Any Bitter Thing Read Online Free PDF

original home, to drink and suffer for a mysterious and necessary period of time before joining up again with his true life. The house unwound whenever Mr. Blanchard went away, no arrête, arrête from Mariette’s mother as he raged around the kitchen knocking pots off the stove. Then, any random midnight, back he’d come, unwashed and unrepentant, blatting in French. Fish talk, Mrs. Blanchard always called it, you save that talk for your fish. I covered Mariette with my body as we snuggled in her attic bed, listening to the commotion, the loud complaints and Mrs. Blanchard’s famished pleading, non, non, les petits. Les p’tits , les p tits , is how she said it, meaning us, cowering in the attic, and the baby brothers on the second floor hiding in the closet with the dog.
    Tais-toi! The children will hear!
    Then, sometimes—not often—a sound that could have been shoe parts slapped into their buckets, but wasn’t—followed by a death-white silence.
    After a couple of weeks, off he went again, making the long drive along the river to the sea, leaving a wake of relief. Mrs. Blanchard brisked about her kitchen as if God himself had appeared in the night and scrubbed another layer of weight from her bird-bones body.
    I kept these things to myself, afraid I’d be forbidden to go back there.
    I liked Mr. Blanchard sober. Loosed-limbed and good-looking, he acted out the parts in stories he loved to tell in his zesty New Brunswick accent, mostly about hauntings in his childhood home back in Shediac. Violence hummed just beneath the surface of these tales, which pinned us, thrilled and pie-eyed, against the backs of our chairs with our mouths agape.
    “Stop it, Ray,” Mrs. Blanchard admonished him, “you give them the nightmares.”
    “That’s how we tell stories up home,” he snapped. “You want them to stay babies?” Mrs. Blanchard’s people were from Sherbrooke, Quebec, a different strain altogether. Her sisters, with their urgent sit-sit-sit accents, tended toward stories of predictable temptations followed by the joy of redemption.
    Pauline, the oldest sister, was there on this day I’m thinking of, not long before Mr. Blanchard vanished for good. A warm night, first night of my ninth summer; Mr. Blanchard had his shirtsleeves rolled above his knotted forearms. He called all his wife’s sisters “my girl,” even Pauline. Mariette and I liked her best. Unmarried, she felt it necessary to advertise, accompanying her tight jeansand pullovers with high heels and lipstick even in daytime. The other sisters were too busy chasing babies to interest us much.
    “That’s quite the caboose you carrying ’round, my girl” Mr. Blanchard said to Pauline.
    “Go catch some fish, Ray,” she retorted, swinging the caboose in question down on one of Mrs. Blanchard’s kitchen chairs. She had sheathed herself in white shorts and an electric blue tank top with black piping; her brunette hair had turned platinum overnight, cut straight at the jawline like the singers in ABBA . “Make yourself useful for a change.”
    He laughed then—a clammy, slow-moving chortle that always made me feel funny. Mariette went silent, then laughed along with him. Then I did.
    “I can make myself useful, my girl,” he said. “Say when”
    “You watch yourself, Raymond,” Pauline said, her rouged lips slicked into a grim line. Her skinny heels dug into the linoleum. “The Levesque girls don’t take shit from the like of you.”
    Then he made that laugh again, and Mrs. Blanchard told him to stop it or else. “Is that a threat?” Mr. Blanchard asked, still laughing, squeezing Mrs. Blanchard’s tiny face between his big thumb and fingers. “Is that a threat from the Levesque girls?” This he said in French. Then he gave his wife a long, embarrassing kiss, and clomped upstairs to take a nap before heading out to sea come night.
    I did not know—had no way of knowing, since I lived with a celibate man whose idea of a party was to