Promise Not to Tell: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

rank-smelling weeds as it would’ve been in Mimi’s day.)
    Try as I might, I couldn’t reconcile my mild-mannered, peace-loving mother with the maniac they were describing. I tried to picture her foaming at the mouth, shooting fire from her fingertips.
    “Since the fire,” Gabriel explained, “she’s been on a downward spiral, lashing out at everyone around her.”
    Ho-Ho-Ho.
    When they were through describing the latest details of my mother’s steadily declining condition, I told them my plans. I had taken a three-week emergency leave from Lakeview Elementary in Seattle, where I worked as a school nurse. Speaking to them as if addressing the school board, I explained how, in the next weeks, I would, with their assistance, assess my mother’s situation and come up with a plan for long-term care, which meant, more than likely, getting her placed in a nursing home (and possibly fitting her with a muzzle—a suggestion I didn’t mention). I’ll admit that I sounded like a social worker, not like a daughter, but in a way, that’s how I felt. This was my responsibility, and I intended to fulfill it—but I hadn’t really been a daughter since I left home at seventeen.
    Gabriel and Raven nodded at me, satisfied with my plan, with my level-headedness. They were pleased, although perhaps slightly puzzled, with how very well I seemed to be taking things. But wasn’t that my job? Wasn’t that what they’d called me in for? To do what they knew needed to be done, but hesitated to do themselves. It would be me who made the final decision to lock up my mother, to take away all her freedoms for what I would tell her was her own good. Neither of them wanted that on their conscience. And who could blame them? They set me up to be the bad guy, the villainous prodigal daughter, and I fell right into it, as if it were a role I was born to play.
     
     
     
    I TOLD YOU , D OE , I don’t want her here.” My mother’s five-foot-two, ninety-pound frame occupied her doorway, rocking back on her heels, then rolling forward to stand on her tiptoes. Back and forth she moved like some hypnotic snake, trying to make herself look bigger. I stepped back, giving my mother some distance, half expecting her to let out a hiss.
    Raven sighed, putting a hand to her forehead. “I’m Raven, Jean. Doe’s daughter. And this is your daughter, Kate.”
    “I know who she is!” my mother spat, shifting her gaze from Raven to me. “I know who you are!” She was leaning forward when she said it. Spittle sprayed my face. Her hands hung at her sides like oversized white paws, odd and useless. Raven and Gabriel were right. I was in no way prepared for this. There was a fire in my mother’s eyes I’d never seen. I took another step back.
    “Well, Kate’s staying. She’s going to stay with you in your house.”
    “This is not my house.”
    Raven tried another tack.
    “Jean, where’s Magpie?” She opened her shoulder bag and retrieved a can of StarKist tuna. The muscles in my mother’s face loosened and she gave a half smile.
    “Inside. She must be inside. Under the closet. Inside the bed. Magpie! Here, Miss Magpie! Breakfast!” My mother turned and walked inside, calling to the cat. Raven nodded at me, and we followed my mother into the cabin.
    I had seen my mother’s tiny house for the first time during my last brief visit two years before. She was just adding the finishing touches, the trim and moldings, after building the whole thing herself. There had been a few more residents at New Hope then, and they helped raise the framed walls and roof. Opal and some friends dug the pit for the outhouse. But other than that, it was my mother’s project. The four-room cabin was built by her own seventy-year-old hands almost entirely from donated and salvaged materials. It seemed to me then, as she took me on my first tour of the place, to be more a work of art than a home. She proudly showed me the built-in shelves, the flooring from an old silo