A Hard Witching Read Online Free PDF Page A

open, so we stripped down to our underwear, though Max, for some reason, retained his socks.
    “Max,” I said, losing patience, “you can’t be Aunt Cherry.”
    We went through this argument nearly every time, but on this day we had something new to fight over: an old wide-brimmed hat, mauve with a veil and yellow roses and a wide satin ribbon along the crown. It must have belonged to Aunt Cherry, we knew. It couldn’t possibly have been our grandmother’s. Max clutched it against his bare chest.
    “Max,” I said, pulling at the hat, “let go. You’re a boy. This is a girl’s hat. See? Do you want to look like a girl?”
    Max tugged, his face set in that bullish look.
    “Okay,” I said, letting go and crossing my arms, “go ahead. Make a fool of yourself.”
    Max jammed the hat down on his head and pranced around on the tips of his toes, lifting his knees high, his long legs absurdly white. “I’m Aunt Cherry,” he said in a ridiculous falsetto. “Look at me.”
    “Max,” I said, snatching the hat away, “don’t be stupid.” I took these play-actings seriously, and for the first time I realized that to Max they were only games, nothing more. I realized that, to him, Aunt Cherry was no one, a photograph in an album. She might as well have been on the moon.
    “Who can I be, then?” he said.
    “You can be …” I considered, not without an element of animosity. “You can be Uncle Aloetius.”
    Max stared at me, appalled. “He’s
dead.”
    “Well, who do you want to be?” I snapped. “You can’t be Aunt Cherry.”
    “What’s going on up here?”
    Our grandmother had appeared in the doorway silently, as she often did.
    I touched the brim of the hat guiltily, was about to say, “Nothing,” when Max piped up, “She wants to be Aunt Cherry. She wishes she was her.” And then he added, though I’d never said this, “She wishes Aunt Cherry was our grandma.” And he laughed, pleased with his joke.
    “Shut up, Max,” I said.
    He scowled at me. “You shut up.”
    Grandma looked slowly from one of us to the other, and I noticed she was wearing lipstick and her good dress—dark blue chiffon with a tiny white stripe and a full, swishing skirt—though we weren’t expecting any relatives until the next day.
    I wanted to say, “You look nice.” She did, but at that moment I could not have said anything of the kind. There wassomething in her face very close to hurt. Or I thought there was, though maybe I just imagined it was there. Hurt was so unlike her. And for a second, for the first time in our lives, I hated Max, hated him so much that sweat broke out all over my body.
    I thought Grandma might be angry, that she might punish us both. It was possible; so much that was strange had happened in the past few days.
    But she just turned to leave, her skirt swirling out behind her. “Don’t wreck that hat,” was all she said, though at the stairs she added, “And for God’s sake, don’t let your grandfather hear you.”
VII
    Though Grandma had offered to pick her up at the airport in Medicine Hat, Aunt Cherry insisted on renting a car and driving herself the hundred or so miles. This seemed perfectly right to me, that she would return to Uncle Aloetius the same way she had left (or, at least, the same way I’d imagined she had left): on her own.
    When Grandma told him, Grandpa simply snorted and flipped a page of the newspaper he was reading. We were sitting in the living room waiting for Aunt Cherry to arrive. On the coffee table stood a glass bowl of late summer flowers—larkspur and calendula and marigold—that I had picked that afternoon in honour of Aunt Cherry’s arrival.
    We all sat there, Max and I grudgingly at either end of the chesterfield (we had not spoken since the fight of the previous day), Grandpa and Grandma in their chairs by the window.
    “Why don’t you two go pick saskatoons out back,” Grandma said finally. “We’ll have them with some ice cream. When Aunt