Catch Me When I Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

will be able to read beyond the title—the text was all blurry because of whatever went wrong in the printing process.
    I checked out St. Catharines online. Found apartments for rent, greenhouses to work at, and a local college with extensive horticulture and agribusiness programs. I’m picturing myself growing plump and juicy vegetables. Organically. I’ve been thinking about Oma’s ingenious ways of warding off bugs, slugs, and worms in her vegetable garden with blender concoctions of eggshells and plantings of stinky flowers nearby. Most of her methods worked. But not for the cabbage worms. Maybe that’s what I’ll do with my life—find an organic way to control cabbage worms.
    I take off my coat and unwrap a Caramilk bar. Two hundred and seventy-three calories, the package reads. I rewrap it, stow it in my knapsack, and fold my wool cardigan more tightly around me. It’s one that Oma knitted when I was in high school, pale yellowy-green, the colour of a new seedling.

You in Your Small Corner
    THE SECRET ROILED in Eustace DeHond’s stomach along with the forkfuls of meat he was forcing down. “Pass the gravy,” his mother said. She had mashed the heaping mound of potatoes on her plate and now spooned a lake of thick brown goo over them. She was fatter since the gunshot, eating heaps of comfort food though the bullet had missed her by two metres. Now she was round in the middle, like Humpty Dumpty, her stomach jutting out so far she had to sit back from the table. That’s how Naomi would look in a few months. Maybe more than a few—he was vague about the pace of pregnancy in humans, knew more about hogs and Holsteins than women in that department. Would Naomi stay enormous after the baby? He would be eighteen with a shapeless manatee of a wife. And a kid.
    He felt too young to marry her. Though he did love her. Was astounded that she wanted him. Useless Eustace.
    But love was an uneasy thing. The ground it created shifted; it was dependent on appetite and circumstance and emotion. What kind of life could he provide for them? Something as simple as the barbed-wire fences he built around their pastures wobbled and curved without his dad’s help to keep them straight. And his dad would be no help. What did he know about parenting?
    His folks would be furious. Unwilling to accept Naomi. Full of recrimination. He imagined his mother’s wrath. “Filthy. What you did was dirty.” He meant to stay on the righteous path. He thought it would be clearer—the choices he would have to make. Like an actual path, where you can see the split ahead.
    When he kissed Naomi, blindfolded, in a game at Stephanie’s party, he was amazed—the petal-soft lips, her breath on his cheek, the musky smell of her. It had just happened, that first time. They slipped out of the house and into the field. Out of their clothes and into the marvel of each other’s flesh. The second time—his memory was murky. They had been drinking, lemon vodka for her, beer for him, in the back seat of the abandoned Dodge in their bush. Afterwards she had vomited in the wild rose hedge along the road while he patted her shoulder and pulled burrs from her hair. Now when he passed rose bushes, the sweet, heady scent triggered nausea.
    He wished he had waited, at least till he went to town and bought condoms. People on TV had sex without getting pregnant. But then, most of them lived in cities where you could get condoms in a minute. He had to plan, to connive. Told his mom he wanted to come along to get groceries because he needed some things for a school project. “Tell me what you need. You stay and help your dad.” “I’d rather get it myself.” “What do you need that I can’t get for you? Is it those girly magazines?” If only he had made do with magazines.
    His mom was watching him now, a peculiar look on her face. Wariness, maybe. She’d worn that