Ellen in Pieces Read Online Free PDF Page A

an hour.
    “This way,” Sean said, striking off ahead of her. “It’s faster.”
    “Would you say you’re generally a happy person?” Ellen asked.
    “I’m really happy,” he said, coughing.
    “That’s so comforting to know. One of my daughters gets low. Because of her father. Of course she blames me. Takes it out on me.”
    He pointed deeper into the trees where he had rigged up a tarp, green to camouflage it. “There’s my pad.”
    “Can I?” she asked, and he gestured for her to go ahead.
    Ellen bent and peered inside the plastic shelter where Yolanda had probably lost her virginity and gained more experience than she’d counted on. Butane camping stove, sleeping bag, mildewed paperbacks. Some things in garbage bags—but the rest damp looking and not very clean.
    “Cozy,” she said, though already she was fretting about his cough. This was a rain forest. What he really needed was to dry out. And the other thing—she’d been avoiding thinking about it, trying not to notice how often he wormed a finger through the dreadlocks to scratch his scalp.
    As he sauntered ahead of her in the tree-dappled light, a songcame to her. A song about a forest boy with shy, sad eyes. An enchanted boy. Her mother used to sing it when Ellen was a little girl.
    “Is there a place you can shower?” she asked.
    Nature Boy.
    “The pool’s too expensive,” he told her. “I found a shower in one of the science buildings. Then, last time? I got caught.”
    He lifted one arm and sniffed. “Sorry.”
    S OME people have it figured out, but there’s no shortage of schlemiels either. Back at the car, a sixty-dollar parking ticket decorated Ellen’s windshield. Plus twenty for Sean.
    “You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “You’re letting me use your shower.”
    She stuffed the bill into the pocket of his T-shirt, over one weak, rattling lung. “We have to stop for some bananas on the way.”
    “No problemo.”
    You can never go back home. Well,
she
wasn’t. So it wouldn’t be the same story twice. Different people, different story. Maybe a happier ending this time. Maybe a perfect one.
    What would Yolanda say when she got back from her exam? Ellen would deal with that after she made some calls. She was going to phone a few old friends and see if anyone had an empty cabin. He could chop wood, do some construction. He was probably strong when he wasn’t sick. Or he could teach juggling at the Waldorf School. Almost everyone had a cabin out back on Cordova Island, or a shack they’d lived in while they built their permanent place.
    A lot of people still owed Ellen. They owed her for the oats they let Larry sprinkle in their beds.

2
POPPYCOCK
    N ow Ellen was alone in the North Vancouver house, blessedly alone at first, then lonely. Yolanda and Sean and little Eli, Ellen’s grandson, had been living on Cordova Island for the past four years. Ellen, a grandmother to a five-year-old? Maybe she’d dreamed it.
    Once a month now, instead of every six weeks, she made her pilgrimage to Tony’s salon so he could camouflage the years.
    Briefly, Mimi had moved back in, making teeny-mouth all day long, that sour, lip-pursing expression that drove Ellen mad. In fact, mother and daughter so irritated each other that in the end Mimi had packed herself off to Toronto, which was, she claimed, “As far away as I can get.”
    “There’s Antarctica,” Ellen had muttered, only to be ambushed by guilt.
    Alone again.
    So Ellen decided to sell the house. Sell just as soon as she unloaded her twenty-plus years of crap. Already she’d given up on boxes and garbage bags, the pretense of logical sorting. The morningher father called, she was ruthlessly heaping everything to one side of the rec room, as though to douse it all with kerosene. Her wedding pictures, for example. Into the pile they went.
    The phone rang and Ellen emerged from the crawl space like a miner from an underground shaft and ran for it.
    “It’s me, your