Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

Highway 10?” her father asked. “I saw him on the phone once. In the office.”
    “I think he’s a partner or something,” Marion said.
    Her father pushed his plate away and took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. When his head was shaking as much as it was tonight, he didn’t light his cigarettes in his mouth. He held the match under the end until the paper and tobacco caught ontheir own. “Used to be a Shell station,” he said, putting the cigarette between his lips and taking a deep drag.
    “Oh, that’s right,” she said.
    “Jack Kreutziger owned it,” he said.
    She nodded.
    “Before that,” he said, “there were the Diehls. Then before that, now this is going back, it was a restaurant. I remember you could buy two thick slices of roast beef, a mountain of mashed potatoes and a side order of fresh peas for a dollar forty-nine.”
    “A dollar forty-nine,” she marvelled.
    “Yes, sir,” he said.
    She could have told him everything—this burst of conversation was him putting out the welcome mat, doing his best to be both mother and father to her. Instead she stood up and began clearing the table. It wasn’t that she thought he’d be mad or even particularly worried about her, that had never been the issue. Her mother might have had something to say about an Italian Catholic who drove a red convertible and wore gold jewellery, but all Marion could imagine her father saying was, “You should bring him around for supper.”
    Still, she didn’t tell him, and although she was touched by what he was trying to do, and she was afraid he’d go away thinking he couldn’t get through to her, it was John she felt guilty about. Ever since Christmas, John had been badgering her to give him an exact date when she intended to introduce him to her father. “Not until the end of February,” was what she said at first, February second being the day her mother died. Now that it was almost the middle of February, she was thinking she’d better wait until after her brother’s wedding in April.
    “If you’re playing games with me …,” John said, shaking his head.
    “You can come around the day after the wedding,” she said. “April twenty-third.”
    “I mean, if you’re trying to tell me something …,” he said.
    Lately he was accusing her of having hidden motives. When she got her hair cut short he said she did it to get back at him for flirting with the French girl who worked in his store.
    “I didn’t know you flirted with her,” she said.
    “I don’t!” he shouted.
    He accused her of thinking that selling shoes was low class. Otherwise, he said, if she’d wanted to work in a store, she’d have come to
him
for a job.
    “But it’s better for our relationship if I’m not your employee,” she said. “Besides, I really love animals.”
    “I hate you working there,” he said. “That old bag’s poisoning your mind.”
    She let that go because it was probably true. Despite John saying “I don’t want to hear about it,” she couldn’t resist repeating Mrs. Hodgson’s grisly stories, usually to his enthralled sisters when he was in another room, but he always seemed to walk in and catch the worst part. He said she did it on purpose, as another way of torturing him. She kissed his clenched fist. She blamed his paranoia on herself, on the secrecy she was forcing him to live in. And her guilt was compounded by a misgiving that there was no real reason not to introduce him to her father, that there had never been any reason. This suspicion, and the prospect of losing him, gave her some troubled moments, although not so many that she moved up the April twenty-third date.
    What moved the date up was something else altogether. The last Tuesday in March she arrived home early to do the ironing, and her father was waiting for her with a snapshot of a fat woman who seemed to be laughing her head off.
    “Her name’s Grace Inkpen,” he said. “She’s coming here Friday to spend a few