The Juliet Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

swiping the tiles, swish, swish, swish , until she is back in the main room.
    “Lift your feet,” Gloria says to Juliet and Keith.
    “Oh, how hot it is.” Bianca’s ropy arms strain. “What heat.”
    She props her mop, wipes her forehead, and advances upon Gloria’s bedroom, where Gloria stands guard before the veil of beads.
    “Your clothes, your clothes,” Bianca demands, snapping fingers with impatience.
    Gloria’s eyes dart.
    Bianca explains: She will take home their dirty laundry and return with it, cleaned, dried, and ironed, in the morning.
    “Wonderful, wonderful!” Gloria dashes about, her pleasure all out of proportion: perhaps because she hates doing laundry, or perhaps because she’s kept Bianca out of her bedroom and wants to compensate for the imagined offence.
    Bianca stuffs their soiled clothing into a plastic bag and gathers her supplies. She is going. Gloria holds the door. It doesn’t seem possible for Bianca to transport on her person everything that she must.
    Gloria calls anxiously down the stairs, “Is it okay?”
    “Yes, yes, it is fine,” Bianca calls back.
    “Mom? The library?”
    “Not today,” says Gloria. “Just play outside. Now. Take Emmanuel.”
    “We need to make a trip to Jalapa,” says Bram after supper.
    Juliet and Keith, freshly showered and wearing T-shirts for pyjamas, dart around the main room, scaring into oblivion the mice and cockroaches. Gloria’s reply goes missing beneath Keith’s rattling cough.
    “It has to be done, and quickly,” says Bram. “The first team arrives next week.”
    “By ‘we’,” says Gloria, “you mean you — don’t you.”
    “We could all go.” Bram scratches the back of his neck.
    “On your motorcycle?”
    “We’re getting a truck.”
    “Over the land mines?”
    Bram inhales deeply, his chest broadening with breath. “So stay,” he says.
    “You don’t want us to come,” says Gloria.
    Bram opens the fridge, removes a bottle of beer. His shoulders slump fractionally and the underarms of his shirt hang damp. But he is revived by his first sip.
    Gloria cries, “Brush your teeth!”
    “You heard your mother,” Bram says.
    “He’s going to leave us here, all alone!”
    Juliet blinks at her dad. His face is crinkled with sunburn, and she can see all the way to his crispy scalp. They share the same thin red hair, fragile skin, but there the comparison ends. Nothing scares Juliet’s dad, not even her mom.
    “So come,” Bram says lightly.
    Gloria begins to cry, which everyone hates, including Gloria, but most especially Bram. “It’s nothing to you to leave us, is it.”
    Juliet understands that no one is listening.
    In the bathroom, Keith coughs again.
    “Your germs are all over my toothbrush!” Juliet punches her brother in the arm; she can’t say why, but she must. He aims for her shoulder. She tackles him and they roll on tiles scented with Bianca’s vicious lemon Pine-Sol.
    “My glasses!”
    “Disgusting!”
    “Stop.” Bram is visible in the doorway for a solitary beat of time before the electricity fails, extinguishing the buzzing light overhead, emblazoning their father’s outline on Juliet’s retinas: he stands solid as a tree trunk, strong as stone. At the apartment’s core, the windowless bathroom is black and it hums in the wake of machinery fallen silent: no fan blades rotating and exhaling, no refrigerator murmuring, no radios blaring outside. Juliet feels herself lifted, like a child much smaller than she actually is, and pressed to her father’s chest, Keith mashed next to her.
    “Apologize.” Bram smells sharpish.
    They hear the grunt and slurp of Emmanuel suckling at their mother’s breast. They hear and feel with disgust each other’s half-brushed breath, hear and feel the lonely beat of their father’s heart against their cheeks.
    “Sorry.”
    “Sorry.” Juliet turns her head away from her brother. Faint moonlight ghosts the curtains in the main room. She can’t remember