The Home Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

red geraniums scattering into the ashes. He opened and closed his two good hands on his knees but even that did not ease the hunger inside him.
    The Torrenses left Tantello soon after the accident. The townspeople let the family go without ceremony fearful that an appearance of support might jeopardize others’ jobs at the mill.
    The Torrenses left their furniture to sell for the rent they owed (for they never caught up from the week Kathleen threw Harold’s pay into the creek) and took their clothing and what else could be stowed in the car besides the five children.
    Mrs Torrens drove with Harold’s useless heavily bandaged hand beside her.
    She did in effect become his right hand.
    The work they ultimately found in the city was cleaning a factory in two shifts a day, early morning and late afternoon.
    Harold learned to wield a broom holding the handle in the crook of his right arm and Kathleen worked beside him picking up the rubbish he missed.
    After some practice he was proficient and she could work independently so that they sometimes had time to sit on an upturned box and eat their sandwiches together Harold laying his on his knee between bites and holding his mug of tea with his left hand.
    The rages of Mrs Torrens subsided with the help of medication from a public hospital not far from where they lived.
    During these times Mrs Torrens’s blue eyes dulled and her beautiful red hair straightened and she moved slowly and heavily with no life in her step or on her face.
    She looked like a lot of the women in Tantello.
    The little Torrenses did very well which would have amazed the people of Tantello if they had followed their fortunes in professions and trades.
    Mrs Torrens was in her fifties when she died from a heart attack and Harold made his home with the second daughter Rachel who was a nurse educator in a big hospital with a flat of her own.
    It was Aileen who won some modest fame in the rag trade.
    She started sweeping floors and picking up pins and scraps of cloth then graduated to more important things.
    When she was a beautiful young woman nearing thirty she was designing her own materials and having them made up into styles she created.
    Long pursued by a colleague who designed and cut clothes for men she eventually married him and he agreed to her whim to drive through Tantello while on their honeymoon.
    â€œDid you live here?” he said standing with her near the little grey house with the small square verandah now with all the railings missing and the roof on one side dipping dangerously over a tank tilted dangerously too from the half rotted tank stand.
    She stood near a clump of red geraniums cold and proud and still as Kathleen stood outside the mill the day Harold lost his fingers.
    â€œI lived here,” she said and looked down on Tantello with the mill shut down now and only a few of the houses occupied mostly by Aboriginal families.
    â€œIs that bridge safe to cross?” her husband asked looking at her profile with her lashes lying soft as brown bracken fern on her apricot cheeks.
    She stretched her mouth in a smile he didn’t understand and began to walk with Kathleen’s walk light and casual towards the car.
    He was a little ahead and his heart leapt when her heard her speak.
    â€œMy beautiful, beautiful mannikin,” she said low and passionate.
    He turned swiftly to take her hand.
    Then he saw her face and felt he shouldn’t.

ON THE TRAIN
    The young woman not more than twenty-seven slammed the gate on herself and the two children both girls.
    She did not move off at once but looked up and down the street as if deciding which way to go.
    The older girl looked up at her through her hair which was whipped by the wind to read the decision the moment she made it.
    Finally the woman took a hand of each child and turned in the direction of the railway station.
    â€œOh goody!” cried Sara who was nearly five.
    â€œThe sun’s out,” the woman