tourist season started in spring. Her unevenly tattooed eye brows underlined the gypsy apparel, the entourage of cheap glittery necklaces and gaudy earrings. All she needed was a bandana tied around her head to complete the look.

Marvin's ex-wife Laura was a classy lady who dressed with an easy elegance that only seemed to heighten Marvin's presence just as Sonja's presence cheapened him. It wasn't only Sonja's disloyal choices and appearance that set her apart from any good taste in the room. It was the secrets she had to agree to keep, the secrets she wore as brazenly as though Laura was a crazy woman who made everything up about her husband.

April was at the bar getting herself another ginger ale when Dean slipped an arm around her shoulders.

"Look who's here, sweetie," he said.

Strains of Heart's "Barracuda" kept the dance floor full, and the band promised to do any song requested so April had just requested they do Elton John's "Your Song" – the song Dean had dedicated to her at their wedding.

She turned expecting to greet someone gladly so that her smile froze awkwardly, half expressed while she uttered a curt, "Hello."

"April," Marvin said, "Hi, uh, it's nice to see you."

"Likewise," April said, her eyes fastened on Sonja who seemed oblivious to her own ill chosen appearance.

"Well, what a night this has been so far! Let's get a drink and sit down, Marvin, the air in here is so dry," Sonja said.

Sonja grabbed the moment to laugh it all off yet again – laugh, laugh, laugh it all off, she liked to say- with the type of forced laugh people give when thinking themselves funny. No one else laughed, but she didn't seem to notice. Stubbornness was her hallmark, but she didn't seem to notice that either. She pulled at Marvin's coat sleeve, but he seemed distracted, not really present with her or anyone else and reflexively pulled back. It was so obvious that everyone fell silent. Suddenly Marvin just turned and followed along behind Sonja, like a good little doggy and April turned to Dean.

"I hope you didn't invite them to sit with us."

"I knew better than that," Dean said this smiling at April, glad for her pluck.

It had never left her from the time they were high school sweethearts through raising their three twenty- something children. At forty-eight, April could still cut a swath across a room in her stylish dresses and heels even though her favorite clothes were still soft blue jeans with pilly old sweaters. April was a confident woman, and it was her goodness that struck people ahead of her presence. Somehow, you just knew this was one good woman who wouldn't entertain anything unseemly.

Including Sonja Macera.

Sonja was already chatting up the company president, a beefy man with a Santa paunch and the charm of thirty snakes, already drunk as a lord and clapping Marvin on the back as if they were long lost pals.

Later in the night, when the band started playing softer music, slower dance songs, Dean said to April, "I feel sorry for the guy, believe it or not. Everyone is avoiding them. He looks lost."

"He looks lost because he is roary-eyed drunk! He's not lost. He is just trying to escape himself."

April knew she was right about this. Laura had shared that Marvin's self-loathing was the hatred between them. He hated himself for all the harm he had caused her and the children, for hurting them all so irrevocably. He'd treated Laura terribly and apologized only when she'd left; I am so sorry I treated you so inhumanely. I know I treated you like an animal. Like a piece of dog shit on my shoe. I am so sorry. I was never a good husband but it wasn't your fault. You were such a good wife. You are the purest person I have ever known.

He'd also said he would always love Laura, and she knew it was true, but, as she told April, that just isn't enough anymore. She didn't want to die there in that drunken sham of a marriage, raising the kids through that was hard enough. Laura said she only wished she had left Marvin sooner.

"Speaking of escapes," April said aloud to Dean, "I need to make one to the ladies room and I wouldn't mind leaving anytime after that. Just let me know when you are ready to go."

The band hadn't played her request yet, but she was tired, and there was still an hour's drive home for them, then driving the sitter home after that.

The washroom was rife with colognes and perfumes, a headiness April was unused to. When April exited the stall she was in, there stood Sonja at the sink, her back reflected in the mirror as she leaned against the counter.

"Why does everyone hate me?" she asked.

"Don't play cute with me," April said. "You know why."

"Laura left Marvin long before I got involved. I didn't take him from her."

"No, you could never do that, that's true," April said. "But you know as well as I do why she had to leave. Then you call her crazy and make crazy motions at her in her own home before you kick her when she is helpless. Does it feel good to be you inside there? I can't imagine being a soulless person like you who spouts religion and God, God, God as if you actually know Him. The only God you know wields a pitchfork."

"You don't understand..." Sonja started.

"No! You don't understand. You crossed a line of love and loyalty of friendship; you committed a crime of assault against Laura for a person who thinks nothing of hurting her and his kids. How could you bring your own children into such a sketchy situation? If I didn't despise the evil you have done to Laura, I might even feel sorry for you. First, her marriage is a sham and then her friendship with you is all false, too. Karma is a bitch, Sonja, and when you meet her, give her my regards and tell her I said thanks."

April grabbed the door handle, the cool brushed steel welcome against her clenching fingers.

"Please...you don't understand... let me tell my side... you don't understand," Sonja plead.

"Your side?! I don't want to hear your side of anything! I don't want to ever understand the kind of evil person who could do what you have done to Laura. You don't even know the meaning of the word 'friend.' You have no idea what 'virtue' and 'conscience' even are or you could never do what you have done to anyone, but especially Laura. She really loved you, and you abused her pure love. How dare you write to her telling her 'she' is of no character value – turn around and look in that mirror if you want to see what a person of no value looks like!"

April was shaking when she stepped back into the ball-room where Dean was smiling her way. "Take me home, my man, I need out of this place right now."

Sonja watched them leaving.

She watched everyone leaving.

They always left.

They never looked back.

She looked over at Marvin sitting with the company president who was asleep, his head on the table. Sonja felt calm again, took a deep breath and started for the table where Marvin sat, too drunk to talk to, too drunk to drive himself home, too broken for any glue to hold him together ever again.

Marvin was different from the rest of the men in her life. She could feel it. Everything was different this time. He just needs the right woman is what she told herself and anyone else who would listen.

Once, after a month long relationship she deemed so intense it warranted a ten-year depression, along with a revolving door of men who routinely dumped her before they even opened the gate, let alone get out of it, she thought she would never feel this intensity again, but here it was with Marvin.

Sonja knew Marvin would never love her the way he loved Laura because he couldn't after what she had done to Laura. He knew she knew what he was and what he had done, too. He even told her that Laura was the purest person he ever knew. She would rather he was able to say that about herself, but she could settle with that the same way she settled with everything else she knew was not good or right about this whole situation.

Sonja knew he really needed her because he had nobody else left who wanted him. Not even Laura.

Marvin really needed her.

And that was enough for her.

She hummed the final bars of the Elton John song to herself ...

How wonderful ...

© Janni Styles

LITTLESOME

Newly opened on Denman Street, the clinic window held two signs, a large one in upper case black letters stating: NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY. Below that, a diminutive red-lettered notice claimed, "New Patients Welcome." Leaving the warmth of early autumn sunshine, I stepped inside and stood, momentarily displaced, blinking away visual sunspots under the cool fluorescent glow of the empty waiting room. Characterless white walls contained the shiny burgundy carpeting and economy grey chairs lined the perimeter of the room, disarmed soldiers keeping watch over a less than hospitable kingdom.

It's only a couple of injections, I told myself, settling on a chair in the corner. Half a dozen glossy magazines were fanned out across the top of a red Formica cube, every one of them at least a year old and none that I would ever buy myself. I pulled a dog-eared travel brochure from my shoulder bag and leafed through the itinerary, excited about visiting places I had only ever seen in pictures. Voices from down the hall grew louder as the young blonde receptionist appeared with an elderly couple in tow.

"See, all that worrying for nothing. It was just a regular mole! Look at that day out there, wouldja? Lucky you two, you get to go out and enjoy it," she said, feigning a pouty bottom lip until she spotted me. "Still, there's work to be done and somebody's gotta do it," she said, her arms sweeping out dramatically and hands coming back in unison to rest on her chest, fingers slightly inward toward herself, amused by her own performance.

I moved to the reception desk, medical card in hand and read her computer generated name tag. Her name was Julie, written in a lower case cursive font with a large gap after the letter 'u.'

"I'm just so glad it turned out to be nothing," the woman said to her husband while donning her sunglasses.

"You just need to have a positive attitude. That way you won't get upset for no reason, right?" Julie said.

"It was worrisome, though. She's had skin cancer before," the man said, taking car keys from the right pocket of his neatly pressed slacks and reaching out with his left hand to gently cup his wife's elbow.

"Well, my aunt really has cancer, she lost both of her breasts and you wouldn't believe what she's going through. Anyway, you've got nothing to worry about so you have yourselves a nice day," Julie called out after the couple, neglectful of the fact that they had already turned their back before she finished speaking. Have you been here before?"

"No, I'm new in the area," I said.

"Where from?" she asked.

The baggy multi-colored scrubs assumed a fashionable edge on her sinewy body that was misleading, a pointed contrast to her unfinished social skills.

"Prince Rupert," I said.

A flicker of forgiveness crossed her face as she took in my obvious sins of straight, graying hair, no make-up and muted shades of clothing. Still, I could never see myself sacrificing books and theatre tickets for tanning studios and French manicures.

"Oh, it's great living here! You'll just love it, it's fabulous," she said.

I did not share the fact that I had lived here with my husband long before we moved to Prince Rupert, before he'd died and my part time job there had no longer sufficed.

"I just need some travel vaccinations," I said.

"How nice for you! A holiday! You're so lucky," she said, ignoring the ringing telephone on her desk to lead me into a medical office down the same hall she had materialized from.

I might have been attending a funeral for all she knew, but she never asked.

"You're going to have such a fabulous time," she said.

My lack of response went unnoticed because she jumped right back in.

"Oh, you will. You'll see! Do you have a work number?" she asked, the forms I'd filled out in still in her hand.

"Yes, it's Kedron Junior School. I seldom use it, and I can't recall it off the top of my head," I said.

"It's okay; I'll get the book out front. So, you're a teacher! Cool!" she said.

"Special Education Assistant," I said.

"Oh."

I looked at her thinking how wasteful it would be to say anything even if I could think what that might be and I sighed, but she wasn't done.

"That must be a wonderful job," she gushed.

"Not so wonderful when your charges have toileting accidents on you or give you a black eye in the process of being restrained from hurting themselves."

I said more than usual about my work and I should have known better. Especially with her.

"Yeah, but it's like, such noble work. That's why I took this job, so I could help people. That makes up for all the other stuff, right?"

She read my confirming nod to myself as acquiescence and that was all it took for her to leave me in peace.

It was hard to understand how Julie was hired after meeting Dr. Peer. Broad shouldered and cosmetic free, her creamy latte skin bore two honest blemishes on her left cheek. With our common denominators of leather clogs and pony-tailed hair, we looked like a couple of old friends and I relaxed into myself again, not minding my freckles, even understanding the waiting room's stark simplicity.

"Where are you going, Kate?" Dr. Peer asked while perusing the contents of a cupboard from which she extracted two tissue ensconced syringes.

"Bangkok. Then Bombay, Luxor, Istanbul and Venice," I said.

This was my first vacation abroad, the tail end of a healing journey. The trip represented both closure and new beginnings for me. I saw no need to tell the doctor any of that.

"I grew up near Bombay," she said.

"I'm looking forward to seeing it. I'm told it's very exotic," I said.

"Yes, it can be. Have you ever had any major health issues?" she asked.

"Not unless you count a lengthy depression," I said.

On her swivel stool, Dr. Peer sat slightly higher than I was in my vinyl chrome legged chair, and she seemed to look down at me, her lucent hazel irises going wayward, both converging her nose exactly like my youngest sisters had before corrective surgery. Until the operation, my sister suffered torment at school for her constant affliction, but our family found it distinctively endearing.

"How long did that depression last?" Dr. Peer asked, her intense gaze restored.

"A couple of years off and on," I said.

Hundreds of nights of tears over learning my husband was dying and then hearing his confession of multiple affairs so that he could die with a clean conscience. Though neither of us was religious, I said he should see a priest but he said it was me he needed to tell. I shuddered, shaking off the tug of bleakness. Seeping into the room between the blind slats, sunlight striped the doctor and myself evenly dark and light.

"Did you take anything for it?"

Dr. Peer tossed the emptied syringes into a waste bin and turned back toward me.

"I was on Zoloft. But I don't need it anymore," I said.

She nodded thoughtfully and I went on.

"Your sign said new patients are welcome. Would you take me as a patient?" I said.

"Certainly. When is the last time you had a physical?" she asked.

"I'm ashamed to say it's been a few years," I said.

I decided against saying that I'd developed an adversity toward doctors when my husband's cancer took so long to diagnose that what was initially operable had become a death sentence.

"Just book an appointment for that when you get back and we'll do your family history then as well."

"Great, thanks," I said, following her out of the room.

The single-minded receptionist had new casualties to convert, a young woman with two small children, one of them crying. The woman held the silent child and both watched Julie lower herself on one knee to make funny faces and noises that the crying child did not find amusing at all.

I hurried past them unnoticed, her insistence appreciated only by those who assimilate everything and everyone into their world of perpetual brightness where even the most fleeting shadows are permitted no rest.

My holiday was booked as a group tour and some of my fellow travelers and I became fast friends, forming the bond of familiarity exclusive to strangers united by circumstance. We could spend time alone if we preferred and I often did, but the sightseeing excursions and most of our meals were shared and someone was always willing to join you if you wanted company on a walk or shopping trip. By the time we reached Bombay, we wore our new roles like veterans.

Sukjit returned to India to claim a lost heritage, traded for a westernization he did not resent, he'd simply never personally explored his birth land, the natural result of his family migration to Canada when he was an infant.

Claiming an aristocratic British lineage and 35 years of wedded bliss, Mr. and Mrs. Henshaw seemed displaced honeymooners among us bargain holidayers. He with his over attentiveness to her every whim, she with her constant reference to him as Daddy.

"How sick is that?" one of three fresh-faced college girls asked on a blistering morning while the Henshaws breakfasted, oblivious, nearby.

Later that day we rode a tired bus through a hilly region of India on a road so narrow the driver steered in, hugging the mountain the whole time. The revolution of the wheels pronounced every pothole with a rattling of metal followed by loud grinding noises that were not at all reassuring.

"What if there is oncoming traffic?" asked a tattooed girl with a pink strip dyed in her long, inky hair.

"Nobody coming. Only one bus every time," the driver said, waving his cell phone as proof of his system of communication.

The girl sat back in her seat, satisfied, and we continued winding our way upward until we reached a tourist viewpoint at the top of a hill, complete with a makeshift refreshment stand. Two women, one in her twenties, the other at least in her seventies, worked together fluently under the shade of a lean-to, passing out drinks, yellow fruit and making change.

My thirst defeated my hygiene concerns, and I warily accepted a paper cup full of warm beige liquid from the older woman. It turned out to be the most divine tea I had ever tasted. It was made from milk stored in ice coolers and a cloth wrapped bundle of aromatic spices, all boiled together on a single jet gas burner.

The old woman nodded and smiled as if she knew every word I spoke.

"Thank you," I said.

"You welcome," she said, flashing a grin of discolored but strong, intact teeth.

"Do you speak English?" I asked.

"Little some," she said, her broadened smile confirming how she'd acquired all the lines in her face.

"It's beautiful here," I said.

"It was better beautiful. My husband die," she said.

I never knew quite what to say to strangers who readily shared personal details and, at first, I said nothing. I watched some of my travel companions snapping photos of one another. Sukjit sat alone on a rock staring out over the regal mountains guarding the winding valleys below, his tears drying under a clarifying sun.

"Loss changes us," I said.

In the end there was only me and my husband, each saying over and over again how much we loved each other, him thanking me between apologies for behaving so foolishly toward the only woman he'd ever truly loved. I turned back to face the old woman.

Her eyes had opened up, radiant white haloes guiding the way to her centre through steady, golden irises. She nodded vigorously and her lavender scarf slipped, exposing the precise centre part in her ashen hair.

"I know you," she said softly.

She reached for my free hand and squeezed, the roughness of her skin pressing against my palm. I inhaled deeply, collecting myself from the unexpected sensation of physical contact and discovered the musky, unfettered fragrance of a woman who had worked hard, suffered long and lived on.

I met her grasp with a firmness I was still growing into and we quietly stared at one another before releasing at exactly the same instant.

Reluctantly, I boarded the bus and we watched one another through the dirt streaked windows until the first bend in the road halted our communion. I descended the mountain with my comrades, bumping along edgeless roads that no longer seemed to matter. Even living out my life alone did not seem such an unwelcome prospect. My fears had succumbed, unable to survive in the thin air up on the mountain.

On my next visit to Dr. Peer's clinic, the New Patients Welcome sign had vanished, along with my annoyance at Julie for her self-appointed mission of forcing everyone into her happy circle. I found myself accepting of her place in the world, even amused by her irrepressible resolve.

As soon as I saw Dr. Peer, I felt an even stronger connection with her than the first time we'd met and I was glad she had agreed to be my physician.

"How was the holiday?" she asked, fastening a blood pressure cuff around my left arm while watching the monitor.

"Exquisite scarcely covers it," I said. "I think I left a piece of myself on a

mountain in India."

"Yes. Holidays do that but daily life soon takes over the memories," Dr. Peer said.

She removed the blood pressure cuff, then stood in front of me to shine a pen-sized light into each of my eyes. Her breath was not entirely unpleasant, simply telling of her strong curry and garlic lunch.

"It's the opposite for me. I'm finding my holiday memories have taken over my daily life," I said, grinning.

Dr. Peer moved to check inside each of my ears and then patted the pillow, motioning for me to lie down.

"Feet in the stirrups," she said, "I will give you some privacy."

Dr. Peer left the room briefly, and by the time she returned, I was in position, privates bared to the cool winds emanating from the air conditioning system in the ceiling.

Moments later, with the doctor concealed behind a modesty shield of blue tissue paper tented over my knees, all I could think was that dentists had it over doctors by far with ceiling televisions installed for distraction.

"Any more episodes of depression?" Dr. Peer asked in the conversational way that doctors do when inspecting your hidden regions.

"No," I said.

"Well, everything is clean down here!" Dr. Peer said, unconcealed surprise registering audibly in her voice.

My body locked involuntarily, rejecting speculum and expelling breath at once. Tendrils of air-conditioned coolness reached into the creases of my body and I shivered.

"Just relax, this will only take a few seconds," she said.

"I can't. I'm sorry," I said.

But I didn't feel sorry. I felt confused. The cool air evaporated quickly against my scorching cheeks, liberating some of the heat emanating from my face and airways, an intense heat I hadn't felt since leaving the Asian continent.

Dr. Peer inserted the speculum, expanded it quickly, and I felt a sharp pinch inside.

"Ouch," I said so quietly into the back of my hand that it sounded like a groan instead of an actual word.

Dr. Peer sharply withdrew the feminine instrument and stood, her eyes glassy conduits for a high-voltage energy that kept me fixed to the table.

"You people are so spoiled here! Back home in my country there is no such thing as depression. Most people have no time for such indulgence! They are too busy to be thinking about anything except getting food. Do you know what we wipe with?"

The question dared an answer I could not get right.

Her hands shot up in an open-palmed, splayed finger motion and I clenched my teeth, awaiting the physical assault.

"This! This is what we use!"

She jabbed high over me, her hands slicing up through the air over her head.

Her hands suddenly moved back down to her side as if remembering their place, and she nodded as if to acknowledge it.

"I'll leave you to dress now. I'll go over your chart and answer any of your questions when I come back," she said.

Clipboard armed, she disappeared through the lone door in the room and I did not make a move until her footsteps receded, completely inaudible.

In my haste to escape the clinic, my normally nimble fingers were disobedient, overlapping one another, and I dropped one of my clogs. I picked it up and exited through a full waiting room of wary onlookers, my barefoot limp remedied only when I was safely outside on the street. I could see Julie; silenced, watching me through the window from her counter inside, and I imagined what kind of positive spin she could possibly invent for a power imbalance. Even so, I knew it would sound flimsy in a court of law: Please understand how vulnerable it feels to be naked with your feet in stirrups...

Walking home swiftly along English Bay, I passed couples strolling together, teenagers, pairs of women and men, some talking, some laughing, most holding hands like the two seniors the age of my parents. The woman carried popcorn, feeding the birds with a sprinkle here and there and I heard my mother's voice playing in my head: clean your plate because kids on the other side of the world have nothing to eat.

I felt bad about it, but it was so far removed from my realm of comprehension that her message only dulled with repetition, and I did not dwell there. A couple my own age walked arm in arm toward me. On reflex of memory, my hand clutched the air to my right, closed in on nothing, and it was all I could do to keep my feet moving.

If our lives had been reversed, I wondered if Dr. Peer would realize we are all hostages of relativity, that I do not hurt any less or mourn any less because I grew up so far away from the shortcomings of her world.

I tried to envision the little girl she was, imagine what her life must have been like but all I could see was the woman, oxygen fueling an unreconciled heart with blood the color of mine.

The sun lowered itself slowly behind the mountains, bringing memories of my wise sister on a distant hill, and I restrained the urge to cry out because I did not know her name.

© Janni Styles

MEN IN THE MOON

A two-by-four cracking across Netta's back when she was vomiting was a hard thing for me to witness. That alone was cruel enough but when she was vomiting because she was pregnant at seventeen in a time and place when our mother couldn't see past the absence of a ring on my sister's finger, it was impossible to forget. Netta folded first to her knees, still clutching the bucket she'd set inside the sink. She pitched sideways after that, the contents of the pail hit the floor ahead of her and she lay there, forming a human Z in a bilious puddle against our red and grey checked oilcloth floor.

"I told you I'll have no more puking in the sink where I wash my dishes!"

Mother railed at Netta even as the emptied tin pail rocked to and fro before completely losing momentum at her feet.

"You've done enough to this family! I can't even go to church anymore. I hope it was worth it, Netta. I never fathomed I'd call my own child a tramp but that's just what you are!"

Our mother bellered those words on her way out of the house to the woods. She didn't even stop for a jacket against the rain. We used to think she went to see our father. Dad keeps a camp shack in the bush where he often stays with his two horses to gather logs he hauls out to the mill for pay. He says he's never seen Mom at the camp save for the once she told us she missed him something awful and went out to visit him while Granny stayed with us at home. Mom only spent the one night because she said there's no electric light to do her stitching by. Dad told us she likely just roams through the woods until she gets all of the 'upset' out of her system.

"It's a good thing you're here to help me, Livvy. Don't cry, there, there," Netta said, an arm slung over me with my bony shoulders pressing into her swelling breasts as I helped her to her feet.

"You didn't deserve that," I said.

"Who's to say what any one deserves? Maybe it's all worked out before we're even born. Don't fret, my sissy, it wasn't as bad as it looked. My mind sparked stars across the back of my eyes and my limbs went doughy as the rising bread I kneaded this morning. I felt like I took a trip to the moon, like there was no gravity at all anymore," she said.

She tried to give a little laugh but you could see it hurt. We maneuvered slowly, her wincing with every step until she collapsed against our maroon chesterfield. I grabbed a quilt from our room and spread it over her before I started mopping up. Netta watched me, telling me over and over, "Sorry, Livvy, I didn't mean to make a mess for you to clean up."
"I know that. But it's okay. Besides, see, I'm nearly done, so you just be quiet and stay still," I said and, as if my words finally had some magical influence, that's exactly what she did.

Netta didn't even shed a tear. She lay there near the wood stove, her face a glistening pearl in the middle of a haphazard fan of golden-brown, wavy hair against our failing chenille. She looked just like a movie star right out of the pictures we went to see when we stayed in town with our aunt who seemed rich to us. We were awed by everything from Aunt Gretchen's indoor flush to the big, fine fridge that she filled up just as fast as we could empty it. Netta told me she was going to live like Aunt Gretchen one day, with an indoor flush and going to the movie house at least once a month.

Only now Netta didn't look much like she was going to go anywhere or do anything, let alone get herself up off the couch ever again. I knelt down and wiped at her face with a cool damp cloth, and Netta seemed to doze off, her breath slow and regular until footsteps on the front porch announced our mother's return.

Mom walked in through the door as if nothing had happened, went over to Netta and ran the smooth back of her hand across Netta's cheek.

"You okay?" Mom asked. Her graying shoulder length hair was rain slicked smooth against her head, a dark helmet of useless protection from her own rage.

Netta didn't answer, not a word. She didn't even flinch.

"Is she okay?" Mom asked, turning to me.

She removed her glasses to wipe the rain drops off, and I watched the same stubby fingers I'd inherited drying the lenses with the tail of her blouse. Mom always appeared so vulnerable to me without her glasses on. It was as if her face was incomplete with no eyes to see properly. I stared at the muddy prints on the floor behind her, some pine needles still stuck to her shoes. Then I looked over at Netta.

"I don't know. She's sleeping, I think," I said.

Mom surveyed the floor where she'd left Netta, spotless now with everything cleared away. Netta stayed quiet, resting under the cozy loft of the quilt I'd covered her with.

"Is she, is the baby -" Mom said this with her eyes turned down, away from Netta.

"She's had no bleeding from down there," I said.

"Thank God," Mom said.

I knew better than to ask if she was thanking God that the baby was still inside Netta or whether she was just glad she hadn't succeeded in killing either one of them.

Netta usually split the kindling to start our morning fire but she was spared certain chores while she convalesced until the bruising across her back faded. They had turned from purple-black shades to pale yellow-greens the day we sat dangling our legs over the edge of the porch skinning corn cobs for supper. Through the screen door, we could hear Mom clinking jars around in the kitchen to can tomatoes harvested from our garden for the winter ahead.

"Netta, come help me – no. Never mind, you stay put," Mom called out.

I glanced at Netta who was calmly picking stubborn corn silk off the front of her dress.

"Do your bruises still hurt?" I asked.

A good six years older than me, Netta often seemed more like a second mother than a sister to me, but I idolized her every move in a way that I did not our mother's. She looked around the yard thoughtfully as if deciding something.

"Not at all," she said, grinning a "sister grin" that told me she was healed.

It crossed my mind to offer to help Mom but that's all. I was content to sit with Netta. Her smile could light up a thousand movie houses just like the stars we saw on the screen at the pictures. I hoped to have a smile half as beautiful by the time I was her age. With my two front teeth trying to point to one another and pimples sprouting everywhere, I was afraid I might always be told how smart I was. Every family we knew seemed to have the beauty and the smart one. Right now, it seemed to me that Netta might be both. There was no need to say I wouldn't tell Mom she was well enough to help. Netta already knew that or she wouldn't have told me in the first place. Besides, I was starting to think maybe she was right about what people deserved all being worked out ahead of time.

When Dad came home from his logging camp, neither one of us told him what had happened but somebody sure must've told him something. He was generally a quiet man, but when he had something to say, it counted. The first morning we all woke up in the house together again, he made an announcement.

"Your Aunt Gretchen needs some help for a while, Netta. Best you pack a bag and go up there to stay a while with her," he said.

His watery blue eyes fixed on Netta's bloating belly the whole time he spoke. Netta naturally raised her hands to put them over her belly and Dad instantly averted his gaze. But her hands stayed still in the uncertain air for exactly two clock ticks before she dropped them back to her sides and nodded. Dad busied himself rolling a cigarette on the kitchen table.

"Livvy, you can help her pack," he said, jerking his head toward our room.

Dad's gentle presence dulled our mother's brittle edges and, although I disliked his cigarette smoke, I adored the way it made him smell. It was a familiar goodness I relied on. I could see the unevenness of his haircut. The last time Mom trimmed it for him she obviously wasn't paying enough attention. His hair was a full inch longer on the right side than the left.

"Can I go to Aunt Gretchen's, too? I'm a good helper," I said.

"Yes, you are. That's why we need you to help your mother with chores around here while Netta's gone. School starts again next week," he said.

He twisted the ends of the cigarette paper with his brown tipped fingers, licked the entire length and lit it with a wooden match.

Our mother kept silent, her stiffly pursed lips aligning with her arms crossed over the bodice of her dress. When I looked toward her, trying to make eye contact, she uncrossed her arms and lifted the teapot off the back of the stove to pour Dad a second cup of tea.

"Well, if you'll only be gone a week, we don't need to pack so much," I said, following Netta into our room. Her eyes beckoned me silent with a look that said she understood something I didn't.

"Netta's done with school. She won't be going back," Dad said, his voice fading though the curtain that served as our door hung open and we could see him and Mom still sitting at the table not ten feet away.

Netta flinched at his additional announcement, shivering the way she did whenever a fly landed on her skin. Everyone knew she loved school and how excited she was about having only one more year to finish. I held Netta's folded flannel nightgown against me while I looked at Mom again but she didn't spout any of the verbals she'd never shied from dishing to people at church or other places about her daughters both finishing school come hell or high water.

"I hope it was all worth it, Netta," Mom said, sipping black tea from her own cup.

I shuddered myself, partly because I never understood how anyone could drink bitter black tea without sugar or milk but Mom could drink it black, with or without sugar or milk. I decided that it must depend on her mood. I had to have milk at least.

We packed Netta's things with the window in our room pushed up wide open and the sheer curtains dancing in sweet clover breezes around us. There wasn't much room to move between our single beds and the two dressers but it was the bigger of the two bedrooms in our house. Many nights we'd stargazed together, hanging shoulders pressed together out that very window with Netta telling me the names of constellations. She said that someday we'd visit the moon and I believed her.

Winter blew in on us with a particular fury I'd never noticed before that year. Dad was home more than he was at camp that winter but it was still lonesome without Netta's bright smile and laughing eyes to temper howling winds that seemed to lick right through the wood and tar paper walls of our little house. By spring, I was sick of canned tomatoes and root vegetables. It was the same food that saw us through every winter but I'd just had enough. My twelfth birthday came and went with the May lilacs and still no sign of Netta.

Near the end of June not long before school let out for summer, Dad drove up to the house in his sputtering truck with a lady sitting on the seat beside him. The lady wore a hat, I could see the outline of it on her head and I figured he'd brought Aunt Gretchen out to the country for a visit.

Mom came out on the porch where I'd been playing with my prized alley collection. She removed her apron and wiped her wet hands dry on it. We stood together watching Dad go to the passenger door to help the lady who carried something in her arms.

"Netta! Netta! Look, it's Netta!" I shrieked.

I charged the truck, forgetting we had three steps down to the ground, splaying all my marbles behind me and not even caring that I might lose my best ones forever to the tall, dark grass underneath the porch.

The baby in her arms was startled by my hollering and gave a little cry of her own. Mom followed me off the porch, her hands working her apron, knotting it up, bunching and releasing, bunching and releasing.

"Do you want to hold her?" Netta asked.

I was too awestruck and shook my head no. I had never held a doll very often much less a real live baby.

"Netta, you look just like a movie star!" I blurted.

"Aunt Gretchen bought me this pretty blue outfit to wear home from the hospital. But I'm just the same old Netta inside here," she said, her smile glowing warmer than the sun on our heads.

She looked so different, so grown up; almost tired looking in the way Mom often was that I could tell she would never be the same old Netta again. Mom stepped close to Netta, passed me her apron and held out her hands to take the baby and Netta placed the soft, ivory bundle in Mom's arms. Tears fell so profusely from both of them that Dad warned, "Careful, you two, those waterworks might drown the baby."

They laughed like he knew they would and Netta said, "Her name is Catherine."

Catherine was the proper name of Mom's mother who had passed on four years ago. She'd gone by "Cassie" all her life except to us, she had always been our darling, doting Granny.

"Oh, my dear Cassie, you are just a heavenly beauty like your Mommy. We'll have to have pictures made now," was all Mom could say.

Netta hugged them both while Dad made two trips to take their things in the house, a brown suitcase and some cardboard boxes tied with string. Aunt Gretchen had sent a cradle for the baby and a box of fresh-baked sweets for us, so Netta made tea while we all settled into one another.

"No milk for me, save the milk for the baby now," Mom said when Netta poured the steaming coppery liquid into our cups.

Something crystallized for me right then over the glittering sugar granules Aunt Gretchen had egg yolked fastly to the cookie tops.

"Me either," I said. "I like it black now, too." Not long after Netta and Cassie came home, a bearded man arrived at our home. He was carrying big leather cases that looked like doctor's bags, but they turned out to hold camera equipment.

He instructed me, Mom and Dad to stand together with the house behind us while Netta sat on a chair holding the baby on her knee in front of us. Dad's hair was trimmed as straight and tidy as if he'd been to the barber that morning. With the steady sun warming us, I began to feel a bit dopey and momentarily envied the baby who dozed peacefully on Netta's lap.

"Wait!" Mom commanded the photographer.

She dug down into the pocket of her best dress, a black and white plaid number with a lace edged collar. She held something shiny out to Netta. The sun glinted off it so sharply that I cupped my hands over my brow to try and make out what it was.

"We bought you a coming home present, too, Henrietta," she said.

I knew it was important because Mom seldom used our full names. She placed a gold ring on Netta's wedding finger and set her hand back on top of the baby's blanket before she let the photographer take any pictures.

In the morning we all went to church together just like we used to before Netta went away. Netta's baby fussed a little but that was fine because all the ladies rushed her, gushing and cooing and that gave Mom a chance to set them all straight.

"Yes, it's good having Netta home with us again. It's so sad her husband got killed at the war. He never even met their little one here. "

I glanced around for Dad, wondering what he would say amid all the moaning and tongue wagging that followed but he was already outside with most of the other men smoking by the cemetery gates. I moved from foot to foot, noticing how even the people who looked like they didn't really believe Mom were all so nice to us anyway.

Beautiful would-be actress that she was, Netta smiled that old sweet smile and gracefully accepted all the attention from the first line of fans she'd ever received.

September found us walking to school together just like we used to. Mom didn't look tired anymore even though she had my niece Cassie to mind all day. Netta and I still talked into the night, tucked safely in our beds, only now we whispered so as not to awaken Cassie who shared our room, her little cradle perched high on Netta's dresser.

I asked Netta one night if I could ask some questions she might take offense to. She laughed that 'sister laugh' I knew so well and said, "For you, anything."

"Are you going to tell Cassie who her father is when she grows up?"

"I might. Or I might just tell her it was the man in the moon. It might as well be for all Stephen cares, running away from us the instant he found out I was pregnant. I don't wish him harm but I'm glad he left and joined the army. At least he'll have one honorable thing to tell his daughter someday."

"Yeah," I said. "Can I ask you one more thing?"

"Sure, Liv. But my eyes are closing down on me fast, I hope I stay awake long enough to answer you," Netta said.

"Was it all worth it?"

"Oh, yes," she said, the thickness of descending sleep noticeably absent from her voice, replaced by a brightness you couldn't see but you could feel there in the dark, brighter than any light.

"Every single bit of it. You might not understand yet, but someday you will."

Every time I looked at Cassie with her clear, trusting eyes and pink, petal-velvet skin, I felt like I already understood something greater than ourselves had happened to the world but I never said so. I was just so glad to have Netta back with everything nice and normal again, it didn't seem important if I understood everything yet or not.

As the leaves continued to turn and fall around us, I brought an armload of wood in one morning to find a length of perfectly good two by four among the chopped logs.

"How did that get in there?" I muttered to myself as I set it aside.

"Olivia," Mom said, halting me as smartly as if I had a brake under her control inside me.

She carefully passed me Cassie, opened the stove and rammed the two by four so hard into the coals that the force vibrated the floorboards beneath our feet. Cassie blissfully slept on in a dreamy star land somewhere close to the moon Netta sang about to her every night.

Nothing was ever mentioned again, even after Netta graduated, got married and expanded her brood by three more. The funny thing is, as hard as you might try, and I know because I most studiously have, the human eye cannot capture so much as a glimmer of that gold band in a single one of those photographs.

© Janni Styles

ONE PART GOOD

On the bus home from her Monday to Friday job at the Vancouver Public Library, Beth often felt anxious, hemmed in by the commuters, strange people pressing against her, people she did not know, their odors and fragrances over riding her own fresh shampoo and soap from her morning shower.

Today she stood between two Asian women, their pretty faces akin to flawless porcelain dolls, their giggles and perfume innocuous but invasive at the same time. On the other side of her stood a khaki clothed man, his lunch box firmly under his arm, his whiskers at least two days old; the stench of stale beer he'd probably drank at lunch wafting down over her, a fine mist of foul breath promising her an unscheduled hair washing again tonight.

She sighed and turned to look at the person standing behind her. All she could see was a set of shoulders higher than the top of her own 5 foot 5 inch tall height and the back of a long black trench coat. Squirming herself around, she resumed her original position until enough riders had exited the bus for her to find a vacant seat.

As the bus exhaled fumes to engage brakes at the next stop, she noticed a handsome guy standing at the bus stop with a guitar case in hand. He boarded the bus and, upon seeing there were no other seats, he jerkily wrangled his guitar down the aisle to avoid hitting passengers with it and then backed himself down into the empty space beside Beth where he stood the guitar between his legs.

After the bus had jolted them to a stop a few more times, Beth had time enough to observe the man up close, his well manicured hands and fresh rain fragrance mingling in her nose with a gentle after shave.

"What kind of guitar do you play?" she asked.

"Classical." The answer was a full stop, no need to elaborate tone of voice.

"Oh! I love classical guitar! My favorites are Andres Segovia, Julian Bream and John Williams. Who are your favorites?"

Beth's excited voice seemed to fill the bus; now quiet passengers all listened to her.

The guitarist looked at her with a renewed respect and answered, half in thought, half in the present.

"All of those you named are brilliant. I tend to lean toward the Pepe Romero and Heitor Villa-Lobos, though. Something about the Spanish elements, I guess." The guitarist let his hands rest in his lap and looked back at Beth. "Are you a musician?"

"No, I work at the Vancouver Public Library. I'm the children's librarian. But I grew up on guitars and always gravitate to classical no matter how many other styles I listen to."

"My name is Gordon, what's yours?" the guitarist asked.

Beth felt her stomach growing all fluttery as she struggled to remove her right hand glove to grasp Gordon's outstretched hand. His hands were a bit cool but solid and signified a man of substance behind them. The crescents on his fingernails were so bright white; the crescent moons surely had stars behind them. She imagined he would be a leisurely lover.

"Beth, my name is Beth," she said breathlessly. Though she knew it was too early for that, she couldn't help herself.

"Pleased to meet you, Beth," Gordon spoke with such a warm voice you knew he truly meant it. He smiled and his teeth were just perfect like the rest of him.

"Likewise," she said. Beth was already imagining kissing him, the taste of his kiss sweet and inviting.

"Are you going to play publicly tonight? Maybe I can hear you play."

Beth saw herself putting the second hair washing of the day on hold to hear a concert in a local church or hall, saw herself applauding and teary at Gordon's immaculate performance.

Gordon laughed and his shining ponytail of gathered golden hair swung around. Beth never liked men with long hair. She liked a short back and sides just as her dad had put it to the barber when she was little, sat in the high barber shop chair next to him watching him get his hair cut. Gordon was different, though, he wasn't her usual taste in men in any way.

"No, I am on my way to a student's home. I teach classical guitar," Gordon said. "Sometimes the students come to my studio, but this one is too young, it's only his second lesson. I'm not sure he's going to stick with it. I think it was more a parental decision than his own choice, but we'll see."

"How wonderful! A classical guitar teacher, that is just terrific!" Beth gushed, the details lost on her already.

Gordon pulled away a bit and put his hands back on the guitar case while he looked at Beth, taking in her long, rain drizzled hair, her cockeyed beret and her matching brown leather blazer and gloves. She had removed her gloves when they shook hands and now held them in her lap, her pale skin with fragile rice paper qualities veiny, almost transparent against the brown leather.

The bus pulled to a stop and a man rose from behind them. You could hear him clumping down the aisle and when he passed them, you could see why. He was limping terribly, his whole body almost twisting with every effort, every single step he made to get himself off the bus.

"I feel so sorry for guys like that," Beth said.

"Why?" Gordon asked.

"Well, I guess... I don't know. I think it's because people judge people too swiftly and some women wouldn't even date a guy like that. They wouldn't even give him a chance."

"And you would?" Gordon said.

A sudden image of a lone sparrow on a sill with an arrow piercing it was quickly shoved aside out of Beth's mind.

"Why, yes. I would. They deserve a chance at happiness, too," Beth said. Her voice was higher than she meant it to be.

"What makes you think they aren't happy?" Gordon asked this in a tight voiced way, a way that seemed more upset than he needed to be.

Beth looked at him, his beautiful face now stony, and his hands whitening under the pressure he was exerting on his hard-shell guitar case. His jeans were soft; the stuff of many washings and Beth longed to be home in her own soft jeans.

"Well, I - I guess I just -" she faltered.

Then, stronger than ever she said, "I guess I just thought about how I would feel and I wouldn't feel very happy in their shoes."

"And you are happy now?" Gordon asked.

Beth felt a switch flip. All the goodness she had built up in her mind about Gordon, all the promises of future joys she had already made if they made it past the first date, all of it evaporated. A broken-winged bird, she carefully put one glove on and then the other.

The bus halted again to let a passenger on and Beth held her breath without knowing why. The passenger, a hefty middle aged man, sat in the empty seat right in front of them and carried on hiccoughing as he had been all the way to sitting.

Gordon said, "Hold your breath and count to 10."

Other passengers suddenly offered their solutions, instant strangers now family united to help a struggling relative: breathe into a lunch bag, sip water while counting to 32. Even Mr. Yesterday Breath chimed in with, Smack'im, that always works for me.

Beth didn't say anything. She removed her gloves again just for something to do and looked out the window, using one of her gloves to rub a little peep hole on the steamed glass. She watched the houses in the neighborhood go by. The pretty house she lived in was divided into six suites and although a little expensive, she had chosen the area for the safety factor; it was one of the better Vancouver neighborhoods.

Gordon reached across Beth – careful not to touch her at all - to pull the bell cord and Beth felt herself curling further inside. She still had no answer for his question. Yet she couldn't help watching when Gordon rose to disembark.

She looked up at his strong back as he stood, the lone passenger in the aisle, shouldering his way down the aisle with the guitar held out in front of him as he limped off the bus, his irregular steps and gait pronounced now that the bus was so quiet, so emptied out.

Beth froze, her gloves dropping to the floor unnoticed. A carousel of words riffed through her mind, unstoppable, Just hold your breath and count to ten...

© Janni Styles

SOMETHING

Awakening to the sound of birds chirping, Nora rolled herself up out of bed and opened the vertical blinds covering the sliding doors to her patio. She smiled at a squirrel scurrying across the patio with his mind intent on something important. He didn't even notice her.

Her handsome neighbor, Hank, sauntered by on the public walking path below her garden, probably on his way to meet another gorgeous gal. She saw the numbers turning over the years and wondered why one of them wasn't good enough for him. Forgetting she was in her night dress, she gave him a big, friendly wave. He didn't even see her. Not many noticed her anymore. She didn't think she would ever get used to that.

One of the lucky ones, her friends said, to keep a sexual attraction about her until she was around sixty -five and disappeared right off the visual radar of the male species. Sexuality gone, though nothing had changed at all inside her; she never stopped wearing lipstick or doing her white shoulder length hair all while telling herself, a girl's gotta take care of herself, even an old girl like me. That didn't stop the resentments from creeping up her throat and out her lips.

"It's hell to get old," was what she told anyone who would listen. "I'm telling you. Just wait 'til you get there. You'll see," she would say to restaurant patrons, perfect strangers she and her children or grandchildren were dining next to.

Ayanna, her helper from the home care agency, ran errands, cleaned or cooked and always tried to say it wasn't that bad. She pointed out Nora's mobility; she could walk wherever she wanted whenever she wanted to. And the independent factor of living alone where Nora did her own laundry and always looked lovely when she got herself ready to go out, even to the doctor. What Ayanna didn't know was the real reason Nora did her own laundry.

Nora refused to have anyone help her with it at all because she didn't want them to see all the accidents she'd had while sleeping or the soiling in her pants when she hadn't made it to the washroom in time.

Still, with an almost royal edge to her image in her double breasted navy blazer over a high- necked ivory cable knit sweater and dark wash jeans with an elastic waist because some things had to give. Wearing a pair of canvas runners in the same navy as her blazer, the soles and neatly tied laces matching her ivory sweater perfectly, one might think, upon sight of her in the grocery store, that she'd just stepped right off her own yacht.

Every day Nora found something to live for, a bird, a baby in a stroller who didn't even care who she was or a squirrel running across her patio. Sometimes when she admired their babies, parents would cast their eyes away, to some middle distance where they just nodded and let her carry on cooing over their child as so many obviously already had. If the baby weren't there, she might have told them to bugger off. But then, if the babies weren't there, she wouldn't be talking to them in the first place. Her worst days were spent lamenting the fact that all she had left to do was die.

"I'm going to die soon, so what does it matter?" she said of anything Ayanna suggested they do.

From her leather wing-backed chair, she pointed her arthritis-gnarled forefinger and warned of old age, as though one had a choice in the matter.

"You'll see. When you get this old, you'll know exactly what I mean. You have to be this old to understand it, so I don't expect you to ever understand me. You could just let me be, though; I don't need to be pestered. You are just the help, after all."

On those quieter days, when Nora lapsed into her 1930's mentality of the help being just "the help," Ayanna would busy herself running errands, scouring the bathrooms or doing some gardening, sweeping off the patio all the dropped petals from the flowers in containers, the little bits of leaf and twig that managed to breeze up on over the stones. She might cook a big pot of soup that kept her in the kitchen most of the day, the aromatics filling her mind as well as the condo, anything to put space between her and Nora.

Eventually, the impasse would be breached by a need of Nora's that she couldn't see to for herself.

"Ayanna! I know you can hear me," Nora would say. "Why aren't you answering me?"

Ayanna, in her medical looking scrubs with little animals or flowers printed all over them would say, "You keep that T.V. volume at 100. How can you expect me to hear anything else from down the hall? It's so loud, maybe it's time to think about getting that hearing aid for you."

"Don't tell me my troubles," Nora would say to Ayanna.

Nora stated repeatedly that she would not ever get a hearing aid because she didn't want to wear anything that made her look old. She'd say it to anyone else who tried telling her the benefits of hearing well again or those who took the liberty of pointing out the positive side of her situation, her independence, where many younger than her eighty-five years were already in care homes.

Once when Nora and Ayanna had been out for lunch, it wound up running on for a few hours because Nora couldn't stop talking, the bi-product of living alone: an inability to exercise manners of equal air time, so starved to talk was Nora. Ayanna did her best to manage this when they were out, but Nora could really stick a fork in things.

"What, you think I can't speak for myself anymore?" Nora would ask right in front of the scurrying busy server she was holding up even further to have this very exchange in public.

"You should be grateful I gave you this job. You should know your place and shut the hell up." Nora said this without regret, remorse or apology. Ayanna just carried on as though no one had even spoken. It was better that way. The more you retorted, the more Nora ramped up her dialogue. Better to let it peter out naturally.

Once, in a restaurant over lunch when Nora was trying to engage a young couple sitting next to them in conversation, Ayanna thought she might have to quit working for Nora altogether.

The young pair of restaurant patrons had indulged Nora at first, their manners undeniable. Then the lad of about 19 with immaculate grooming and short-styled hair began to show signs of discomfort, not wanting Nora to interrupt their lunch anymore, just when it grew equally as apparent he may not have a choice. The girl, about 16, just kept smiling a smile not unlike a Kewpie doll at the fair ground where you aimed darts at balloons to win one cheap prize or another but never could snag enough points for that ever-grinning Kewpie doll.

"Let's go to the grocery store once we finish our lunch," Ayanna said, her voice deflated and so low, it was almost as though she never even spoke.

"Let's do this, let's do that. You think I don't know what you are doing? You think you are smart with that certificate you have but I'm the boss here. I'm the one who gives the orders, Missy, not you." Nora said this as she leaned forward and pointed her index finger at Ayanna, that telling finger warning Ayanna to mind herself or she could lose her job.

Not very good at giving orders, Ayanna was well-schooled in taking them. A high school drop-out, she had attended a Community Caregiver Program and earned her certification but she was tired of working for agencies that charged thirty dollars an hour and paid her only twelve out of it.

"You do whatever you want, I'm going to the washroom," Ayanna said.

She laid her napkin across her plate over the cold fries they insisted on serving with her toasted club sandwich. Artificial potatoes was what she and her family from El Salvador called frozen potatoes of any cut.

"You people are all the same, You come to this country from under a rock pile, you take our money and you want to get away with doing nothing. You get back here. I'm telling you, I'm talking to you. You sit down!"

Nora's voice rose in direct proportion to the distance Ayanna was putting between them.

When Ayanna came out of the washroom Nora wasn't at the table. At first, Ayanna panicked but then she remembered Nora was fine at getting herself a taxi. Once she had wound up in a mall ten miles from home and got so confused – nothing there was familiar to her, she said - the police were called, and Ayanna had to go and fetch her.

Today Nora was outside the door of the restaurant sitting on a bench admiring hyacinths, tulips and narcissus overflowing the flower beds next to the cars in the parking lot.

"Look! Look how pretty all those flowers are!" Nora said this as though nothing had happened between them at all.

And, really, in Nora's book of life nothing had happened between them.

Ayanna waited until Nora was ready to get up. Then she held out her elbow for Nora to take her arm and the two walked past the flowers toward the parked cars where Ayanna had parked Nora's car, the car she was no longer allowed to drive herself.

"Ayanna, would you move in with me?"

Nora asked this as Ayanna helped her into the car, the heady fragrance of White Doves perfume fluttering past her from Nora's coat and hair.

"I don't know. I never thought about it," Ayanna said honestly.

"Well, you'd make a hell of a lot more money and I need somebody like you. I don't want to go into one of those places for old people. That's not my crowd at all."

"I know," Ayanna said.

It was true. Nora thought of herself as much younger and when a man in his seventies tried to flirt with her once at the donut shop where Ayanna had left her to wait while she ran errands and shopped, she took great offense and sent him packing. Who does he think he is? I don't go for old guys like that, and he's too old for me anyway. The truth was she didn't go for guys at all anymore. She was, as she herself put it so often, well past all that.

"Let me think about it, okay?" Ayanna said this with her head turned to see what was behind as she backed them out of the parking space.

"You've got pretty hands," Nora said, her eyes watching Ayanna's slender hands on the leather bound steering wheel. "I wish I could still drive. I hate the way my life is going."

"I know," Ayanna said again. Ayanna worried about her own parents still living in El Salvador with little to get by on. She tried to send them money every month but sometimes there just wasn't anything left after her rent and bills.

"It's a good offer. I stand by my word and I'll pay you half what I'm paying the agency every month, $2,000 cash and your room and food are all in. What do you say?"

Nora looked out the window at the passing buildings. The world was changing so much and she was tired of all the changing, changing, changing.

Why couldn't things ever just stay the same?

"How about we try it for a month? That should give us an idea if this will work or not. I don't know what I'll say to the agency, though, I've worked for them so many years now," Ayanna wheeled the car left at the intersection, turning toward what might become her new home.

"Don't say anything. They don't need to know all your business. Just tell them you are not available for them for a while. That way, if you really can't stand me, you can always go back to this way of doing things," Nora said.

"The hardest thing about growing old is you don't grow stupid along with it, you tend to wisen up in many ways you wish you'd had under your belt when you were younger," Nora's voice trailed and then suddenly bounded back.

"Look at that girl over there, all dressed up in high heels and tight jeans in the middle of the day!"

Ayanna didn't bother looking anymore; she knew Nora would find something to say about anything.

"Look, look! They nearly got in an accident over there for looking at her! Nobody notices me anymore," Nora said.

"I do," Ayanna said, softly, "I notice you."

"Well you are the only one then. Men don't notice me anymore. My own kids and grandkids don't notice me," Nora said. "Even the squirrels don't give me a second glance anymore whether I have a handful of peanuts for them or not. You wait and see. Everybody stops noticing you when you get old."

In the quiet pause before Nora spoke again, Ayanna inhaled the warmed leather smell from the seats they occupied and wished the traffic around her would stop pressing her to go faster.

"When I was young, I was really something."

Nora said this with an ache in her voice that Ayanna felt between them in the car and that made her wish she knew what would help Nora feel better.

"I was really something."

Nora fiddled with the band on her ivory leather hand bag, one of five she had insisted on buying when the handbag store held a clearance event. You'll never use five purses, you already own about twenty, Ayanna said that day. I don't care, Nora said, I want them and I can afford them.

"You are still really something," Ayanna said. Her own short dark hair was looking a bit shaggy she noted in the mirror and she glanced at Nora's always perfectly done shoulder length hair style.

Her eyes went to Nora's lap where Nora's aged knobby fingers were working a spot off her new ivory handbag.

"Yeah? You really think so...," Nora's voice trailed, and then, "you are just saying that to be nice. I know you."

Ayanna drove on, quiet and thoughtful.

"Well, even if you don't really mean it, that's awfully nice of you to try to make me feel better," Nora said.

"I do mean it. I hope when I am your age, I am as strong as you are and able to live on my own like you do. You are really something."

"Well, I'll take it," Nora said. "it's more than I get from the squirrels."

Her laugh was contagious and Ayanna couldn't help joining in.

"Oh, we do have some good laughs, don't we," Nora said. She chuckled to herself as Ayanna wheeled the car into the drive way. Home now, Ayanna held the car door open for Nora who always grew quiet when the day drew to a close. Trees heavy limbed with spring blossoms draped over the car snowing soft pink petals everywhere. Masses of tiny petals caught in Nora's snowy white hair giving her the appearance of an innocent, an elder fairie with her crystal blue eyes lost in some thought or other. She didn't even hear Ayanna answer.

"We sure do," Ayanna said, "we sure do."

© Janni Styles

TWO CENTS WORTH

"Well, that's just great. On top of everything else, the bloody stamps are gone up again."

Barbara says this as she digs in her purse, her neatly clipped white fingernails scrounging around against the cloth lining for two pennies she may have dropped in her handbag during the pressured haste of a Shop Mart check-out line.

"There now," she said, a tad smugly, "if they want their jeezly two cents they can have it. There's my two cents worth."

She taped the pennies to the envelope next to the stamp, both neatly in perfect alignment together beside the flat red maple leaf stamp.

Shelly pressed the toast plunger down, then walked over to the kitchen table and looked down at the envelope. The bouquet of lilacs in the centre of the table wafted her way along with the tantalizing aroma of bread warming in the toaster.

"It'll probably screw up the postal machines, you know, Mom."

Her mother sat up, straight as a board ready for combat and nearly shouted, "I don't give a good goddamn if it screws up the postal system forever. That'll teach the buggers to stop putting the price up every time a person turns around!"

Shelly snickered and Barbara continued after taking a sip of tea from her china mug with peach colored roses all the way around it. Peach, Shelly read in a magazine last week, is the color of 'harmony.'

"It's not funny you know. That smirk'll be on the other side of your head some day when you realize how this world operates. Between the post office and the Russians we're all going to hell on a handcart."

Barbara was growing louder and louder

"What do the Russians have to do with anything?"

Shelly asked this as she absentmindedly spread peanut butter on her toast, licking her fingers. She wanted to lick the knife, too, but she knew Barbara would yell at her for it. Startled at the sound of her mother's hand hitting the kitchen table behind her, Shelly dropped the knife, and it clattered loudly against the yellow stoneware plate.

"The weather, Sweet Baby Jesus, are you blind as well as ignorant? Just since you were born can't you see how wet and gloomy and dark the summers have got and how much colder the winters have got? We never had snow before like we had last winter. Not here on the coast. Back home, yes, Lord! The things I could tell you about walking on top of snowdrifts away up over the telephone wires. You kids don't know how good you got it."

Smiling to herself, Shelly left the kitchen, heading down the hall toward her bedroom. Her mother probably wouldn't notice that she was ranting to herself for a while, and when she did, the silly feeling of discovering she was talking to herself would drive her down the hall to say," I thought you was still standing there. Why don't you let a person know when you're gonta' leave a room? Did I ever feel foolish talking to myself! It's a good thing nobody come in the

house."

Then she'd laugh and go back down the hall way to do whatever she was doing before the rant started.

It was easy to laugh here in the safety of home. Nothing seemed out of place to Shelly here among the vinyl sticky-back papered coffee table and different colored carpet in every room. Here, it never seemed like anything was out of line.

It was only when she went to a friend's house and saw the tidy order, the coordinating curtains and wallpaper that picked up the tone of the sofa, the same color carpet throughout the house and the decorator cushions placed just so at each end of the sofa; it was only then that Shelly began to feel any difference.

What was acceptable behavior at home was not acceptable elsewhere, no more acceptable than the fake brick wall paper stuck between the counters and the cupboards would be. Mrs. Gibson was proud of her handiwork, showed off her touches to anyone who walked in, just the same way she displayed herself before the world with no regard for protocol, probably no idea what it was.

Shelly loved her mother, who seemed to have no idea her behavior could embarrass anyone, much less herself; she really was oblivious and couldn't comprehend why anyone wouldn't think as she did, see the world her way. Even when Shelly protested aloud how much she dreaded public outings with her mother, it hadn't changed a thing.

If one of these unannounced fits started in public, it could go on forever. If she saw she had captured a bent ear or two, Mrs. Gibson could carry on for ages, and there was no escaping her in public. Shelly would just "yes, mother" her, hoping it would end before they ran into one of her friends from school, whom Mrs. Gibson would waste no time "enlightening" with her definitive opinions and world findings.

The friend would smile much like Shelly did at home, amused by the banter, but Shelly would be mortified, keeping her back to both of them as if it wasn't really happening while wishing it never had. She used to try to stop her mother but that only seemed to make her worse, escalating her volume to convince people she was right.

You couldn't escape her ranting and raving. Shelly told herself one day she might be used to it. She didn't see that day coming anytime soon but she could recall once or twice when her mother didn't say much at all.

Shelly didn't know it was normal to bleed from "down there" at a certain stage of life. No one had discussed menstruation with her, so how could she have known? The school did provide scant information in health class, but by then it was far too late for Shelly.

When it initially happened, she panicked, thinking she would get a spanking for it since it was, like most things she didn't understand these days, her own fault in some way.

Shelly hid the menses bloodied and awkwardly folded toilet tissues as long as she could. She hadn't counted on some of them falling out of her underpants on the second day. It happened early in the morning after she had risen to get ready for school and was hurrying downstairs to the bathroom.

As she bounced down the steps, the tissue worked itself down one leg of her pajamas, fell at her feet and promptly rolled to the bottom step, only four steps away from her now. Right at that same moment, her mother walked by.

"What's that from?" she asked casually, apparently thinking it was probably just another nosebleed. Shelly couldn't think at all or she might have grasped that and jumped on it.

Instead, Shelly colored red with fear and embarrassment, red as the blood on the tissue and she burst into tears. Luckily, somehow, her mother did not seem angry. She dropped her hands from her hips and stared at Shelly. Then she nodded to herself.

"Oh. You've started that already have you. Another one of us with this Godforsaken curse, just what the world needs. Lumped up Christ, will the suffering never end?"

Shelly's mom stood there for a few seconds, a mighty sigh emitting slowly from her well endowed chest as she carried on with whatever she was doing before this proclamation.

Over her shoulder, she called out, "Your father can take you to the store later to get a box of pads."

At first, Shelly kept on crying, she hadn't really heard her mother but when the words registered, she experienced a mild form of shock. It was a miracle from God! It had to be.

She would not be verbally attacked this time. It really was nothing but a miracle! She didn't care that she had no idea what was wrong with her; she just couldn't believe her luck. Shelly didn't even have to go to school that day because her father, who worked steady nights, got up and took her to the store.

A shift worker at the cardboard carton plant, Eldon mostly worked graveyards for the extra fifty cents an hour. Shelly's dad was a quiet sort who rounded out her mom's noise with some welcome balance. He didn't say much, he just liked to play his guitar and sing whenever the notion struck him.

Shelly loved those musical times. Their mom would even fall silent as the family gathered in the kitchen to listen to him play and sing his country songs.

One of Shelly's favorite family memories was of her little sister, pressing her head against the guitar while standing between their dad's legs. Shelly had to kneel if she wanted to do that (her surprise sister was born when Shelly was already ten years old) and sometimes, she still did. Usually, she just watched her little sister listening to the magic that left you feeling as though all the answers to all the problems in the world lived inside that guitar.

Her dad had a quirky way of grinning sideways at you when he was teasing you about something. The day he took her to the store for pads, he wasn't grinning. He was very quiet, very serious, and yet so gentle, it was like watching a bull moose behave like a gentle wee lamb.

There, in his khaki green work shirt and trousers, he bought a white elastic belt with two garters on it as well as a box of pads. He even explained how to use everything to Shelly before he paid for them, both of them standing right there in the aisle on the worn wood floor of the Nelsonton General Store. It was as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and nobody should ever have to feel bleeding from your privates was a bad thing at all.

Shelly kept quiet, rapt as she watched her father's big, kind hands moving through the air, showing her the way. She read the word on the square blue box with a picture of a little white pad, and one of her mother's words came back to her: pads. So this was what she meant. A box of pads with gauzy strands on each end, clean white mini mattress pads a person could use for doll beds. That is, if a person were still so inclined.

When they got home, Shelly took the things her father had bought into the bathroom and put them on, following the picture directions on the box along with what her dad had said. He must have seen someone put these on because he had told her to hold it between her legs while she fastened each gauzy end to the tiny metal teeth on the elastic garter ends.

It certainly felt better than a wad of rough tissue balled up between her legs, chafing her skin, but even so, she hoped she wouldn't bleed forever. How could she go swimming and what about gym days in school? Showering with the period wouldn't be any fun at all.

The bleeding subsided two days later, and she thought that it must have been another miracle from God, until her cousin slept over for the weekend.

Cousin Myrna was filled with all kinds of tidbits about Shelly's experience. She said that it would happen every month for the rest of her life. She knew, she said, because she had started having her monthlies two years ago.

"Why didn't you tell me about it?" Shelly asked, feeling let down that her favorite cousin hadn't shared this.

"I thought you knew." Myrna said this so matter of factly that Shelly knew it was the truth.

Myrna said monthlies meant that you could have babies and boys would be more interested in you now, because you were a "woman." She also said that it wouldn't be long now before Shelly would have to start wearing a bra because her boobs were going to get bigger than they were now just like Myrna's had.

Shelly nearly started to cry at all of this. Just when she thought God had answered all of her prayers, next thing you knew she had to start worrying about having a baby and getting big boobs. She had thought that only adult women could have babies so this really scared her. She was only twelve, well, almost thirteen, but if this was what it meant to grow up she wanted to stop.

It wasn't until much later, when she was much older, that Shelly could look back on such things as her mother's two cents worth with a distance that muted the realities enough to accept them for what they were, just life moving forward. Life, however it was for everyone in their own homes with their own people, it was all just life moving forward.

© Janni Styles

WINGLESS

Get out of there, you little ditch pig!

My boss, a stout forty- something woman squawked this so that every passenger outside the bustling metropolitan airport glanced over to see what she was talking about.

Laughing seemed the only thing to do, but in hindsight, I am left with a longing to rewind, to replay and undo that otherwise sunny day. A little girl with pale yellow corn silk hair looked up to see me laughing, and her smile vanished, her head hung low. How rotten I felt to see that I did that to a little child. I looked away, and then looked back at my boss's daughter.

The child had solemnly climbed out of the open ground area she had been playing in, the only place there was any real earth to be had underfoot, a few sprigs of grass doing a bad comb-over on a patch of dirt between the outdoor benches and the building. It was hardly the place you might find a child at play.

Oblivious to the busy flow of people coming and going, the child was humming and singing to herself. She had a doll she was talking to, a long, slender doll that she was already being programmed to grow up like. My heart was sore from wanting to lift the child's head, take back my laugh, but there was nothing for it.

My nerves got the better of me as they are wont to do when I find myself in prickly situations. My words fail me, so I blurt a laugh and hope the tension release is global; or at least in the immediate group of people around me.

That day I could hear a couple of passing sniggers but nothing that eased the discomfit of waiting a couple of more hours with my boss and her daughter for their flight to visit relatives in the east.

Cleaning I was good at; I could clean a house from tip to stern, that's why I was hired by my boss when she opened her cleaning company. Kids were a different story. Growing up an only child does that to you. You tend to do most things alone.

If I had really wanted to, I could probably have feigned a headache and left. But my boss Rosemary was the kind of woman who liked to have company, someone with her all the time. She came from a big family of 13 kids.

Until today in giving them a lift to the airport, I had never really been in a position to notice how my boss related to her children. The delay in the flight caused a whole new set of problems for me that I never saw coming. The headache would have been so much simpler; had I known.

"What the hell do you think you are laughing at?"

Rosemary took a long drag off her cigarette without moving her eyes away from my face. In my peripheral vision, I could see her daughter's shoulders bunch up and then relax, relieved the question wasn't fired off at her.

"I don't know. I really don't."

I said this because it was the truth. It was just nerves in motion. I looked around for something serious to take my mind off the fact that this level of scrutiny was making me all the more nervous, making me want to laugh again just as I did in church or any other place requiring quiet reverence. I adjusted my sunglasses on my nose and looked at the plane flying so low overhead, I felt like I could touch the metal underbelly at one point.

"Well, when you've had kids yourself, you can laugh. This is my third one and trust me, I know what I'm dealing with in my own kids," Rosemary said.

Silence would have been a welcome option, but the roar of a jet taking off gave us none. I watched the jet stream and wondered if I might still fake a headache to get away from my boss. The trouble was, she said she would pay me for the entire day, even though I'd only worked a half day before driving them to the airport.

It's cheaper for me than airport parking for three weeks, Rosemary had said.

"Melody, come here. You have dirt smeared all over your face from farting around over there." My boss said this to her daughter while stubbing out her cigarette under the toe of one of her flip-flops while extracting a tissue from her pocket.

Dressed for a long flight of seven hours, the mother and daughter looked like the poster children for mother/daughter outfits, or at least a page out of the Sears Catalogue. Their matching shorts and top sets, in navy blue with a tiny white flower print, looked like T-shirt cotton and would be so easy to nap and travel in.

"It's okay, Gigi," she glanced my way as she wiped the dirt off her daughter's nose. "You don't have to wait; I'll pay you for the day anyway."

That was it. How could I leave now?

I never understood kindness. Just accepting kindness wasn't enough in my culture from the Philippines. In my mind, you would be no better than the common thief if you just took something for nothing.

"Maybe I'll just wait since it's too late to start a job now," I said.

"Sure, whatever you want. Why don't you go grab us a coffee, then?"

Rosemary had just lit another cigarette. There was no smoking inside the airport. Actually there was no smoking within a certain zone outside the airport doors, but Rosemary straddled the parallel of the two regions, her bottom planted on the edge of a giant concrete planter over which the sign was posted on the outside wall of the airport.

"Can I come, can I come?" Melody skipped over by my side and grabbed my hand, holding fastly though I wasn't sure Rosemary would approve.

"Sure, why not. It'll give me the last break I'll get from you for three weeks."

Rosemary inhaled long and looked out over the parking lot, absentmindedly, already gone on her mini vacation.

Melody was a good kid; she didn't cry or whine or do any of those things that some annoying children do. On the drive to the airport, she had spent the entire 45 minutes amusing herself with her dolls and toys and singing songs. She even asked us to sing along, but Rosemary said she didn't feel like it and I didn't know any of those nursery rhymes. I only know nursery rhymes from the Philippines, so I couldn't do much about that.

"Where are your kids?"

Melody asked this gaily as we walked through crowds of travelers, some returning home with the look of the party being over written all over their faces, others setting off for their break away, the coconut suntan cream already applied, fragrancing the air around us.

"I don't have any kids," I said.

This statement left me feeling both grateful and a bit sorrowful at once. I decided I would run with grateful.

"When are you going to get some?"

Melody asked this as if she were asking when I would next eat, her innocence so endearing that I grasped her hand tighter lest any child snatchers be lurking among us.

"I don't think I will have any children now," I said.

"Why not?" came the straight up curious answer.

"Well, I don't know. I think I am too old," I said.

"Well, how old are ya?" Melody questioned me as though she would be able to figure out if there were a better life plan for me, and I felt myself warming to her more and more.

"I am going to be 38 in six months." I said this to Melody with a weight in my voice I knew she wouldn't catch, my inward heaved sigh of never knowing if I might even wind up with a partner or not.

"Hey! That's cool! You are 37 and a half and I am seven and a half!" Melody giggled, happy we had something in common.

"Would you like a pop or juice or something?"

Standing beside me at the counter, Melody scrunched her nose at me and said, "My mom doesn't like me to have pop. She says it wrecks your teeth. But if you gave it to me, it might be okay. When things are gifts we have to be polite and just say thank you."

In that moment, I smiled so broadly, I felt sure my face would crack. Melody's way of working things out in the world was so simple, and yet, here I was, an adult, not knowing from one moment to the next how to negotiate my world.

"I'm hungry," Melody said. "Can I have a girl cheese sandwich, too?"

"You mean grilled cheese?" I asked Melody.

"No, I mean girl cheese. It's better than boy cheese!"

She giggled, and I couldn't help joining in. The elderly server behind the news-stand counter told Melody, "Sorry, we don't have sandwiches here. You have to go to the restaurant for that."

"Oh," was all Melody said.

I ordered two coffees and one orange soda pop. We carried the drinks back to the place where we'd left Rosemary, who was pacing up and down the sidewalk, her purse clutched tightly to her chest, her smoking so incessant she barely inhaled before she exhaled.

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

"I'm just so afraid they're going to lose our luggage. It always happens to me," she said.

"Oh, I don't think you need to worry about that," I told her. "The airlines are very organized and that doesn't happen as much as people think it does."

"You don't travel much, do you?"

Rosemary drank from the tall paper cup for what seemed a long while. I thought surely the coffee was too hot for that, but she didn't seem to mind at all.

I didn't answer her question because it was useless. She knew I had only ever travelled from the Philippines to Canada when I was able to get a work permit. Then I had run full out learning English – the little I arrived with was not enough to live here – finding a room to rent in a nice home and finding a job had taken up my time.

"What's in that cup, Melody?"

We could all see the bright orange soda making its way up the clear straw to Melody who stopped drinking long enough to say it was a gift.

"A gift! You little asshole. You did that to me once today already," Rosemary said.

"Oh my goodness! You call your child names like that, I - ,"

Rosemary's sharp glance shut me down. Her visor cap was bright pink with an opening for her pony-tail at the back and it swung toward me as she did, dangling over her right shoulder, the dyed red curls just resting there, waiting to unscrew.

"How many times do I have to tell you, you don't have any kids so you have no idea what goes into raising them. Don't you dare go telling me how to raise my own kids. They are MY kids. I'll do as I like with them."

Rosemary's voice was shrill, and I regretted sorely not feigning a headache because I could feel one coming on that might last three weeks.

Melody didn't even flinch; she just finished her orange soda, carried the empty cup to the waste basket and resumed a skipping and hopping routine as though she were playing hopscotch with an invisible map.

The next day, well after they arrived in British Columbia, my phone rang interrupting my daily horoscope reading. Not one to follow anything much, I enjoyed reading the astrology pages to see if they actually rang true. Rosemary was a Virgo. Virgo's were having the worst day of all the signs today, a fact that might have given me some pleasure if I were so inclined, but I feared the karmic elements of wishing others ill if I don't want that for myself.

"It's me," Rosemary said. "They lost our luggage. Can you go to the house and pick up the stuff I asked Eric to pack up for us? I need you to courier it to me because Eric is leaving on a business trip and doesn't have time."

"Sure," I said, "I'm nearly finished at the Warren's, so I'll do that on lunch."

"Thanks," Rosemary said, and I could hear her leaving, ready to hang up.

"Rosemary!" I nearly yelled into the phone, surprising myself a little.

"Whaa – what?"

"Nothing," I said and instantly felt foolish for thinking it okay even to ask how Melody was doing.

In the way the universe dekes out of giving some people more of what they don't deserve and others less of what they do, Melody's voice broke through, she was asking Rosemary if she could say hi to me.

"Hi there, Melody. Did you like the flight to your Uncle Rob's house?" I asked.

"It was okay. I forgot to bring my bear in the car, and I can't sleep good now," she said.

"I know. I found him, so I will put him in the package I send to your Mom today, don't worry," I said.

Rosemary was already roaring in the background, telling Melody to hurry up because that was long distance on her uncle's phone and who did she think was going to pay for her to play on the phone? It was always amazing to me to see how people who seemed the toughest had the nicest, most resilient kids.

"You better go," I said. "Have fun with your cousins."

I was feeling sorry for Melody and didn't want her to get into any more trouble with her mother.

"It's okay, my mom always says stuff. I just ignore her most of the time. Dad says it's not good to pay too much attention when she goes off on us or it just makes it worse."

I was still chortling to myself when I hung up the phone, feeling so out of my depth that I didn't even grasp until then that Melody was already so used to such things in her world.

© Janni Styles

~ PICTURE STORY ~

Everything in my life has a back story. I believe this is true for all of us sharing this big old earth of ours. If I took the time to write all the magical and coincidental things that have happened to me, I would have little time left for sleep or anything else.

I know pictures are usually not present in an adult work but something compelled me to include line drawings of certain photographs in this collection. The pictures I chose to share in this work are from places and times in life when just a mere suggestion of a new road ahead meant changing course and carrying on toward new life, new breath and new loves.

Sometimes in life very little is needed to awaken us to a new way of being in the world; the power of suggestion can be very strong. Just as in real life, suggestions often lead us through dark valleys, rough waters or dense forests to the fading distance of an ever changing hopeful horizon that is ever beckoning to our souls.

~

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J.T. Styles (Janni) lives on the west coast of Canada where she never laments the rainfall on what some dub the "wet coast." To her, it just means more writing or reading time. A survivor of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) who lives with Polymyalgia Rheumatica and Fibromyalgia, Janni has won awards for her poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She loves dogs, nature, lightning storms, reading, writing, many genres of music, and kind, just and gentle people.

