Because They Wanted To: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

on Sunday morning. Robin introduced the children. The oldest boy’s name was Andy and the little one was Eric. The baby was Penny. The boys looked at Elise gingerly, as if she might do anything.
    Elise left feeling strange about the arrangement. She was glad she had a job, but she didn’t like having to wait for money. The family on the porch registered her departure. The little girl crouched and stared up at her as if from the bottom of a pit.
    She went back to the flat she was sharing with a guy named Mark. She had not known him until four weeks ago. He was the friend of a girl in Seattle named Wren, and when she told him that Wren had given her his address, he let her in. He was a pale, exhausted twenty-five-year-old with an air of affable ruin. He offered her a cup of tea. They sat together in the living room and talked while he sewed leather patches onto his jeans with dental floss. He told her he had come to Vancouver to stop using heroin and to recover from romantic disappointment. He sewed very deliberately, as if each fine, repetitive movement replenished his faith in the bodily truth of his existence. He told Elise that his roommate had gone to London for the summer; she could stay in his room. She had been sleeping there since then. The sour, musty little mattress was covered by a faded flannel sheet with blue sheep on it. Instead of a blanket, there was a heavy pink curtain that she slept under. Once she got used to it, she’d come to like its exaggerated scratchiness.
    She found Mark in the kitchen, drinking tea out of a flowered china cup and reading an article about an actress who had been a porn star at the age of twelve. She told him about the baby-sitting job, the abusive husband and the no money at first.
    “It sounds fucked up,” said Mark cautiously. His face had the abstract look of someone who has just categorized something and then quickly stepped away from it.
    “I think she’s just freaked out,” said Elise.
    “I guess she would be.” Mark scratched his stomach and blinked at the sunlight trembling on the table.
    For some reason, this conversation made her more determined to make the job work. She lay in bed that night, imagining herself going to the apartment every day, playing with the children and caring for them. She imagined greeting Robin as she came home from work with that tremulous smile on her face, her shoulders drooping as she stooped to take off her shoes. They would form a team. Elise would save money. Years later, Robin would still write to her to tell her how the kids were doing. Elise lay awake under the curtain all night, thinking these thoughts and listening to people walk up and down outside the window. Every now and then, one of them would yell terrible abuse, and she would strain to hear it.
    In the morning she had some of Mark’s bread and cheese for breakfast, along with olives snuck from an old jar, and left to baby-sit. There were only a few people on the street; they seemed random yet deeply set in their private purposes. Two men with big blunt faces walked along drinking beers and talking about how some ridiculous awful thing that was always happening had happened again. “Pop goes the weasel!” said one. “Yeah, pop goes the weasel,” said the other. A pretty, peevish young man in a dress and a wig swiftly padded along in his stockinged feet, his tiger-striped pumps and matching purse in one hand. A middle-aged woman carrying three heavy bags pressed forward as if she had decided that no other direction was allowed.
    The front porch of Robin’s apartment building was bare except for a child’s red plastic bucket with some dirty water and a dead gold-fish in it. Robin let her in, greeting her as if they were both already far away in some happy future. The two boys, however, were sitting at a rickety table eating bowls of cereal, and the baby was sitting up on the bed, flailing its tiny fists at the present. The older boy, Andy, stopped his spoon in midair