Cherry Bites Read Online Free PDF

have never been an ambitious person. I just liked going to school. History was what interested me in high school, recent history, so that’s what I ended up studying. After I’d gotten my bachelor’s degree I just kept on going till I had a master’s and then my Ph.D. It could have been Henry’s influence. He was my first real boyfriend and a history nut. We talked a lot about wanting to understand what went before, getting down to the actual reasons that led men and women to do the things that they did.
    As a fifth-generation Canadian on Murray’s side I wanted to know why men like my great-great-grandfather left Armagh to come to such a strange and stormy land. Was his Irish life so terrible? Or was it restlessness? And what about my great-great-grandmother? Was it love that made her follow? Duty? How hard did she fight against the plan? Or was it she who grew restive? How could anyone be so brave and strong and naive? Yeah, I know: famine in the old country, promise of land in the new. But still. I feel so far removed from anyone who could have set out on such an adventure.
    That I come from such stock is a source of pride for me. I wonder what they pictured as they clung to the ship’s rail and peered out over the dark waves. How different were their dreams from what awaited them on the distant shore? Quite different, I’ll bet.
    It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Pete on one of those ships. I was physically stronger than my brother, but he was a tough little guy in his way.
    He was slight and very pale. It didn’t take much to flatten him. He was one of those kids who went to the doctor once a week to get needles because he was allergic to so many things: dust, cats, tomatoes, strawberries, nuts, pollen. It seemed to go on for years, that desensitization process. Maybe that’s why needles were so easy for him to take in later years.
    During grades one to six he missed many weeks of school with one childhood disease after another. He got chicken pox, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, all the things that young kids got. Nora fussed, of course, but supposed it was just as well he contracted them early on. She wished I had come down with them at the same time, to get it all over with at once, but apparently I had an immune system like Mighty Mouse.
    Pete’s strength came out in other ways. For instance, he wasn’t afraid to take a dare. I thought of it as toughness at the time, but as I look back now, I see it could have been foolhardiness, not giving a hoot.
    He stole from Norbridge Pharmacy all the time, with his friends Ralph and Timmy egging him on. He insisted on going in alone.
    “Hi, Mr. Fisher,” he said, as he pocketed a small bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. He was in grade four by this time.
    “Hello, Pete,” said Mr. Fisher, one of the pharmacists.
    He didn’t call my brother by his nickname; no adults did. They thought it was disgraceful.
    “What can I do for you today?”
    “Nothing, thanks. I’m just browsing,” Pete said.
    Sometimes he sat at the counter drinking a chocolate milkshake, thin and frothy, reading Superman comics. Mr. Fisher always gave him the silver container that the milkshake was made in, with the extra bit to top it off. He liked Pete, didn’t have a clue about the Evening in Paris or the pen set or whatever contraband he had hidden in his parka pocket. And he didn’t seem to mind that my brother returned the comics to the stand, never buying one. Pete did pay for the milkshake, of course, just twenty-five cents in those days.
    He wrapped up the perfume—it was close to Christmas—and put it on his teacher’s desk. That wasn’t even part of the dare. He liked to take things a little further.
    His teacher was Miss Pratt, the same one who had turned me in and watched gleefully as I got the strap. No one liked her.
    He used one of the tags Nora had bought to attach to Christmas presents. On it he wrote:
    in morning light
your eyes are like the sky
from Mr. Dupont
    It