Bone Dance Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Earl’s dead.” Her fingers trembled. She gripped the edges of thin letter paper. Francine’s smile dropped like a stone in dark water.
    Alex took a deep breath. She thought about Grandpa. She got silver-white flashes of the park that January night, of running through the snow, of the ambulance outside Grandpa’s apartment block.
    A second deep breath. Her mother pulling her intoher arms. “Your grandfather is dead,” she whispered. A simple statement.
Your grandfather is dead.
    A third breath. Earl McKay was her father.
    A fourth breath. Quietly, with wonder, she said, “Last night I dreamed about him dying.”
    â€œHow?” said Francine, who didn’t appear to have heard what she had just said. “What does the letter say, Jeanette?”
    Mom folded and unfolded the letter. Finally, she tucked it in her pocket. “That he died of pneumonia.”
    â€œPah!” Francine exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “If I know Earl McKay, there’s more to it than that.”
    â€œMore to what? Mom? What’s going on?”
    â€œI can’t believe you still haven’t told her,” Auntie Francine said with a kind of low, helpless rage. “You have a ridiculous attitude toward him, Jeanette. And you always have.”
    Alex’s mom just stood, unanswering, perfectly composed, her Dene bones, her rich silken skin, her black hair pulled back with a four-directions beaded hair clip, her ears glinting with silver and turquoise earrings. “Always a lady, just like her mother,” Grandpa used to say.
    Francine grabbed up her sweater and coat and her car keys and said, “You’re not going to read it to me, are you. If you want to be so stubborn and carry your pain around like it’s some goddamn jewel, well, go ahead.” Then she left. She was always leaving. Making abrupt exits. Her way of coping. But she always came back.
    Alex said, “What haven’t you told me, Mom?”
    Her father was “a catastrophe,” according to Auntie Francine. A series of catastrophes drove him away from home, away from them. First, he’s laid off from his construction job. Next, he gambles away the rent money in a poker game. She is born three days later during the middle of a howling blizzard. When Grandpa discovers catastrophe number two and shames her father by covering the rent money, he comes one more time to the hospital to see her and her mom. Then he takes off. A few months later family friends say they’ve seen him up in Edmonton. “At least then your mother knew he was alive,” said Francine, “not like some cat that didn’t come home because it went out and got run down by a bus.”
    Sometimes she thought he was a criminal. Sometimes she thought he was an ordinary man. Most times she thought he was a coward. Still, she had longed for those letters. Hoarded them, kept them perfectly in the shiny wooden box, memorized them.
    The, afternoon snowlight outside the window was brighter than bright. It hurt the eyes. The sky burned blue straight up to the heavens. Beyond that, the cosmos, the darkness of space. But down here, on planet earth, another winter day.
    Mom looked out the window. Her eyes suddenly teared up. “Every letter he ever sent you,” she said carefully, “you’ve kept like a sacred thing.”
    â€œMom, that’s all I ever had of him.”
    She turned to look at Alex. “Exactly.”
    â€œWhat kind of an answer is that? I was six years old when I got his first letter. Mom, I could barelyread. You could have kept it from me. But you didn’t. You gave it to me. You read it to me.” And you allowed me to get sick with excitement, she thought, but she would never say it. There are some things you should not say out loud.
    â€œAlex, he could never stick to anything for long. I’ve told you this before. But he loved you… in his own way.”
    She had one