Marry or Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

was close to tears. “So, I just took the bus. I’m down by the airport. Oh, Sharla. I’ve been wanting . . .”
    Sharla made no reply. She rummaged in her lap for the lip balm. What was she doing? She wanted more tissues; she was pointing at the box, exasperated. She thought Francie worked there. She didn’t know her. She thought she was an aide.
    Francie passed her the box. “Well, it’s good, it’s good to see you again.” She would go a little way into what she had planned to say, she decided. Just to have it said, whether Sharla made any sense of it or not. “Because you mean a lot to me.” What kind of a half-assed thing was that to say? Was that what she had been preparing all these weeks? “You always have. Sharla, I know I was . . . you know I—I was . . .”
    Sharla was chewing her lips on the inside and staring at a flagpole out the window.

    Francie kept still for a while and then she sighed. “Well, I’ll come another time.” She got off the bed. “Is that all right? I will, I’ll come again, if it’s all right.”
    What was that sound? Did Sharla sigh too? She had reached out and taken Francie’s wrist. She held it lightly, in fingers from which the plumpness, the flesh itself, was gone. To Francie it was like having her wrist taken in chopsticks. But the hand gently pulled her. Relief flooded Francie and she bent close, to lay her cheek on Sharla’s.
    â€œKiller,” Sharla whispered.
    Â 
    ALL THE WAY home on the bus she had a pain over her eye. Back in the kitchen, with the pain still making her half sick, she talked to Rafael. He said he had friends coming over and he didn’t know why he was the one who always had to make the cake. He meant his girlfriend Tonya was coming, but Francie didn’t argue; she kept it short so he wouldn’t look at her hands shaking.
    Twenty people were coming—everybody from the house, the neighbors, Tom’s partners—to pro cess, as Dale put it, through the duplex and bless it. This was Dale’s plan. She got the idea from Georgette, who was newly out of the penitentiary and said she was a Chinook. Dale had candles and feathers, she had a smudge pot, a big bowl of sage leaves to be burnt as Patrick and Georgette performed the blessing.
    Dale and Patrick were going to break their rule and give everybody except the ones in AA a glass of champagne, including Rafael. Francie happened to know that alcohol was nothing new to Rafael. He was only fifteen but he was living by himself over the garage, where he had taken care of his mother Paloma after she got too sick for her job at the prison and then too sick to
work in the halfway house. “Look in the trash,” Paloma had whispered to Francie. “Beer cans.”
    Kids drank beer. Francie knew that; it was Dale and Patrick who didn’t know it. They always said Rafael was Paloma all over again, but lately Francie could see that more than just his mother’s nature had gone to make up his. Until recently, tall as he was, he had been a little boy. In Francie’s brief time there he had gone from a stick-limbed kid she could boss around and buy T-shirts for and even bundle into her lap with his feet dangling to the possessor of a place on the basketball team and a girlfriend two years ahead of him in school. He had grown another three inches. He would roll his eyes if you talked to him. Tom told him where to put the extension ladder and he slammed it down somewhere else. He bounced the ball so hard on the siding it left scuff marks. He screamed at the refs on TV.
    Francie had made promises to Paloma: that she would watch over Rafael, be the next best thing to a mother to him. Make sure he graduated. Make sure he kept up his art. Keep an eye on his girlfriend.
    Tonya came over every day. Dale and Patrick didn’t know what you could be up to at that age.
    As she was getting the cake out of the oven,