Apricot brandy Read Online Free PDF

stood looking out through the screen door. Dad’s view.
    As a child, most of Karen’s visits down here didn’t bring her inside. She would trot down across the acres in the late afternoon, important and pleased with her errand, admiring the gold light on the swelling plums. She would knock at the screen door and call, “Daddy! Mom says dinner is in one hour exactly.”
    From inside, his preoccupied, cheery voice. “Okay, Punkin! I’ll be up!”
    What had happened in those years that came after? Those years when he would step out of this shed and go up to find his daughter? She shoved open the screen door, stepped out, and let it clap shut behind her. And stood there looking up towards the house. You could just see the tops of Dad’s prized brandy-trees in the back yard, the peaches and apricots under which his daughter lay reading. Because Dad, after the door banged, always stood looking for a moment, didn’t he? Because there was always that uncertain interval between the far, tiny door-noise and the miniature engine-growl that followed it.
    Yes, she was sure he had stood here, eyes probing that green skyline for her, for that faraway long-ago girl. Stood staring here and thinking… what? Could she ever know? Perhaps, if she could, it would kill her to know it. That brutal shit! He had murdered her heart here, buried it here so many years ago. Now all that she had was his sickness, but none of his reasons.
    She snatched open the screen and slammed it wildly three times back against the shed wall, as if she could shatter it. Then she went back into the shed and flung herself down into Dad’s big tattered leather armchair bought at some yard sale before Karen’s birth. At first she thought she was going to root through his books and papers, search there for some fragments of his thoughts, but she found she had eyes only for the brandy cannon.
    It was a long-spouted two-gallon jug of thick faceted glass, notched to rest on an axle between two wheels of carved wood. The neck of the spout was wreathed with an almost indecipherably fine-cut design, something with perhaps a dragon in it. It was filled only and always— filled now— with Dad’s own hundred-proof apricot brandy.
    Karen reached and plucked out the glass stopper. A gust of Dad’s breath stung her eyes and nose, soft and stunning, a vaporous smack in the face. For an instant his huge weight crushed down on her again, smothered her smallness in that sweet stink of poisoned apricot.
    “You really messed with me, didn’t you, Cannon?” Her voice was breaking, hot tears were sliding down her cheeks. “You shot me full of holes.” This was what she had come here to face. Right here. To hell with logic, resolutions. This was the demon she had come here to wrestle.
    No less than three dusty glasses stood near. She plucked the least sticky one, polished it on the tail of her Pendleton. She pressed the cannon’s muzzle down and poured it— a generous tumbler-sized glass— full of gold. And she took it down in a breath, in three long golden gulps.

V
    “I’m heading home now, Dr. Harst— okay?” Fiona Billings, his clerk, poked her head into the morgue. Looking up from the dead Pakistani he was working on, Dr. Harst beamed her a look of kindly dismay.
    “My goodness, Fiona, it’s after six! You should have left an hour ago. Phil and Jed are long gone.”
    Plump Fiona scowled her pleased scowl. “Well, shame on them, then, with all this work you’ve got in.” Last night a van of Pakistanis had hit a tree and four were now residents of the morgue. When Harst and Marty Carver had arrived after midnight with Jack’s body, the Pakistanis were just being brought in. “At least you’ve got three of your reports typed up now, Doctor,” she said. She worked from the tapes he made while performing the post-mortems.
    “Fiona,” he said, “you’re an angel.” Meaning it, too, feeling, with a rush of sentiment, how long and faithfully she’d worked for